This is my fourth column addressing the City’s recently released draft strategy for reducing rough sleeping in the City of Cape Town.
The City lists what they refer to as the challenges of, and challenges associated with rough sleeping, but in effect this is where they now blame everything on the national government.
They mention that the lack of an overarching national framework constitutes a large policy deficit, which has led to an incoherent homelessness policy and strategy at all government levels.
The City makes another mistake in blaming the national government for being bureaucratically constrained, and lacking in innovative and proactive measures as well as funding to address the issue. It is within this context that the City has spent significant effort, as well as funding, to address rough sleeping.
This is false. The national government has failed in not having produced its own guiding policy and the funding for social interventions is as a rule, never enough.
If we have to name a culprit in this instance, it is the provincial department that is failing in providing its mandate.
After all, it is their mandate to initiate programmes, distribute funds and monitor and evaluate those services that they are meant to be providing on behalf of the department.
It is through the provincial department’s reporting that funding is adjusted annually by the national department.
Only a year ago, in the National Assembly, and in response to a DA member, the National Minister of Social Development read out the figures provided by the Western Cape Provincial Government to her department.
The Western Cape Provincial Department had reported that we have 41 street children in the Western Cape and all are accommodated in shelters. They also reported that we have 748 unaccommodated adults living on the streets of the entire Western Cape. This depicts serious cluelessness.
The Western Cape Department of Social Department and the Western Cape Provincial Government’s lack of interest and involvement in addressing the issue of homelessness is exemplified by the fact that during his entire 5-year term as Premier, Alan Winde has in all his budget speeches combined featured the words “homeless”and “homelessness” only twice.
And then, unexpectedly, I finally see a possible reason for the City’s sudden decision to produce this draft strategy.
The development of a strategy to reduce rough sleeping aligns with a number of strategic objectives and imperatives of the City.
Aspects of rough sleeping fall within certain City mandates (something they have always denied) and the move towards reframing the approach to rough sleeping from a public health and well-being perspective requires strategic guidance.
Unlike other City strategies, these interventions are targeted at an individual or family level. But why make this distinction?
The focus of this document should not be confused with operational actions that are undertaken such as to prevent unlawful occupation of public spaces, the resolution of problem buildings or the provision of state-subsidised housing. This is a seemingly strange but not so strange a distinction to make.
This will allow the City to continue evicting people, who will land up on the streets yet in the same breath, they are saying these individuals will not be provided for with services being reserved for those within the City’s definition of being rough sleepers.
This allows the City to continue using the narrative that it has the right to evict those who according to its by laws are preventing others from accessing and using public spaces
This approach recognises that rough sleeping in Cape Town is not just about insufficient housing, but rather a complex set of social factors influenced by poverty, mental health, substance abuse, and family violence. The City is still in denial of the structural causes of homelessness.
And it allows them to offer the other housing alternatives that we have been calling for like private and long-term housing alternatives, but they are clearly saying these will again only be provided in informal settlements on the outskirts of Cape Town.
As they put it in their strategy: development of township areas with access to basic services and top-structure provision.
The City’s admissions in its aptly timed release of this so-called strategy, is indeed a strategy. A strategy that is currently focussing on ensuring that the City continues to play the part and seen by the general public as the party willing to admit fault and compromise, when they will effectively have compromised nothing whatsoever and merely created the illusion of listening and caring enough to be doing their best. And will no doubt again label those refusing these offers as ungrateful.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I was almost fooled.
* Carlos Mesquita is an activist for the homeless and a researcher working in the Western Cape Legislature for the GOOD Party.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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