As violent protests over lack of housing and service delivery erupt in Cape Town, it is useful to contrast the city’s experience with that of Durban.
Cape Town’s problems can be understood from various angles. It is no worse off than Durban in terms of human settlement needs — indeed, in terms of absolute numbers, its problems pale in comparison. Cape Town, however, is increasingly volatile.
The arguments about tensions between coloureds vs Africans, and between those born in the Cape and newcomers to the city are well-known.
Now to the less obvious. Since the African National Congress gained control of the Western Cape and city of Cape Town, there has been more emphasis on the needs of African townships. No problem there. The new political leadership, however, has failed to come to grips with the “insider-outsider” phenomenon.
It is reluctant to abandon the housing waiting list, which favours “insiders” such as those living in backyard shacks in Guguletu and Langa, but the most visible manifestations of urban poverty and homelessness, such as the Joe Slovo informal settlement along the N2 highway, are populated by “outsiders”.
This dilemma began to take its current form when the N2 Gateway Project was foisted on the city by the national government. Despite its developmental rhetoric, the project is driven by a desire to change the physical appearance of the city as quickly as possible — hence the focus on newer, “outsider” settlements such as Joe Slovo and Barcelona that greet tourists on arrival, to the detriment of the backyarders of Langa and Guguletu who are “invisible”.
The problem has been aggravated by the political strategy of Cape Town’s leaders. Instead of engaging communities in dialogue to explain the strategy and tactics of the project, politicians and senior civil servants naïvely believed that the ANC’s overwhelming victory in April 2004 meant they no longer need to consult anyone — just deliver, fast.
Consequently, instead of engagement and participation, Cape Town has pursued a “marketing” strategy, vaguely promising that everyone will benefit from N2-like delivery — eventually. Combined with deliberate information blackouts and sidelining of community structures other than those controlled by ward councillors, this is the real fuel under the fires currently burning in Guguletu, Langa, Khayelitsha and Blackheath.
In fascinating counterpoint to events in Cape Town, last Sunday Minister of Housing Lindiwe Sisulu gave the keynote address at a major human settlement-oriented event in Durban — not behind closed doors with politicos and bureaucrats, but in a mass public meeting in an informal settlement, organised by the Homeless People’s Federation (HPF). The minister did more than speak: she committed herself to a partnership with the HPF, including financial support for building skills training and, remarkably, a request for HPF assistance in surveying shack dwellers in Cape Town’s N2 settlements.
The choice of Durban for this government-people meeting was rooted in that city’s strategy of nurturing positive, open relationships with organised residents of its informal settlements. The metro housing department has worked with HPF groups to develop incremental community-based projects that meet real, immediate needs — like building public ablution blocks, surveying informal settlements to determine housing needs, and building houses through the People’s Housing Process.
Although elected councillors are often involved in this process, the Durban Metro leadership is wise enough to know that sometimes the authentic voice of the settlements is to be found in informal structures.
Because of realistic, incremental, and participatory strategies like these, Durban, though not immune to conflict, is meeting real development needs, and is seen to being doing so by the residents of its massive informal settlements. Instead of pursuing high-profile projects for a tiny minority in the hope that this will assuage the frustrations of those excluded from them, Durban is active in many places at once, acting incrementally. Instead of rigidly adhering to bureaucratic waiting lists, Durban is responding to community initiative and rewarding it.
But most importantly, instead of keeping its low-income communities at arm’s length, Durban is engaging them. That’s why Durban is building while Cape Town is burning.
Ted Baumann is executive director of the Utshani Fund, which is affiliated to the Homeless People’s Federation