GOOD Speech by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of Western Cape Parliament
03 September 2026
*Note to Editor: This speech was delivered in the Western Cape Provincial Parliament during the Interpellation Debate on Tuberculosis (TB)
Tuberculosis is not a mystery disease.
We know exactly how it spreads, and we know exactly how to stop it.
It travels through overcrowded homes, through backyard shacks with no ventilation, through taxis packed shoulder to shoulder.
TB thrives wherever poverty concentrates people and starves them of air, of nutrition, of dignity.
And that concentration is not accidental. It is policy.
Just this year, our Constitutional Court, in the Tafelberg judgment, confirmed what communities on the Cape Flats have known for generations: that adequate housing is not simply “four walls.”
It named habitability – a structure safe, sound, and fit to live in – as one of the tests adequacy depends on.
Speaker, ask the residents of SST-Marikana in Khayelitsha whether their housing is habitable – where the Public Protector herself has already found this City failed to provide adequate water.
Ask the residents of Hanover Park, still reporting leaking roofs and crumbling structures years after they first complained.
The Constitutional Court found this Province failed to provide habitable, well-located housing.
That failure doesn’t stay in the Human Settlements budget – it turns up in Health, in every TB case this Province now spends more to treat.
And this is not activist language.
That is a finding this Province has already lost – and it is showing up in a body count.
Building far from clinics, far from care, far from air and light, that is a constitutional harm, not a side effect.
So when the MEC is asked what her Department is doing to curb TB transmission, we must also ask why the housing ‘policy’ keeps manufacturing the very conditions TB needs to survive.
You cannot fix a health crisis in one department while another perpetuates apartheid geography.
And when we ask about access to diagnosis and treatment, we need to ask why a person on the periphery still waits weeks for a result that should take hours; because the clinic, like the housing, was never meant to be near them.
TB is curable.
If people in this Province are still dying of it, that is not bad luck, it is spatial apartheid with a body count, now confirmed in law.
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