Johannesburg - South Africa needs new cities, as the current ones are old and overpopulated.
These are the words of Human Settlements Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi, who was speaking on the sidelines of the UN Habitat Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, on Thursday.
According to the SABC report, the minister said the country could not continue to rely on the current cities, which are overpopulated due to a lack of expansion.
Kubayi’s observations on the need for SA to build new cities came just days after statistician-general Risenga Maluleke reported that Limpopo contributed the highest number of people who migrated from other provinces to Gauteng.
Maluleke said increasing rates of migration should concern lawmakers as this resulted in skill drain, especially for rural provinces such as Limpopo, the Eastern Cape and other provinces.
“The poor always follow the rich, and, in every environment, nobody wants to stay in an underdeveloped area. With the exception of Gauteng and the Western Cape, all other provinces are what we call rural provinces, so all of us are moving from our rural provinces to townships, suburbs, and everywhere.
“So that’s what particularly drives young people and they move with skills because either they move when they are young and they get trained there and they never come back,” Maluleke said.
Maluleke was speaking during an event hosted by the University of Limpopo’s Turfloop graduate school of leadership that hosted the country’s statistician-general under the theme of “unpacking South Africa through numbers”.
Kubayi also visited a social housing project in Nairobi, where she said South Africa was busy with a few feasibility plans to make this a reality.
She said as a minister, it was in her interest to ensure that the country expanded and developed new cities.
“My interest as minister of human settlement is to develop new cities. South Africa has to grow better. We will have some of these conversations, and later, when we are ready, we will make our announcement, but we do believe that there are lessons to be learnt from other countries, even on the continent, where they have been able to move and create a new city in a different area,” she said.
The Star