Pensioner gets her house after government admits mistake
Free State housing department’s database incorrectly showed Maleroele Molato had received a house 15 years ago
Maleroele Molato during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for her new brick house. Photo: Tladi Moloi
Maleroele Molato, a 75-year-old widow from Naledi Village in the Free State, has finally received her long awaited brick-and-mortar house.
GroundUp reported in April that Molato was living in a dilapidated mud hut. She had applied for a government house ten years ago, but the system showed she had already been allocated one five years earlier. It appears her name was incorrectly linked to a house in Gauteng.
Her mud hut was badly damaged during heavy rainfall in April. After queries from GroundUp, the Free State Department of Human Settlements promised to rectify the situation and provide Molato with a house.
Her new house was handed over to her on Saturday. “God has finally answered my prayers. I have never been so happy in my old age. I feel like jumping around, if I was still a teenager I could have jumped around with joy but I am old now,” Molato said.
“Now I will sleep peacefully in a proper house without fearing that the house may collapse.”
A cow was slaughtered in the celebration attended by dozens of community members.
“I want to thank those who opened our eyes to her situation,” said Human Settlements MEC Saki Mokoena during the handover.
“After we looked at the situation we realised the situation was bad and we decided to appoint the contractor and requested him to build the house within three weeks. Today, we are here to hand over the house and to celebrate with her. The mud house is gone and the new house is here with a bath and a toilet inside.”
He said that there are plans to build another 136 houses in the area to replace mud huts which cannot withstand the impact of climate change.
Maleroele Molato’s new brick house. Photo: Tladi Moloi
The mud hut where she was living before the Free State government realised its mistake. Archive photo: Tladi Moloi
Support independent journalism
Donate using Payfast
Next: Chris Hani mayor sues SANCO leader for defamation
Previous: Freedom of expression and the right to be informed
© 2025 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.