The South African government has delivered well over 3
million formal homes free of charge since the 1994 transition. But in
post-apartheid Cape Town, many recipients of these houses are fed up. Rather
than the endpoint of the post-apartheid urban crisis, deficient delivery
reproduces it anew, accentuating discontent in the process.
At the heart of apartheid lay the fortification of South
African cities as white spaces. Above all, this meant the prevention of
non-whites from entering city centers by force if necessary and cloaking this
in the rhetoric of legality. A series of key developments in the 1970s and 80s,
however, catalyzed a reversal. Most prominently was the repeal of the pass laws
in 1986, the set of laws that required non-whites to carry pass books with them
at all times and limited their entry into spaces designated as “white group
areas.” In the case of Cape Town, designated a so-called “Colored Labor
Preference Area”[1] during this period, Xhosa residents were deemed “migrants”
and deported over a thousand kilometers eastward to state-created
“homelands”[2] in the Eastern Cape. The systematic underdevelopment of these
rural bantustans left many so-called “African” South Africans with little
choice but to return to cities in search of employment. As the apartheid state
began to shy away from the 1960s and 70s model of forced relocations, by the
early 1980s, black residents were able to establish squatter settlements in
peri-urban locations around the country, seeking jobs in cities and having no
other affordable housing options. This is not to suggest that informal
settlements were not already present in urban areas—they date back to the
1890s, and above all, to the period of interwar industrialization[3]—but they
multiplied at an unprecedented rate during this latter period.
The sudden lifting of influx controls meant a rapid but
delayed urbanization. These residents had been forcibly kept out of many cities
since at least the 1930s, and certainly since the passage of the Group Areas
Act in 1950. With the transition to democracy in 1994 and the African National
Congress’ ascension to power, this immediate proliferation of shantytowns was
viewed by the ANC as a threat to its own legitimacy. Mandela’s promise of a
million houses within a decade was expeditiously fulfilled, with the
development of a massive housing rollout plan in 1994 as part of the
Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP). People in need would receive
formal 40 m2 houses, called “RDP houses,” free of charge. Even after the
closure of the RDP office two years later, these houses would continue to be
called “RDP houses,” at least colloquially, and retain this name even today.
Every person in every shack settlement in South Africa who I have encountered
knows what “RDP house” means, and this is generally the term used to describe
state-provisioned formal housing.
Since 1994, more than 3 million such RDP structures have been
delivered.[4] As Tokyo Sexwale, then Minister of Housing, famously remarked in
2010, “The scale of government housing delivery is second only to China”.[5]
Assuming the average household size of 3.6 people,[6] this means that nearly a
quarter of the South African population has been housed under this delivery
program.[7] Yet during the same two decades since 1994, the number of informal
settlements has increased more than nine-fold.[8] Currently, between a quarter
and a third of urban South Africans live in informal housing.[9] This might
take the form of informal settlements, or sometimes, as in most of Cape Town’s
so-called Colored townships, it means that people erect shacks in the backyards
of formal houses and pay rent to the homeowner. Thus the same period during
which all of these people were formally housed saw an exponential increase in
the number of people living in shacks. Despite one of the most substantial
housing delivery programs in modern history, urban informality mushroomed
during the two decades following apartheid.
The overwhelming bulk of this can be attributed to late and
post-apartheid urban influx, driven above all by the underdevelopment of the
bantustans. Frequently too, RDP house recipients illegally sell their homes for
a fraction of their value in order to meet immediate needs.[10] If accepting an
RDP house frequently requires relocation to a peripherally located site,
commuting costs can increase substantially. Given that no transport subsidy is
provided and these houses do not come with jobs, they are often sold out of
necessity, with residents returning to the same informal settlements and
backyards where they were before.
More damningly of the more than 3 million RDP homes
constructed between 1994 and 2010, more than 2.6 million of these are at “high
risk.” Nearly 610,000 of them need to be demolished and rebuilt altogether, and
this is according to the National Home Builder Registration Council’s
(NHBRC)[11] own figures.[12] Twice that number have workmanship related issues,
which the NHBRC estimates will cost on average R12,000 ($1130) per house. The
combined cost of remedying structural defects, minor defects, and non-compliant
construction is estimated to be R58.7 billion ($5.5 billion).
The shoddy construction is largely attributable to so-called
Black Economic Empowerment companies, in essence private sector startups given
nepotistic contracts with no oversight or accountability in the name of some
sort of progressive affirmative action. Given the extremely low profit margins
in RDP housing delivery,[13] larger construction companies tend to shy away
from applying for these government construction contracts, or “tenders” as they
are known in South Africa. In other words, the privatization of implementation
means that costs are trimmed at the expense of providing durable structures.
When the Department of Human Settlements releases a subsidy for an RDP house,
the structure ultimately provided by a private contractor must meet a number of
national guidelines in terms of size and quality. But with RDP home provision
far from a lucrative industry, these companies have every incentive to cut
corners.
What began as an attempt to resolve the post-apartheid housing crisis has now actually exacerbated it.
What began as an attempt to resolve the post-apartheid
housing crisis has now actually exacerbated it. RDP delivery has reinforced the
apartheid era geography of relegation by formalizing peripherally located shack
settlements, rendering their far-flung locations permanent. With these houses
already deteriorating and residents frequently opting to sell them off,
delivery has hardly served as the antidote to proliferating urban informality.
Whereas post-apartheid housing protests were initially most common among shack
dwellers, cities across the country have witnessed a recent rise in protests by
dissatisfied RDP recipients. In Cape Town, these protests have spread across
the Cape Flats, from Scottsdene in the northeast to Pelican Park in the
southwest. Increasingly RDP beneficiaries are joining the ranks of informal
settlement dwellers and backyarders in organizing against the municipal state,
the perceived culprit of the post-apartheid housing crisis.
***
When I visited one such residential RDP development in Cape
Town in early June, I encountered houses much smaller than I was used to
seeing—they didn’t even seem to comply with the 40 m2 requirement. This
development—Pelican Park—is a flagship project for the City, providing
countless photo ops for Mayor Patricia de Lille, Western Cape Premier Helen
Zille, and numerous other visitors. Ten years in the making, it is the City’s
first integrated housing development, meaning that RDP houses, subsidized gap
units, and mortgaged housing will exist in the same development.[14] Roughly
2000 RDP houses will exist in Pelican Park when the project is completed in
2017.
Beyond the size of each house though, it was the shoddy
construction that was driving recipients of these structures to organize
against the City. Residents were beginning to form various neighborhood
committees to contest what they viewed as deficient housing. One recipient of a
new home, Layla, took me into her new place. I met her when she was still
living in an informal settlement just a few kilometers away, but after years on
the waiting list, she finally secured a formal structure at the new housing
development of Pelican Park just a few months ago. The internal walls were left
unplastered and made of large, light gray concrete bricks. If you rubbed the
bricks—and not even particularly vigorously—sandy material would fall away. One
could easily rub a divot into one of these bricks in a matter of minutes.
“I must make it livable,” Layla told me, pointing to the few
pictures and mirrors with Arabic script she’d hung on the walls. I noticed that
the molding on the ceiling was actually just white styrofoam glued along the
corners. Apparently this was from the contractor—not of Layla’s doing. It
reminded me of the so-called “New Tech” houses I’d seen in Delft,[15]
constructed almost entirely out of styrofoam. I asked her why the walls were
left unfinished, and the floor was exposed concrete. “The company that built
these houses said they ran out of money from the subsidy. It was all in the
plan, and look how cheap the materials they used were, but now they say they
ran out of money from the [RDP housing] subsidy, and so they couldn’t put tiles
on the floors, couldn’t put plaster on the walls, couldn’t finish it really. So
now we have these houses, and we must make it livable ourselves, they say. But
how? We have no money. That’s why we’re in these houses in the first place!”
She took me upstairs. At the top of the staircase, there were
two doors. Each led into a tiny room barely large enough for a queen-size
mattress—also unfinished. Layla pointed to various cracks that had already
appeared in the wall. Granted yesterday was one of the coldest days I’d
experienced in Cape Town—there was even a bit of snow in Mitchell’s Plain, an
exceedingly rare sight—but it was freezing in there. The walls provided little
in the way of insulation, and there were generous “vents” cut through the brick
all throughout the house, effectively rendering inside and outside equivalent
temperatures.
We descended the staircase again. At the bottom was the
living room, with a tiny kitchen in the hallway leading to the front door.
There was a small bathroom—again, with very large cracks in the brick—and then
another tiny room—the smallest of them all— right next to the front door.
“They have us now on high consumption,” Layla told us,
referring to the electricity usage bracket in which each of the recipients is
located. Everyone seemed to know the term well. “We’re supposed to be on low,
but they have us on high consumption. We don’t even know how to change it. Then
there’s the solar geyser they promised us.[16] It’s in the plan—look!” She
pulled out the blueprints and official plan for her home, and it was indeed
there. I snapped a photo for examination in greater detail later. She also gave
me a piece of paper with all of the specifications, but I couldn’t find any
mention of a solar geyser there. I saved it for later. “It’s not even the City
that’s not giving us the solar geyser—it’s Eskom![17] They are supposed to, but
now they say it’s too expensive. But they have to give it to us!”
Two women were seated in Layla’s living room—one elderly and
heavy-set, the other younger and a bit more middle-class in comportment (though
also an RDP house recipient). The older woman took me outside. “Look over
there,” she said, pointing to a house down the road. “See those men on the
roof? They are putting my roof back in. It blew off yesterday, and I just moved
in! Seriously, tiles blew right off. In a brand new house? Are they crazy? Go
over. You must take pictures.”
Once back inside, the third woman pointed to the walls.
“Look,” she said, taking us into the bathroom. “It’s not cement, but just sand
pushed together to look like cement. See all these lines, these cracks? In a
new house! What’s it going to look like in 20 years? It’s all falling out
already!” She pulled out her phone. “I must show you these pictures of my
house. Give me your number and I’ll send them on WhatsApp.” She showed me one
photo where she’d removed the cover on the light switches, and in the hole
behind it, the wall was stuffed with crumpled newspaper. “How is this not a
fire hazard? They aren’t supposed to put paper in there, but it was cheaper
than real insulation or even concrete or sand. They didn’t even fill it in!” A
second photo revealed a sizable crack in the ceiling that was there when she
moved in. A third showed a light fixture falling out of the ceiling. “That one
they told me they’d fix. Not the crack though.” Layla chimed in: “Now Human
Settlements wants to come because we’re meeting. Before they were trying to run
away from me, but now they see we’re getting organized.” The older woman joked,
“There they busy with my roof,” pointing in the direction of her house.
“At the end of the day we are humans and not dogs. Did they build these houses for animals?”
Between Layla’s house and the older woman’s was the entrance
to a small informal settlement. “It’s been here for 24 years,” Layla told us.
“Or rather, they were down the road, but they were moved here 2 years ago to
make room for some of the first houses. They haven’t been integrated.”
“What? They weren’t included in the Pelican Park project?”
Faeza asked. A backyarder herself, Faeza was visiting the project from the
predominantly Colored township of Mitchell’s Plain. As the chairperson of a
relatively new citywide social movement called the Housing Assembly, she was
helping to organize dissatisfied residents in Pelican Park. “No,” the older
woman answered. “Four of them did get houses a few months ago. But the rest they
say are being moved to Delft.”
“It must be Blikkiesdorp,” Faeza responded. She was nearly
moved there herself just a couple of years ago, but refused after visiting the
notorious relocation site. “At the end of the day we are humans and not dogs.
Did they build these houses for animals?” Layla couldn’t contain her
frustration. “It’s not about quality for them, but just quantity. We gonna be
hidden too because the bank houses gonna cover everything up.”[18]
***
Two weeks later I returned to Pelican Park. Residents had
constituted themselves into three committees. The purpose of each committee was
to represent RDP recipients in their struggle with the City over the faulty
homes. “This is one committee,” Layla told me, “but there are two more. Pelican
Park is coming in three phases, and so that means three committees. Each will
choose two people, and then there will be six on the umbrella body. That means
that six will report back to the Housing Assembly. The rest of the working
group is meeting tomorrow.” It was interesting to watch how representative
bodies formed in the earliest part of this relocation site. The residents in
Layla’s phase of Pelican Park were meeting to form a local committee, and I’d
come to help facilitate an interactive workshop on the RDP housing crisis with
a few members of the Housing Assembly. We were holding the workshop and meeting
in an empty RDP house; the recipient had yet to move in.
Auntie Winnie, one of the women who had been moved from the
same informal settlement as Layla, walked over to me. I hadn’t seen her since
she lived in Zille-Raine Heights, a small land invasion not too far from
Pelican Park. She was mixed about her situation: “This has to be like the
happiest time of my life, but it’s like a nightmare.” She’d waited most of her
adult life on the waiting list, and here she was with a defective house.[19]
She turned to me: “They said they were supposed to spend R100,000, R120,000
[about $9400 to $11,200] on this subsidy, but they didn’t spend more than
R40,000 [approximately $3750]. It’s a scandal. Where is the money?”
Winnie disappeared to go make sandwiches while the meeting
began. Layla gave the introductory remarks. “I’m an activist,” she emphasized.
“Not ANC, not DA. I come from Zille-Raine Heights where we took land because we
were gatvol of backyards, gatvol of being on the waiting list, and gatvol of
paying rent.[20] They tried to move us to Happy Valley, but we refused.[21] We
know that the database don’t actually work. There’s people that’s five months
on the waiting list that got a house here. But others 30 years, 23 years on…the
waiting list.” She was presumably referring to others in Zille-Raine Heights
who did not receive houses in Pelican Park. No one was clear as to how the
selection process proceeded.
A few days later, when I interviewed the City’s head of
housing allocations, Alida Kotzee,[22] she explained some of these disparities.
While typically RDP houses are allocated according to time on the waiting list,
“this case was political,” she told me. Then Mayor Helen Zille had personally
promised the residents of Zille-Raine houses, and so they named the settlement
after her.[23] Moreover, the land these residents were occupying was owned by a
nearby school, and so residents needed to be relocated. Thus while generally
RDP provision proceeds according to the demand database, exceptions are made in
cases of land invasions and other contingent circumstances requiring immediate
attention, or else in “political” cases. Zille-Raine Heights was both political
and a land invasion. No answer was provided as to why all residents weren’t
relocated, but I didn’t press the matter.
Beyond the problem of the selection process though, residents
remained dissatisfied with their homes, viewing them as haphazardly constructed
warehouses for the poor. “They promised us free-standing, but these are not
even semi-detached!” one woman inside the meeting shouted. “They showed us the
plans, but these houses are 3 or 4 in a row. It’s all lies, empty promises.
We’re being lied to. This is not what we signed for. It’s unhealthy
here—unhygienic. It’s like a dirtbin through my house.” More complaints: no
sports field or park for the children (as guaranteed in the RDP, claimed
Ebrahiem); a lack of amenities—schools, clinics, churches, mosques; there’s no
library; safety and security is already becoming an issue, and they weren’t
provided with burglar bars.
“How can we afford burglar bars? We can’t! If we could afford
them, we wouldn’t be here!” another woman interjected. “It’s a health risk,
living here,” added another. “Too many people have asthma to be by these raw
walls. Both of my children have asthma. It’s cold, it’s damp.” “And it’s
already overcrowded, and we just moved in! I stay by my sister, and lots of
families are staying with each other here already. I stay in a three-bedroom
but have to sleep in the kitchen.”
These were residents who had been living in informal
settlements or in backyards, many without electricity. On my last visit to
Zille-Raine Heights, people were cooking over an open fire in the middle of a
field, and some of the shacks I entered had dirt floors and low ceilings. These
RDP recipients’ standards were not high, yet here they were, organizing a
neighborhood council in order to contest the delivery of houses they alleged
were substandard and in some cases, already falling apart.
This crisis of delivery in post-apartheid Cape Town is hardly
an aberration, but mirrors experiences in municipalities throughout South Africa.
The fact that the majority of RDP houses are substandard or pose health and
safety risks only two decades after the program’s inception is obviously
alarming. But even more significant is the fact that rather than mitigating the
demands of the post-apartheid housing crisis, RDP delivery appears to actually
accentuate them. If delivery began as a means for the ruling party to both
control rapid urban influx and shore up its own legitimacy, the current
delivery regime has resolved neither problem. Above all, deficient delivery
only intensifies anti-state politics. Far from placated recipients removed from
the rolls of the waiting list, residents remain incensed, dissatisfied, and
above all, organized against municipal governments.
When analysts write about the recent spike in service
delivery protests across South Africa, it is frequently presumed that delivery
will conciliate residents and dissipate this “rebellion of the poor.”[24] In
other words, delivery and protest are typically viewed as antithetical. Yet as
the case of Pelican Park demonstrates, recipients of the ultimate service—free
formal housing—are far from satisfied. Rather than the endpoint of the
post-apartheid urban crisis, deficient delivery reproduces it anew,
accentuating discontent in the process. Residents’ names are scratched from the
waiting list and from the municipal state’s perspective, these cases are
considered closed. But for relocated residents, this is simply the continuation
of their struggle for access to decent housing. Removal from the waiting list
without the receipt of houses that they consider tolerable is akin to dismissal
and marginalization—far from the “progressive realization of the right to
adequate housing” guaranteed by the post-apartheid Constitution in these residents’
book.
References and
Footnotes
1.
“Although
Black Africans made up perhaps three-quarters of the national population, in
Cape Town they composed only about 15%; Whites approached 30%, Coloureds 55%.
The Pass Laws had been far more draconian here in the Western Cape than
anywhere else, because jobs were racially reserved not only for Whites but also
for Coloureds; most Black African labor was excluded. A Coloured Labor
Preference Area (CLPA) was formalized, whose boundary ran through the arid
mid-Cape interior, buffering Western from Eastern Cape in a manner reflective
of nature’s climatic buffer at the time of European arrival.” John Western.
2002. “A Divided City: Cape Town.” Political Geography 21: 713. ↩
2.
“Homelands,”
Prime Minister Verwoerd’s euphemism for bantustans, were at the center of the
apartheid administration’s claim to shift from white domination to “separate
development.” In essence, these were simply the apartheid period iteration of
the pre-apartheid “native reserves.” But the term “homeland” (tuisland) also
“signalled a momentous change: it dispensed with the old assumption that
‘bantu’ were a single ‘homogenous’ people and instead envisaged the creation of
self-governing African territories, supposedly based on historically determined
ethnic or ‘tribal’ grounds.”
3.
Saul
Dubow. 2014. Apartheid, 1948-1994. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 105. At the
core of this shift from reserves to “homelands”/bantustans was an attempt to
move from race (“African” in the apartheid terminology) to ethnicity (Xhosa,
Zulu, Venda, etc.), thereby fragmenting perceived opposition into rival
“nationalities.” Four such bantustans were actually deemed independent
countries, though no foreign government recognized them as such. ↩
4.
A.
W. Stadler. 1979. “Birds in the Cornfield: Squatter movements in Johannesburg,
1944–1947.” Journal of Southern African Studies 6(1): 93–123; Philip Bonner.
1995. “African Urbanisation on the Rand Between the 1930s and 1960s: Its Social
Character and Political Consequences.” Journal of Southern African Studies
21(1): 115-29. ↩
5.
While
the current figure is closer to 3.4 million, a definitional change in 2007
means that the program is increasingly oriented toward providing not housing,
but “housing opportunities.” The irony of this policy shift is that these
“housing opportunities” are typically site-and-service schemes and require
relocation to greenfield sites—precisely the opposite of the shift toward in
situ upgrading promised by the national Department of Human Settlements just a
few years earlier. ↩
6.
Republic
of South Africa. 2010. Proceedings of Extended Public Committee, 21 April 2010.
↩
7.
Statistics
South Africa. 2012. “Census 2011 Statistical Release – P0301.4.” Accessed
online (http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P03014/P030142011.pdf). ↩
8.
This
is a conservative estimate, as the average household size has declined since
the transition, and of course, the national population has steadily risen. ↩
9.
Kate
Tissington. 2011. A Resource Guide to Housing in South Africa 1994-2010:
Legislation, Policy, Programmes and Practice. Johannesburg: Socio-Economic
Research Institute of South Africa (SERI): 32, 36. ↩
10.
Mark
Misselhorn. 2009. “A New Response to Informal Settlements.” Transformer 15(6):
16-9; Alison Todes. 2000. “Reintegrating the Apartheid City? Urban Policy and
Urban Restructuring in Durban.” Pp. 617-29 in A Companion to the City, edited
by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. Malden: Blackwell. ↩
11.
According
to the National Housing Code, recipients are prohibited from selling RDP houses
for eight years. After this point, they acquire title deeds and can dispose of
their property as they wish. ↩
12.
The
NHBRC is the national regulatory body of the home building industry. ↩
13.
Sipho
Mashinini. 2011. “Strategic Corporate Plan 2011/12.” Presentation to the
National Homebuilders Registration Council, Johannesburg, 16 March 2011. Slides
available online
(http://db3sqepoi5n3s.cloudfront.net/files/docs/110316nhbrc.ppt). ↩
14.
Interview
with Herman Steyn, Manager: New Settlements, City of Cape Town Department of
Human Settlements (23 June 2014). ↩
15.
Gap
housing applies to those whose income is too high to be eligible for RDP
houses, but not high enough to qualify for a mortgage or loan. ↩
16.
Delft
is another Cape Town township, located 20 km northeast of Pelican Park on the
periphery of the municipality. It includes Blikkiesdorp (literally “tin can
township”), a relocation camp for homeless and evicted Capetonians. It remains
arguably the most notorious such temporary relocation area (TRA) in the
country. ↩
17.
“Geyser”
is the South African English term for a hot water heater. ↩
18.
Eskom
is the national electricity parastatal. ↩
19.
“Bank
houses” or “bond houses” are the colloquial terms in South Africa for mortgaged
homes secured with loans from the bank. RDP home recipients and residents of
informal settlements frequently view them with disdain as upper class excesses.
Whereas the City advertises Pelican Park as an integrated housing development, the
RDP recipients with whom I spoke all viewed it as a ploy to hide the RDP
structures behind more attractive houses. ↩
20.
The
City of Cape Town, like all accredited South African municipalities, runs a
demand database for RDP housing. Citizens register based on need, and
hypothetically at least, the City then delivers based upon order of
registration, with exceptions made for special needs, old age, and veterans.
This technology has existed since the late apartheid period, and there is
continuity between the apartheid waiting list and the current demand database. ↩
21.
Afrikaans
for “fed up,” literally “full to the ass.” ↩
22.
Happy
Valley is, like Blikkiesdorp, a temporary relocation area (TRA) on the
periphery of Cape Town. ↩
23.
Interview
with Alida Kotzee, Director: Public Housing and Customer Services, City of Cape
Town Department of Human Settlements (23 June 2014). ↩
24.
Jessica
Thorn and Sophie Oldfield. 2011. “A Politics of Land Occupation: State Practice
and Everyday Mobilization in Zille Raine Heights, Cape Town.” Journal of Asian
and African Studies 46(5): 518-30. ↩
25.
Peter
Alexander. 2010. “Rebellion of the Poor: South Africa’s Service Delivery
Protests – A Preliminary Analysis.” Review of African Political Economy
37(123): 25-40 ↩
