The Calm before the Storm

There is nothing quite like a perfect winter's day in Cape Town. This past week, as the mercury dropped across most of South Africa, the Cape basked in balmy, wind-free weather.

But everyone knows how quickly the Cape of Good Hope can become the Cape of Storms, turning entire areas of the Cape Flats into lakes and marshland overnight. These annual winter floods cause misery for thousands of people living in shacks, and weigh on the mind of everyone in a dry home.

As predictable as the annual deluge, is the torrent of criticism that follows. Angry editorial writers, clergy and activists demand to know why the government has not done something to prevent this seemingly avoidable human suffering.

The purpose of this newsletter is to answer this question while the sun is still shining -- during the proverbial calm before the storm. It sets out what the City of Cape Town and the Provincial Government tried to do in preparation for the rainy season, and why we largely failed.

If it had been possible to implement our plans, there would today be five sites ready and prepared -- with full basic services and decent accommodation -- to receive 1774 families from some of the worst-affected flood zones. Indeed, if we had been able to implement our plans (formulated just after the 2009 election), we would have been prepared before last year's rainy season.

But this hasn't happened.

The major obstacle has NOT been the plethora of laws and regulatory red tape that ensnare all development. These challenges proved complex, but manageable. What proved insurmountable were the community conflicts that often derail (or at least impose long delays on) most development projects in poor communities. Indeed, the great irony of so-called "service delivery protests" in Cape Town is that most of them are intended to STOP delivery from happening.

This seems absurd in a situation of so much need. But it is precisely the extent of this need that causes fierce contestation over resources that become available. This applies particularly to construction projects and service provision, and the job opportunities that accompany them.

Community resistance is aggravated in the context of flood relief because people living in flood-prone areas are typically the most recent migrants to Cape Town. Flood relief is seen by many others as a way for "newcomers" to jump the housing queue -- not as the emergency relief measure it is intended to be. It is worth looking back to analyse where things went wrong with the stalled projects and try to learn some lessons from our failures.

Soon after the DA was elected to govern the Western Cape in 2009, the Province and City began working together on a plan to minimise the humanitarian disasters associated with the annual floods. The first task was to identify land that met several important criteria (in order to minimise legal complexities): the land had to be owned by the Province or the City, it had to have access to bulk services, it had to be appropriately zoned, and not require an Environmental Impact Assessment. Not many sites met these criteria. Nevertheless, we managed to identify five suitable sites. In order to minimise the predictable community resistance to beneficiaries coming in from "other areas", we decided to prioritise relief for flood-prone areas that are close to the identified sites.

We also embarked on a major public participation exercise, led by the Provincial Minister for Human Settlements, Bonginkosi Madikizela, and former Mayco member for Housing in the City, Councillor Shehaam Sims. The potential beneficiaries were supportive, but the people living adjacent to the identified sites strongly opposed the proposal. To address this resistance, we sought a compromise, proposing that 50% of the sites go to flood victims, and 50% to "backyarders". But this was not enough to meet the surrounding community's minimum demand for 80% of the sites.

The size of the proposed sites also proved contentious. If we had met the demands, it would have effectively negated the purpose of moving a significant number of people out of flood zones.

Eventually, we only succeeded in persuading residents living in the vicinity of just one of the identified sites to accept an "incremental development area" in their ward -- a ward where the majority of residents happen to support the DA. In the run-up to the local election, it took great courage on the part of their DA candidate, Councillor Gordon Thomas, to publicly back the development and persuade his voters to do so too.

We now have a model project in this ward where we can begin our flood-relief programme this winter. Unfortunately it will accommodate only 384 families, of which just half will be flood victims, on the basis of the 50:50 split agreed during the negotiations.

In contrast to this successful project, most of the councillors in the ANC-held wards resolutely resisted our efforts. They would rather people continue to live in the water, than allow the DA-led government to deliver a better life for them.

In one of the areas, where the ANC councillor was somewhat more helpful, the negotiations succeeded in achieving "sufficient consensus" for the development to start. But as soon as the contractor moved onto the site, a new group, claiming it was "not consulted", drove the developer off the site with threats of violence.

The City is now spending R18000 a day on "holding costs" as the developer waits -- and the winter rains draw closer. Our only option now is to seek a court order to enable the project to continue.

These delays have also resulted in the City under-spending its capital budget for housing, eliciting much criticism from the ANC. Having prevented this expenditure by blocking the projects, the ANC now claims its voters are the victims of delivery failure! No doubt, when the rains come, Tony Ehrenreich will call a press conference to say that if the City had spent its full housing capital budget it would have been able to avert the flooding disaster!

Political posturing merely compounds the problem, as year after year, in-migration escalates and extreme weather patterns play havoc with the lives of the poor. The current legal and regulatory environment relating to land release, combined with community resistance, make it impossible to get ahead of the wave of urban migration. As a result, desperate people will increasingly erect their shacks in places that are unfit for human habitation. And the annual flooding crisis will worsen, despite our best efforts.

This article by Helen Zille first appeared in SA Today, the online newsletter of the leader of the Democratic Alliance.

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