Key topics
- Cape Town’s rapid growth strains infrastructure and urban planning.
- UCT’s decline undermines Cape Town’s intellectual and academic standing.
- Geordin Hill-Lewis faces pressure amid DA leadership challenges.
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By RW Johnson ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Living in Cape Town at this time is both pleasant and yet in many ways a strange experience. Sometimes it feels as if the whole country has been tipped on its side as people from Jo’burg, Durban, Bloemfontein, the Eastern Cape, let alone the many others from Zimbabwe, the Congo and elsewhere, stream southwards into the Western Cape. Cape Town now has over five million residents but the mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, already looks ahead to a city of ten million and more. It is perfectly obvious that the city desperately needs a proper structure plan to guide its future development, yet there is no sign of such a document.
It is clear, for example, that if a laissez-faire attitude continues, not only will Khayelitsha swallow Stellenbosch but that the city’s ever-increasing traffic will jam up solid for this is not California, land of endless urban freeways, but a city where road development is tightly constrained by mountains and the sea. Without doubt we should be planning for a new city on the West Coast, a new centre to pull people and development away from historic Cape Town. The model we should have in mind is the US “twin city” of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
As it is urban development is constrained by the wholly unrealistic demands of Reclaim the City and other clamant NGOs. They continually demand the provision of low-cost housing in the city centre, oblivious of the fact that you can search in vain for low-cost housing in the centre of London, Paris, New York etc. Indeed, it’s a contradiction in terms: any low-cost housing in the middle of Cape Town would instantly become valuable property and its owners or tenants would be richly rewarded.
Similarly, there is a split personality over development. If investment is poured into upgrading inner suburbs like Woodstock, Mowbray or Observatory, existing residents find their property values zooming happily up. But then the cry is heard that gentrification is making it difficult for old time residents to buy back into property in the area. Again, no one seems to realise that all this has happened a hundred times before in, say, Paris or London, that it’s just the normal growing pains of modern urban development.
There are, too, those who argue that a multitude of homeless vagrants should be allowed to camp out and live on the streets of the inner city. This is not a view shared by most residents and it would, indeed, be disastrous for Cape Town’s development. And no other city in South Africa has spent as much as Cape Town in providing alternative accommodation in order to overcome this problem.
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Black intellectuals from elsewhere in South Africa invariably denounce the city for apartheid-like inequalities and claim that all the city’s money is lavished on old “white” suburbs and nothing is spent elsewhere, though in fact this is the opposite of the truth. But I make a point of asking black newcomers about their experience. They invariably reply that they really like Cape Town, appreciate that “everything works here”, that the city and roads are kept clean and tidy and that unemployment is so much lower here.
The only real beef is that no one is too keen on living in Khayelitsha. In effect this is a complaint about the lack of large and properly constructed apartheid townships like Soweto, Kwa Mashu etc. As a result the choice is very stark between much higher-priced suburbs and a vast squatter camp prone to flooding. It is noticeable that many Zimbabweans, in particular, are willing to pay higher proportions of their income in rent in order to live in more salubrious suburbs. There is unanimous appreciation for the fact that, unlike the horror stories from the rest of the country, the public schools and hospitals still work as they were supposed to in the Western Cape.
As was evident during the great Day Zero water crisis of 2017-18 Cape Town’s civic morale is strongly positive and this is a great advantage to the city. There is a quiet confidence that things are managed better here, a pride in the city and a willingness to rally round in the common interest. People know that every year the Western Cape builds many more schools and classrooms, that the premier and the province’s mayors are generally honest and honourable people, that infrastructure is being properly maintained and that people from all over want to come here.
But there are still many problems. Far too much of Cape Town’s sewage is simply discharged into the sea and there are troubling reports of many beaches being badly polluted. The gangs that roam the Cape Flats are as powerful, violent and unrestrained as ever. No administration in the city’s history ever seems to have got the upper hand over them. Partly as a result, the levels of crime and violence, particularly in the city’s outlying areas, remain uncomfortably high.
Another major problem is the continuing decline of the University of Cape Town. For as long as anyone can remember its campus has been the source of endless student troubles, of bizarre examples of super-woke sentiments and behaviour and a general dilapidation of its status as Africa’s top university.
My own lengthy experience of the academic world led me to believe that academic administration is, or should be, all about striving continually to improve standards, to get better and better students and more and more distinguished academics. That is not just the top priority, it is almost the only priority. In an age of international university rankings and league tables, any other choice is suicidal.
So I was staggered at the sight, in recent time, of a UCT Vice-Chancellor (who was my own former student) deliberately appointing affirmative action academics and, judging by the endless stories of straight A white students being turned down by UCT medical school, using the same racial biases in student admissions. There was thus a quite deliberate policy of lowering standards across the board. It quickly appeared that affirmative action appointees – not to be confused with black academics appointed on merit -seldom publish research and in some cases the university’s research profile was largely dependent on a small coterie of senior (and often retired) academics who would soon be gone from the system.
Bizarrely in the early 2020s UCT seemed to take pride in the fact that the Vice-Chancellor and a whole gaggle of Deputy VCs, were all women, as if academic administration was all about women’s lib. In fact this became the most disastrous period in UCT’s entire history when fire destroyed a number of its buildings including the Jagger Library and its world famous and irreplaceable collections, a blow from which the university can never recover. Yet the mystery was that UCT had stood on its present site for over a century and fires on Table Mountain are a normal, recurrent phenomenon, yet nothing like this had ever happened before.Â
The answer was, of course, that routine maintenance and fire precautions had been neglected – the most elementary duty of any administrator. We then heard that perhaps the Jagger Library would be replaced by a nice open space and a garden – a clear indication that the insurance companies had refused to pay up after such obvious negligence. The Vice-Chancellor was sacked, but she could never have been appointed but for an almost demented sense of political correctness. Even now, years after the fire, UCT’s present management does not seem to realise the urgency of restoring whatever can be restored of Its Jagger collection, a matter of great international importance.Â
So low has UCT sunk in the minds of many locals that the recent pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah activities on the campus passed without much comment, as did the fact that Jewish students and academics felt intimidated and unsafe. This was a barbarous stain on UCT’s proud history of anti-apartheid and peaceful non-racial commitment. Yet there is no need for universities to get involved in foreign affairs and the damage done to UCT’s reputation and its relationship with the Jewish community, a tremendous source of fine students, top academics and philanthropic help, has been considerable.
The result, of course, is that the Cape Town middle classes of all races now quite normally send their children to Stellenbosch University and UCT has largely lost its traditional constituency. It has been an epic period of institutional self-harm. This has been a great blow to the city and the province, though some consolation is taken in the parallel rise of Stellenbosch and the fact that the province now has four universities in all.
But in the end either UCT will have to be rescued or an alternative centre of academic excellence will have to be created. Most of the growth in the Western Cape, tourism apart, stems from service industries, law, finance and high-tech. If these industries are to grow they will need a conveyor belt of bright graduates.
So the rise and rise of the Western Cape is not an uncomplicated story. The decline of UCT is not the only major intellectual loss for the city. Also, the decline of the Cape Times and Cape Argus under Iqbal Surve’s malign hand has been so complete that almost no one reads them, with the result that people in Cape Town and the Western Cape generally are extremely ignorant about their own local affairs. It is a major blind spot and one can only hope for a major digital replacement.
Growth and expansion are fine but if they only mean more houses, offices and restaurants that’s not enough. Cape Town has the longest urban culture and traditions of any South African city and it simply cannot afford to lose these major layers from its intellectual and cultural life. How long can a civic culture survive if there is no reputable media in which local affairs are discussed and debated ? If you talk to retiring UCT academics they speak with a sense of resignation and despair at a heritage betrayed. This is the very opposite of what is needed. There is a real danger that as Cape Town grows it is losing its intellectual heart.
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A more immediate problem is that because the DA finds itself with a leader who has become, frankly, an embarrassment, there is increasing talk of drafting in the mayor of Cape Town, Geordin Hill-Lewis, to replace him. This would be a major blow to the city, for Hill-Lewis, a popular and successful mayor, has only been in office since November 2021 and given the magnitude of the challenges facing the fast-expanding city, it is essential that it has capable and experienced management.
The history is not promising. Many have not forgotten the chaotic period of ANC municipal rule under Nomaindia Mfeketo with major new scandals exploding from week to week. Comically, every so often the ANC sends its “big guns” down to Cape Town to try to win the Cape back to the party. Nomaindia is almost invariably one of these “big guns” but she is a reminder to Capetonians of everything they want to put well behind them, so such visits always end with a further slump in the ANC vote.
Helen Zille replaced Nomaindia as mayor in 2006. She had been warned that it was folly to combine two full-time jobs – mayor and Leader of the Opposition – for one was bound to suffer. This she ignored. In fact she was a fine mayor but neglected the Leader job, so she lasted only three years as mayor. She was replaced by Dan Plato, a much lower-energy option.
Then in 2011 Zille, again against advice, made a most unfortunate deal allowing Patricia de Lille to become mayor. De Lille had made it clear that she had a visceral dislike of the DA and she ran her own little party in a completely authoritarian manner. So Cape Town was turned over to someone who centralised all power (and all appointments) in her own hands, who played patronage politics like an ANC boss, and who affronted the democratic culture of the DA at every turn. Inevitably this ended with a large-scale revolt against the mayor by the municipal DA caucus.
Seven years of De Lille was followed by a further three years of Dan Plato. When Hill-Lewis was chosen to replace him Plato immediately left the DA and joined the party of Marius Fransman, one of the shadiest characters in South African politics.
So the fact is that although Cape Town is the jewel in the DA’s crown, the party has treated the city pretty badly. Since 2006 there were three good years under Zille and now again three good years under Hill-Lewis, but the rest was pretty forgettable to downright bad. If the DA is to deserve and continue its dominance in the city it has to leave Hill-Lewis in post.
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