A new era in housing: The Department of Human Settlements' essential shift from housing builder to settlement enabler
Image: Tracey Adams / IOL
The challenge for the Department of Human Settlements (DHS) is to move from being a housing builder to a settlement enabler, ensuring that delivery is not just about numbers, but about equity, dignity and inclusion.
This is according to Dr Uduak Johnson and Dr Thandile Ncwana, who are Academic Programme Leaders at the Management College of Southern Africa (MANCOSA) School of Public Administration, in response to an enquiry by "Independent Media Property".
They described the first year of South Africa's 7th Administration, which came into office about a year ago following the 29 May 2024 elections, as being marked by cautious optimism and necessary institutional realignment.
They said while progress has been uneven, key reforms such as governance strengthening, spatial policy recalibration and targeted investments in vulnerable groups signal a shift toward developmental governance.
'What remains now is for the 7th Administration's plans to be translated into tangible, community-centred outcomes.'
Delivering the 2025 Budget Vote on Wednesday, DHS Minister Thembi Simelane said over the next five years, the Department's delivery efforts will be driven by a focused agenda that seeks to consolidate past investments, respond to urgent needs, and deepen our impact.
'Therefore, as we begin to lay the foundation of the recently approved 2024-2029 MTDP, we have committed to deliver the following during the 2025/2026 financial year: 41 944 housing units, 32 250 fully serviced sites with water, sewer, electricity, and roads, 4 282 units through the First Home Finance programme, originally known as FLISP (Financially Linked Individual Subsidy Programme), 3 000 social housing units and eradicate 8 047 mud houses,' Simelane said.
Dr Johnson and Dr Ncwana said that despite the intent of policies such as Breaking New Ground (BNG) and the Comprehensive Plan for the Development of Sustainable Human Settlements, delivery has often occurred at the urban periphery, reinforcing marginalisation.
They said by the time the 7th Administration took office last year, the backlog had grown to over 2.3 million housing units, with 2 700+ informal settlements nationwide and slow progress in land release and infrastructure upgrades.
The academics said, despite severe budget constraints and inflationary pressures, the DHS has made incremental progress with highlights that include the Special Housing Needs Programme (launched March 2025), targeting vulnerable groups such as people with disabilities, elderly persons, and survivors of domestic violence.
Another one is the Housing Assistance Programme for Military Veterans, fast-tracked, with 4 560 beneficiaries confirmed. They said it also brought Institutional Stabilisation as boards were appointed to five of six DHS entities, thereby improving governance oversight.
With regards to policy advancements, the academic programme leaders mentioned the approval of a new Human Settlements White Paper in December last year, outlining integrated and sustainable development frameworks.
They said with regards to Social Housing Expansion, the Social Housing Regulatory Authority (SHRA) approved 1 898 units in FY2024/25, while the SHIP 15A pipeline continues to grow.
Additionally, they said digitalisation efforts have begun to improve beneficiary tracking and reduce fraudulent housing allocations, although their implementation is still partial.
The MANCOSA academics said persistent and emerging challenges for the department included systemic constraints.
'Informal Settlement Growth: Upgrading initiatives remain underfunded and inadequately implemented. Although the Informal Settlements Upgrading Partnership Grant (ISUP) exists, the number of informal settlements continues to grow beyond 2 700.'
They said there were also governance failures with reports from the Auditor-General (AGSA) and Special Investigating Unit (SIU) pointing to irregular expenditure, ghost beneficiaries, and project mismanagement, especially at provincial and municipal levels.
The other challenge was the spatial disconnect as settlements remained far from transport, economic nodes, and services, continuing the apartheid legacy.
The academic leaders said the budgetary pressures with reduced allocations to the Human Settlements Development Grant (HSDG) and the impact of inflation have constrained delivery.
'Provinces such as Gauteng and the Western Cape underspent and had portions of their HSDG reallocated to better-performing provinces like the Eastern Cape (99% expenditure).'
To meet its long-term mandate, Johnson and Ncwana said the DHS must pivot from mass delivery alone to an enabling developmental role that prioritises spatial justice through the release of well-located urban land, upgrading over displacement in informal settlements, inclusive and participatory urban planning, including People's Housing Processes (PHP), blended finance models, combining public subsidies, private investment, and concessional loans as well as performance-based budgeting, where provinces are rewarded for efficient delivery.
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The strategic use of corruption discourse under the banner of constitutional defence allowed donor media and NGO actors to entrench liberal hegemony while masking deeper geopolitical interests. This apparatus has always focused on gender discourse, deploying feminist rhetoric selectively to neutralise radical Black intellectuals and disrupt decolonial mobilisation. This pattern was evident during the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall uprisings, where the sudden infiltration of US-backed think tanks and NGO intermediaries – in quiet collaboration with elements of Luthuli House – corresponded with a wave of allegations targeting radical Black male leaders. The frequency with which sexual misconduct and rape claims were deployed against prominent and outspoken figures during these movements, often without full due process, raises serious questions about the weaponisation of gender justice as a tool of ideological warfare. 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Sikhakhane's erasure as a decolonial jurist is politically motivated. And the liberal media's choreography in service of soft regime-change agendas is a historical pattern. To ignore any one of these truths is to enable the ideological capture of justice under the pretence of neutrality. Procedurally, the Tribunal exposed the fragility of the expert testimony used to publicly frame the case. Advocate Muzi Sikhakhane's cross-examination of Lisa Vetten revealed that her analysis rested on partial evidence, translated and summarised through a legal filter that omitted linguistic and cultural context. Crucial annexures were absent. Vetten had not consulted the Tribunal's cultural-linguistics assessor, despite the case hinging on meaning and tone communicated in isiXhosa. Her findings were presented as conclusive without the primary data being fully explored. Chairperson Judge President Bernard Ngoepe's order to admit the full isiXhosa WhatsApp exchanges into the record was a tacit acknowledgment of these procedural gaps – gaps that GroundUp and its media allies had already sealed shut with a premature headline designed to foreclose complexity and manufacture consent. This moment, then, is not only about what happened between two individuals. It is about whose frameworks we are allowed to believe, whose voices are authorised, and whose truths are strategically denied. It is about how knowledge is managed, contained, and weaponised. And it is about whether South Africa can withstand the growing grip of liberal epistemic capture disguised as gender justice, or whether it will open a path toward decolonial clarity, where multiple truths can breathe without one being used to suffocate the rest. As for Thamm's increasingly degenerate journalism, in which she has cast the Tribunal as an 'intellectual heavyweight title fight between the Old Patriarchs and the Gender-Based Violence Expert,' – is not worthy of anything more than the derision we reserve for mercenaries fighting in service of empire. Her reductionism flattens a complex and politically charged legal encounter into a tired has-been morality play. Far from being a helpless woman pitted against patriarchal power, the expert witness in this case is ideologically armed and institutionally weaponised. The case cannot be read through the paternalism of liberal gender tropes. It demands to be read through the fresh lens of decolonial thought and praxis. And this case is not simply about personal conduct. It is about ideological warfare. It is about who gets to speak, who is erased, and what forms of knowing are cast as either legitimate or deviant. More than ever we are witnessing an all-out assault on radical Black thought, African jurisprudence, and decolonial critique under the sanitised banner of human rights and democracy. The interest shown in this case by donor-funded media and NGO actors must be interrogated. It bears the familiar markings of regime-change politics: rooting out those who threaten liberal orthodoxy, targeting those whose authority emerges beyond the limits of civil society funding pipelines. The soft coup unfolding within the GNU has ideological foot soldiers in law, media and academia. Their project is to purge the judiciary, academia, and political thought of any element that does not conform to Western standards of civility and containment. What we are witnessing, then, is not justice – but ideological capture. Whether South Africa can resist this and re-centre African epistemology remains the question. What is clear is that the machinery of liberal capture is always in motion – and it speaks with one voice. * You can read Gillian's academic analysis here: The Erotics of Power, the Semantics of Guilt: A Decolonial Disruption of South African Legal Discourse * Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker and social critic. She writes on decoloniality, media and political resistance across the Global South. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
