Nyanga is one of the townships that will benefit small-scale residential developers in providing affordable and formal accommodation.
Image: Armand Hough/ANA Studio
Few things are as horrifyingly infuriating as an election in South Africa. Let’s begin with election manifestos. They may as well be written in the handwriting of a 60-year-old doctor that no one can decipher or understand. It is a completely wasted exercise. If election manifestos were subjected to any serious analysis, we would find that they are rarely implemented in full. Then take the campaigning that accompanies our elections.
They've gone from robust to ridiculous. The stump speeches are either sycophantically arrogant, privileged, nationalistic, ethnic or downright boring. They repeat claims that no one believes anymore. Anyone with a computer and a memory of standing in a hospital queue, sitting through load-shedding or dodging potholes will know that parties across the political spectrum have 'guilty' written across their speeches and pamphlets. Add in the expensive motorcades careering through places of absolute poverty, dropping off food parcels, and one is left sick to the stomach. Then come the photo-ops of candidates "doing work" in their constituencies, and one is driven to puke across freshly painted walls and ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
The South African electorate is an abused and exploited people. Our politicians behave like a bunch of feudal landlords, who derive wealth and power from the labour and obligations of the peasants who occupy and cultivate land. In return for the privilege of access to the land and some degree of protection, the peasants owe them rent, labour, produce, military service or other obligations. Over the next two months, the promises will become more outrageous, and the pressure to give them your vote more demanding.
Lorenzo Davids, CEO, Development Impact Fund.
Image: Supplied
As always, once the election is over, you and your community will become a distant memory for many of the people you voted for. Communities riddled with crime and poverty will remain riddled with crime and poverty.
The litmus test of our politicians’ manifestos is the South African township.
One of South Africa’s first township was developed in 1901–1902 with the establishment of Ndabeni (initially named Uitvlugt) in Cape Town. Authorities built Ndabeni in 1901 on a state-owned farm near Maitland to forcibly relocate non-white residents from Cape Town's docklands and District Six. They used an outbreak of bubonic plague as justification to segregate and tightly contain the movement of Black and Coloured residents away from white neighbourhoods – ostensibly for health reasons.
Later, the government formalised this approach nationwide with the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923, which required local authorities to set aside distinct residential areas for Black South Africans. This law led to the creation of other early planned townships, such as Langa in Cape Town in the mid-1920s.
Have any pre- and post-apartheid urban township communities been transformed from crime-ridden, economically marginalised and high unemployment communities to communities where people can walk the streets safely, businesses have moved into them, where unemployment is no longer endemic, children can play outside without fear of being shot, violated or abducted, and government services are readily available and working?
After 32 years of democracy, the condition of South Africa's townships is perhaps the clearest measure of whether our political system has managed to transform the lives of the people it governs. I spent my youth in three communities: Athlone, Bellville South and finally in Mitchell Plain from 1978 onwards. When I visit each of those communities today, every single one is deemed unsafe to walk in and one trades there at risk of your life.
Small cafes that depend on night trading all have burglar bars on their doorways so that customers don't enter the stores. One calls out what you need to the shopkeeper through the burglar bars. Drive-by shootings are anticipated realities. Walking in one’s residential neighbourhood should be the first sign of a well-functioning government. The abnormal have been normalised.
The reality is that despite manifestos and political stump speeches in the democratic era, no pre- or post-Apartheid township community has been transformed into a well-functioning, safe, non-violent, crime-free living and trading space. The collapse of the township as an urban living, trading and education environment is the single most significant indicator of the failure of politicians across our entire political spectrum.
Townships and their transport, trading and sporting clubs will continue to decay, and service delivery will remain unreliable or, in some cases, non-existent. Your calls to your politicians after they have been elected to office will go unanswered, especially if they are aware that you have not voted for them or campaigned against them.
According to the Township Potential Atlas, about 21.7 million people are living within 532 distinct townships. A sister development to townships is the informal settlement. Over 5 million people live in more than 4000 informal settlements across South Africa. That’s more than 26 million people who live in environments where violence and poverty dominate their lives and where residents cannot safely walk the streets.
While we market our tourist infrastructure and its opportunities and boast thriving upper-middle-class communities across South Africa, the growing township crisis is waiting to explode. When I drive through recently developed townships, I see houses built with about a meter space between them. I see streets where two cars cannot pass each other. I see a time bomb. Townships are becoming untransformable. They are no longer thriving living spaces. They are essentially the fulfilment of the 1902 plan: crumbling containment centres.
These are the red flags for the 2026 local government election. It is entirely predictable that every township housing development without economic prospects and proper services will descend into a gang cartel-controlled and crime-infested living space. It is how the secondary system works. They take over where the primary system - the state and its essential services – fails, is non-existent or have been bought.
Whatever necessary service the state fails to provide, the crime cartels will exploit, provide and ultimately control. That is how townships without well-functioning essential services work, and politicians are fully aware of it.
The next two major elections – in 2026 and 2029 – will either call attention to the plight of 26 million township and informal settlement residents and the development agenda that should guide their communities, or South Africa will face the dire consequences of its total collapse. Housing provision without a supportive and thriving ecosystem is simply containment. Voters should be engaged on the future of the kind of housing that will be developed for those who are on the margins of South Africa’s economy.
Politicians should be questioned on the economic, transport, health, education and safety systems for new large scale new housing developments. Without deep debate, analysis and testing previous manifestos, we are simply voting for the continuation of the same crises.
