Gérald Darmanin said on Sunday he expects the destruction of around “1,250” substandard housing in Mayotte by “the end of the year”, regretting “the delay” in this operation due to “very many legal remedies”. .
Accompanied by deputy ministers Olivier Klein (Housing) and Jean-François Carenco (Overseas), Gérald Darmanin attended, on the second day of his trip to Mayotte, the destruction of the last unsanitary huts in the Badamiers district in Dzaoudzi, in Petite-Terre .
“There will have been roughly 1,250 (destructions) by the end of the year”, said the Minister of the Interior, who had mentioned 1,000 destructions by the end of the year in his interview with the Figaro put online Friday evening.
At Badamiers, Gérald Darmanin denounced the numerous appeals against this destruction, which “prevented the prefect from doing his job of fighting against insalubrity”.
The destruction of the bangas (unsanitary huts) is one of the components of the Wuambushu operation launched at the end of April by the minister. “We are going to speed up (…). This component, he said, has been delayed because of the very numerous appeals”.
“I would have liked, he continued, that those who came to do legal tourism in Mayotte had visited the bangas, unsanitary places where the children did not have running water, where if there was a cyclone, we would all have cried over the very many deaths that there would have been here”, and that “to prevent the construction of social housing”.
“What is important, insisted the minister, is the destruction of unsanitary housing and regaining control of the land.”
In the afternoon, Gérald Darmanin went with Olivier Klein to the relay village managed by the Coallia association in Tsoundzou 2, in the east of the big island. “Here, 37 families” from the slums “live in decent conditions before finding permanent housing,” tweeted the Minister of the Interior.
Gérald Darmanin ended a two-day visit to Mayotte on Sunday afternoon to defend Wuambushu (“recovery” in Mahorais), an operation to fight crime, illegal immigration and unsanitary housing carried out for two months.
This policy is supported by elected officials and many Mahorais but denounced by associations as “brutal”, “anti-poor” and violating the rights of migrants, mostly from neighboring Comoros.
Wuambushu “does not solve any fundamental problem, on the contrary increases tensions between inhabitants of the island and aggravates the great poverty of people who are already very precarious”, estimated the heads of seven NGOs and associations, including Doctors of the world, the Secours Catholique and the Abbé Pierre Foundation, in a column published on Saturday by Le Monde.
During his visit, Gérald Darmanin also promised to remedy the lack of water affecting this French archipelago in the Indian Ocean and announced a freeze on the price of bottled water from July 15.
The minister also said he was keen to “develop tourism” in the 101st French department, noting that “there is no reason why Mayotte is not a very beautiful place of tourist destination”. He promised to return there in September.
25/06/2023 17:49:43 – Dzaouzi (France) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
