UNEMPLOYED single mum Lucie Manyike is living in a tiny and rundown one-roomed house with her four children and her grandchildren.
Lucie, who was forced to cover her window with a piece of zinc to keep out the winter cold, told Daily Sun she had been applying for a Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) house for years with no luck.
The 53-year-old from Acornhoek, near Bushbuckridge in Mpumalanga, said: “I have applied to a number of successive councillors. They kept promising me my RDP house would be constructed soon but nothing came of it.
“Three of my daughters applied as well, as they have children, but we were unlucky. We are squeezed in here with my 15-year-old boy and there is no privacy.” She said her two eldest children moved out to start their own families and they were hustling to survive.
“I’m a little bit fortunate that my eldest son and his sister have already moved out. I don’t know what would be happening if we were all here,” she said.
Her 27-year-old twin daughters Bridgette and Prudence said they were struggling to survive on their children’s South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) grants. Bridgette said: “We survive on child grants but they only last for two weeks after buying food. We have to pay for the kids to go to creche from the grants. The R350 grant, which helped us a lot, was cut in March and we can’t find any jobs.”
Municipal spokeswoman Fhumulani Thovhakale said the family was among a group of beneficiaries that had been shortlisted to get houses soon.
