A House Divided: the feud that took Cape Town to the brink by Crispian Olver (review)

In that distant time before the Covid-19 lockdown, those of us living in Cape Town were already aware of how our lives could be transformed by exogenous ‘shocks’. Several years of poor rainfall culminated, in late 2017 and through early 2018, in a countdown to the ‘Day Zero’ when the city – with a population of about four million people – would run out of drinkable water. Cape Town’s water crisis coincided with and perhaps even prompted a political crisis. The Democratic Alliance (DA) – the party governing both the city and the province – first announced that it had taken responsibility for water away from the DA mayor, Patricia de Lille, and then proceeded to attempt to depose her. After the DA had repeatedly failed to oust her, de Lille eventually resigned from the party and as mayor. It turns out, as Olver writes, that the water crisis was ‘a symptom of a far deeper malaise’ (230).

Crispian (Chippy) Olver’s book dissects the events that led to the conflict within the DA and City Council in Cape Town. Parts of the story were reported in the media – and in court – at the time. Olver has gone beyond these, interviewing some of the participants in the conflict, some of whom he can name and some of whom remain anonymous. The City Council refused him access to municipal sources and he does not seem to have interviewed several key players (including de Lille herself, and the city manager at the time, Achmat Ebrahim) so his account is presumably incomplete. Nonetheless, Olver does an excellent job in tracing the strands in the governance of Cape Town that led to the dual crisis of early 2018.

The first strand in Olver’s story is political and revolves around de Lille. She had joined the DA in 2010 in order to stand as the party’s mayoral candidate in local elections the following year. Her first term as mayor ‘appeared successful’ (17), and she led the DA to a strong majority in the 2016 local elections. De Lille seemed unable to tolerate dissent, repeatedly humiliated dissenting officials and bypassed DA councillors (and even members of the mayoral executive committee) when it became clear that they were not going to rubber stamp her preferences. Olver seems sceptical that there was any clear ideological divide, as De Lille herself has claimed.

The second and perhaps most important strand was De Lille’s embrace of a ‘massive, ill-conceived administrative restructuring’ (229). Apparently believing that the bureaucracy was preventing her from realising her agenda, she centralised power in her office (including through an all-powerful Strategic Policy Unit), micromanaged departments, empowered acquiescent officials and pushed out many competent and experienced managers, especially in housing and planning. Ironically, she gutted the Council’s capacity to achieve precisely the spatial transformation of the city that she claimed was her primary goal.

The third strand in the governance of Cape Town is the apparently invidious influence of real estate developers. Olver discusses a series of conflicts over development, including of the Philippi farmland, Maiden’s Cove (Camps Bay), Paardevlei (outside Somerset West), Bo-Kaap and the Foreshore Freeway project. In case after case, developers (and allied estate agents) sought to influence municipal policy, including through the capture of civic organisations. Olver reports that he has no evidence of bribery and attributes developers’ political influence to their funding of the DA as a party.

Olver returns to the water crisis at the end of his book. He admits to remaining ‘somewhat mystified’ (229) as to why the City Council failed to respond earlier to the deepening drought but infers that it reflected at least two of the strands in the political malaise: the Mayor, Council and governing party were all distracted by factional conflict and weakened by de Lille’s centralisation. Only after de Lille’s powers had been curbed did the City Council make a serious effort...