South Africa

The coverage of last week’s little tussle between Helen Zille and the ANC over the new World Cup stadium seems to have given passing reference to why Zille took such drastic action. The DA may have won the Mayor ship and wrested control from the ANC, but I think their actions were driven by a growing reality over the massive challenge they face in running the city. The stadium battle is only the first problem the DA will face in a city that is in dire need of upgrades and service delivery.

 

To further this point and understand the long road ahead for the City lets look at a few highlights from an article written by Carol Paton in the Financial Mail :

 

Cape Town's electricity and sewerage infrastructure is crumbling and in urgent need of huge investment; the administration is weak, demoralised and distrustful of Zille; the housing crisis grows every year no matter if the province spends its entire budget; and the city faces a R3bn price tag to meet Fifa requirements for the soccer World Cup in 2010.

 

The elephant in the room is the housing shortage and the inability of previous City administrations to tackle the problem :

 

As with all city politicians that have gone before her, housing is the problem that is most on her mind. Cape Town, says Zille, gets about R350m/year for housing - which would allow almost 9 000 matchbox houses to be built annually, assuming that infrastructure for water and sewerage has been paid for out of the city's other budgets. 
"There are 250 000 households on the waiting list, which grows by 16 000/year. You don't have to be Einstein to figure out that you are going backwards every year," she says. It's a numbers game that the city just can't win, and rather than continuing to promise everyone a house it would be far better to take an honest look at housing policy: either changing the national budget to ensure that there will be brick houses for all, or changing the policy to fit the budget by giving everyone services, like water and sewerage, but not all of them houses, she argues.

 
It might be a more realistic way of looking at the problem. But Zille is completely without influence to change national housing policy. And were she to try to do it alone, announcing to the poor of Cape Town that the DA did not plan to build houses, would be political suicide for her party.

 

Then there is the less visible but also important :

 

Six years ago, the Unicity Commission - a body set up to strategise the merging of Cape Town's six metropolitan substructures - put the sewerage infrastructure backlog at R1,4bn. Neighbourhood-based sewage pump stations built decades ago are no longer able to deal with the demands of a city of 3m people. But since the commission's warning, no investment in sewerage infrastructure has been made, except for an emergency R200m at one of the sewerage works. 

 

And of course who could forget :

 

The electricity crisis is more visible. Cape Town needs additional generating capacity urgently and the city will have to campaign hard with national authorities to make sure that it gets it sooner rather than later. Aside from the crisis in the supply, the distribution network - 6 000 substations that fall under the control of the city and now regional electricity distributor RED1 - are decrepit. With a maximum lifespan of 30 years, most are 33 years old and, says an official, "have been in crisis maintenance mode for five years". It is these substations that continually trip the network when Koeberg attempts to bring the power back up after an outage.

 

If the DA pulls this one off, they deserve to move on to bigger and better things…

 - (Big hat tip to Hex) -