Why Cape Town crumbled in the drought
It’s 2018 and Cape Town is in the grip of its worst drought on record. The prospect of ‘Day Zero’ – when the taps will run dry – is driving residents into a frenzy. Then the ruling DA removes control of the water issue from mayor Patricia de Lille. While politicians turn on each other, revealing deep-lying fault lines and new enmities, it raises a critical question: who will lead the city through the crisis? In his new book, author and academic Crispian Olver reveals how the city of his childhood is run
In the middle of January 2018, Mmusi Maimane announced that Patricia 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.
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.
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. 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.”
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 EFF calling the DA the “Drought Alliance” and later the “Deurmekaar [Muddled] Alliance”. At the end of the fractious meeting, Neilson read out a list of proposed changes to De Lille’s powers as mayor, stripping her of all management of water issues.
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?”
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.
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.
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 [falling-out]. 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.
Opposing narratives
There were two entirely different narratives in circulation, and public opinion veered from one to the other. In one version, 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?
Both sides were willing to throw wild
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
allegations of impropriety at each other, but 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 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 ...
A failure of leadership
In July 2019, as I prepared to leave Cape Town to return home to Johannesburg, I reflected on what I’d learnt from my months of research. I’d started out on my quest at the height of the city’s water crisis, wondering how a city, together with the other spheres of government, could so monumentally mismanage a situation they’d known about for years. My inquiry had led me to look into questionable property development projects, and the dynamics between the property sector, the city administration, political funding and local communities.
I’d also ended up looking into the roots, unfolding and denouement of a devastating factional battle within the DA. What did all this reveal about political power not only in the city, but more generally? What did this mean for the DA and South African politics? And where did this leave the City of Cape Town and its residents?
The city’s management of the water crisis had been an administrative, political and leadership failure. Despite being warned a decade earlier that the city would run out of water, the necessary water-augmentation projects weren’t initiated until June 2017. At the time the tenders were finally published, the city had announced that the first plants would be able to start producing a month later, by August 2017 — a preposterous prediction.
As the water crisis accelerated in late 2017, and panic peaked in January 2018, Capetonians became increasingly irritated with Auntie Pat’s constant stern admonishments and finger-pointing for the water crisis. It was the local equivalent of the national blame game when South Africans were told by Eskom chairman Jabu Mabuza that the Eskom crisis and rolling blackouts were the fault and responsibility of “all South Africans”. It was also enormously frustrating to watch the petty infighting unfold when a real crisis needed attention — for a prolonged moment the adults had left the room while the children squabbled. It meant that Capetonians had a double whammy — let down by the national ANC government on energy security, and let down by the DA for not properly handling either the water crisis or the conflict with De Lille. It was a failure of leadership that affected Capetonians at a deep level.
At the height of the crisis Capetonians did make a huge effort to reduce their water use, eventually cutting total consumption by half. The city can claim some credit for this achievement, through ramping up water restrictions and its crisis communications.
Back-pedalling on Day Zero
But the DA then created more confusion. In March 2018, without any change in rainfall or water outlook, Maimane started back-pedalling on the scare story, and announced that Day Zero would probably not arrive.
Not everyone was happy with the news. The Western Cape farmers, for example, who’d been forced to drastically reduce irrigation of their crops, felt “let down and betrayed by the government” and said that Day Zero had been a hoax. “Nothing much has changed in the city. The prevailing drought continues unabated. None of the city’s augmentation schemes are up and running yet … There is no guarantee of the coming winter season’s rainfall being sufficient to break the drought.” The city appeared “to have cried wolf too soon and now needs to backtrack on its expedient Day Zero predictions”.
In the winter of 2018 strong squalls of cold weather moved across the Cape Peninsula, flooding the Cape Flats informal settlements, and the city had to call out its disaster response teams. By July 2018 the dams were 60% full, and by the end of winter they were at 80% capacity.
The worst had been avoided but water restrictions remained in place and Cape Town’s residents had to absorb hefty tariff increases starting in July 2018. This included a fixed charge each month in addition to the consumptive charge, a version of the “drought tariff” that De Lille had originally proposed and which had contributed to her downfall.
These measures are unlikely to ever go away completely. Cape Town will evermore face water scarcity and will need to manage its remaining resources, even if augmented, very carefully ...
Unanswered questions
I’m still somewhat mystified as to why nothing had been done earlier; I can only chalk up the lack of longterm planning to leadership myopia — not just in the City of Cape Town, but in the national Department of Water and Sanitation as well.
Looking back at the water crisis and what was revealed in the process of my research, however, I now understand why, even as the prospect of the drought became far more real, the city was so incapable of properly responding.
For several years, it had been progressively wounded by a massive, ill-conceived organisational restructuring, laid on top of many previous restructurings whose vestiges remained unresolved. As a result, most staff didn’t know if their jobs were secure. Policy and strategic leadership functions had been taken away from senior managers, and experts within line departments were often ignored. There was a five-month period, between the end of 2016 and early 2017, while the DA haggled with De Lille over her mayoral committee, when the city was rudderless, deprived of the leadership a mayoral committee could and should provide. Unable to read the political tea leaves, no-one wanted to take any significant decisions.
At the same time, a massive factional contest had erupted within the city. Towards the end of 2017, as accusations swirled around De Lille and her key allies and staff, everyone was fighting for their lives. In hindsight, it was a miracle that anything had been done about the water crisis at all. But for the citizens of Cape Town, it was an injustice, as public interest had suffered.
In many ways, the water crisis had been the proverbial canary in the coal mine — a stark symptom of a far deeper disease. The city’s administration had been neutered, rendered pliant to the whims of the mayor’s office. This highlighted a systemic problem in the way that government in South Africa is positioned in relation to politics. In the immediate post-apartheid period, the imperative had been to transform an apartheid state bureaucracy, and the vehicle for that transformation was seen as political control. The legal framework for public administration put executive power in the hands of politicians and didn’t sufficiently protect senior civil servants from political interference.
Constant churn
All of our senior civil servants, including at municipal level, are on fixed-term contracts of not longer than five years, and when their term of office is up, politicians can easily not re-employ them.
In municipalities, there’s a constant churn of senior officials coinciding with the five-year electoral cycle. Frequently managers aren’t retained by the incoming political team, even from the same party. This has made senior municipal officials highly vulnerable.
If politicians lack integrity, the blurring of that line creates fertile ground for a patronage-based system to take root. In municipalities such as Nelson Mandela Bay, I’d seen how these powers to intimidate senior managers were used to enable the capture of the city administration and rampant looting. But even in “clean” administrations, it often creates undue influence from business interests, who maintain ties to political leaders via political funding and even social interactions. This influence then gets transmitted down through the echelons of the administration.
This may not strictly be state capture in the way we’ve come to define it in South Africa, but it creates an uneven playing field (of which politicians themselves are not always fully aware) between business interests and other public constituencies that don’t benefit from the same level of access to and influence on politicians.
In addition, in response to a period of ANC rule in the Cape Town metro, the DA adopted an overbearing political stance towards the administration. This created an unhealthy interface between the political and administrative spheres, which unnecessarily politicised the upper layers of the City administration and made it vulnerable to political whims.
Olver has been a medical doctor, political leader, environmental activist and public servant. He joined former president Nelson Mandela’s office in 1994 as head of planning for the Reconstruction and Development Programme, and was director-general of what was then the department of environmental affairs & tourism. Olver is also the author of How to Steal a City, about the Nelson Mandela Bay administration crisis.
As the water crisis accelerated in late 2017, and panic peaked in January 2018, Capetonians became increasingly irritated with Auntie Pat’s constant stern admonishments and fingerpointing for the water crisis. It was the local equivalent of the national blame game when South Africans were told by Eskom chairman Jabu Mabuza that the Eskom crisis and rolling blackouts were the fault and responsibility of ‘all South Africans’