The Western Cape, and in particular Cape Town, has remained stubbornly trapped in the apartheid past. Thirty-two years into our democracy, the poor still stay on the periphery. They remain far from the economic and opportunity centres, trapped by design on the margins of society.
This is a damning fact that has long been masked under the DA government, but our apex court has decisively unmasked this reality. The recent scathing and unprecedented Constitutional Court judgment against the DA-led City of Cape Town and the Western Cape government has laid bare these structural failures.
In a unanimous ruling penned by Justice Nonkosi Mhlantla on July 2, the court brought a definitive end to the decade-long battle over the Tafelberg School site in Sea Point.
The court ruled that under Sections 25(5) and 26 of the Constitution, both the city and the province are strictly obligated to provide affordable and social housing within inner-city limits and core economic nodes, rather than pushing lower-income residents to peripheral or township borders. Yet, incredibly, this damning ruling hardly made any news.
The court’s ruling and the scathing public protector’s finding on Cape Town’s dismal failure to provide basic municipal services to residents of Langa and Khayelitsha have confirmed all that many poor residents of the city have been experiencing for years.
For millions of poor and working-class city residents, their lives have been condemned to the apartheid spatial planning of townships and informal settlements. They continue to spend almost half their salaries just to commute to the city centre. Their poverty doesn’t allow them to live near the city and access opportunities.
The mainstream media missed a monumental opportunity to educate citizens on what this historic ruling truly means in our democratic discourse.
When the highest court in the land issues a structural interdict forcing a major metro to account for its spatial failures, it should be front-page news. Instead, it was met with a deafening silence. - Sipho Masigo
