Western Cape has the worst rates of informal settlement in South Africa

One of the most striking features of the Western Cape over the past 20 years has been the growth of informal settlements. The modest efforts to combat this trend has been overtaken by events, with the rate of formal settlement shrinking from 85% in 2003 to 82% in 2013, and 80% in 2023. In this period, the national level of formal settlement went from 74% to 78% to 84% and the Western Cape went down from third place to dead last (see the three graphs below, data from Stats SA’s General Household Surveys from each respective year):

The City itself is second only to Durban when it comes to metropolitan rates of informal settlement:

This means (based on population statistics from these years) that around 678,000 people lived in informal settlements in 2003, 1,080,000 in 2013, and 1,486,000 people in 2023. That is 88% of the size of the population born outside the province. As StatsSA demonstrate, the amount of foreigners is only a quarter as large as migration from the rest of the country:

The main corridors for migration into the province are from the Eastern Cape, with roughly half of all migrants from there returning to the Eastern Cape at some point. The migration from Gauteng is nearly as big, though predominantly middle class.

The cause of this mass migration, and the reason for its enormous size and informal character is predominantly the result of a frustration of law and order by a heavily politicised High Court panel, renowned in the legal profession for being far more politically biased than High Courts for other provinces. The main legal mechanisms frustrating clearances of illegal settlements are the PIE and ESTA acts, which in their actual text states that they were intended to protect tenants from unfair eviction practices, but have now come to be interpreted as protecting illegal squatters.

But this is not the only factor. Since 2006, the DA have instituted a policy called “Violence Prevention through Urban upgrading”. In practice, this German government-backed initiative has not resulted in any clear reduction in criminal or violent activity, but has massively incentivised land settlements, since as soon as the land is settled, DA councillors and municipal workers will work hard to ensure that these people get title deeds and utilities, whose payment is unenforceable. As the City often boasts, their service delivery in this regard far outsrips the ANC’s in the rest of the country, making the Western Cape the most accommodating province in which to illegally occupy land.

As the City ratchets up their levies on the middle class, already squeeed by skyrocketing property evaluations due to foreign real estate marketing and restricted land access due to ballooning illegal settlements, the expenditure on these almost ungovernable enclaves rises beyong the ability of the City to keep up.

Yet when faced with the opportunity to demand a fairer share of national revenue, the mayor has refused, insisting that the tax revenue of its residents must be handed, in the majority, to the ANC-controlled national government.

There are several fixes to this problem. The DA can back the Peoples Bill in the provincial parliament, grabbing back power over the budget, policing, transport and other systems. They can pass their own tenancy laws, since housing is a concurrent schedule in the constitution. And they can bargain for their residents to receive a bigger share of their own tax money back. They could even cut billions in unnecessary and wasterful vanity projects.

But Geordin Hill-Lewis remains committed to wealth redistribution and ANC-style transformation, refusing to even exploit Sakeliga’s 2022 Concourt ruling that would make BEE procurement quotas unenforceable.

The influx of black settlers has deeper long term consequences – while the DA promotes the evangel of their “good governance”, black voters do not buy it. Less than 5% of the black population have ever voted for them in any election, and locally the DA have taken to avoiding campaigning in many black areas, since this only stimulates turnout for the ANC and EFF. By pushing a campaign strategy which cultivates voter apathy, they are effectively admitting that they only survive when black people cannot vote.

This is unsustainable too. In the 1870s, the Cape parliament was assured of liberal English rule, because despite being the majority, Afrikaners did not turn out to vote in numbers. But when the British declared their intention to annex the Boer republics, the Afrikaners formed the Afrikaner Bond party, and transformed the political landscape.

Additionally, these settlements are prone to runaway fires, which are in the news every week, taking dozens of lives. In effect, they are playing with fire in more ways than one.