THE GOVERNMENT WILL cannot realize its promise to build three hundred homes by the end of the year. Although several housing construction projects are now in preparation or implementation, the pace is far too slow to achieve the original annual target. The government expects to deliver only a few dozen homes this year, while the country has had tens of thousands of home seekers for decades.
It is a painful, but now frighteningly recognizable pattern: the Surinamese government presenting ambitious housing plans with much fanfare, only to end up ingloriously stranded in the mud of reality. The recent announcement that the promised three hundred homes will not be achieved by a long shot before the end of the year is therefore no longer surprising.
Housing should not be a political toy that is reinvented with every change of government and then stagnates, because it is a fundamental right
The current stagnation is not an isolated event. It is yet another chapter in a decades-long drama of failed public housing policy. Anyone who looks at Surinamese history will see a graveyard of unfinished projects and empty promises. Think of 1996, when the Wijdenbosch NDP government promised with much fanfare to build two thousand homes per year. However, valuable contracts with foreign contractors stalled because the government did not pay its bills.
In the decades that followed, successive governments pumped millions into programs that failed in the preparation phase or simply came to a standstill because of, for example, a lack of utilities. And what about the eighteen thousand homes that President Desi Bouterse wanted to build. The Chinese Broad Homes prefab housing factory near Smalkalden in Para was opened in 2015 with an enormous amount of political display. It was presented at the time as a revolution in Surinamese housing construction that would squeeze at least three thousand homes per year from the robot-controlled machines. This would mean that every family would quickly have their own home.
The reality was that the factory never really started running and the promised massive housing construction did not materialize. Today, that factory only reminds us of how foreign investments of millions and grand promises bleed ingloriously to death as a result of mismanagement. The vague public-private partnership projects of the previous government also ended in a fiasco, and projects that did get off the ground suffered legal ramifications on all sides, meaning that even citizens who have already paid off their houses are still living in uncertainty.
Minister Diana Pokie of Social Affairs and Housing (SoZaVo) recently launched housing projects in Voorburg and Reeberg. But the no more than three hundred houses that this should result in are very small drops on a red-hot plate; if they are phased out at all, because few people in Suriname have confidence in that.
Why does the government fail, decade after decade, to set up a streamlined apparatus that does deliver results? As long as projects such as the Affordable Housing Project (AHP) remain stuck in preparatory phases, or only meet the need piecemeal, Surinamese citizens will buy absolutely nothing. Of course, initiatives such as renovation subsidies and online application systems are worth mentioning, but they do not disguise the core problem: the structural lack of decisiveness and continuity. Housing construction should not be a political toy that is reinvented with every change of government and then stagnates, because it is a fundamental fundamental right.
