February 2010

The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality Heritage Task Team wants the municipality to renovate and preserve dilapidating historical buildings in Port Elizabeth.

Cape Town - Government plans to set up a guarantee fund of R1 billion to incentivise the private banking and housing sector to develop new products to meet the country's housing demand.

President Jacob Zuma, in his State of the Nation Address in Parliament this evening, said a key new initiative would be to accommodate people whose salaries are too high to get government subsidies, but who earn too little to qualify for a normal bank mortgage.

This forms part of government's work towards upgrading informal settlements and providing proper service and land tenure to half a million households by 2014.

The government is to set aside over 6 000 hectares of "well located" public land for low income and affordable housing, said Zuma.

The government was also busy rolling out various pilot projects of its Comprehensive Rural Development Programme which was launched last year in Giyani, Limpopo.

Zuma said since the pilot was launched there last year, 231 houses had been built, while access to health and education has improved, infrastructure had been provided to support agricultural development and training to the community.

Johannesburg - As part of the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of former President Nelson Mandela's release, the Victor Verster Prison has been named a memorial site.

"The Victor Verster Prison will be considered a memorial site which depicts the experience of the struggle for liberation in South Africa," National Heritage Council CEO Sonwabile Mancotywa announced on Wednesday.

The prison outside the town of Paarl, which is now known as the Drakenstein Correctional Centre, is where Mandela spent the last years of his 27-year-long imprisonment.

Mancotywa said the prison will affirm and assert the liberation heritage which will be showcased not only to South Africans but to international visitors.

Briefing the media on the eve of the commemoration of Mandela's release, Mancotywa said the house will receive world status recognition as a heritage property of universal value when it is finally listed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) as part of the National Liberation Heritage Route (NLHR).

Through the NLHR, the council hopes to restore all significant accounts of events, places, epochs and individuals.

Pretoria - All 212 unclaimed bodies have been removed from the Gale Street mortuary in Durban, says KwaZulu-Natal MEC for Health Dr Sibongiseni Dhlomo.

Dhlomo announced this on Wednesday during his surprise visit to the mortuary which has been in the news for overcrowding, lost bodies and unhygienic conditions.

All bodies removed were of people who died from unnatural causes and were not claimed by their next of kin who may not know of their unfortunate deaths. Some of the bodies had been at the state facility for about two years.

An interdepartmental task team comprising officials from the Health Department and SAPS was established to oversee the clearing of the bodies.

Only 19 bodies, which are still to be identified by families, were left behind including three bodies which were recovered and brought in by the special investigating unit.

Dhlomo acknowledged that everyone involved had to take desperate measures to resolve the situation.

"Burial is our preferred method of body disposal, however the circumstances have compelled us to dispose of the bodies in pauper graves.