A House Divided

Battle for the Mother City

Crispian Olver

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781868429691
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Corruption politique et inconduite

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.

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 ...