“South African cities today: some challenges”
Many cities in one
Invisible cities, by the Italian writer, Italo Calvino, are a fable about Marco Polo’s numerous adventures. In the story, Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan the cities he encounters on each of his travels. He tells of just cities and unjust cities, of cities in the heavens filled with canals and jewelled palaces, of cities full of torment and decay. Indeed, the cities he describes are of many kinds, each different to the other, with different kinds of people and customs of their own. Some of these cities are thriving and splendid places, others are wicked infernos filled with decay and suffering.
But in the end, it is clear that these tales about many different cities is really a single story about just one city with many different facets or realities. That city, we come to learn, is Venice, in Italy.
As Kublai Khan listens to Marco Polo’s stories, one question constantly worries him; what he wants to know, most of all is whether the general tendency in these cities points more to progress or decline.
Calvino’s story resonates with us, because the notion of multiple cities in one city seems to capture the reality of the apartheid city, which for many of our fellow citizens is still largely, if certainly not wholly, their present reality 16 years into our democracy. Kublai Khan’s question too resonates what we want to know is what state our cities are in? And most of all, whether the trend is towards or away from our idea of progress: a better life for all.
Let me thank you for inviting me to address this conference of the South African Cities Network (SACN) as you progress in compiling your third State of the cities report. I extend too the Minister’s greetings to this conference. He was keen to attend, but is, unfortunately, out of the country at the moment.
The SACN was, of course, established on the initiative of our department in 2002, basically to provide a platform for the nine largest cities in the country to cooperate in responding to the strategic challenges facing you in the context of globalisation and to collaborate on your common problems of urban governance. The Network was established to encourage the exchange of information, experience and best practice on urban development and city management and to share your acquired learning in ways that can add value to government in all three spheres.
Your highly regarded state of the cities reports are important repositories of data and information about the condition of city government and urban life. They increase our capacity as a state to engage the unique challenges confronting the urban built environment. We are aware of the international commendations you have received for these reports and we congratulate you on this. We look forward to the finalisation of your third report and are interested to see how it will relate to the new local government turnaround strategy that we are finalising following the October National Indaba on Local Government, at which we considered The State of Local Government Report.
Having the South African cities network is good. But we should also be thinking about a district municipalities network of some sort, even if the future of districts is being reviewed. If it is not to be a district network, perhaps a network of municipalities that are mainly rural? This has become more necessary with the government’s present focus on accelerating service delivery and development in the rural areas.
Local government turnaround strategy
The Ministry believes that the turnaround strategy presents us all with an opportunity to do things differently, provided we make “local government everyone’s business.” Government wants to forge the strongest partnership possible in the interests of more effective and accountable local government. The Ministry will draw on the special expertise that exists in professional bodies such as the SACN.
The declaration at the end of the National Local Government Indaba, which discussed The State of Local Government Report, confirms that we have made significant progress but that municipalities in general are severely distressed. We need new, much more collaborative approaches to tackling the challenges we face.
Making local government everyone’s business through this turnaround strategy is not solely about focusing on the present troubles in local government. Rather, it is about ensuring that the system of cooperative governance as a whole is in fact capable of contributing to the realisation of a better life for all, with a particular focus on local government, which is after all the sphere of government that is closest to people.
As the report shows, the state of local government is a reflection of the inequalities that are the reality of our country. The distorted patterns of wealth, ownership, poverty and unemployment in our country are transmitted through to local government in the form of different settlement types and vastly different operational capabilities. The per capita capital expenditure of metros, for example, is on average 10 times greater than that of a local municipality in a former homeland.
Operating expenditure is on average six times greater. Each kind of settlement is confronted with peculiar pressures of its own. Our cities, towns and rural villages co-exist in an interlocking relationship because of the same structural forces that reproduce inequality in our society, urbanisation is fuelled by deprivation in rural areas and deprivation in rural areas obstructs economic activity and effective government by further depleting the resource base.
We sought to respond to the reality of spatial inequality by introducing a model of developmental local government. Differences in settlement type were accommodated by creating three categories of municipality. But to level the playing fields of inequality, we adopted a more or less uniform approach to policy, regulation and service delivery. The report shows that too much uniformity may have created expectations that some municipalities lack the capacity to meet. It may also have reduced our capacity for paying particular attention to the particular circumstances in our different municipalities. It was with this in mind that President Zuma posed the question whether a one-size-fits-all approach to local government remains the right one, when he addressed the country’s mayors and managers in Khayelitsha the day before our Indaba.
Cities crucial in our development
We must pay closer attention to the condition of our cities, as a group of similarly situated municipalities, and in their own right, for of course there are dissimilarities between the nine largest cities in our country. As the United Nations (UN) State of the World’s Cities Report for 2006/07 shows effective urban government is essential given the problems of the 21st century: “In 2008, the world reaches an invisible but momentous milestone: for the first time in history, more than half its population, 3,3 billion people, will be living in urban areas. By 2030 this is expected to swell to almost five billion. Many of the new urbanites will be poor. Their future, the future of cities in developing countries, the future of humanity itself, all depends very much on decisions made now in preparation for this growth.”
Developmental local government is our vision for local innovation within a framework of national unity. Under apartheid, large cities were poisonous places of white privilege built on racial exploitation. But they were also places where civic mobilisation against oppression, and for a better life, ultimately triumphed. That spirit of struggle for social justice, which infuses our vision of developmental local government, offered the prospects of turning cities into citadels of hope, possibility and human solidarity. The creation of the democratic institutions for equal citizenship under a single government and common tax base in our cities has been a momentous achievement.
To return to Calvino’s story: Marco Polo’s provocative response to Kublai Khan’s anxiety that the general pattern connecting these many cities seemed to point away from progress, and towards `the infernal city’ as being the final destination is this; “There are two ways to escape suffering the inferno. The first is easy for many; accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension, seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
The infernos we inherited from apartheid are the infernos of racialised poverty and inequality that will engulf our society if we are not vigilant, if we don’t constantly seek out and build upon that which is not inferno. Doing things differently means we must maintain our vigilance and constantly seek to overcome the inferno. We can see apartheid’s duality still imprinted in the patterns of human life in our urban spaces the duality of great privilege, from unfair advantage, coexisting with greater suffering, from unfair discrimination. These are the infernos in the midst of our cities.
But we can also see a spirit of endurance and purpose rising in our city governments in spite of these challenges. There is a will and drive to cause positive change. We have seen the new stadiums for the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup rise above the skyline and the persistent sceptics. Green places and parks and tarred roads have been built in townships that were intended to be places of dust and grime. There are bold initiatives to improve public transport in all major cities so that we can bridge the distances between people and work in ways that benefit the poor and marginalised especially. Some cities are experimenting with new energy efficiencies such as green construction and sustainable water resource management. Some have built innovative partnerships with local universities, research institutions, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the private sector to ensure that the needs of their local economies are served by the skills and knowledge necessary.
As your 2007 state of the city finances report shows, our nine cities are potentially among our strongest assets in our national quest to escape the inferno of persistent inequality. They are home to 38 percent of the country’s population and contribute to 65 percent of the national gross value added. In 2005/06 they accounted for 71 percent of the total operating expenditure and 54% of total budgeted capital expenditure of local government. But the cities are vulnerable; growing urbanisation has led to the growth of large informal settlements in major cities and large towns, placing a strain on urban infrastructure and services. Land for development is costly and scarce.
The growth of urban poverty in tandem with the growth in unemployment, especially with the economic recession, is a pressure-cooker for social conflict. These days community protests are common, widespread and often violent. These protests convey people’s estrangement from the state. It is noteworthy that many of the public protests occur in the economically stronger and better performing municipalities. The combination of extreme inequality and poverty has created the conditions for social conflict and public violence in our municipalities.
In 2008, we saw how quickly social conflict can engulf the country, become xenophobic and destroy lives and property of innocent people. The challenge of reducing informal settlements remains one of the biggest challenges facing the country and is a major concern for government. There is a vital task for cities to play discerning the causes of social conflict and mediating their potentially destructive effects.
In some of our major infrastructure projects, we have seen what effective intergovernmental collaboration can achieve. Our accomplishments as a country in preparing for 2010 would not have been possible without an effective partnership between all spheres of government. SACN must help us to learn from that experience, to show us why it worked, so that we can infuse that practical experience into the workings of our intergovernmental system generally. We have seen that we can only tackle the huge tasks associated with building a public transportation network if we work together. Unseating the grip of spatial apartheid is too big a project for a municipality to go it alone. How do we translate these experiments into a long term intergovernmental arrangements? What changes to policy or incentives are desirable to make things easier for cities to go about their work on the country’s behalf?
We must take care that we keep the well being of our citizen's front and centre of all we do. We must be watchful that we do not render invisible the multiple realities of urban existence in our country or displace the politics of a better life as we look for technocratic solutions to the problems of urban government. In his book, The City: A Global History, Joel Kotkin captures something of the sacredness of the human city; “Cities can thrive only by occupying a sacred place that both orders and inspires the complex natures of gathered masses of people. For five thousand years or more, the human attachment to cities has served as the primary forum for political and material progress. It is in the city, this ancient confluence of the sacred, safe and busy, where humanity’s future will be shaped for centuries to come (p160).”
Your role as cities in shaping the future of this country cannot be over-emphasised. So it is, that while we welcome the progress several of you are forging, we express deep concern at the state in which others of you are. This very municipality in which we meet had its mayor and mayoral committee removed a few days ago. Tshwane, the capital of our country, is financially and in other ways challenged. We simply cannot afford some of our cities to be as challenged as you are. We appeal to South African Local Government Association (SALGA) and the provincial governments to offer more active assistance to the troubled municipalities. As a department, we are very willing to help. But you simply must do more to make your cities work. And they are not just your cities, they are our cities, they belong to all of us, including those living in the most remote rural areas. For how the cities perform will, in the long term, signally shape the prospects of all of us.
It is the cities too that can help us to effectively respond to the current phase of globalisation we face, and the consequences of the global economic and financial crisis that has afflicted us. We would like you to more actively contribute to this.
We would like to see you far more involved in Local Economic Development (LED), especially now with this recession. With a million jobs lost, you have to play a more determined role in creating jobs, within your constraints. Are you sufficiently involved in?
Of course, some of the challenges you face are beyond your control, especially the migration of people into the cities, which is likely to increase with the economic recession. And it is for national and provincial government to come to your support in contending with your external challenges. But there are many challenges you can contend with, and some of you are not doing so. We urge you to unite and attend to these challenges. You simply cannot afford not to.
We believe too that as cities your participation in the local government turnaround strategy will play a significant role in determining its success.
All municipalities are required to shape, through the fullest consultation with the widest range of stakeholders, their own municipal-specific turnaround plans within the framework of the national turnaround strategy by March next year. We urge you to give the fullest attention to this. And should you want any help from us, please know we are ready to offer what we can.
Social compact towards equitable cities
This then brings me to my last point which is the subject of two knowledge products that will be launched today at this third conference of the network. Townships, in the South African context, have a unique and distinct history, which has had a direct impact on the socio-economic structure of these areas and how people perceive and operate within them.
Over the years, townships have developed an iconic profile in the South African society, as representing the very heart of where the struggle for freedom was waged where many of today’s leaders, politicians, business people, trade unionists, sportspeople, musicians, artists and others were born and raised. Prior to 1994, townships in South Africa operated and functioned in isolation from the mainstream economy and society, and were associated with racial segregation, exclusion and marginal provision of services and economic opportunities.
Since 1994, the government has implemented a number of initiatives to upgrade and regenerate townships, such as the Special Integrated Presidential Projects (SIPPs), the Urban Renewal Programme (URP) and the Neighbourhood Development Programme (NDP). The cumulative knowledge on the effectiveness of these programmes is yet to be realised at a national scale.
The township transformation timeline is a project of the Department Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs in partnership with the European Union through the sector policy support programme. The project outcomes provide a strong basis for the integration and inclusion of townships into the core city development strategies. The urban renewal source book is a home grown set of booklets produced in partnership with National Treasury, amongst others. It is aimed at local practitioners seeking to improve the quality of life of citizens. The Source book presents a series of case studies on how some of our municipalities are seeking to tackle their challenges.
I urge you to attend the launch these publications this evening. Unfortunately, because of my commitments to the 16 Days of Action on No Violence to Women and Children I will not be able to be there. But I wish the launch every success. And I draw your attention to the importance of the 16 Days of Action campaign and the vital role the city municipalities have in making this campaign effective.
Once again, I thank you for inviting me and wish you every success in your deliberations.
I thank you.
Issued by: Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs
24 November 2009
Source: Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (http://www.dplg.gov.za/)
