South Africans have become inured to potholes that are never filled, to a murder rate that keeps climbing, to a government that doesn’t work, and to politicians behaving badly.
With President Cyril Ramaphosa besieged over Phala Phala, allegations of sexual harassment swirling around finance minister Enoch Godongwana, and DA leader John Steenhuisen calling his former wife “roadkill” on air, it’s a wonder anyone in SA can bear to read a newspaper anymore.
So you can imagine my relief on spending some time last week with a politician who is proving that SA’s seemingly intractable problems — such as crime, and even bad driving — can be tackled in imaginative ways.
Understated but widely respected, Western Cape premier Alan Winde made me feel more hopeful about SA’s future. Certainly, I am grateful to live in Cape Town, where his innovative, collaborative approach really does seem to be making a difference.
You will have to read the Financial Mail this week for all the details, but let me give you just two examples where Winde is using lessons the province learnt during Covid-19, combined with technology and data, to tackle some of society’s hardest challenges.
First, crime. Winde’s focus has always been the economy, but he realised years ago that the province would be unable to attract investment if it could not ensure people’s safety. As premier, his goal is to halve the province’s murder rate at a time when the country’s murder rate is climbing.
Unable to get more policing resources or powers from the national government, or to create its own police force, the province had to get creative. Over the past two-and-a-half years it has given R1bn to the City of Cape Town to train more than 1,100 metropolitan police officers.
This was combined with a multimillion-rand investment in crime-fighting technology, adapting the GIS mapping system developed to track Covid-19 superspreader events to identify the province’s 13 murder hotspots.
By deploying the 1,100 extra officers to these places and ramping up crime prevention, the murder rate is now plateauing or declining in all 13 areas, with the best performance being a 42% reduction in Kraaifontein’s murder rate over the past year.
Another breakthrough made possible thanks to Covid-19 is a joint venture between the province and the minibus taxi industry. Born out of the Red Dot service of 100 dedicated taxis the province paid to ferry health workers during the pandemic, the new Blue Dot taxi programme subsidises taxis in exchange for better driver behaviour.
More than 800 Blue Dot taxis have been fitted with trackers that monitor their speed and are plastered with customer service hotline numbers so passengers can rate their service. If the taxi meets a set standard of behaviour the operator receives a monthly subsidy from the province. So far, Blue Dot taxis have cut their speeding incidents 50%.
In short, Winde is showing it’s possible — with better management, technology and data — not only to turn the tide against crime but even to get taxi drivers to behave, two areas where most people had long given up hoping things could ever improve.
South Africans appear to be voting with their feet. According to Stats SA the Western Cape attracted almost 470,000 people from other provinces between 2016 and 2021, of whom 21% were from Gauteng. Over the same period Gauteng, with more than double the population, attracted about 1.55-million people from other provinces, of which just 4% were from the Western Cape.
On a net basis Gauteng attracted about 200,000 migrants a year between 2016 and 2021 followed by the Western Cape with just under 60,000, while four provinces shed migrants: the Eastern Cape (-319,345), Limpopo (-187,356), KwaZulu-Natal (-83,083) and the Free State (-28,517).
People move to where the jobs are and the quality of life is perceived to be better. Judging from the Western Cape’s performance, Winde is winning. Now, if he could just get his fellow politicians to stop misbehaving, that would really be something.
Update: August 22 2022
This story has been updated with additional information.
• Bisseker is a Financial Mail assistant editor.
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