Fact-checking the ANC’s January 8th claims about progress

Celebrating its 112th birthday and 30 years in government, the African National Congress is keen to demonstrate its successes ahead of South African national elections in 2024.

  • President Cyril Ramaphosa was most on the money when it came to claims about education, access to basic services and health markers in South Africa.
  • Literacy rates have improved significantly since 1994, more than 85% of households access water and electricity, the government’s antiretroviral treatment programme is impressive and the incidence of tuberculosis is decreasing.
  • However, the ANC understated the number of South Africans employed in 1994, inflating the growth in employment over 30 years, and was unclear on the number of free “houses” provided and how many of these were women-owned.

The city of Mbombela in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province was the location for this year’s African National Congress (ANC) January 8th statement.

The annual event marks the anniversary of the country’s ruling party, which turned 112 in 2024.

“We are here to celebrate our past, to chart the future and outline the tasks for the period ahead,” president Cyril Ramaphosa told the crowds gathered at Mbombela Stadium.

Mindful of “complex moments” both at home and globally, Ramaphosa spoke of the significant improvements that had taken place in South Africa over the last 30 years, made possible by his party.

“There are those who say nothing has changed, but they also know that they are not telling the truth.”

To support his argument, Ramaphosa made several claims, which we’ve fact-checked in this report.

Claim: “Currently, more than 45% of the seats in parliament are held by women.”
Verdict: Correct

Women should be represented in all public institutions, Ramaphosa said, before claiming that almost half of the seats in parliament were held by women.

This is true for the national assembly. According to data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), an organisation that represents several international parliaments, 45.8% of the 400 seats in South Africa’s parliament are held by women.

Claim: “I know of no country – certainly on our continent, and in other continents as well – that has built houses, 4.7 million, and given them to our people mahala.”
Verdict: Misleading

One of the ANC’s greatest achievements, Ramaphosa said, was the expansion of basic services and infrastructure.

Using housing as an example, Ramaphosa said: “I know of no country – certainly on our continent, and in other continents as well – that has built houses, 4.7 million, and given them to our people mahala.”

“Mahala” is Southern Sesotho for “free”.

Listeners would be forgiven for thinking that “4.7 million houses” meant physical buildings.

With this claim, Ramaphosa appears to have deviated from the version of his speech published on the ANC website, which said that “through the provision of houses, subsidies and serviced sites, government has managed to provide 4.7 million homes”.

But we can only fact-check what he said, and not what he intended to say.

It is correct that the Department of Human Settlements (DHS) has provided about 4.8 million “housing opportunities” since 1994. But a “housing opportunity” is not the same as a “house”.

“Housing opportunities” include several categories of government housing which range from newly constructed housing to bare plots of land which have only been connected to utilities, such as water, electricity, and sewage.

In 2019, the DHS provided Africa Check with a complete breakdown of the number of housing opportunities it had delivered up to December 2018. Manually adding the numbers of newly built houses listed in each of the department’s annual reports published since then, we counted a total of 3,459,965 newly built houses.

Housing opportunities provided since 1994

South African government-subsidised housing in the form of new housing units and serviced sites provided since 1994. Figures for each year are as reported in linked sources, which sometimes use different terms or descriptions.

Financial Year
Pre-2018 Total 3,118,931 1,062,123 4,181,054 Provided to Africa Check by DHS
2017/18 86,006 50,309 136,315 Provided to Africa Check by DHS
2018/19 77,721 48,034 125,755 2018/19 DHS Annual Report
2019/20 69,513 51,166 120,679 2019/20 DHS Annual Report
2020/21 45,551 39,273 84,824 2020/21 DHS Annual Report
2021/22 28,351 42,046 70,397 2021/22 DHS Annual Report
2022/23 33,892 25,322 59,214 2022/23 DHS Annual Report
Total 3,459,965 1,318,273 4,778,238

We therefore rate this claim as misleading. At Africa Check we apply this rating when elements of the claim are accurate but presented in a way that it is misleading.

Claim: “Nearly 2 million women are now the proud owners of state-provided houses.”
Verdict: Correct

Fébé Potgieter, head of policy and research at the ANC, told Africa Check that the source of this data was the DHS, which “keeps a database of all beneficiaries of government housing subsidies, broken down by gender”. She provided a photograph of a portion of a spreadsheet, which lists female “total approved beneficiaries” by province. The figures add up to 1,917,851.

It is not clear from the photograph exactly what categories of state-provided housing are included in this count. But Potgieter said that the DHS database “includes breaking new ground housing subsidies (RDP) and FLISP subsidies”.

Breaking new ground houses, formerly known as reconstruction and development programme (RDP) houses, are newly built houses. The “First Home Finance” programme, previously known as the “Finance Linked Individual Subsidy Programme” (FLISP), assists recipients with loans for buying houses, apartments and serviced sites, or for building homes on already purchased sites.

Potgieter also pointed Africa Check to an article on state-subsidised housing which used data collected by Lightstone Property, a data and analytics firm. Lightstone data indicated that 1.05 million women were single owners of breaking new ground housing, and 600,000 more were joint owners with another person. This means 1.65 million women were the owners of newly built houses.

Presumably, the remainder is made up of women who received housing subsidies, but this is difficult to verify from the photo we were sent. We have reached out to Lightstone Property and the DHS for clarity. Until then, we rate the claim unproven. In other words, publicly available information neither proves nor disproves this claim.

Update: While originally rated unproven, the DHS confirmed that the figures shared by the ANC were accurate and based on thorough verification, including visiting beneficiaries in person. Of the 2,039,859 beneficiaries to have received actual houses, 1,917,851 were women (some of whom may own a house jointly with someone else).

This article was written by Africa Check, a non-partisan fact-checking organisation. View the original piece on their website.

Read original story on www.citizen.co.za

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Jana Boshoff

Jana works as a senior support specialist for Caxton digital. Before that she was a journalist at the Middelburg Observer 15 years where she won numerous awards including Sanlam's Up and Coming Journalist, Caxton Multimedia Journalist of the Year, and several investigative awards. She is passionate about people and the stories untold.
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