GOOD Speech by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament
13 August 2026
Note to editors: This speech was delivered during an interpellation in the Provincial Parliament on allocated housing funding
Speaker, I thank the Minister for his reply, but I did not hear an answer. I heard a description of process. What this House needed was an explanation of failure.
Let me be precise about what we are discussing. R664.3 million allocated to build free basic houses for people on a waiting list of over 680 000, went unspent.
At the cost of roughly R430 000 per BNG house, that is enough money to have built over 1500 homes this year alone.
Fifteen hundred families who could have had keys in their hands and instead have nothing but another year on a list.
On top of that, R157.2 million allocated to upgrade informal settlements, where people are living without water, without sanitation, without dignity, also went unspent.
That is R821.5 million that this Minister’s department was given, that this Minister’s department did not use, in a province where the need has never been greater.
Speaker, let me set two things straight. First: R664.3 million and R157.2 million are not opposition figures. They are the Minister’s own numbers, given in his own reply to this House. He cannot dispute today what his department has already certified in writing.
Second: The unspent money is lost; it doesn’t get rolled over or reallocated within the department. Unspent conditional grant money does not come back to this province.
National Treasury either hands it to a province that can actually spend it, or it is forfeited to the fiscus entirely. Either way, Western Cape loses that R821.5 million permanently. It will not build one more house here.
So whatever this Minister says next, the fact does not move that money is gone, for good, and it was his department that let it go.
This is a department that has lost the capacity to spend the money it is given, finish what it starts, and tell this province the truth.
Minister, I am not asking for a spending report. I am asking you to explain to the 680 000 families on that waiting list why R821.5 million meant for their homes is now gone, not delayed, gone, while they waited another year.
Was it planning? Project management? Political will? Which is it, and what changes before next financial year, so this House is not having the identical conversation, over identically forfeited money, in twelve months’ time?
The people on that list are not abstractions. They are entitled to an answer. I now invite the Minister to give this House one.