(image: Heathfield Tennis Club META Facebook page)

Fresh off the latest shenanigans from the Democratic Alliance (DA), with talk of municipal services essentially being outsourced, it should piss me off more than it does. But I keep coming back to what might seem like small issues, because sometimes the small things are a microcosm of how a city is run and, more importantly, who it is run for.

It also doesn’t help that the mayor is always on the Cape Flats doing the mayorly kak all mayors do: opening supermarkets, shaking hands at newly opened clinics, showing up for community events and generally being photographed doing mayor things.Lately, he has been playing dominoes. And then there is the street tennis.I am petty, so I cannot let this one go. I grew up watching Wimbledon during the school holidays. We would watch the matches and then run outside and stage our own little tournaments in the streets. Tennis, for me, is wrapped up in childhood nostalgia: watching the greats on television and then taking whatever space was available to us and turning it into our own version of Centre Court.

So seeing the mayor repeatedly playing street tennis on the Cape Flats is not lost on me. But okay. He is a public official. This stuff is probably on his agenda, brainstormed by his bevy of PR officials. And the DA, as always, will clamour for the coloured vote till kingdom come in ǁHui ǃGaeb. The bare minimum is often all that is required. Show up in people’s spaces, play some games, shake some hands, take a few photographs and gwa, campaign done.

Except here is the thing. The mayor plays tennis. Communities are fighting to keep somewhere to play it.

Two communities on the Cape Flats have been fighting tooth and nail to keep two tennis courts open, and they are sadly losing the battle.And this is where the street tennis photographs stop being cute. Because these courts are not simply pieces of municipal land with nets and cracked surfaces. They are some of the few outdoor spaces where people can spend time, exercise, meet other people and build community without having to spend money. The City of Cape Town, meanwhile, appears to be crickets. Launching manifestos. Paddling in potholes. Playing dums. While communities are sukkeling in a game of vriet kaart just to keep a recreational space open.

(image: Lansdowne Tennis Club META Facebook page)

Local Communities: 0, City of Cape Town: 15… Game, Set, Match?

I really didn’t think much of a post in a local community WhatsApp group at first.It was a link to a petition calling for support for the tennis courts in Heathfield and Lansdowne.I have always watched and loved tennis, but I never played or used the l local courts myself. To me, tennis was mostly nostalgic: school holidays, Wimbledon on television, and then running outside afterwards to stage our own tournaments.But I checked my apathy pretty quickly. Just because something does not affect us directly does not mean we cannot have empathy, or lend a hand where we can. And what I found was much bigger than two tennis courts.

Lansdowne: when a public sporting space becomes a lease problem

The Lansdowne Tennis Club is a third-generation community hub dating back to the 1960s. It has survived decades of change, and now its existence has become entangled in something that is bureaucratic at its heart, a public sporting space: a lease.

According to the City, the original lease with the Lansdowne Tennis Club was concluded in 1993 and terminated in 2018 after the club disbanded. No valid lease has existed since then and no rental payments were received, although the courts continued to be used by the local community for recreation and sport. The City says Recreation and Parks is now willing to assume responsibility for the facility as a sporting amenity, while the revived club has applied for a new lease. For now, the proposed disposal has been paused while that application is assessed.

And this is where I start asking questions.

Why does a community sports facility have to fight its way back into existence through a lease in the first place? To be clear, the City does have a system for this. Its own Sports Assets Management Policy says clubs cannot occupy a municipal sports asset without an occupancy agreement, which can take the form of a lease, management agreement or booking. So I am not arguing that there should be no accountability around who uses public land, who maintains it or how it is managed.

I am asking why the starting point so often seems to be the administration of the land as a property transaction, rather than the protection of the community function that land already serves?

Because the City’s own policy framework says that access to sport and recreation is important to building healthy, liveable and inclusive communities, and that the City has a role in providing accessible, affordable and safe recreational facilities, particularly in previously underserved areas.

The City’s own records also show that leasing municipal sporting facilities to community clubs is not unusual. In other parts of Cape Town, sports clubs have been granted leases over City land specifically for sporting and recreational purposes, sometimes at nominal tariff rentals, with conditions around maintenance and continued community sporting use. So why did Lansdowne get as far as a proposed disposal? That is the question I keep coming back to.

Because while the paperwork moves between Property Transactions and Recreation and Parks, there are actual people using these courts.

The club was revived in February 2025 under new leadership and, according to Athlone News, has become a gathering place for the community. Volunteers run free tennis sessions for children, and residents have rallied around the courts. More than 1 000 people had signed an online petition opposing the proposed disposal by the time the City announced that it would pause the process and assess the club’s lease application. The courts are also in poor condition. There are cracked surfaces, loose patches and uneven areas, and players have already been injured. Yet despite that neglect, the community is trying to breathe life back into the facility.

That, to me, is what makes me JAS.

The community is saying: we want this place. We will use it. We are willing to organise around it. We want our children here.

And the City’s response becomes a question of leases, property status, disposal processes and administrative responsibility. What does a city owe a community that has kept a public sporting space alive, even when the bureaucracy around it has not?

Sometimes it is that an old woman who has lived in the neighbourhood for 43 years can point to the courts and tell you that her children grew up there. Sometimes its value is simply that people have somewhere to go where nobody is asking them to buy something. And that is a kind of public value that does not always fit neatly into a property transaction.

Heathfield: another legacy under threat

Then there is Heathfield Tennis Club. For years, the club has been advocating for the repair and upgrading of the Chadwin Road courts, which have fallen into disrepair.

Again, the community has done the work of showing that the space matters.

The club has persisted. It has advocated. It has tried to keep the courts alive.And yet the City of Cape Town has not provided the necessary support to bring the courts back to the standard the community deserves.

The surrounding communities include Grassy Park, Lavender Hill, Steenberg, Retreat and Heathfield. These are communities where accessible recreational spaces matter.

And that is what keeps getting lost when we talk about municipal land as if it is simply an asset on a spreadsheet.A tennis court is not just a tennis court.

It is somewhere young people can spend an afternoon that does not require them to buy anything. It is somewhere people can simply exist.

WHAT GETS TO ME THE MOST IS THIS SHRINKAGE OF SPACES, WHERE YOU DON’T NEED MONEY TO EXIST IN, COMMUNE IN, BUILD FRIENDSHIPS AND COMMUNITY.

We are living in one of the most unequal cities in the world, in a country where millions of people are working but still struggling to make ends meet.

What happens when public space is increasingly treated as something that must justify itself financially? This is why I cannot bring myself to dismiss the fight over two tennis courts as a small issue. They are signs we keep ignoring.

If the City of Cape Town cannot find the political will or compassion to protect two relatively small community spaces when the communities themselves are saying, loudly and repeatedly, we need these, what does that tell us about how the City approaches the much bigger public goods that poorer communities depend on?

We can lay blame wherever we want. National government. Provincial government. Local government. But local government is where so much of daily life actually happens. It is where people encounter the state on the ground. It is where streets are maintained, parks are managed, public facilities are provided and communities interact directly with the institutions that are supposed to serve them. And it is why the City’s approach to public space matters.

This isn’t really about tennis

We are a nation of working poor, yet our local government acts with impunity, showing a lack of compassion and political will to keep these public, free spaces open in one of the most dangerously unequal cities in the world.

(ps. these are just two tennis courts I have read about, who knows what else is going on?). I am going to fix my language too here. These actually are not just two tennis courts. They are signs we keep ignoring, if the city of cape town and the DA at large cannot even be compassionate enough to save these two spaces, what of the bigger issues outside of recreational spaces? They clamour for support and post all the victories, then why are so many people starving, unhoused, unemployed, struggling to afford basics? Now we can lay blame anywhere, from national to provincial to local. But local is where change is better effected, care is better distributed because it is on the ground. Now they are basically threatening privatisation, and yes is is threat, and setting themselves up to earn government salaries yet outsourcing their responsibilities? They are essentially more dangerous than someone threatening you directly, because they are doing it through policy, by-laws and profiteering, all at the expense of the working poor.

It’s time to stand up for our communities. Support the efforts to save the Heathfield and Lansdowne tennis courts by signing petitions, attending community meetings, and raising awareness. Let’s ensure that our public spaces remain accessible for all, and where everyone can thrive without the barrier of cost. City of Cape Town being the city that works for a few.

ps. stop inviting that bra into your leisure spaces, he doesn’t care. If he did the courts would have been saved a long time ago, and not subject to laborious processes. Ya’ll are also one invite away from playing kennetjie with a man and his administration who only do things for the gram.

The wildest part is that the losing side is always the community. Like it is the one constant in cape town.

Claim

A document circulating on social media claiming to be an official State Security Agency (SSA) alert warning of planned terrorist attacks at several sites in Johannesburg is FAKE.

The document, dated 22 July 2026, is titled “ALLEGED PLANNED TERRORIST ATTACKS OF VARIOUS SITES IN THE CITY OF JOHANNESBURG” and claims that a group of 12 men is planning to detonate six explosive devices at strategic infrastructure and urban centres in Johannesburg.

It names the Johannesburg Botanical Gardens, Sandton Square and Park Station as alleged targets. The time and date are unknown.

The document further makes several specific allegations about the identities and nationalities of people supposedly involved, including Nigerian, Somali, Pakistani and British nationals, as well as a member of the South African National Defence Force.

It also alleges a connection to a British intelligence operative and the British High Commission in South Africa.

The document carries the South African government emblem and State Security Agency branding, apparently intended to make it appear to be an authentic government security alert.

The document was subsequently shared on X, in a post dated 25 July 2026.

Verdict

The document is not an authentic State Security Agency security alert.

The South African Government has publicly identified the circulating information as “FAKE NEWS”.

The State Security Agency has also issued a public warning concerning the false information.

What we found

The document adopts the appearance of an official government communication. It uses the national coat of arms, the words “State Security” and “State Security Agency, Republic of South Africa”, alongside a formal-looking alert format.

However, official government communication subsequently contradicted the document’s claims.

On 25 July 2026 (the same day as the viral post), the official South African Government Facebook account posted a warning about trusting or sharing unverified content relating to migration, as misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.

The government’s warning is significant because the circulating document presents itself as an official security communication. The government’s own public communication therefore provides primary-source evidence that the document circulating online should not be treated as genuine.

Reputable news outlets such as Sahara Reporters debunked the notice on 26 July, the same day South African authorities publicly flagged the document. However, the government’s statement did not provide further information about where the document originated or indicate whether an investigation into its circulation had been initiated.

Comparing the alleged alert with genuine State Security communications

To further establish whether the document is authentic, we will compare the circulating alert with previous verified State Security Agency alerts, notices or public security communications.

The comparison will examine, where available:

• Document formatting and layout

• Use and placement of the State Security Agency logo and government emblem

• Typography and font choices

• Headings and terminology

• Date and document formatting

• Official reference numbers or identifiers

• Signature blocks and authorisation

• Contact information

• Language and phrasing used in genuine SSA communications

• Whether comparable security alerts are normally publicly distributed in this format

• Whether the alleged alert contains features absent from authentic SSA documents

Fake alert

vs Official statement

A comparison with the latest publicly available SSA media statement we could locate, dated November 2022, reveals notable differences in structure, attribution and contact information. While official formats may change over time, the legitimate statement identifies the issuing authority and provides named media contact details and an official ssa.gov.za email address, none of which appear on the circulating document. The SSA’s online media-release archive does not appear to contain releases more recent than 2022, which is why this statement was used for comparison. We have also contacted the SSA and South African Government News to ask whether a formal or more comprehensive statement regarding the circulating document will be issued, and will update this fact-check if further information becomes available.

The Significance

The fabricated document is particularly concerning because it presents specific and serious allegations as an official security warning.

It names alleged perpetrators, identifies their nationalities, describes supposed links to foreign intelligence services and names specific locations as potential terrorist targets.

False security alerts of this nature can cause unnecessary fear and confusion, potentially affect public behaviour and damage trust in legitimate government security communications.

The inclusion of specific nationalities and alleged foreign links also creates a risk that the false claim could fuel xenophobic suspicion or hostility towards particular communities.

Conclusion

The document circulating online is not a genuine State Security Agency alert.

The South African Government has explicitly labelled the alleged Johannesburg terrorist attack warning fake news, while the State Security Agency has also warned about the false information.

The public should not share the document as an authentic security warning and should verify claims about threats or planned attacks through official government and law-enforcement channels.

This fact-check was produced by Ling Sheperd, a freelance journalist and writer, as part of the African Fact-Checking Alliance’s (AFCA) incubation programme. It was produced with peer mentorship from Code for Africa’s fact-checking initiative, PesaCheck, with financial support from Norway Democracy. AFCA mentorship respects the journalistic independence of the researchers, offering access to advanced techniques and tools. Editorial decision-making remains with Triangle Project. Want to learn more? Visit:

https://factcheck.africa/

Initially I assumed I was about to discover some wonderfully progressive American law that South Africa had somehow forgotten to write. Not quite. Our own Domestic Violence Amendment Act 14 of 2021 explicitly recognises coercive behaviour and controlling behaviour as forms of domestic violence, including conduct that isolates someone from support or regulates their everyday behaviour or movement. In other words, South African law already understands something that reality television had just made me look at differently: abuse does not have to begin with a punch. A law cannot guarantee that a woman will be believed, that an institution will respond properly or that a protection order will suddenly make an unsafe relationship safe. But it can give us language for what is happening. “That’s just how he is” can become controlling behaviour. “He’s just jealous” can become something worth taking seriously. That distinction matters because coercive control is often precisely about making behaviour that restricts someone else’s freedom appear ordinary, private or even loving.

Then, because apparently one Housewives storyline was not enough to send me down a legal rabbit hole, there was menopause. Rhode Island Senator Lori Urso has been behind legislation that treats menopause as something more substantial than a punchline about hot flushes and ageing. In 2025, Rhode Island enacted workplace protections for menopause, including reasonable accommodations for workers experiencing menopause-related symptoms. Urso has also introduced S2890, which would require private insurers to cover medically necessary hormonal and non-hormonal menopause treatments. The Senate passed that bill in May 2026, but it is important to say that it is not yet law. And once again, this isn’t a neat Rhode Island-versus-South-Africa story. South Africa already recognises menopausal management as a Prescribed Minimum Benefit for medical-scheme members. What struck me was the broader idea behind both sets of legislation: something women have historically been expected to simply endure can become a matter of public policy. Menopause is common, but common doesn’t mean inconsequential. Control can be common too, but familiarity doesn’t make it harmless. It is profound that the law is saying that these experiences belong in conversations about rights, workplaces, healthcare and protection rather than being left entirely to women to manage behind closed doors.

(image credits: The Real Housewives of Rhode Island - Wikipedia, Hey Rhody magazine)

(Spell and grammar check run through co-pilot)

The announcement that Cape Town will host the Pan-African Conference on Family Values next year might have slipped past many South Africans. It shouldn’t. The gathering brings together organisations associated with the continent’s growing anti-gender movement, a network that has become increasingly coordinated in its opposition to LGBTQ+ rights and broader gender equality. Their choice of Cape Town is significant. South Africa has long stood apart because of its constitutional protections for LGBTQ+ people. Hosting this conference here feels less like a coincidence than a statement: that even the continent’s most progressive legal landscape has become a new frontier in a wider ideological campaign.

Triangle Project hosted a discussion in March 2026 unpacking the anti-gender movement in South Africa.

In stark contrast representatives from Cape Town Pride are about to travel to Amsterdam to receive the WorldPride torch ahead of WorldPride 2028, the first time the event will be held on African soil. Across Africa, progress has never been linear. Botswana’s courts have expanded protections in recent years, while South Africa continues to provide constitutional safeguards that remain unmatched on the continent. At the same time, countries such as Uganda have enacted some of the world’s harshest anti-LGBTQ+ laws, and debates over restrictive legislation continue to shape the political landscape elsewhere, including Ghana. The continent’s story is not one of uninterrupted progress or inevitable decline. It is one of competing futures unfolding at the same time.

Perhaps that is why these two announcements matter more together than apart. Every gain in visibility has historically been met with resistance, and every movement for equality has attracted those determined to push it backwards. The answer, however, has never been to become smaller or quieter. It has been to become more visible, more organised and more connected. If Cape Town is becoming the stage on which these competing visions of Africa meet, then WorldPride is about far more than a parade. It is a reminder that dignity is not a finite resource, and that defending the rights of LGBTQ+ people ultimately means defending the principle that everyone deserves to live freely, safely and without fear. There is movement building around this happening as we speak. So when calls for support go out, please heed the call. Its a cliche, probably overstated but tbh not comprehended and regarded enough because we wouldn’t be here having to fight to just exist in peace, BUT NO IS FREE TILL WE ALL ARE.

Verdict

Both the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) and South African Government News (SAnews/GOVZA) issued official statements confirming that the poster is fraudulent. They urged members of the public not to share the notice and reminded South Africans that official government announcements are published only through verified government communication channels.

A review of official GOVZA notices also reveals several inconsistencies in the design of the circulating poster. The South African coat of arms is incorrectly positioned and does not follow the standard government branding used in official notices. Authentic GOVZA notices consistently place the coat of arms at the bottom of the graphic, accompanied by the words “Republic of South Africa” like here, here, and here. The colours and layout also differ from the government’s established visual identity. Authentic South African government public notices also include social media icons and handles, and a link to the South African government website at the bottom.

From left: An official South African Government public notice versus the public notice under investigation.

The address provided on the poster is also questionable. A search of the official Department of Home Affairs branch directory does not list a Home Affairs office at the stated address. A Google Street View search likewise shows no DHA office operating from the North Rand Road location. The Department of Home Affairs is located at the Absa Building, 324 Commissioner Street, in the Boksburg CBD.

False government notices can spread quickly during periods of heightened public debate and can cause real-world harm. In South Africa, where immigration remains a contentious issue and xenophobic violence has occurred in the past, fabricated government notices can reinforce misinformation, inflame tensions and encourage vigilantism against foreign nationals.

By falsely using government branding, such content also undermines public trust in official institutions and makes it more difficult for people to distinguish between legitimate government communication and fabricated content. Members of the public should verify announcements through the Department of Home Affairs, GOVZA and other verified government communication platforms before sharing or acting on them.

Sources

• Department of Home Affairs (official X page)

• South African Government (official X page)

This fact-check was produced by Ling Sheperd, a freelance journalist and writer, as part of the African Fact-Checking Alliance’s (AFCA) incubation programme. It was produced with peer mentorship from Code for Africa’s fact-checking initiative, PesaCheck, with financial support from Norway Democracy. AFCA mentorship respects the journalistic independence of the researchers, offering access to advanced techniques and tools. Editorial decision-making remains with Triangle Project. Want to learn more? Visit:

https://factcheck.africa/

South Africans have become accustomed to KAK. These queues are not merely administrative inconveniences. They are reflections of something much deeper: how a society treats people once it no longer considers them economically productive. The reality is that our elders are the original skarrel kinders (hustlers). They have always worked, from childhood even. They toiled, tilled soil, cleant roads, planted entire vineyards and made the winelands and agriculture in general flourishing industry it is today. They built roads, buildings and infrastructure, and all they get is a pittance of a pension. The South African government’s treatment of pensioners is what we call STANK VIR DANK! (ingratitude)

The measure of a democracy is not found only in election results, GDP growth or investor confidence. It is also found in the everyday experiences of those with the least bargaining power. Children. Persons with disabilities. The unemployed. Older persons. If these groups struggle to live with dignity, then our policies deserve closer scrutiny. That is where the concept of relative deprivation becomes useful. We need to accept that there will be no reparations and not even a salient and meaningful apology from the perpetrators of institutional slavery and racism. The only thing that can happen is if our democratic governments do right by those who were wronged. And, they are doing one helluva kak job at it.

Relative deprivation is not simply about poverty. It describes the gap between what people need to participate in society with dignity and what they are actually able to afford. A person may receive an income and still experience deprivation if that income no longer provides meaningful access to food, healthcare, transport, housing and social participation.For many of South Africa’s pensioners, that gap continues to widen.

The cost of growing old

South Africa’s Older Person’s Grant currently provides R 2 400 per month. If you are older than 75 years, you will get R2 420. Even that extra R20 is an insult, and disgraceful. According to the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group’s Household Affordability Index, the average household food basket now costs approximately R5,502.42, while a nutritionally adequate basket costs even more.

These figures tell only part of the story. Food is one expense among many. Pensioners must also budget for electricity, transport, municipal services, toiletries, clothing, communication costs and, in many cases, chronic medication. Every increase in the price of fuel or electricity ripples through these household budgets. Every increase in the cost of transport makes access to healthcare more difficult. Inflation is not experienced as an abstract economic indicator. It is experienced at the supermarket till and on the taxi ride home.

The long shadow of colonialism and apartheid

It is impossible to discuss poverty among older South Africans without acknowledging history. Colonialism extracted land, labour and wealth. Apartheid formalised exclusion through laws that denied the majority of South Africans access to quality education, secure employment, property ownership and meaningful opportunities to accumulate wealth across generations. Democracy inherited these inequalities, and corruption entrenched it.

Successive governments cannot be held responsible for creating apartheid’s economic architecture. They can, however, be judged by how effectively they have dismantled its consequences.

More than three decades into democracy, many older South Africans remain the financial anchors of their households. Grandparents continue supporting unemployed adult children, raising grandchildren and stretching fixed incomes to cover expenses that extend far beyond their own needs. The Older Person’s Grant was designed as social protection for older citizens. For many households, it is unofficial family income.

Policy must centre people

Good public policy should begin with a simple question:

Does this decision improve the lives of those with the least bargaining power?

If the answer is no, then policymakers should ask why? Affordability should never become a mechanism through which strategically under-valued people are excluded violently from full participation in society. This is an assault and and an act of violence to continue to exclude older people from society in such a systematic way. From moving everything online, and expecting older people to just understand the technology overnight. Even when they do, they can’t afford smartphones and devices. The rapid descent of analogue has left many people behind, with no back-up or support system, and often because or elders are the support system.

The South African government is a failure

South Africa has made significant investments in social protection since 1994, and millions of lives have undoubtedly been improved because of it. Acknowledging that progress should not prevent honest criticism where the system continues to fall short.

Older persons still spend hours waiting outside government offices. Public healthcare remains difficult to access for many, particularly in rural communities. The rising cost of living continues to outpace household incomes.

Municipal failures often increase the financial burden on those least able to absorb additional costs. Meanwhile, corruption and wasteful expenditure have diverted public resources that could have strengthened the systems older South Africans rely upon most. These are not isolated policy failures. Together, they shape what ageing looks like in South Africa.

A society reveals itself

A society that values its elderly does not do so through speeches on commemorative days. It does so through affordable food, accessible healthcare, functioning public services and social protection that keeps pace with the realities of everyday life. Older persons are not economically obsolete. They are parents, grandparents, caregivers, neighbours, teachers and living archives of our collective history. Many continue carrying households long after they should have been allowed to rest. Perhaps the better question is what kind of society we can afford to become if growing old increasingly means becoming invisible.

It’s not welfare. It's making sure people fare well at every stage of life.

There is going to be a peaceful protest this Monday, let us show our support*

Sources:

(Screenshots from Pensioners South Africa META Facebook Page)

(Video: Newsroom Afrika)

South African Government News

The Witness Newspaper

Ground Up News

IOL News

News 24

Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group’s Household Affordability Index

This video circulating on Facebook claiming to show the Acting National Commissioner of the South African Police Service (SAPS), Lieutenant General Puleng Dimpane, stating that the planned nationwide protest on 30 June 2026 is FALSE.

Verdict

False: SAPS has confirmed the video is fake and misleading.

The video circulating online appears to show Lieutenant General Puleng Dimpane speaking about the legality of a planned nationwide protest scheduled for 30 June. It has been widely shared on social media platforms, with claims that it is an official SAPS statement.

The South African Police Service (SAPS) has publicly rejected the video, stating that it does not represent any official statement from the Acting National Commissioner.

In a statement shared on SAPS’ verified social media accounts, the organisation confirmed that the video is fake and misleading and urged the public to rely only on official SAPS communication channels.

SAPS also warned against the spread of unverified content that misrepresents state officials or their statements.

The video also showed several inconsistencies that raised questions about its authenticity, including its poor video quality. The audio did not match the lip movement, and the voice in the clip was not recognisable. The voice in the video did not match Lieutenant General Dimpane’s voice as heard in previous public press briefings. These are some of the qualities of an AI-generated video.

We then analysed the video using UncovAI, an AI video detection tool. The tool flagged both the video and audio as likely synthetic, with high confidence scores suggesting possible digital manipulation. A screenshot of the detection results is included below, and the full results are available here:

Hive Moderation, another AI-detection tool, said the audio in the video under investigation was 99.2 per cent AI-generated.

The planned 30 June protest is linked to anti-immigration mobilisation in South Africa. Organisers say it is focused on undocumented migration, while critics and human rights groups have raised concerns about xenophobic rhetoric and its potential impact on undocumented migrants.

Misleading or manipulated videos involving state institutions can distort public understanding of official positions, especially around sensitive issues such as the tensions in South Africa at present. This can increase confusion, spread panic, and potentially escalate tensions between communities and authorities.

It also highlights the growing challenge of digitally manipulated content spreading on social media, where false statements can appear credible if shared widely

Sources

• South African Police Service (official Facebook page)

• Uncova A.I detection tool

• British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)

• South African Broadcasting Corporation SABC News

This fact-check was produced by Ling Sheperd, a freelance journalist and writer, as part of the African Fact-Checking Alliance’s (AFCA) incubation programme. It was produced with peer mentorship from Code for Africa’s fact-checking initiative, PesaCheck, with financial support from Norway Democracy. AFCA mentorship respects the journalistic independence of the researchers, offering access to advanced techniques and tools. Editorial decision-making remains with Triangle Project. Want to learn more? Visit:

https://factcheck.africa/

The irony was not lost on either of us. My mother was a City of Cape Town employee. By day, she worked within the machinery of local government. By night, she was one of thousands of people hoping that machinery might eventually work for her.

We joked about it often. The alternative was to acknowledge something much heavier: that waiting can become a permanent condition. That after enough years, a waiting list stops feeling like a queue and starts feeling like a place where people live.

Today, as the Constitutional Court delivered its landmark judgment in the Tafelberg case, I found myself thinking about those conversations. About the paperwork. About the waiting. About the indignity of being told, year after year, that your turn is coming. The highest court in the land basically declared that the Western Cape governments' sale of the Tafelberg School property in Sea Point unlawful. The court ruled that both the Province and the City of Cape Town violated their constitutional duties to address apartheid-era spatial inequality by failing to provide affordable inner-city housing.

But what does this victory actually mean?

A few years ago, I spoke to an elderly claimant in a land restitution matter. He was well into his eighties. After decades of waiting, the state had finally offered him a flat. On paper, it looked like a success story. A wrong had been acknowledged. A measure of redress had been provided.

But he shrugged.

What, he asked, was he supposed to do with a flat in town now?

His family, his community, his doctor, his masjied, his life, were all on the Cape Flats. He struggled with mobility. The building had stairs he could not comfortably use. The place he had once been removed from no longer existed in the way he remembered it. The city had changed. He had changed. Time had done what forced removals alone could not.It is one of the uncomfortable truths about redress. There is no formula that can restore what apartheid took. No parcel of land, title deed or apartment can return lost decades. No judgment can rewind a life.

JUSTICE CAN CARRY MANY INDIGNITIES.

I fantasise when I look at my mother’s housing paperwork. Because what if there was a provision that allows me to inherit her position on the housing waiting list. The queue survives her. The file remains active. The state recognises the continuity of the application, even if it cannot recognise the loss of the person who made it. Imagine inheriting a deceased person’s right to housing? Yoh I can’t. I would probably die on that list too. Our rights or rather lack thereof has become a hereditary insult at this point.

That is why the Tafelberg judgment matters, even if it does not immediately build a single house.

Victories like this do not materialise from nowhere. They are built over years by people willing to continue long after public attention has moved on.

For more than a decade, housing activists, community organisers, researchers, lawyers and ordinary residents refused to let this issue disappear. Organisations such as Reclaim the City and Ndifuna Ukwazi kept pushing when the political route stalled. Journalists at GroundUp continued documenting the story through court dates, setbacks and appeals. Community members attended meetings, lodged objections, organised protests, shared testimony and insisted that the geography of apartheid was not merely a historical fact but a present reality.

Social movements rarely get the tidy endings we assign them in hindsight. There is no final chapter where everyone goes home and the struggle is complete. The work continues because the conditions that produced the movement continue.

The right to housing did not win this case on its own. People did. People who organised, documented, litigated, protested, researched and persisted. And perhaps that is what gives me hope. Not that a court has spoken, but that for once, the Goliath’s that are the City and Provincial government have fallen, and the strategically undervalued folks have won.

Image credits: Ground Up News, Reclaim the city Facebook page

What compounds job insecurity are those mornings of anxiety. The checking of emails to see maybe something landed. Then there is also capacity.I have capacity for a lot but I seem to be functioning on fatigue I am still carrying from last year. My mother has not been the first person I have had to care for physically at end of life, and it is taking its toll on me mentally and physically. Especially now when I get to sit still. But sitting still is emailing, scrolling, completing applications of all kinds. I seem to land everything but paid opportunities. Even now I just got off of a professional development webinar, which is a good thing but I won’t be paid. It is not going to pay my funeral policy, utilities or even buy a little plant for myself. Because yes everything can’t just be about bills, but here I am. Did everything right, studied, studied further, worked from the mailroom up so to speak, saved what little I could save, that always went for an emergency which has been constant. My entire working life has been about survival mainly. So seeing that bank notification just sent me over the edge with all I had to go through with the UIF and the Department of Labour to get the benefits which are now done. The department of Labour and employment is no better, they purport to be doing everything to get South Africa employed, but it is at best a farcical entity. They are non responsive on all their social media channels, and at best function as a shell company.

I am not on the precipice of anything and am on the precipice of everything all at the same time. There are days where I have such energy, that I filled out 20 applications, did all the laundry, gardened, washed the dogs, caught up with friends, wrote a little, just on a high functioning kick ….until the inevitable crash and reality of being part of the 8.1 million people unemployed in South Africa, and not for a lack of trying. We are all navigating joblessness, relentless violence in our neighbourhoods, stress, grief and pain that I never have words for anymore. I hope it changes for all 8 million of us soon. I am also immensely optimistic most of the time, so this is not me going into a state of ideating again. I am just feeling a little unstable, and will shift my mind to where it needs to be , so I can invite blessings, goodwill and a stable pay cheque in soon. I am also not shying away from the fact that at least once a day I delve off into the unbelievability that my mother is really no longer alive. I still wake up every morning and for a brief moment she is still alive to me. For all this and more being jobless is just feeling overwhelming. I guess if we had more respite and grace from our government institutions, there would be less dread and despair. Let’s see what tomorrow’s email check brings.

In a country where youth unemployment remains one of the most urgent socio-economic challenges, the use of AI-generated messaging by a government department responsible for employment policy has triggered a broader conversation: what does innovation mean when millions of young people remain locked out of the economy?

The Department’s post can be viewed here:

South Africa’s youth unemployment crisis has persisted for years, with youth unemployment remaining above 40% depending on the measure used. For many young people, the struggle is not simply finding a “better opportunity” it is gaining access to a first opportunity at all. And this is where the symbolism of the moment matters. In a nation filled with storytellers and amazing creatives, a whole department of labour asked an online bot to generate messaging about looking for work. This is a pattern across government departments. In perhaps the grossest display from a government department the Communications department was found to have used A.I generated citations in its A.I policy. The irony here is breathtaking. As recently as April, two Home Affairs officials were suspended over AI use linked to a revised White Paper on Citizenship and Immigration

The problem is not AI. The problem is the disconnect.

Artificial intelligence is becoming part of everyday life. Governments, businesses, and institutions across the world are experimenting with AI tools to improve communication, efficiency, and service delivery. But public communication does not exist in a vacuum.

When a state institution uses AI-generated content during a moment focused on youth struggles, the message is interpreted against the backdrop of lived reality.

For young South Africans facing unemployment, inequality, and rising economic uncertainty, the question becomes less about the technology itself and more about what it represents.

Are we using the tools of the future to build pathways into that future, or are we creating the appearance of progress while structural problems remain unresolved?

A labour crisis that cannot be solved with better messaging

South Africa’s unemployment challenge is deeply structural. Young people continue to face barriers including limited entry-level opportunities, unequal access to skills development, geographic inequality, and an economy that has struggled to absorb new workers at the pace required. The result is a generation navigating a difficult contradiction: being told they are the future while struggling to access the basic building blocks needed to participate in it. A digital economy cannot thrive on exclusion. If AI is going to shape the future of work, then conversations about AI must include the people most affected by changes in employment systems particularly young people searching for their first foothold.

The accountability question

The debate sparked by the Department’s video points to a larger question facing public institutions: How should governments communicate during moments of crisis?

Innovation matters. Digital transformation matters. But so do trust, transparency, and material outcomes. A meaningful response to youth unemployment requires more than campaigns. It requires measurable pathways like:

• Expanded opportunities for first-time job seekers

• Stronger work-integrated learning programmes (BRING BACK APPRENTICESHIPS AGGRESSIVELY. WE ARE TIRED OF SEEING POSTERS FOR ENERGY DRINKS. PUT UP POSTERS FOR PAID LEARNERSHIPS)

• Support for youth-led enterprises and creative economies

• Investment in green and digital sectors that create accessible employment pathways

• Greater alignment between skills development and actual labour market needs

Young people do not need to be marketed a future. They need access to one.

The Algorithm has fokol rhythm

An AI-generated video is ultimately about more than a single post. It reflects a growing tension between technological optimism and economic reality.

The question is not whether government should embrace new technologies.

The question is whether those technologies are being used to transform people’s lives, or simply transform the way institutions speak about them.

Because the future cannot only be generated. It has to be built. Giving the youth a chance actually means GIVING TO THE YOUTH, not generating a story they could have conceptualised and produced.

The queue outside a SASSA office has become one of the defining images of the post-apartheid condition: citizens waiting for assistance from a democratic state that promised dignity, standing in the shadow of an economy that has never fully delivered transformation. A close family friend has been struggling for two years to access a pension. He gave up and went back to being an e-hailing driver full time. He had this option, most people don’t.

These queues are not only about social grants. They are monuments to a deeper contradiction. South Africa defeated apartheid, but it did not defeat all the conditions that made apartheid possible: extreme inequality, unequal access to wealth, spatial segregation, and an economy where millions remain excluded from security and opportunity. South Africa has always been on the precipice of something, but it was never revolution. It has always been about violence.

What happens when a society is told it is free, but many people do not feel free? Freedom is about being able to wake up, and not feel the walls crashing in as you think about how will you skarrel to get food and keep a roof over your head. People are struggling. People have been struggling.

The answer, too often, has been xenophobia.

But xenophobia in South Africa cannot only be understood as hatred of foreigners. It is the symptom of a much larger crisis: the failure to complete a social transformation that would allow liberation to be felt in everyday life. The tragedy is not simply that Africans turn against Africans. The tragedy is that people abandoned by the same system are left fighting each other. The apartheid state was built around controlling belonging. It was a system of borders: borders between races, between communities, between urban and rural spaces, between those considered citizens and those reduced to temporary occupants.

The passbook was not only a document. It was a technology of exclusion. It decided who could enter, who could work, who could remain. Apartheid understood that controlling movement meant controlling possibility. The democratic transition promised the opposite: a country where dignity was not determined by race, birthplace, or privilege.

South Africa’s liberation struggle was never only South African. Across the continent, people understood apartheid as a continental injustice. Neighbouring states hosted exiles. African communities carried the costs of South Africa’s struggle. The fall of apartheid was celebrated as a victory beyond one nation. It was a moment when the idea of Africa as a shared political and moral project felt possible. But decades later, the continent faces an uncomfortable contradiction.

The country that became one of Africa’s great symbols of freedom has also become a place where other Africans are sometimes treated as threats. The border that colonialism drew has survived not only on maps, but in the imagination.

To understand xenophobia, we must understand relative deprivation. People do not experience inequality only through what they have. They experience it through what they believe they should have had.

A generation was promised a different future.

A home.
A job.
Security.
Dignity.
A life beyond the humiliations of apartheid.

When those promises remain out of reach, frustration grows. Relative deprivation is the anger produced by the gap between expectation and reality. And South Africa’s tragedy is that the gap between political freedom and material freedom remains enormous. The country created one of the most progressive constitutional democracies in the world, but the dream of a fully realised social democracy has remained incomplete. Many citizens experience the state not as a source of empowerment, but as a place where they must wait. You wait for housing, healthcare, social assistance, employment, help, respite and a breather. My late mother died while being on a housing waiting list since 1999. As the saying goes, Cape Town is a city that works for a few. And when people wait long enough, resentment looks for somewhere to land. This is where xenophobia becomes politically convenient.

A migrant worker becomes blamed for unemployment. A foreign trader becomes blamed for economic hardship. A newcomer becomes blamed for failing services.The person standing next to you becomes easier to confront than the structures above you. The powerless become visible. The powerful become distant.It is easier to blame the neighbour you can see than the systems you cannot reach. The anger is real.

The direction of the anger is the tragedy.

Because the Zimbabwean worker, the Congolese trader, the Mozambican labourer, the Somali shopkeeper did not design South Africa’s economic order. They did not create unemployment. They did not create inequality. They did not create the long history of racialised wealth. They became the easiest target because they were close enough to blame.

This is the unfinished question of postcolonial Africa. Colonialism created borders that divided communities, economies and histories. After independence, many African states inherited these borders and were forced to build national identities around them. But a continent cannot imagine solidarity while treating movement itself as a threat. The dream of African unity cannot exist only in speeches and commemorations. It must confront the reality of African lives: people move because economies, families and histories have always moved. Africa has never been a collection of sealed boxes. It has always been a conversation.

South Africa’s xenophobia is therefore not only about foreigners. It is about a country wrestling with the consequences of an incomplete liberation. A revolution that transformed the political order but struggled to transform economic life. A society that abolished the passbook but still carries the instinct to ask who belongs. The most painful border is not always the one between countries. Sometimes it is the border between people who have been promised a future and the reality they inherited.

Outside the SASSA office, the queue continues. People wait for a state that promised a different tomorrow. And somewhere else, a neighbour becomes an enemy, not because they created the crisis, but because they are close enough to see it. The greatest tragedy of xenophobia is that it teaches the abandoned to fight the abandoned. A country built from the dream of freedom cannot afford to forget that freedom was never meant to stop at the border. And I will say this now and it will be the hill I die on. Cowardice is real, lack of access too. No one inciting violence like this is able to reach the people siphoning South Africa. They have and will continue to suck the marrow out of the country till there is nothing left. White monopoly capital must fall. Corrupt government departments must fall. We are still being pillaged and plundered by the few elites but choose to attack the migrant looking for a safe haven. It is shocking and breathtaking even in how we have collectively moved on from holding the white racist elites in this country accountable for their terror they still wield. The violence they inflict by hoarding wealth, exploiting workers and decimating our mineral wealth.

Dig deeper. Interrogate everything , and have some humanity. We can literally overthrow those who should be overthrown.

(First image credit, the Daily Voice)

Carol Lennon, s nurse and outreach worker at Triangle Project writes in anger:

“Cape Town advertise that there is a safe sleeping zone for 60 people in D6… I am trying to get a client in there and no one will tell me how to register the person.”

The message is not unusual. What is unusual is its clarity.

Because what it describes is not a shortage of care. It is a system of controlled access to care, where visibility, geography, and administrative legibility determine who is allowed to survive the night indoors.

The City of Cape Town presents its homelessness response as structured, expanding, and responsive. But on the ground, frontline workers describe something else entirely: a shifting maze of eligibility rules, informal gatekeeping, and unclear entry points.

And at its centre is a figure we rarely name: THE IDEAL UNHOUSED PERSON

NO ROOM AT THE INN

Across municipal communications and winter relief messaging, Cape Town consistently signals expansion: more beds, more shelters, more outreach capacity during winter peaks. The official framing suggests a linear relationship between need and provision: when demand increases, capacity rises to meet it.

But frontline accounts repeatedly disrupt this narrative.

In Carol’s account, the problem is not whether spaces exist. It is whether anyone can access them in practice:

• clients must be located in specific zones

• registration pathways are unclear or withheld

• peer outreach workers act as gatekeepers rather than navigators

• shelters fill up through informal allocation systems rather than open access

The result is a paradox: announced capacity without navigable entry.

The City of Cape Town frames homelessness interventions through programmes under its social development and urban safety structures, including street people initiatives and shelter partnerships. On paper, these are public-facing systems.

On the ground, access is mediated through multiple intermediaries, including district-based outreach structures and private security-adjacent systems such as improvement districts. The outcome is not simply inefficiency. It is stratification.

Who is eligible?

One of the most revealing details in the account is geographic restriction.

A client is reportedly told they do not qualify for a safe sleeping space because they are not located in the CBD. This introduces a crucial distinction:

Not “need,” but proximity to surveillance infrastructure, determines eligibility.

Homelessness becomes administratively legible only within certain mapped zones. Outside those zones, vulnerability does not disappear, it becomes non-registrable.

This produces a contradiction: the people most in need of shelter are often outside the areas where shelter access is activated. The system therefore rewards spatial conformity. It requires unhoused people to already be in the “correct” place before assistance becomes possible. This is not accidental. It is structural.

The ticket economy of survival

Carol’s account also references “tickets” distributed through CCID-linked peer workers. This introduces another layer: allocation by encounter.

Rather than open registration, access appears to depend on being:

• found

• recognised

• selected

• and issued a limited entry token

In this system, survival becomes contingent on being seen at the right moment by the right actor. This creates what could be called a “ticket economy of survival,” where scarcity is not just material but procedural. Even when beds exist, entry is not guaranteed by need. It is mediated by chance encounters within controlled urban space.

The ideal unhoused person

From this system emerges a pattern.

The ideal unhoused person is:

• already inside the designated surveillance geography (CBD or approved zones)

• already known to outreach networks

• already compliant with procedural instruction

• already able to wait, queue, and present repeatedly

• already legible within administrative categories

• already found, rather than searching

This figure is not described in policy documents. But it is produced by them.

Because every threshold in the system selects for one thing above all: administrative ease of processing. Need alone is not enough. Urgency alone is not enough.

What matters is legibility.

Conditional access

Frontline workers like Carol become translators between human urgency and bureaucratic opacity. They do not simply deliver clients to services. They navigate:

• shifting eligibility rules

• unclear registration channels

• inconsistent information between departments

• and time-sensitive scarcity windows

In her account, even attempts to place a recently hospital-discharged client into shelter meet procedural dead ends. This is not individual failure. It is systemic design.

And it produces a secondary crisis: carers begin to absorb the frustration of the system itself.

The ideal migrant problem (and why it overlaps)

This logic does not exist only in homelessness policy. It mirrors broader South African urban governance patterns around migration and informal settlement life.

The “ideal migrant” in many urban systems is:

• economically useful

• socially quiet

• administratively documentable

• spatially contained

• non-disruptive to municipal planning narratives

In both cases, the underlying expectation is the same: belonging must be earned through compliance with systems that were not designed for those being assessed by them. This is where homelessness governance and migration governance intersect.

Both produce conditional inclusion, reward legibility over vulnerability, and transform survival into administrative performance.

The City’s dual reality

The City of Cape Town can simultaneously:

• announce expanded shelter capacity

• publish winter response plans

• and fund outreach programmes

while frontline workers report:

• inaccessible registration pathways

• full shelters despite advertised availability

• and unclear allocation systems

These are not contradictory realities. They are layered realities. One is communicative. One is operational. And between them lies the gap where people fall through.

What this system actually optimises for

Despite its humanitarian framing, the system appears to optimise for:

• manageability

• visibility control

• and administrative throughput

This is not universally accessible, nor is anyone really guaranteed shelter.

This is why the “ideal unhoused person” matters as an analytical tool.

It reveals that the system is not broken in random ways. It is selective in structured ways.

Be so fucking for real City of Cape Town

Cape Town does not simply distribute shelter.

It distributes access to shelter through thresholds:

• geographic thresholds

• informational thresholds

• bureaucratic thresholds

• encounter-based thresholds

And thresholds always produce a remainder: those who arrive too late, stand in the wrong place, or are never “found.” The City may count beds.

But what it does not count, and what it cannot easily count is the number of people who are never able to reach them. And so in the rain, the question is not whether shelter exists. It is who is allowed to become legible enough to enter it. The mayor and his endless photo ops and that smug grin so big like a hotel kat se gevriet, makes us even more angry. Stop taking photos and start getting intersectional in how you assist your residents, unhoused of te not. You are here to serve the people, not looks. Fok man.

In a recent ruling, the High Court found elements of the City’s fixed electricity charges unconstitutional, pushing back against a pricing model many households experienced as punitive. For a moment, it looked like a recalibration, a reminder that public utilities are meant to serve the public. But when you widen the frame, the picture begins to shift.

Because at the same time that the City is being told it cannot extract revenue from residents in quite the way it had planned, it is preparing to host one of the most energy-intensive industries on the planet. Data centres and sommer a vrag of them.

The scale we’re not really talking about

According to recent reporting, new data centres could consume up to 34% of Cape Town’s current electricity supply. In real terms, that’s in the region of 580 megawatts of demand. This isn’t a marginal addition to the grid. It’s not a handful of office parks or a new mall. It’s a structural shift in who or what the city’s electricity is for.

Put differently: more than a third of the city’s current power could be redirected into server farms, humming quietly behind high walls, storing, processing, and moving data across the globe. Not people. Not homes. Not even traditional industry.Just… the cloud, an ominous network vrieting up water and electricity.

A different kind of customer

Households are politically sensitive revenue sources. They protest. They litigate. They vote. Their ability to pay is finite, and increasingly stretched. Data centres, on the other hand, are something else entirely. They are high-volume electricity consumers and sign up for long-term contracts.

A 580 MW load, running continuously, translates into millions of kilowatt-hours consumed every single day. Even at conservative bulk tariffs, that’s a revenue stream that doesn’t trickle it pours. It literally floods the city’s coffers. The revenue implications of losing fixed charges on households begin to look… small. Almost negligible. A rounding error against the kind of predictable, industrial-scale income that data infrastructure can generate.

Is the City shifting its revenue model — away from residents, and toward infrastructure?

Cape Town’s dams are running dry babes

Cape Town knows water anxiety intimately. The memory of Day Zero isn’t abstract; it lives in politicians and religious figures standing on Table Mountain praying for rain, capetonians researching compost toilets, and overall panic.

Water use adds another layer of opacity. While data centres rely on complex cooling systems that can involve both energy and water consumption, there is currently no clear, publicly consolidated account of their cumulative water demand in Cape Town. That absence of transparency sits uneasily alongside a city that has recently lived through acute water scarcity.

Global appetite, local consequences

Globally, data centres already consume around 1–1.5% of all electricity, and that share is rising fast. That’s in contexts where energy supply is relatively stable. South Africa is not that context. We already sukkel with load shedding and fragile infrastructure. So the decision to scale up one of the most energy-hungry industries in the world is not neutral.

Cape Town may have lost a case on fixed charges. But it may be positioning itself to win somewhere else entirely, and it’'s in megawatts, in long-term contracts, in becoming a host for the invisible machinery of the digital world. And maybe that’s the future. We have to move with the world, but at what cost? Consumers are suffering. e can’t afford anything anymore. Maybe we never could because we adapt, add another side hustle, steal, succumb to corruption.

In a city still learning how to live with limits, we are building for an industry that has none. Because you can defer a payment. You can challenge a tariff. You can even win in court. But when the system is built around you instead of for you, you don’t get to decide what gets powered. And you definitely don’t get to decide what gets to drink.

Workers’ Day arrives wrapped in themes around dignity, labour, progress. We are reminded that workers built this country, that work is the foundation of stability, that participation in the economy leads to security.

Work does not guarantee survival.

South Africa’s official unemployment rate sits under 32%, with expanded unemployment significantly higher. Among youth, the crisis is even more severe. These numbers are repeated often, but rarely felt in full. Because they suggest a divide between those who have work and those who do not. In reality, the line is far less stable.

Work is often temporary, underpaid, or inconsistent. Contracts end. Payments are delayed. Opportunities disappear without warning. You can be formally employed and still live with the constant awareness that your income is fragile.

I am writing from that space, not fully unemployed, but not secure enough to plan. A kind of suspended state where you are always one delay away from instability. When work falls away, there is supposed to be a system that holds you. The Unemployment Insurance Fund exists as that promise. A mechanism meant to cushion loss, to provide temporary relief, to ensure that people do not fall immediately into crisis.

But a system is only as effective as its timing. Across the country, workers report waiting weeks, sometimes longer, for UIF payments after submitting claims and meeting requirements. The reasons are familiar: backlogs, administrative processes, system delays. But delay is not neutral. When UIF does not arrive on time, it is not an inconvenience. It is rent unpaid. It is food uncertain. It is transport cut off. It is the slow accumulation of debt in the absence of income.

What makes this harder to hold is that the burden of delay falls on those least able to absorb it. There is an assumption built into these systems that people have time, reserves, or alternative support. That they can wait. But many cannot.

In a country where millions are already navigating unemployment or precarious work, delays in social protection systems intensify vulnerability. They shift responsibility away from institutions and onto individuals, who are then forced to improvise survival.

People borrow. They stretch what little they have. They rely on family, friends, and informal networks to fill the gap. These networks, often invisible in policy discussions, become the real infrastructure of survival. Even within formal employment, security is not guaranteed. You can follow every rule, meet every requirement, contribute to every system, and still find yourself waiting for support that arrives too late to matter.

Because if employment does not ensure stability, and support systems cannot respond in time, then what remains is not protection. It is uncertainty, managed privately and unevenly. Workers’ Day asks us to celebrate labour. But celebration without accountability risks becoming performance. It honours contribution without confronting the conditions under which people are expected to survive.

Because dignity is not abstract. It is material. It depends on systems that function when they are needed most. There is a particular kind of exhaustion in living inside this gap between what is promised and what is delivered, between policy and reality, between survival and delay.It teaches you something difficult: That stability, for many, is not guaranteed by work. It is negotiated, day by day, in the absence of it.

If this feels familiar, it’s because it is. It is happening quietly, repeatedly, across the country in homes where people are waiting for money that is already owed to them.

Workers’ Day should not only be about celebration. It should be about accountability.

Share this if you’ve experienced it. Share it if you’re still waiting. Share it if you know that survival in this country is not guaranteed by work, but negotiated in its absence.

What is happening there is criminal, and the conditions feeding it are political. A wall may interrupt the symptoms for a while. It may redirect movement, delay incidents, create the appearance of control. But walls have never solved the crises they are built to hide. Containment is not cure. And like anything left to fester, boil, and harden under pressure, what is walled in today returns tomorrow in another form, often sharper than before.

So the question is not only how do we stop the harm, but why is harm so consistently produced here?

The money we already spend on containment

Walls, surveillance, policing interventions. These are not neutral choices. They are public funds directed at managing symptoms rather than addressing conditions. I have to say I AM SO GLAD POLICE IN SOUTH AFRICA ARE GOING TO HAVE BODY CAMS, ALBEIT A YEAR LATE (insert upside down smiley emoji here)

Now imagine if even a fraction of that investment went into a Universal Basic Income Grant (UBIG) pilot in the very community being walled in.

A structural test of what happens when survival is no longer the dominant daily occupation. Imagine a world without having to skarrel for your basics.

UBIG is not theory. It is already being tested.

• In Finland, a basic income trial improved wellbeing and reduced stress, even without dramatic employment shifts.

• In Kenya, GiveDirectly cash transfers improved food security, mental health, and local economic circulation.

• In the USA, the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) showed reduced income volatility and increased full-time employment among recipients.

• In Namibia, basic income pilots contributed to reduced crime and improved school attendance.

• In Alaska, the Permanent Fund Dividend shows that unconditional cash stabilises households rather than destabilising them.

Different contexts. Same pattern: when people are not constantly on the edge of collapse, social harm decreases.

Crime is not a personality trait

Crime is often treated as moral failure. But in structurally excluded environments, it behaves more like a pressure response system, and what happens when formal systems fail to provide income, safety, or dignity. That does not excuse harm. It explains persistence. And if that is true, then walls only manage visibility, not causation.

What a UBIG pilot could do instead

Instead of millions spent on containment infrastructure, the same investment could fund:

• A guaranteed monthly income floor for every adult in the pilot area

• Localised economic circulation through nearby shops and informal traders

• Community-led safety structures focused on prevention, not punishment

• Monitoring of crime rates, schooling, health, and household stability over time

These are direct interventions into causality.

Why the resistance?

Because UBIG disrupts a familiar logic: that poverty must be endured until “fixed” through discipline or exclusion. It shifts the question from who deserves support to what produces instability in the first place.

And it exposes an uncomfortable contradiction: we will fund walls to contain poverty, but hesitate to fund people to move beyond it.

The real question

If millions can be spent to separate a community from risk, why is it harder to spend the same amount to remove the conditions producing that risk? At some point, this is no longer a technical debate. It is a moral one.

Because containment has already shown us its limits. It reduces visibility, not violence. It manages exposure, not causation.

UBIG offers a chance to test whether stability itself is a form of safety policy. And maybe the real discomfort is not the cost. It is the implication that we may have been treating the symptom all along.

As a Cape Flats resident my whole life, I know what invisibilisation feels like. We know we do not form part of the aesthetic Cape Town is packaged and sold to the world. We are also not going anywhere. And we are not here to be swept under the rug, or treated like the vullis some imagine us to be.

Cape Town has a talent for presenting itself as two cities that happen to share the same skyline.

One is polished into global recognisability with the beaches, mountains, investment portfolios, tourism brochures and people kiki-ing and having a lekker time 24/7. The other is lived in: uneven infrastructure, long commutes stitched through spatial apartheid, and communities where basic services arrive like afterthoughts rather than rights.

Into that contradiction steps Ellen Pakkies, now a mayoral candidate for the Cape Town under the National Coloured Congress, with a platform centred on confronting the city’s ongoing drug crisis. (Cape Times, 2026)

Her entry into formal politics is being discussed in terms of symbolism, but symbolism is not the point. Governance is. Because the question her candidacy raises is not just who she is, but what the city has been structurally unable or unwilling to become.

The Cape Flats was designed, not discovered

The Cape Flats is often spoken about as a “high-crime area” or “vulnerable community,” but those labels erase its origin story.

It is a product of apartheid spatial planning, and forced removals that pushed Black and Coloured communities to the city’s periphery, onto low-lying land that was cheaper precisely because it was less habitable and less serviced. Distance was not accidental. It was policy. And policy has afterlives.

Flooding in the Cape Flats is not simply meteorological. It is infrastructural inheritance. Drainage systems that were never designed for long-term dignity. Housing developments that sit in environmental risk zones. A maintenance backlog that has accumulated across decades of uneven investment. When water enters homes in these areas, it is not just weather. It is history returning through the floorboards, lifting tiles and linoleum, and reminding people of how forgotten they are every time an election comes around.

The drug economy is not an anomaly, it is an outcome

The drug crisis Pakkies speaks about is often framed as a law enforcement issue. But that framing is politically convenient because it is administratively safe.

It allows the city to treat symptoms while avoiding the architecture that produces them: unemployment, spatial exclusion, under-resourced schools, fragmented social services, and generational trauma compounded by state absence.

On the Cape Flats, the drug economy is not an external invasion. It is an embedded system that has filled gaps left open by governance that has been consistent in form, but uneven in impact. This is where Pakkies’ candidacy becomes politically sensitive in a different way.

She is not entering as an abstract policy actor. She is entering as someone whose public story is already entangled with the consequences of that system; a system the city continues to describe, manage, and statistically report, but not fundamentally reorganise.

The mayoral race is not just governance; it is control of the city’s narrative

The mayoralty of Cape Town is one of the most politically valuable municipal positions in South Africa. It is not only about service delivery. It is about budget allocation, urban development priorities, investment signalling, and international branding. In other words: it is about deciding what Cape Town is allowed to look like.

And more importantly, what it is allowed to become.

This is why the contest is so tightly held, and why it often produces a politics of management rather than transformation. The incentives of the role lean toward stability of image, and keeping the “global city” functioning even when that stability depends on unresolved structural inequality elsewhere in the metro.

Within that framework, candidates who emerge from the Cape Flats carry something disruptive even before they articulate policy: they represent governance from the edges rather than governance about the edges.

What Pakkies’ candidacy exposes even before votes are counted

Whether or not she wins, her presence in the race interrupts a familiar pattern: that the Cape Flats is where problems are identified, not where solutions are designed.

It forces a difficult question into the centre of municipal politics:

What would it mean if the people most affected by the city’s structural design were not only subjects of policy, but authors of it?

Because Cape Town has long mastered the language of intervention without the practice of redistribution. It can acknowledge crisis fluently like drugs, housing backlogs, flooding, inequality while maintaining the underlying spatial and economic arrangements that produce them. That is the political tension her candidacy sits inside. Not as exception, but as exposure.

The city that manages crisis, but avoids transformation

Cape Town’s governance history is often described in terms of efficiency or failure, depending on political position. But both framings sometimes miss the deeper pattern: the city is highly capable of managing crisis, less capable of undoing its conditions. And that distinction matters. Because management keeps systems stable. Transformation requires them to change.

Ellen Pakkies entering this arena does not automatically resolve that contradiction. But it does sharpen it. It places lived experience of the Cape Flats directly into a political space that has historically processed that experience from a distance.

And in doing so, it forces a question that no election slogan can fully contain:

Is Cape Town being governed toward repair or toward continued containment with better branding? I don’t know about yous but this year’s mayoral race in Cape Town is going to be the one to watch.

The City of Cape Town loves the language of progress.Smart cities. Digital migration. Streamlined services. Apps instead of queues. Portals instead of paper.

Efficiency now lives in the cloud.

But somewhere between the server and the street, something else is quietly disappearing: the people who carried this city long before it discovered the word “innovation.”

The City of Cape Town has been shifting residents toward e-billing. On paper, the logic is clean. Less printing. Faster delivery. Lower administrative costs. Paperless. Modern. Efficient. But for thousands of older residents, this isn’t progress. It’s displacement.

Progress that forgets who built the city

Efficiency is easy when you design systems for people who already have the tools.A smartphone. Reliable internet. An email address. The confidence to navigate platforms that change every six months. But when a city forces essential services into digital spaces without building real bridges for elders, it isn’t modernising.

It’s excluding.

Pensioners are already stretching grants to cover electricity, food, transport and medication. Many households are still anchored by a single older person’s income.

Now quietly, another cost enters the room. Data. Devices. Software updates. Password resets. Portals that time out. That is not innovation. That is shifting the city’s administrative convenience onto the shoulders of people least equipped to carry it.

The people who carried us

I grew up in a country where grandmothers were infrastructure.In the 1990s, when the HIV/AIDS crisis tore through South Africa, entire communities were held together by elderly women. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Families collapsed under the weight of grief and stigma. And in house after house, the same figure stepped forward.

A grandmother.

She raised children who had lost parents. She cooked for households that doubled overnight. She nursed the sick when formal systems failed.

Many of us remember those homes.

Plastic covers on the couches. Kettles that never stopped boiling. Brown envelopes of important documents kept carefully in drawers. Grandmothers were the social safety net long before the state learned the language of “support systems.”

They carried us.

Which is why watching systems quietly push them to the margins now feels less like progress and more like civic KAKAPUSA (Khoi for Amnesia).

The myth of neutral technology

Digital systems are often sold as neutral. But they aren’t. They reflect the assumptions of the people who build them. And those assumptions are usually simple: that everyone has a smartphone, that everyone checks email daily, that everyone can navigate login portals, update apps, manage passwords and troubleshoot digital glitches.

But cities are not made only of the digitally fluent.

A truly public system works for the person with fibre internet and the pensioner who still files important documents in a brown envelope. When a city stops designing for both, it stops being public.

The arrogance of efficiency

There’s an old story often attributed to Aesop. In the fable, a society decides its elderly have become a burden. The young, eager for speed and strength, decide the old must be sent away. Efficiency, they believe, demands it.

But when crisis arrives, the young discover something too late: the elders carried knowledge no one else bothered to learn. Knowledge about survival, restraint and judgment. Without those voices, the society collapses under the weight of its own confidence. Progress without memory has a way of doing that.

A city that works for itself

Cape Town often markets itself as one of the most technologically advanced municipalities in the country. But a city is not advanced because it can digitise a bill.

A city is advanced when the systems it builds honour the people who built it.

When “paperless” becomes a quiet barrier for elders who rely on routine, physical records and accessible communication, the city isn’t streamlining. It’s shrinking the circle of who counts. And that is the real inefficiency. Because the measure of a city is not how quickly it processes transactions. It is how well it remembers its people.Our elders are not obsolete hardware waiting for a software update.

They are living archives.

They survived apartheid. They navigated economic upheaval. They held families together through epidemics and political transition. They raised generations who now work in the very institutions redesigning the systems that exclude them.

To treat them as logistical inconveniences in the march toward digital efficiency is not just careless. It is profoundly ungrateful.

What real progress would look like

Progress does not require abandoning elders. It requires designing systems that respect them. Paper billing alongside digital systems. Accessible help desks. Community assistance points. Simple interfaces that don’t assume constant upgrades.None of this is radical. It is what a public institution should do.

Because when a city quietly designs systems that only work for the technologically comfortable, it reveals something uncomfortable about who it believes the city is really for.

The question Cape Town should answer

Cape Town likes to imagine itself as forward-thinking. But progress is not measured by how quickly we digitise bureaucracy. It is measured by who we carry forward with us. And right now, the question hangs in the air like an unanswered email. When we call something progress, who exactly are we leaving behind?

STOP WHEREVER YOU ARE RIGHT NOW, look around you. At the mall, the cinema, a rugby match, the beach, anywhere, see how little older people you see, and how nothing is adapted for aging and decreased mobility. That is just the physical, it is digital too. And yes it is that deep.