Just 42,773 government-subsidised houses were built in South Africa in the 2023/24 financial year. That’s an 82% decline compared with the 235,635 houses built 26 years ago in 1998/99.

The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), now known as Breaking New Ground (BNG), was introduced in 1994 by Nelson Mandela. Since then, more than 3.5-million houses have been built for recipients who met certain criteria.

The government had aimed to upgrade all informal settlements by 2014 but, a decade later, almost 3-million people are still on the national housing needs register. The Department of Human Settlements says not all the people on the register actually qualify for a BNG house.

The department blamed their slow progress on Covid-19 and budget cuts in an email conversation with The Outlier. But numbers were on the decline long before the pandemic and, two years later, there is no significant sign of recovery.