Op-Ed: Cape Town’s course of injustice: Subsidising the rich to exclude the poor By Michael Clark
, which found that South Africa is the most unequal society in the world. The report shows that inequality follows racial, gender and spatial lines, and is deepening every year – with a small population of the wealthy elite getting richer, and the poor and working class getting poorer.
Nowhere is inequality more visible than in Cape Town. Twenty-six years after apartheid, Cape Town remains the most spatially divided city in South Africa – with residential settlement patterns are still segregated along race and class lines. The city continues to be split in two: the majority of black and coloured families live in densely populated, peripheral townships and informal settlements where most are trapped in a cycle of poverty.
The City is not wrong when it says suitable land is extremely scarce in central or well-located areas – it is expensive to buy and will only become more so in the future. But the City is missing the most obvious solution. It already owns vast tracts of land in well-located areas. Land that is unused or under-utilised, that could provide ample space for social housing and reverse the City’s apartheid legacy.
And yet the City proposes renewing a 10-year lease with the Rondebosch Golf Club for a nominal amount for the exclusive use of its few wealthy members. The City also claims that the lease renewal is justified because the golf course is “exceptionally beneficial” and serves “the community”. According to the City, the golf course is a public space rather than an exclusionary private space. This logic simply does not hold. The membership fees at Rondebosch Golf Course are. When we compare these fees to the median income of the average South African – a mere R13,546 a year – the stark reality of exclusion becomes painfully evident.
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