One of the successes of the apartheid government was its precision in planning and discipline in execution.
A blueprint for structuring the living, housing, shopping and work areas was developed and replicated across the country. Such that you can go to any town in South Africa, the structure and layout is the same.
Townships are a distance from the shopping and work centres.
Small towns have a single long street, often called the Church Street that is an entry and exit point from that town.
The spatial plan is so simple that it enabled the ease of both implementation and maintenance of control and security provision for citizens and government. Border control and movements in and out of the country were also diligently monitored.
As such, the gathering of social intelligence could happen within hours as movements could easily be monitored. The simplicity also enabled the psychological and structural entrenchment of the economy as we know it today.
Of course, the tight monitoring, manipulation and control of people was used to advance the economic interests of one group over another and was therefore not desirable. It bred the need for freedom, rebellion and strong desire to bring the system of control down, replacing it with democracy.
Democracy was understood to come with equality, human dignity and all the freedoms we hold dear listed in our constitution, such as, the freedom of movement, association, expression, assembly, opinion, religion and others. Democracy, therefore, came with the relaxation of a number of the control and monitoring mechanisms.
Arguably we moved from one extreme to the next as policing and maintenance of rule of law is one of the biggest challenges we’ve seen, post-apartheid. Poor border control and management has seen the influx of undocumented and illegal immigrants, to a point that no one can confidently state that the total number of people living in this country is the one documented by Statistics South Africa (StatsSA).
Politicians have often bemoaned the collapse of public infrastructure and services such as hospitals and healthcare to the number of additional people than planned for as per the predictions from StatsSA, who are using the services. South Africa has been reluctant to openly admit this because it’s politically incorrect and with the history of xenophobic attacks, it is safer for the governing party to tread carefully on challenging the matter of illegal immigrants and the negative impact to both safety and economic development for locals.
Unfortunately, whether one admits and deals with an issue head on or chooses to bury one’s head in the sand, the impact remains and the problems get even bigger when left unattended.
For instance, we woke up on Thursday the 31st August to horrific news that one hijacked building in Johannesburg city centre had caught fire and at least 74 people had perished while about 50 were injured. This is the biggest tragic death toll post 1994.
The reports suggest that more than 200 people were living in this building, majority being undocumented immigrants from the continent. This is one of the buildings that were designed for office space rather than living spaces as per the apartheid spatial plans.
Due to lawlessness in the inner city, buildings have been hijacked and rented out to desperate individuals who are looking for cheap accommodation closer to economic activities. These buildings are not maintained and they lack basic services. They are subdivided to fit as many people as they can possibly fit to maximise profits for the illegal landlords. A recipe for disaster that was always waiting to happen.
This tragedy opens a lid to the need to challenge and manage spatial design to drive economic inclusion and transformation. It is interesting to observe that South Africans living and owning businesses such as hair salons and nail parlours in townships often don’t expand these businesses to opportunities in suburban areas, for instance.
This despite the fact that majority of black professionals (their market) have migrated to suburban areas that are closer to their workplaces. It’s as if there’s a psychological barrier that keeps people where the apartheid spatial planning allocated them and they only access opportunities in their vicinity.
As a result, these much-needed services in suburban areas are provided for by immigrants. These may be legal or illegal immigrants who live in the vicinity of these suburban areas, such as the hijacked buildings in the city centre.
This suggests that illegal immigration will remain a problem for as long as there is an economic incentive for it. The gap that has been left by locals to provide services needed across all areas must be closed by challenging the spatial design that keeps people psychologically in bondage to the spaces allocated to them.
Dr Sibongile Vilakazi is the president of the Black Management Forum.
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