Cape Town has been South Africa’s COVID-19hotspot. The provincial and local governmentshave intervened to prepare the city asa COVID-19 entry point and there has beenan outpouring of civil society action. Stateand civil society partnerships complement,contradict and coexist in efforts to respond tothe risk posed by the virus. Only joint actionhas managed to mitigate some of the mostnegative impacts of a tight lockdown, ensuringthat poor people did not starve and thatthe benefits of an early and firm restriction ofmovement could be achieved.
COVID-19 is a quintessentially urban pandemic,originating in a street market,leading to city lockdowns across theworld and impeding city-to-city connectivity – atleast for a while. It is also urban because, typically,local actors move to the frontline of communitysupport, with sub-national governments workingalongside neighbourhood religious or gangleaders in public facilities, schools, communitycentres and on street corners. Local service providersand enforcement agents (a patchwork ofcivil society structures and ordinary residents)give the city-specific texture to COVID-19 responsesand it is this collective action that willdefine post COVID-19 urban politics.
In a global pandemic the local context is particularlyimportant. Dependence is necessaryon outside (national and international) information,resources and connections, but effectiveresponses to any crisis (before, during and after)need to work with local realities and draw inmultiple micro actors. Understanding the widertrajectory of a pandemic hinges on establishingthe composite, variegated global picture of localresponsibilities and reactions. How different localauthorities navigate risk depends on sub-nationalas well as national policy responses, but alsoon how residents and civil society organisationsmobilise around pandemic-induced problems.
How well the various stakeholders work together at local level may be mostsignificant of all in mitigating the non-health dimensions of the COVID-19crisis and defining new modes of engagement.
Cape Town has been South Africa’s COVID-19 hotspot. As a major port cityand leading global tourist destination with significant underlying healthrisks – associated with high levels of diabetes and HIV/Aids and the world’shighest incidence of tuberculosis – it has been particularly vulnerable tothe new virus. At the end of May the city accounted for more than 60%of South African cases (Cowan, 2020). Although the overall COVID-19 incidenceand death figures for Cape Town are currently low, the city may beseen as South Africa’s Milan or New York. Thesituation is exacerbated by local government’slimited health and social protection mandate,fractious intergovernmental relations, comparativelylimited state resources, and very highlevels of social, economic and health vulnerabilitiesacross the country.
But the city, which has a fractured past, alsohas a tradition of mass organisation in the faceof crisis. Over the past three months there hasbeen a huge outpouring of action to mitigatethe unintended consequences of a tight lockdown(for the first two months there was noaccess to alcohol or tobacco and very heavyrestriction of movement). The most visible civilsociety response has been the launch of a network of online communitygroups. At the same time, the provincial and local government have tried tointervene beyond medical preparations around the lockdown to prepareCape Town as a landing point for the virus. What emerges is that only jointaction has been able to mitigate some of the most negative impacts of theharsh lockdown regime to ensure that poor people did not starve and thebenefits of an early and firm restriction of movement could be achieved.
Cape Town under lockdown
Cape Town was the country’s COVID-19 landing point. The terms of the responsewere set on March 15th when a national state of disaster was declared.With the scale of the challenge, it is unsurprising that all of governmentand civil society galvanised their resources and that (at least in thecritical early phase) actors within the state and beyond worked together.
This partnership-based response presupposes capacity in each stakeholdergroup – existing relationships of trust at the local level and stakeholdersbeinginstitutionally able to work together.
In Cape Town, because government health, education, transport and welfare(and some policing) fall under provincial not local government control,both the premier and the mayor have critical responsibilities for citizens’welfare at city level. The metropolitan area of Cape Town accounts for twothirdsof the population of the Western Cape province, making the city themajor hub of provincial COVID-19 concerns and raising issues of intergovernmentalcooperation, which have not always been happy (Cowan, 2020).These inter-state tensions appear to have been put aside to respond to theenormous social and economic challenges of COVID-19 lockdown; in mostcases working in partnership with civil society actors.
Unemployment in the city runs at 11.9% (Western Cape Government, 2017)and many households have low wages, depend on meagre state grants,and have had their income halted by lockdown, stretching existing socialsafety nets beyond capacity. As a result, the immediate threat in lockeddownCape Town was access to water and food (Davis, 2020). In response,the national government introduced a R500 billion social relief and economicsupport package to bolster existing food assistance through vouchersand cash transfers. The package included plans for the Department ofSocial Development to partner with the Solidarity Fund (a public benefitcompany supported by business, civic society and government aimed atfunding COVID-19 relief measures). Along with school closures and thefreeze on non-essential services nationwide, the Department of Educationinitially closed provincially executed school feeding schemes that providefood to millions of learners on a daily basis under the National School NutritionProgramme. However, at a provincial level, school feeding schemes inthe Western Cape were quickly reopened and have since provided meals tolearners across the province with the help of the Peninsula School FeedingAssociation and other community organisations.
The Western Cape’s Provincial Treasury also approved additional fundingof R53 million for short-term emergency food relief programmes. A portionof this funding has been allocated for family food parcels (R20 millionto distribute 50,000 food parcels) to be prepared and distributed throughthe Department for Social Development and selected non-governmentalorganisations (Department of Health 2020). The remaining funds were directedtowards early childhood development centres and feeding schemesthrough schools as well as the Department of Social Development. At citylevel, the mayor donated equipment and ingredients to NGOs runningcommunity kitchens across the city’s jurisdiction. The city’s Water and Sanitation Department also distributed water tanks and trucks to informal settlementswhere residents do not have access to piped water. Preparingthe city for COVID-19 and responding to the unfolding impact of the virusrequired the combined efforts of all three tiers of government – national,provincial and local – across a range of agencies and previously establishedcivil society partners. However, the most visible responses have not beenstate-driven.
As the lockdown intensified in Cape Town, shortfalls in government foodprovision became apparent (particularly for migrants who do not qualifyfor government welfare provisions), and the serious risk of food insecurityand hunger became obvious. In response, inter-and intra-neighbourhoodmobilisation around food has taken variousforms across the city and has included establishedcharities and faith groups fundraising forand establishing community kitchens and foodparcel delivery schemes. The Cape Town Together(CTT) movement and associated neighbourhood-based Community Action Networks(CANs) emerged as new civil society actors.
Cape Town Together is a Facebook-based collectivethat started as a community response to COVID-19 prior to lockdown.The collective rests on self-organised efforts to take local action andshare resources. Each CAN is organised at the neighbourhood level throughWhatsApp and Facebook groups and is also connected to the broader CTTnetwork, which aims to support these locally led neighbourhood initiatives.
CANs distribute food and other essentials such as face masks and soap, buthave also shared information about COVID-19 and good hygiene practices,launched fundraising campaigns, and performed neighbourhood mappingto identify who needs help.
These “on-the-ground” city-based responses form part of an emergingcountry-wide social justice response to the pandemic organised under thebanner of the C19 People’s Coalition. The coalition, which has a strong CapeTown leadership, comprises over 250 organisations and 20 working groupsworking to lobby the South African government for what it describes asan effective, just, equitable and pro-poor response to the pandemic. Theover 250 organisations include many of the traditional anti-apartheid socialmovements of trade unions, community organisations and NGOs. In policyterms, their focus is crucial not least because it makes more directed andextended demands of a post-COVID national and sub-national state. C19members are united under a shared “Programme of Action” which stressesincome security for all (a basic income grant); access to sanitation and tofood; the importance of community self-organisation and representation innational coordination; adequate training and support of community healthworkers and other frontline health and emergency services workers; free,open and democratised communication; mitigation of inequalities in theeducational system; and prevention of a nationalist, authoritarian and security-focused approach in containing the virus (C19 People’s Coalition, 2020).
COVID-19 responses, in other words, have reinvigorated an already powerfullocally grounded civil society movement in Cape Town and South Africa.
Collaboration, complementarity or conflict?
Collective efforts to respond to the risk posed by COVID-19 in Cape Townare characterised by the coexistence of complementarity, collaborationand conflict within government and between government and civil society.
A well-organised and experienced civil society in the city, which wasforged in opposition to apartheid and in response to HIV/Aids, meant thatgaps in government delivery were patched by religious communities,homeless shelters, feeding schemes, NGOs and community-based groups,such as those mobilised in response to COVID-19. Together, these organisationscomplemented the government’s efforts to address the basic needsof a population kept indoors under one of the most tightly controlled of alllockdown regimes, filling gaps left by inadequate and patchy state-sponsoredsocial protection – particularly with regards to food and water.
COVID-19 amplified pre-existing inequalities in Cape Town and revealedflaws in an otherwise reasonably strong disaster risk response. Unlike theshorter-term emergencies precipitated by fire or flooding, neither the municipalitynor the province was able to respond adequately to provide sustainedsupport to the most vulnerable over an extended period of exposure.
Over and above the hardships of housing problems, loss of livelihoods,insufficient capacity for distributing food, inadequate data on who needssupport, the bureaucracy involved in verifying food claims have made thethreat of hunger posed by COVID-19 greater than the threat of the disease(Davis, 2020). Civil society agility bolstered and complemented governmentefforts and partially filled this gap.
Civil society also proved more flexible than government in this crisis. Pre-existingcivil society organisations could rely on the information and systemsthey already had in place for identifying who needs support and offering it,whereas the CANs have been able to rapidly and flexibly respond to needthrough direct communication over WhatsApp and other platforms, andmobilise in order to distribute resources where needed. In some instances,civil society organisations such as soup kitchens, feeding associations andpublic health charities have collaborated directly with the city and provinceto provide food and medical staff to homeless shelters and community clinics,and to distribute food within neighbourhoods – in doing so providingservices on behalf of government. A more lasting legacy of COVID-19 islikely to be a stronger and more coherent demand from civil society for thestate to deliver on its mandate of urban transformation.
References
C19 People’s Coalition. “A Programme of Action in the time of COVID-19”,March 24th 2020 (online). [Accessed on 03.06.2020]: https://c19peoplescoalition.org.za/poa/
Cowan, K. “MAPPED | SA’s 14 Covid-19 hotspots – and the areas emergingas new hotspots.” News24, May 29, 2020 (online). [Accessed on 29.05.2020]:https://m.news24.com/SouthAfrica/Investigations/sas-14-covid-19-hotspots-and-the-areas emerging-as-new-hotspots-20200529?isapp=true
Davis, R. “The biggest lockdown threat: hunger, hunger everywhere.” TheDaily Maverick, April 17, 2020 (online). [Accessed on 23.04.2020]:
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-04-17-the-biggest-lockdown-threat-hunger-hunger-everywhere/
Department of Health. “Additional R53 million allocated to food relief programmesin the Western Cape.” Western Cape Government, April 5, 2020
(online). [Accessed on 23.04.2020]: https://www.westerncape.gov.za/department-of-health/news/additional-r53-million-allocated-food-relief-programmes-
western-cape
Western Cape Government. “Socio-Economic Profile: City of Cape Town.”2017 (online). [Accessed on 29.05.2020]:https://www.westerncape.gov.za/assets/departments/treasury/Documents/
Socio-economic-profiles/2017/city_of_cape_town_2017_socio-economic_profile_sep-lg_-_26_january_2018.pdf
