OPINION | A woman handed a house, but denied the title deed, is not empowered - News24

The government says it wants to empower women. It could start by handing over their title deeds, writes Anlu Keevé.

Earlier this month, I took a Grade 10 pupil to an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet for her birthday. It happened to be Women’s Day.

Somewhere between the second and third plate, she told me about the janitor at her school, who was wrestling a wheelbarrow up a short flight of stairs when a female teacher offered to give him a hand. This was, he explained, a job for a man, and he preferred to go and find a man to help him.

Our discussion about this exchange took up the rest of the drive home, because it’s not a subject you can raise with a teenager on Women’s Day without setting off a long conversation about what an empowered woman is.

In fairness to the janitor, I doubt he believes women are incapable of helping to get a wheelbarrow up five steps. He was more likely trying to be courteous in the idiom most familiar to him and, as courtesies go, it is harmless enough. I have no particular wish to manhandle a wheelbarrow up any stairs myself, and I suspect the teacher’s own enthusiasm for the job was limited, but the principle survives our shared indifference: a woman who wants to do with a wheelbarrow whatever she wishes should be free to do so.

What struck me afterwards was that the janitor’s response has a much larger and far more consequential echo, and it’s an echo that rings loudest in government.

One step short
Every August, the speeches about the empowerment of women are resounding. This year’s Women’s Day address at the Union Buildings, under the theme of “Empowered Women Empower Nations”, was no different.

President Cyril Ramaphosa observed that women made up more than half of the population while holding nowhere near half of the country’s wealth, land or enterprises. He undertook to widen women’s access to finance and to markets, and then said something far easier to test against the facts: his government was “ensuring that women hold title to the land they work”. This promise has been circling for years.

As a first response to his recycled promises, it must be said that the word “empowerment” has been worn smooth. Strip out the ceremony and it comes down to this: gaining freedom, confidence, and power to control your own life, make your own choices, and claim your rights.

The word carrying the weight of empowerment in the president’s 2026 address is “title”. A title deed is the state’s written record that a named person owns a described piece of ground, and it is what turns a house from the place where a family happens to live into an asset the law will defend on their behalf.

For three decades, the state used subsidised housing as an instrument of empowerment. In 1997/1998, the state completed 209 000 housing units, and the following year it managed some 235 000. Delivery held above 100 000 a year from 1996 through to 2013.

However, in 2023/2024, the state completed only 35 000 units, which means a government with 30 years of practice and a far bigger budget now builds roughly a seventh of what it once did.

As of May this year, the Minister of Human Settlements, Thembi Simelane, put the housing backlog at 2.6 million, representing somewhere north of 12 million people waiting.

At the same time, the national title deed transfer backlog for state-subsidised housing is officially estimated at over 900 000 units, with independent researchers putting it at potentially more than one million units.

For all the talk of empowerment, the disconnect between handing a woman a house and actually empowering her sits in the title deed.

The deed empowers whoever holds it, but since government has chosen women as the subject of the promise, consider the woman’s case. The title deed gives her security: she has the freedom to do with the property as she sees fit, and the courts will defend her right to do so. The title deed also allows her to use the property as collateral and, in this way, turn dormant value into capital that can be put to productive use.

Finally, the title deed gives her the confidence that what she builds will be passed to the people she chooses when she is gone. Security, capital and the certainty of passing something on are worth having in their own right, but they also spill over her front gate.

Shelter, not property
Terence Corrigan, projects and publications manager at the Institute of Race Relations, drew together research on Africa for a 2020 study, “Property Rights Belong to All”, showing that where women hold secure rights over land and property, households eat better and children are healthier. Mainly because rental and business income lands in the hands of the person doing the feeding.

Too often, Corrigan shows, women across the continent are denied this because of traditional conventions or modern law, or because of a reliance on a “head of household” principle, which vests control in family property in household patriarchs.

Elsewhere, a misguided sense of state paternalism has offered women some access to land and housing, but not the full, empowering benefit of ownership. In the housing sphere, this has meant providing shelter, not property.

As one Zambian activist said: “Women’s land rights are human rights; as such any custom that hinders women from enjoying their land rights is retrogressive and should be reviewed or abolished.”

For three decades, government has failed to reap the benefits of its own empowerment tool. That is what makes the annual speeches so difficult to sit through.

Government correctly identified property as the thing that would change the livelihoods of women, and with that, millions of households, only to stop one administrative step short of the prize.

Registering a deed costs a rounding error next to building the house it describes. It asks only that the state finish what it started.

Empowered women may well empower nations, but a woman handed a house and denied the deed to it has not been empowered by anybody.

Anlu Keevé is a policy analyst and research coordinator at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.news24.com/opinions/columnists/opinion-a-woman-handed-a-house-but-denied-the-title-deed-is-not-empowered-20260825-0638