GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Mayoral Candidate
19 August 2026
The fire that ripped through the informal settlement known as BM Section on New Year’s Day in 2013 killed five residents, destroyed about 1,000 shacks and left 3,000–4,000 people without any shelter.
Then-Mayor of Cape Town Patricia de Lille responded to the disaster by establishing a crisis committee bringing together the City, Province and Presidency to secure permanent housing for families who lost everything. The committee made good initial progress, relocating some members of the community, installing electricity and identifying land for development…
Thirteen years later I revisited BM Section to monitor the community’s progress. What I found was zero progress since De Lille’s departure from the City approximately eight years ago. The shacks have been rebuilt, and the community continues to live in fear of another fire, in squalor.
Returning to my office in the Provincial Legislature, I fired off three simple questions to Provincial MEC for Infrastructure, Tertuis Simmers: Is the Crisis Committee still active? How much has been spent on housing for BM Section? What provincial land has been found for these families?
The answers, received this week, are damning:
1. CRISIS COMMITTEE: Hasn’t met since De Lille resigned as Mayor. No date of its last meeting. No final resolutions. No account of what happened to the commitments made to a community that had just lost its homes to fire.
2. FUNDING: Simmers didn’t say how much money has been spent housing the BM Section fire victims, if any. Instead, he provided a list of the total housing grant allocation across the whole Western Cape for every year since 2013.
3. LAND: No land has been identified, released, donated, or transferred. “None,” was Simmers’ only response to this question.
I have seen what “None” looks like in BM Section… toilets virtually swimming in raw sewage, streets of mud and stagnant water, children with runny noses, parents stripped of essential human dignity.
The only plan in sight for the community is to hide it behind the R114 million security wall the City wants to build along the N2 – not to improve the lives of the BM Section community in any way but to shield commuters from having to deal with, or see, poor people at all.
By using concrete to hide poor people visible from the highway, instead of using it to build houses for them, the DA-led Western Cape Province and City of Cape Town align themselves with the work of apartheid ministers Piet Koornhof and TE Donges who became synonymous with the implementation of forced removals and Cape Town’s spatial plan of separation.
Koornhof later had the grace to seek amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for his role in mass removals. Simmers and his boss, Mayor of Cape Town Geordin Hill-Lewis, would do well to acquaint themselves with Koornhof’s application.