GOOD Statement by Axolile Notywala,
GOOD City of Cape Town Councillor
20 November 2025
For women and children, using a toilet in an informal settlement can be a deadly exercise. The story of Sinoxolo Mafevuka, a 19-year-old young woman who was brutally raped and murdered in 2016 in a shared toilet 200 metres away from her home in the SST informal Settlement in Khayelitsha, stands as a brutal reminder of what it means when a city fails to protect its most vulnerable residents. Her life was taken because safe sanitation was never prioritised.
Yesterday, 19 November 2025, almost 10 years after Sinoxolo’s death, the world observed World Toilet Day. Tomorrow, 21 November 2025, South African women will participate in the National Shutdown against GBV and Femicide. The conditions that led to Sinoxolo’s death almost 10 years ago persist across the city. The SST informal settlement still has no safe toilets.
In the city’s 677 informal settlements, most residents still rely on communal toilets, chemical toilets, or have no toilets at all. For women, children and the elderly, the simple act of searching for a toilet in the dark in communities with no public lighting has become a matter of life and death.
This is not an accident of poverty, but a consequence of political choices and the refusal to undo the legacy of spatial apartheid by the Democratic Alliance (DA) in Cape Town.
Despite this, the City of Cape Town continues to drastically under-invest in the communities where the crisis is most severe. In the 2025/26 budget, only R34.1 million is allocated for informal settlement sanitation installations. This is a mere 0,7% of the City’s R5 billion water and sanitation capital budget. On average, and to put this into perspective, this amounts to R50 369.00 for each of the 677 informal settlements in Cape Town.
The City will claim that it spends more through bulk sewer infrastructure that “also services informal settlements.” But this is misleading. Bulk sewer systems overwhelmingly serve formal suburbs with individual flush toilets. If informal settlements have no flush toilets or only a handful of shared toilets, then bulk sewer upgrades do not meaningfully benefit them.
This chronic underinvestment in water and sanitation infrastructure for informal settlements has created the conditions in which women and children face violence, rape, and even death simply because their communities are denied the sanitation that every human being deserves. This cannot be separated from South Africa’s broader crisis of GBV and Femicide, which remains among the highest in the world.
Cape Town must confront an uncomfortable truth: our city remains deeply unequal because its leadership has chosen to prioritise some lives over others.
Until safe sanitation is treated as a right for all, and not a luxury for some, women and children in informal settlements will continue to face the highest levels of danger. The City must take responsibility, redirect resources, and act with urgency.
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