Addressing a meeting of “traditional leaders” in the Cape Town City Hall on Wednesday this week, as part of the ANC’s election campaign, Ramaphosa also blamed Apartheid [read whites] for African backwardness and the fact that blacks are always poor.
“Land in cities and towns must be identified for seizure without compensation upon which high-density housing can be developed so that ordinary South Africans can live close to their places of work,” Ramaphosa told the meeting.
“Apartheid distributed people outside of the major cities. The poor lived outside the cities, and the rich inside them,” he continued.
“Just like other world cities, South Africa had to develop high-density housing in the city and town centers, and the government was going to use the seizure of land without compensation program to identity suitable land within the urban areas.
“This is going to reduce the living costs of the poor who will then not have to travel so far to their places of work,” he said.
Ramaphosa went on to blame whites for the collapsing railway infrastructure in South Africa, even though the ANC has ruled the country for the last 25 years.
He acknowledged that the public transport infrastructure was very poor and that it cost the South African economy dearly. He undertook to “pull the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) right” after a new series of criminal corruption scandals recently shook the state-owned rail transportation system.
“Some train stations in the townships [the black suburbs] are closed. People do not use them anymore because of crime and the unreliability of the train system,” Ramaphosa told the meeting, adding that this too was due to the “heritage of apartheid [read whites] which left us with poor public transport systems.”
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