Title deeds backlog is a human rights violation – IRR

The scale of South Africa's title deeds backlog, along with the slowdown in the delivery of government-subsidised housing, has prompted the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) to call on the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) to declare these failures a human rights violation.

The Commission has made similar declarations in the past regarding housing-related delays, including in the case of delayed Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) house deliveries to beneficiaries in North West.

According to a November 2024 report, the SAHRC found that the North West Department of Human Settlements (NWDHS) had infringed on beneficiaries' constitutional rights by failing to deliver RDP houses timeously and adequately.

In that report, the SAHRC placed responsibility squarely on the NWDHS, citing mismanagement, inadequate planning, contractual disputes and insufficient oversight as factors that worsened the failure.

In September last year, Minister of Human Settlements Thembi Simelane revealed that the national title deeds backlog exceeded one million, with more than 30,000 of the unallocated deeds dating back to the apartheid era.

Between 1994 and 2014, the number of unissued title deeds grew to 423,642, and nearly doubled again over the following decade to reach 774,064.

IRR Strategic Engagements Manager Makone Maja said the deprivation of property rights suffered by title deed beneficiaries was surely as egregious as the failures identified in North West, and equally deserving of being declared a human rights violation by the SAHRC.

Maja noted that it emerged during a parliamentary debate last November that the Department was aware of 593 potential beneficiaries who had died without ever being granted their title deeds, saying that these individuals had waited in vain for property rights they were promised.

Maja said the IRR would be writing to the Commission to register its strongest condemnation of what it called an abhorrent stain on government, adding that both the government and the Commission itself claim to be determined to course-correct and make up for the injustices of the past.

Maja said condemning the backlogs as human rights violations, and implementing accountability measures to expedite clearing them, was how the SAHRC could ensure the injustice ceased to be perpetrated against people who have waited since the dawn of democracy to enjoy the property rights protections they were promised.