GOOD Statement by Suzette Little, GOOD Deputy Secretary-General & City of Cape Town Caucus Chairperson:
The written responses received from Western Cape MEC for Infrastructure, Tertuis Simmers, offer a troubling window into a housing system paralysed by inefficiency, poor communication, and bureaucratic bluster. In reply to parliamentary questions posed by GOOD Secretary-General and MPL, Brett Herron, it was confirmed that the City of Cape Town’s housing waiting list remains at a staggering 431,902 people.
Communities across the metro continue to cry out, saying they’ve been waiting for years, often decades, for a housing opportunity. The situation is made worse by growing concerns over how vacant units are allocated. In some areas, families are occupying more than one unit, while others claim people from outside their communities receive allocations without any transparency.
According to the MEC, the person at the top of Cape Town’s housing list has been waiting for 44 years, since March 1981. Yet there is no indication that any of the top 10 applicants are even aware of their current status.
And what is the provincial government’s excuse? That the list is “not accurate.” That people “haven’t updated their details”. This scapegoating of the poor to cover up systemic failure is not only insulting, it is cruel.
The Western Cape Housing Demand Database (WCHDDB) is recognised as the official waiting list but while most municipalities update this list directly, the City of Cape Town submits its data via a delayed monthly transfer, limiting responsiveness and transparency.
We must urgently ensure those at the top of the list are prioritised for housing as promised. As GOOD, we are making a public call to anyone who first applied for housing in 1981, 1982, or 1983 to contact us. We will do everything we can to assist in updating their information and holding the City accountable to its own database.
Nobody should wait 44 years for a basic human right. Housing delayed is dignity denied.
GOOD Crisis Response: The party advocates for effective responses to national crises, such as pandemics.
Shadowfax
The only way to know that small things irritate is when you share a room with a mosquito at night.
Impulse
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.