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- Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
It's 2018 and Cape Town is wracked by its worst drought on record. The prospect of 'Day Zero' – when the taps will run dry – is driving citizens into a frenzy. Then the ruling Democratic Alliance removes control of the water issue from Mayor Patricia de Lille. While politicians turn on each other, revealing deep-lying faultlines and new enmities, it raises a critical question: who will lead the Mother City through the crisis? Against this fraught backdrop, author and academic Crispian Olver resolves to explore how the city of his childhood is run, and he sets his sights in particular on the relationship between local politicians and property developers. Interviewing numerous people – including many dropped from the City administration in often-questionable circumstances – he uncovers a Pandora's box of backstabbing, infighting and backroom deals. Olver explores dodgy property developments in the agriculturally sensitive area of Philippi, on the scenic West Coast and along the glorious – and lucrative – Atlantic Seaboard, delves into attempts to 'hijack' civic associations and exposes the close yet precarious relationship between the mayor and City Hall's 'laptop boys'. And in blistering detail he gets to grips with the political meltdown within the DA and the defection of De Lille to form her own party.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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A House Divided
The feud that took Cape Town to the brink
Crispian Olver
Jonathan Ball Publishers
JOHANNESBURG AND CAPE TOWN
Table of contents
For Gammie,
the friend I left behind.
Abbreviations
ANC African National Congress
Bokag Bo-Kaap Action Group
BKYM Bo-Kaap Youth Movement
Bokcra Bo-Kaap Civic and Ratepayers’ Association
CBD central business district
CFO chief financial officer
Cope Congress of the People
CTICC Cape Town International Convention Centre
CTSDF Cape Town Spatial Development Framework
DA Democratic Alliance
DP Democratic Party
ECC End Conscription Campaign
EFF Economic Freedom Fighters
FSB Financial Services Board
FSCA Financial Sector Conduct Authority
ID Independent Democrats
IDP integrated development plan
MDA Mitchell Du Plessis Associates
MEC member of the executive council (of a province)
MFMA Municipal Finance Management Act
MP member of Parliament
MSP Multi Spectrum Property
NGO non-governmental organisation
NNP New National Party
NP National Party
OCA Observatory Civic Association
ODTP Organisational Development and Transformation Plan
PAC Pan Africanist Congress
PHA Philippi Horticultural Area
RDP Reconstruction and Development Programme
SFB Sea Point, Fresnaye and Bantry Bay Ratepayers’ and Residents’ Association
SPU Strategic Policy Unit
TDA Transport and Urban Development Authority
UCT University of Cape Town
UDF United Democratic Front
US, USA United States, United States of America
VOC Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company)
WCPDF Western Cape Property Developers Forum
‘Every kingdom divided against itself is brought
to desolation, and every city or
house divided against itself shall not stand.’
Matthew 12:25
Map of Cape Town and surrounds
Prologue
‘This city has gone mad,’ my friend Miriam said over the phone in January 2018. ‘I never thought it would get to this.’
She had just returned from dropping off her three kids at school, and driving through the suburb of Newlands in Cape Town had encountered a chaotic jam of cars and people trying to get to a natural spring that flows in the area.
My heart sank when the call came in; Miriam always chooses to phone in the middle of a working day when I’m juggling work pressures. But I knew this was important: Cape Town was in the grip of the most severe drought in its history, and the municipality had just told people that the city was going to run out of water in four months’ time. Panic was infesting the residents, who were desperately stockpiling bottles of water and flocking to the few natural springs in the city where fresh water still flowed.
The beautiful Mother City and its iconic Table Mountain sit on top of a deep and ancient aquifer that nourishes some 36 artesian springs that run off the mountain. The original name for Cape Town, given to it by its indigenous olive-skinned Khoi people, was Camissa, meaning ‘place of sweet waters’, and it couldn’t have been more appropriate. The Khoi venerated the springs as mystical sites connecting them to another world, and now Capetonians were venerating them for their life-sustaining resource.
During the drought, the Newlands spring had become a point of congregation. People from across the desolate stretch of sand dunes and wetlands known as the Cape Flats mingled with the well-heeled residents of the affluent, still predominantly white Southern Suburbs as they gathered crystal-clear spring water in plastic bottles. Traffic and throngs of people congested the narrow Newlands roads. On the day of Miriam’s phonecall there had been a punch-up as people jostled to get to the spring, and traffic police had been deployed to patrol the area to control the situation.
Miriam is a remarkable woman. She exemplifies the best of the Cape liberal tradition – she wears her heart on her sleeve, always stands up for the underdog in any situation, and isn’t afraid to speak her mind. At the time, she’d recently sorted out the archives at the Legal Resources Centre, instructed George Bizos at the Marikana Commission of Inquiry, and co-written Bizos’s memoir about his 65 years of friendship with Nelson Mandela (which was longlisted for the Alan Paton non-fiction award), at the same time as moving her household from Johannesburg to Cape Town. Her relentless energy combined with a very human and fun-loving streak made for a great friend. But she also felt that I was some sort of expert on the workings of government, so chose to bend my ear every time she was aggrieved by the municipality.
‘I’m so angry I could cry,’ she said. ‘These complacent Newlands residents are objecting to the traffic and the people, and the City just does what they ask. It’s a colour thing: what they really mean is that they don’t want black families from the Cape Flats coming in to their nice clean suburb to collect water. Next thing they’re going to call in the army and we’ll have a water war. Who do you think is going to lose out then?’
This wasn’t the first time Miriam had phoned to offload about the water issue. The previous weekend she’d been wound up by her visit to some well-off friends on their Tokai wine estate. When she arrived at their house with exquisite views across the valley, she’d seen their lush green lawns being watered by sprinklers, which she thought was an obscene display of insensitivity in the middle of the drought. ‘There are water restrictions across Cape Town. They apply to everyone. You can’t just opt out because you’re willing to pay high water tariffs,’ she railed to me. ‘When I objected, they said the water was from their borehole, but isn’t that also bad? What if they pump all the groundwater out from the aquifer? If everyone in Cape Town is expected to cut down on the water they use, why do the rich get to opt out just because they can afford to drill a borehole?’
A few days later, the city closed the Newlands spring and announced that its precious water would be rechannelled to a new location nearby, from where people would still be able to queue and draw water. The new water-collection point opened in May 2018, with a limit of 25 litres per person.
Miriam’s phonecall was interlaced with other anxieties. As Cape Town’s water crisis reached it height, the most bizarre drama played out in City Hall. The feisty mayor, Patricia de Lille, who had recently won an overwhelming mandate for a second term in office, was stripped of her powers, and a bitter factional dispute broke out in the corridors of the Cape Town civic centre. The very foundations of the City had seemed to come adrift, and Capetonians were left wondering what was going on.
1
The dead sea
In March 2015 I got a graphic sense of the drought in the Western Cape when I travelled from Johannesburg to Cape Town to ride the world-famous annual Cape Town Cycle Tour, the largest timed bicycle race in the world attracting some 50 000 participants. The summers in the Cape had been getting steadily hotter and drier – ‘It’s climate change,’ my friend Miriam said glumly – and in the midst of a heatwave, with a furious southeasterly wind blowing, fires had broken out on Table Mountain and quickly engulfed the whole peninsula, burning perilously close to people’s houses.
Friends whose homes were perched on the mountainside in Kalk Bay posted alarming pictures of themselves fleeing down to the safety of the main road as a wall of fire approached. In horrendous temperatures, an army of firefighters worked round the clock for four days trying to control the flames, while helicopters buzzed overhead dropping buckets of water on the fire. As fire engines raced along the hazy smoke-filled highways, sirens blaring, there was an impending sense of crisis and doom – a dry and tortured city punished by the gods with blazing infernos.
That year, the cycle-race route was dramatically shortened, and I’d gone back home to Johannesburg with a sense of alarm, a feeling that some subterranean force had shifted. I worried about what sins might have been committed for a city to be punished like this.
Over time, Cape Town’s City Hall had been growing increasingly strident and berating about water. The City of Cape Town had begun communicating with its citizens about the crisis in November 2016, when they’d launched a rather lacklustre ‘Think Water’ campaign, with the limp slogan ‘Care a little. Save a lot’. Even though the administration knew there were only about 135 days of usable water left, no plan was in place for what would happen when it was finished.
(At that stage, the City administration hadn’t yet invented the concept of ‘Day Zero’ – popularly regarded as the day when the taps would run dry. When and if it was announced, Day Zero would in fact entail water rationing through an alternative municipal supply system, reducing consumption to 25 litres of water per person to eke out the supply through the rest of the summer season.)
At the press conference to launch ‘Think Water’, Mayor Patricia de Lille presented a worst-case scenario that would kick in if dam levels fell below 10%, a cut-off point at which most water remaining in the dams wasn’t usable: the City would then provide a ‘lifeline’ water supply, with minimal supply pressures, intermittent supply, and very stringent restriction measures. At that stage, switching off the taps and queuing for water wasn’t mentioned. Eighteen months later, a journalist covering the crisis crisply referred to this period of City communications as the ‘ineffectual’ phase of the campaign.1
It wasn’t until late 2016 that real action started to happen. In November 2016, as the Western Cape entered the hottest, driest summer months on record, and with dam storage levels at a disturbingly low 36%, Cape Town introduced Level 3 water restrictions. These banned the use of hosepipes or automatic sprinklers, permitting watering of gardens only using a bucket or watering can; watering times weren’t restricted but residents were ‘urged’ to limit their watering to the mornings and evenings. Washing or hosing-down of hard-surfaced or paved areas with drinking water wasn’t allowed, while washing of vehicles and boats with potable water had to be done using a bucket. Swimming pools could still be topped up as long as they were fitted with a cover.
The situation was so severe that Helen Zille, the premier of the Western Cape province and former mayor of Cape Town, announced a project called ‘Avoiding Day Zero’ with measures to restrict water flow. ‘It is very important that everyone saves water. I shower with a bucket and I hope everybody is doing that too,’ she said.2
The notion of the premier bathing in a bucket every few days caught on, but township residents caustically pointed out that they’d been washing in buckets all along, so the new restrictions made little difference to them.
In March, the metro was declared a local disaster area, which unlocked R20 million of disaster-fund monies, but little more in terms of infrastructure solutions. In May 2017 a water indaba (conference) was convened, at which the national Water and Sanitation Department announced that the situation had deteriorated significantly, and that the capacity of dams in the Western Cape was the lowest recorded in 30 years. The Western Cape disaster-management centre and its interdepartmental team (a permanent structure that pulls together officials from various departments in response to any crisis) pleaded for interventions such as procuring desalination plants, digging boreholes at hospitals and tapping into the aquifer under the city. That same month, Zille finally declared the whole province, including the Cape Town metro, a disaster area.3 But besides cajoling residents of Cape Town to use less water, the City administration introduced no new infrastructure solutions.
Then the winter rains forecast for 2017 didn’t arrive.
According to Zille, the South African Weather Service had bluntly acknowledged that they couldn’t predict whether or when rain would come, as previous forecasting models had proven useless in the era of climate change. ‘The [South African] Weather Service informed us that as far as forecasting goes, we are flying blind,’ she said4 – a terrifying prospect for a city that relied for the replenishment of its potable-water resources mostly on the runoff from winter rainfall.
The City formally requested information for water-augmentation proposals in June 2017, and followed up with requests for tenders for various water-augmentation schemes from August, starting with land-based reverse-osmosis desalination plants. But by November it was clear that Capetonians weren’t cutting back enough on water use, and that the limited water-augmentation efforts hurriedly undertaken would be insufficient to avert the impending crisis.
The tone of communications soon became more punitive. On 15 November 2017 De Lille graphically outlined what hitting Day Zero would entail – extreme rationing, a partial shutdown of the water system, and water provision through designated water points. She also gave an exact date for when this was expected to take place: 13 May 2018.
As the media noted, this new tack in communications coincided with the involvement of a prominent former leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA), Tony Leon, and his communications agency. Resolve Communications had been contracted by the City to manage publicity around the crisis, and they were the architects of the more assertive strategy that used Day Zero to frighten Capetonians into using less water.5
Xolani Sotashe, the leader of the African National Congress (ANC) in the city council, subsequently accused the DA, which ran the municipality, of cronyism in hiring Leon as communications adviser. ‘Tony Leon is now all of a sudden the spokesperson for Capetonians,’ he scoffed.6
The tone of the City’s communications shifted from cajoling to stern, with references to ‘stubborn’ residents ‘behaving badly’.7
On 17 January 2018 De Lille made an announcement that massively stoked Capetonians’ anxiety. The city had reached the point of no return, and Day Zero was now inevitable, she said. The mayor argued that 60% of Capetonians weren’t complying with the water restrictions, and that the city now had to compel them to. ‘It is quite unbelievable that a majority of people do not seem to care and are sending all of us headlong towards Day Zero. We can no longer ask people to stop wasting water. We must force them.’8
De Lille announced further water restrictions – the hitherto unknown Level 6, which restricted water consumption to 87 litres of water per person per day, regardless of where they were (at home or at work) or what they were doing; by the following month, with dam levels at around 25%, Level 6B kicked in, bringing daily permitted water consumption down to 50 litres per person, with limits on irrigation from boreholes and wellpoints, and fines and the mandatory installation of ‘water-management devices’ for those who didn’t comply. It wasn’t clear how these restrictions would be implemented, however, since the City had no mechanisms to monitor or enforce them.
These measures rubbed against the interests of large property owners in the city, while the mood among the citizens of Cape Town was verging on panic – public anxiety was amplified by the fact that the mayor didn’t have a credible disaster-management plan in place when she made the announcement.
The media were scathing. ‘Don’t let the City of Cape Town gaslight you – the water crisis is not your fault,’ wrote one journalist, pointing out that attacking your clients isn’t usually the best tactic in disaster communications. ‘We paid our taxes,’ he pointed out. ‘We relied on government to build infrastructure and make plans and do its job. We did save water when we were asked. You’d be hard-pressed to find this 60% of callous Capetonians in a city obsessed with saving water. The 60% number is never justified or clarified, and its source is never revealed.’9
The mood of panic was now accompanied by a growing sense of distrust, a feeling among Capetonians that they weren’t being told the truth.
On 24 January 2018 the DA’s national leader Mmusi Maimane, accompanied by (among others) Helen Zille and Deputy Mayor Ian Neilson – but not Patricia de Lille – announced that dam levels had dropped even further and that Day Zero was being moved up to 12 April. ‘The crash the City has been trying to avoid now seems inevitable. We are bracing for impact,’ Zille told a provincial official. ‘Sticking to the Province’s constitutional mandate of support and oversight is not enough in these circumstances. When Day Zero arrives, how do we make water accessible and prevent anarchy?’10
Capetonians were then presented with an apocalyptic vision of their immediate future. According to the City’s plan, municipal water would be made available at 200 distribution points across the metro. As Zille pointed out, if every family sent one person to fetch their water allocation, about 5 000 people would congregate at each point every day.11 Given that families would need some form of transport to carry their allocation of water, it was going to be a logistical and traffic nightmare. Zille said she was awaiting a full operations plan, including personnel requirements, security, infrastructure and budgets, but this did little to quench people’s anxiety. The sense of doom and crisis was palpable.
While City Hall was increasingly pointing a finger at residents, government agencies had also been engaged in a petty blame game. The City and province, both controlled by the DA, said the ANC national government had penalised them by not allocating infrastructure funds. Maimane said that the City of Cape Town was hamstrung by national government’s refusal to cooperate. Questions were raised about why Cape Town wasn’t getting the same level of support extended to ANC-run councils – there had been national support for a desalination plant at Richard’s Bay in KwaZulu-Natal, for example, and the Johannesburg metro had been supported to set up ‘restriction committees’ with tougher enforcement for water-saving measures.12 Maimane also hinted at corruption in the national Water Department with ‘price-rigging from water-related service providers’.13
His concern was well founded. The minister for Water and Sanitation, Nomvula Mokonyane, an ardent supporter of then-President Jacob Zuma and known as ‘Mama Action’ within ANC circles for her ability to mobilise the ruling party’s constituencies and to channel resources into its campaigns, presided over wide-scale fraud and corruption in her department. Mokonyane had, for example, caused favoured companies such as LTE Consulting to be given massive infrastructure projects (it had R5-billion worth of projects in 2016), while LTE had made generous donations to the ANC.14 Mokonyane had also notoriously interfered in the Lesotho Highlands Water Project to get LTE appointed,15 and the company had been awarded a project in Giyani in the northern province of Limpopo, where costs ballooned from R502 million to R2,7 billion before the project ran out of funds and collapsed.16 Irregular expenditures of R4 billion in her department had been picked up by the auditor-general in the 2016/17 financial year.17
When reviewing her department’s financial statements for 2016/17, the auditor-general commented sarcastically that ‘the only consistency is consistently missed targets’. The auditor-general’s office also castigated the minister and her department for attempts to bully them into not giving a negative opinion, referring to ‘the contestation and pressure placed on the audit teams’.18 Such intimidation of the auditor-general has become commonplace in departments and municipalities where widespread corruption has taken place.
National incapacity aside, however, there’s no escaping the constitutional reality that City Hall was supposed to be primarily responsible for managing Cape Town’s water infrastructure and services, and controlling the way people used them.
When one looks back at the water crisis that engulfed Cape Town between 2016 and 2018, the lack of government planning at all levels is striking.
None of the government agencies – national, the Western Cape province or the City of Cape Town – can credibly argue that they didn’t know about the impending disaster. As far back as 2009, the then Department of Water Affairs and Forestry had issued some dire predictions about Cape Town running out of water. In that same year, the massive Berg River Dam19 had been built to supply more water to the city, but at the time the department had predicted that, even with a water-conservation strategy, the city would need further ‘supply interventions’ by 2019 or the taps would run dry.20 Back then, the deal had been that the national department would take charge of surface-water augmentation, such as transfers from the Berg and Breede rivers, while the City of Cape Town would be responsible for other water-augmentation measures, such as water reuse and desalination, and tapping water from the Cape Flats Aquifer.21
Nonetheless, when in 2014 city officials took a proposal to council for a desalination plant, council rejected it: there had been very good rains that winter, dams were overflowing, and the cost of desalination was deemed too high.
At the peak of the crisis, in January 2018, former Deputy Mayor Grant Haskin mentioned two reports from 2002 that predicted ‘dangerous water scarcity’. In a statement to the city council, Haskin ridiculed the City and senior politicians who said the drought had caught them by surprise. ‘That is utter nonsense,’ he said.22
‘So, government knew the problem was coming,’ the Daily Maverick concluded in January 2018. ‘They even had a pretty good idea of when it would happen. And they had all the plans in place to mitigate the disaster. Somewhere between planning in 2009 and today, the wheels fell off, nothing was done.’23
Nic Spaull, an economist from Stellenbosch University, summed it up when he asked, ‘How the hell did we get this close to what will be the biggest natural disaster of the post-apartheid period, and the majority of Capetonians are carrying on business as usual?’ He pointed out that the scale of the crisis was such that, if unresolved, it could cripple the city. ‘It is clear that there has been an outright failure of leadership in the City of Cape Town … Patricia de Lille has been the mayor of Cape Town for more than six years, and the DA has run the Western Cape for more than seven years. It’s been years in the making. It is beyond clear that the blame for this crisis lies ultimately with the City of Cape Town and their too-little-too-late responses to an imminent catastrophe.’24
How could this modern city have been so ill served by the custodians elected to look after it? How had it come to this? What was really going on?
2
The black swan1
As Cape Town’s water crisis was coming to a head, I was still struggling to make sense of what I’d come across in Nelson Mandela Bay. In 2015, as a local-government-turnaround expert working under Pravin Gordhan, I’d been sent to Port Elizabeth to lead a clean-up of corrupt syndicates, which came horribly unstuck when those syndicates and their political allies staged a fightback.2 Apart from the stress of the assignment, I was disturbed by how effortlessly I’d crossed the dividing line between politics and the administration, and found myself privy to the same kind of dubious transactions I was investigating.
Writing a book about this experience had been cathartic, but I’d been left with many unanswered questions about corruption, the way municipal governments navigate the often-conflicting demands of politics and public administration, and the influence of economic interests in that equation. I was struggling to get back into work, and instead set out to take a deeper look into these questions. So I registered to do a PhD in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.
These academic endeavours were only the latest manifestation of my longstanding interest in local government. After a decade of civic campaigning and underground activism against the apartheid system, I’d joined President Mandela’s office in the 1990s. I was part of the team in charge of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP),3 where I got involved in local government and development planning issues.
My early days in the new ANC government were heady – the new local-government system had to be set up, a major redemarcation of municipalities was required, and a raft of new legislation about structures, powers and functions had to be passed. I was centrally involved in crafting and implementing the legislation for local government, and some of my colleagues still joke with me about what a mess local government is in today, and how all of us early idealists are complicit in its systemic failures. Maybe this is why I keep coming back to the morbid illness that seems to beset local government – although I left government in 2005, much of my subsequent work as a consultant has remained focused on distressed and broken municipalities.
I’ve seen first hand how in dysfunctional municipalities business and even criminal interests control local politics and manipulate municipal decisions to extract maximum financial advantage. Apart from what this forensic interest might reveal about the darker sides of my character, I find dysfunctional municipalities interesting because they highlight so much about the inner workings and skeletal topography of local government, and in so doing reveal the systemic faultlines within the system.
The 2018 plunge into academia, late in my career, was a shock. Not only did I find myself woefully ill prepared for the rarefied theoretical debates about the nature of the state and power, but I found it distressing to have to objectively observe without rolling up my sleeves and trying to fix what was broken. Yet after the Nelson Mandela Bay crucible, I wondered whether some of the catastrophic dysfunction racking the Port Elizabeth city administration was the manifestation of systemic faultlines and tensions inherent in local government that also existed in better-run cities under different political coalitions.
I’ve always been interested in the nature of power and how it’s exercised. Both as a politician and as a senior civil servant, I’ve had the opportunity to use it and discovered its intoxicating effects as large schemes come alive with resources and administrative fiat. But power is by nature Janus-faced – I quickly learnt the pragmatic compromises I needed to make to get things done, compromises that could undercut the principles I’d started out with.
I have no doubt that power is a messy business, not for the faint-hearted – but is it possible to stay on the right side of your principles and still get things done? For political parties, in particular, is it possible to reconcile the twin imperatives of serving the public interest and keeping yourself in power, especially when it comes to political fundraising and organising to win the next election?
To illuminate that central question, I decided to examine three cities in some detail. The first was Nelson Mandela Bay, where I’d seen how public interest had been thrown under the bus as the City administration became a mechanism to siphon off public funds, not only for competing factions within the ruling ANC but also for personal gain. The second was Johannesburg, the City of Gold and heart of the South African economy, where economic interests have reconfigured themselves under a new DA-led coalition which ended a long period of ANC rule.
And, finally, Cape Town seemed an obvious choice to include in the research, for several reasons. First, the municipality, as well as the Western Cape province, were controlled by the DA, and thus its local politics would offer an interesting contrast to that of Nelson Mandela Bay and the Eastern Cape, which had historically been ANC strongholds. At the same time, the City administration had garnered a string of clean audits over the years, another glaring difference from the rampant looting and corruption I’d observed in some other municipalities. Yet, while the local government was ostensibly well managed and relatively clean, there were clearly problems behind that facade. Drowned out by the noise and panic surrounding the water crisis were concerns and uncomfortable questions raised over a series of property deals involving the mayor. And besides highlighting what appeared to be a mind-boggling leadership failure, the water crisis was also revealing a level of infighting within the DA that seemed to go far beyond garden-variety political competition.
Political control in the City of Cape Town has always been fiercely contested, partly because of the city’s unusual demographics. The largest part (42%) of its population is designated as ‘mixed race’ or ‘coloured’, while black Africans make up 39%, and European descendants (‘whites’) account for 16% of the city’s residents. This means that no population group completely dominates.
While whites have mostly voted for the DA and its forerunners, and Africans have mostly stuck to the ANC, the shifting allegiance of coloured voters has been the key to controlling the city. Since the coloured vote swung away from the ANC in the 2000 elections, the party has steadily lost its hold on the City and the province, even though it has so far maintained its control over the national government. Nevertheless, in each election, the DA has had to fend off attempts by the ANC and other parties to make inroads into its base, and to erode the ANC’s hold on the African vote.
After a hotly contested campaign, the local election in August 2016 solidified the DA’s position, however. Patricia de Lille, a well-known and highly respected figure in South African politics, was the party’s secret weapon. A former trade unionist, De Lille was a feisty and street-smart politician with a solid track record in liberation politics. In 2003 she had branched out of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) to form her own party. While in national Parliament, she had famously campaigned for a robust investigation into the arms deal.
In 2010, she merged her Independent Democrats (ID) party with the DA, which positioned her to be appointed as Cape Town’s mayor the following year. At the time of the merger, Helen Zille, who was then the national leader of the DA, had already moved on from City Hall to become premier of the Western Cape.
De Lille’s first term as mayor appeared successful – she brought a more racially and socially inclusive politics to the city, which combined well with the DA’s track record of efficiently running municipal affairs. Even though standards of living in Cape Town were still largely determined by race, De Lille was popular among coloured and African constituents.
De Lille and a close team of loyalists worked tirelessly in the 2016 local-government elections, leading the DA to another victory with a resounding 66% of the vote – the strongest mandate that any City leader obtained that year.
Former DA leader Tony Leon put out a congratulatory opinion piece in which he claimed that the election’s biggest winner was Patricia de Lille. ‘By winning more than 66% of the votes last week, she posted the biggest win of any party in any city,’ he wrote. ‘Just consider this: 10 years ago, the DA barely edged into power [in the City] with just over 41% of the vote – a plurality win which required mayor Helen Zille to build a ramshackle coalition with seven other minor parties.’
Leon pointed out that there were many ironies in that story. ‘At that stage, De Lille aligned unsuccessfully with the ANC to stop the DA. She later folded her tent into Zille’s coalition and stands today as the top woman in the party, heading the province which provided the blue team [the DA, whose party colour and branding is blue] with the most gold medals.’4
The DA seemed poised to break through the glass ceiling of racial stereotyping and build a strong constituency among black voters. It was an exhilarating moment for the party’s leaders, with major national implications.
Yet within 18 months of that resounding electoral victory, De Lille had been drawn into an increasingly public battle within the party. Squabbles between city councillors are fairly commonplace, and initially the public didn’t pay too much attention. But the factional battle between DA councillors started to look like a herculean contest for political control within the party itself. Worse still, that battle unfolded while the city was in the midst of its devastating water crisis.
Towards the end of 2017 De Lille announced a punitive drought charge that was to be based on property prices. It was a drastic measure, designed to radically cut water consumption, especially by high-volume water consumers. The tariff would fund new water schemes that would assist in meeting water needs.
The DA councillors in the City initially approved the charge, but property owners were furious about the financial burden this would create. The DA received a substantial number of complaints from some of their wealthiest funders; 60 000 public comments were submitted to the council, almost all objecting to the charge. This seemed to be the last straw,5 and in the middle of December, when the focus of the country was on the ANC’s 58th national conference and the election of a successor to Jacob Zuma, the DA released a press statement saying that the party’s federal executive had been aware of ‘a number of issues’ in the DA’s City of Cape Town caucus, including troubling allegations of maladministration, and that the party’s national leadership had therefore decided to suspend Mayor De Lille.6
Despite the announcement, nothing happened. Instead, in early January 2018, as the nation was still trying to digest the opaque outcome of the ANC’s national leadership contest – Cyril Ramaphosa had narrowly been elected president of the ANC, but with many Zuma loyalists in the national executive committee and in the so-called ‘top six’ – De Lille went on a charm offensive, saying that even though she faced suspension, she remained committed to making sure that the ‘well-run city’ did not run out of water. ‘We can all avoid Day Zero,’ she said, ‘but we must do it together.’7
In the middle of January 2018, Mmusi Maimane announced that De Lille would be relieved of her water-related responsibilities ‘immediately’, although he then clarified that the DA would ‘bring a resolution to Council that removes the Mayor from any role in managing and directing the City’s response to the prolonged drought’. This was despite his assurances a mere three months earlier that he fully agreed with De Lille’s approach and had regular updates with her. The reason for the action was, according to Maimane, that the party required ‘unity of purpose and cohesion’ in the City of Cape Town to effectively tackle the water crisis. He said that the DA wanted the deputy mayor, Ian Neilson, and the mayoral committee member in charge of water, Xanthea Limberg, to take over the management of the water crisis.8
I found the announcement extremely confusing – the intervention was bound to deepen the factional split in the council, not lessen it. And if the DA didn’t trust De Lille to manage the water crisis, surely she should no longer be mayor?
I also wondered what had happened to the earlier announcement about her immediate removal as mayor – Maimane told a media briefing following a DA federal-council meeting on 14 January 2018 that they had decided not to suspend De Lille as mayor after all ‘in adherence of due process’, which seemed to be an admission that due process hadn’t been followed before.
The media started asking questions, wondering whether more was going on behind the scenes.9
The day after Maimane’s announcement, De Lille arrived at City Hall wearing her mayoral chain, and told the waiting media that she was going straight in to chair a drought-relief meeting. ‘I am carrying on with all my work as usual and focusing on the water crisis,’ she said.10 When questioned about whether she’d been distracted by the internal battles from performing her role in managing the crisis, as the DA alleged, De Lille said, ‘I spend 80% of my day on the water crisis. I start with [the water crisis] first thing in the morning. I’m out in the field with it, because I believe we need to show Capetonians what we are doing. I work 16 hours a day.’11
On Friday 19 January 2018 De Lille called a special council meeting at the Cape Town civic centre, supposedly to approve the drought charges and water restrictions. In a closed session, the councillors took the decision to suspend one of De Lille’s main allies in the administration, the city’s head of transport, Melissa Whitehead, while a formal investigation into her was undertaken. There were apparently three ongoing investigations into Whitehead, each of which could result in criminal action. Then De Lille’s drought levy was voted down, although the councillors did approve substantial tariff increases for high-volume water users.
The opposition was scathing in the debate on the matter in the council, with the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) calling the DA the ‘Drought Alliance’ and later the ‘Deurmekaar [Muddled] Alliance’. At the end of the fractious meeting, Ian Neilson read out a list of proposed changes to De Lille’s powers as mayor, stripping her of all management of water issues.12
The bizarre nature of the decision was summed up by the ANC’s Xolani Sotashe, who asked, ‘Who is a mayor but doesn’t have powers? Does the mayor go to the caucus, drink coffee, eat biscuits and go home?’13
De Lille was furious, telling the council that the amendments to her delegated powers hadn’t followed due process, and that she hadn’t been consulted about them.14
The abiding impression was that the water crisis had become a political device for rival sides within the DA to pursue other agendas, while the citizens of Cape Town bore the cost.15
What also became clear as the furore gathered pace was that the battle between parts of the DA and De Lille was doing enormous reputational damage to the party, and even to De Lille herself. The DA’s internal polling data showed a precipitous drop in its support in Cape Town as a result of the fallout.16 Capetonians were growing tired of the ongoing brittle drama while they stared at a bone-dry future.
It seemed incomprehensible that a party that had just 18 months earlier won the 2016 local-government elections in Cape Town with two-thirds of the vote could commit political suicide in the face of a crisis that demanded clear-headed vision and leadership.
There were two entirely different narratives in circulation, and public opinion veered from one to the other. In the one version, Patricia de Lille was the victim of a conservative racist pushback within the DA, as the old guard and their conservative funders were alarmed at the pace of transformation and level of social integration that De Lille was championing. According to this version, De Lille’s popular appeal and power base posed a threat to right-wing forces within the DA, who felt that she had to be dealt with.
The alternative narrative was that De Lille was a narcissistic bully who overestimated her role and importance, had massively centralised power, and was now engaged in dispensing patronage and doing backroom deals that seemed more reminiscent of an ANC-run municipality. According to this version, the DA had to get rid of her if it was to retain any claim to its clean-governance agenda, regardless of the political cost.
Discussions around dinner tables in the Cape swung between these polarities. Which version were we to believe? Could both versions be true? And, more importantly, what was really at the root of this conflict? What were we not being told by either side?
While both sides were willing to throw wild allegations of impropriety at each other, there were some areas that they both avoided talking about. For instance, many rumours were floating around about links between business and local politicians. The DA and even Patricia de Lille herself had been championing some big property deals that seemed at odds with her socially inclusive agenda. In light of the city’s history, did property and land ownership offer a vector of investigation into how party, economic and public interests were being handled in Cape Town?
I was convinced that neither side was telling the whole truth, and that there was some subterranean drama to which we, the public, weren’t privy.
Attempting to unpack that very drama aligned perfectly with my study of local government and might reveal broader lessons that reverberated beyond the City itself.
3
A tale of two cities
‘Not approved.’
There it was, next to a nonchalant tick in a box. At first, I thought it was a mistake. It had to be. How could the City of Cape Town have turned me down? Surely someone had ticked the wrong box.
Then I saw it. The perfunctory one-pager carrying the City seal rejected my request to research the municipal government ‘due to the high risk and significant impact on the CCT [City of Cape Town]’.
High risk? What risk could a researcher pose – unless the city administration didn’t want something revealed?
I kept reading and re-reading the document, flabbergasted. What was the municipality afraid of? This was supposed to be the best-managed metro in South Africa, with a long string of clean audits. This was the administration that claimed to be ‘Making progress possible. Together’, according to the slogan at the bottom of the very letter slamming the door in my face. The contrast couldn’t have been more jarring. Clearly, ‘progress’ didn’t involve scrutiny, and ‘together’ didn’t include the likes of me.
Six weeks earlier, I’d gone through the motions of formally applying to do research in the City of Cape Town. Topical and symptomatic as the water crisis was, I didn’t set out to look at it directly: I’m not a water expert, and I felt drawn more to the deeper institutional and social issues behind the crisis. I wanted to focus on how the city was governed, and in particular the way that financial interests intersected with politics and the City administration. The emergence of red flags around several property deals had piqued my interest, suggesting that, in Cape Town at least, battles over land, social policy and housing may offer broader lessons about how the often-conflicting demands of money, politics and public interest were being navigated. I framed the research as a study into how different interest groups leveraged their position to extract benefits from the municipal government – what I grandly worded as ‘the political economy of rent-seeking’ – and I blithely requested access to records and officials without thinking about how threatening this might appear.
My research request had followed a chance meeting in April 2018 with Craig Kesson, one the DA’s key political appointees in the City, who used to run Patricia de Lille’s office and now headed the powerful Strategic Policy Unit (SPU) in the mayor’s office, which coordinated all City policy and its implementation. Kesson was part of a delegation of Cape Town councillors and officials attending an executive-leadership programme in Johannesburg organised by National Treasury. It was a high-powered initiative, with national ministers and mayors from South Africa’s main cities engaging international experts on city governance.
As an invited expert I participated in the teaching programme, but was also able to network freely with the delegates. Because of my research project, I was keen to get to know the Cape Town delegation better and see if I could make some contacts. It turned out to be not so straightforward. The tension within the delegation was palpable, with members of Cape Town’s mayoral committee not speaking to each other.
The programme included a gala dinner, which I dreaded – even the term ‘gala dinner’ hints at the prickly vanity typically on display at these events. But I mustered just enough motivation to attend and plonked myself down at the Cape Town table. Kesson, his dark eyes flashing behind thick glasses, oozed confidence and dominated the conversation. While coming across as somewhat brash, he struck me as intelligent and concerned about social issues. He claimed to be acutely aware of injustice, having himself been bullied when growing up in what is now KwaZulu-Natal.
The conversation rekindled memories of my own feelings of rejection and sense of alienation, tied up in my case with being gay and trying to find my own identity in a cloistered and suffocating world cut off from the country’s social life and politics during the struggle against apartheid – I’d attended an English colonial boarding school in what was then Natal that was deeply homophobic.
On returning to my native Cape Town to attend medical school, I had enthusiastically got involved in the anti-apartheid movement as part of the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), which opposed the conscription of all white South African men into military service in the South African Defence Force. After the ECC was banned in 1986 along with the United Democratic Front (UDF) – a countrywide coalition against apartheid created when civic and church organisations eventually joined hands in 1983 – and a whole raft of mass democratic organisations, the ECC leaders were rounded up and put in prison for a few weeks, giving us white activists a small taste of what black anti-apartheid leaders went through all the time.
I had then traded the city of my childhood for the rolling green hills of the Eastern Cape, where as a young doctor I’d joined the ranks of the mass democratic movement and the ANC, before making Johannesburg my home.
In response to my confession about having been away from Cape Town for so long, Kesson was surprisingly enthusiastic. ‘When you come to Cape Town, I’ll show you around all the places,’ he said. I left the dinner with his email address and an undertaking to meet on my next trip.
