IRR urges Minister Thembi Simelane to prioritise women’s property rights

The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) will be writing to Minister of Human Settlements Thembi Simelane this week to urge her to speed up the process of extending property rights, especially to women.

Says IRR Strategic Engagements Manager Makone Maja: “Celebrating Women’s Month without guaranteeing rights that are integral to women’s safety, dignity and financial security is meaningless, especially in a country such as ours where 46% of households are women-led. When women are not safe, neither are their children or their families.”

As of May 2026, the housing backlog in South Africa was a towering 2.6 million, according to the Minister. This is a crisis that confronts over 12 million people who live in fear, uncertainty, and unstable and unsafe living conditions.

Maja says: “The Minister still relies on the excuse of apartheid spatial inequality for the slow roll out of housing development, yet she is a member of a party that was kept in power for 30 uninterrupted years of majority government on the strength of promising to eradicate the issues apartheid caused.

“South Africans must see the apartheid blame game for what it truly is – the government’s excuse for its own bureaucratic deficiencies that cause implementation delays and ultimately lead to its failure to deliver.”

The Institute is concerned about the data from Minister Simelane’s department that demonstrates that the government’s expansion of housing has slowed. According to the Department’s housing data, recent years have seen the lowest completion rates of serviced sites (where municipalities have installed water and sanitation infrastructure for housing to be constructed) and housing units completed since 2001.

Between 1996 and 2013 the government was consistently delivering over 100,000 completed housing units annually, even doubling that number in some years, such as in 1997/98 (209,000 units) and 1998/99 (235,635 units). By comparison, a fraction were delivered in 2022/23 (33,892 units) and 2023/24 (35,011 units).

Maja concludes: “The Minister must cease being hypocritical in singing one tune in support of women’s rights while her very actions or failure to act leave them vulnerable to exploitation as a result of not having secure property rights.”

Media contact: Makone Maja, IRR Strategic Engagements Manager Tel: 079 418 6676 Email: makone@irr.org.za

Media enquiries: Michael Morris IRR Head of Media Tel: 066 302 1968 Email: michael@irr.org.za