While the coronavirus has wreaked havoc with our economy, plunging us further into an economic decline and worsened our issues of poverty, hunger and unemployment, it has also shown us what is possible and how quickly we can adapt.
Within the space of six short (or long, depending on how you look at it) months, our corporate community has turned office work into remote, distributed work virtually overnight, adapting and adopting new systems to support the seismic shift that has happened under our feet. New technologies were also employed fast and at scale, enabling us to keep many of our commercial wheels turning.
Why then can we not apply the same innovation, adaptability and sheer resilience to our many challenges, to address long outdated systems and behaviours that no longer serve us as a country?
In SA, now many years after our democracy, widespread inequality is still a reality. There are clear and tangible fault lines that exist between races, genders and classes and the coronavirus has amplified this, making it abundantly clear how different the experience has been for the haves and have nots. This despite our aspirations to dismantle apartheid and use our space to transform our cities and make them more inclusive.
A case in point: on March 23 2020 President Ramaphosa called for all South Africans to wash their hands with soap and sanitise. That assumes there is water in the first place; 33% of our population do not have access to basic sanitation, rendering the clarion call close to impossible. The same goes for social distancing; how does a densely populated township located on the city’s outskirts implement a requirement of a 1.5m distance between all residents, when there is little room to swing a cat, making it logistically unviable for the majority of South Africans to employ? Add to this the open sewers and shared ablution facilities and the crisis becomes even harder to control.
Our cities’ shortcomings have also been exposed; climate change has affected us all; some municipalities have a surplus of water, while others experience prolonged periods of drought. There is collective agreement that our reliance on fossil fuels needs to end, to be replaced by a reliable source of renewable energy as we all deserve access to clean energy.
Our mobility transition too needs to be fast-tracked and we must ask ourselves why we are so car-based? Providing access to affordable public transport should be among our key priorities, as there are many people who are locked in townships and cannot get to the cities to find work and create a dignified life for themselves. The Gautrain’s expansion project goes some way to address this.
Along a similar vein, our municipalities need to become digitally adapted; why are they not embracing technology to streamline their services lying right in front of them? The fact that we still have to force citizens to update their vehicle registrations in person is archaic.
Solutions to these challenges require our attention, our resources and our collaboration. The future cannot live with the current, and at the current rate of urbanisation, the current structure will not survive.
While we have a sound urban development framework, too few of our provinces have taken the existing policy and exploited it. But despite all of this good work and policy, we cannot achieve anything unless we have partnerships. The government has to work with civil society and the private sector because as it stands, the government sees itself as the only provider of services.
This crisis has indeed amplified issues of race and poverty in our country, but it has also shown us what is possible if we act together, collectively and swiftly. We can turn the tide to address the legacies of our past, while simultaneously rebuilding our future by enabling partnerships that address the very fundamentals that are holding us back.
• Mbanga is South African Cities Network (SACN) CEO
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