17 June 2008
editorial
Johannesburg — LAST week's flurry of unnecessary legal action in the Cape Town High Court produced the type of compromise a primary school child might have come up with -- the Cape Town city council and Western Cape provincial government have formed a joint task team to draft a single plan to deal with refugees displaced by xenophobic violence.
Cape Town is SA's only major metropolitan area not controlled by the African National Congress (ANC), although the party does hold sway at provincial level. This division of political power, which arose when a coalition of parties led by the Democratic Alliance (DA) ousted the ANC in the 2006 municipal election, has proved lethal to co-operative governance.
DA leader Helen Zille, who is also Cape Town mayor, is set on using her track record governing the city as a platform from which to grow the party, starting by securing control of the province from a divided ANC. With provincial elections less than a year away, Western Cape premier Ebrahim Rasool appears just as determined to stymie the DA's plan -- and secure his own political legacy in the likely event that he is purged along with President Thabo Mbeki.
Relations between Zille and Rasool have deteriorated steadily in the past two years, worsened by the provincial government's regular attempts to undermine the city, through fair means and foul. Last week's legal action, in which the province tried to force the city to open community halls the DA insisted were already sheltering refugees, was a new low.
The source of the political conflict is ostensibly a difference in approach between the city and province, with the former having opted to accommodate the refugees in a few large and relatively remote tented camps similar to those in Gauteng, and the latter favouring rapid reintegration of the displaced people back into communities.
In fact, there is no need for conflict at all -- the tented camps were a necessary emergency response and were never intended as a long-term solution. The ANC has tacitly acknowledged this through its decision to move victims of xenophobic violence who were initially provided shelter at police stations and in community halls in Gauteng to similar tented camps well removed from the informal settlements where the trouble occurred.
Tents are not ideally suited to the wet and windy Cape winter, but the community halls that are under the city's control are not the solution either -- depriving locals of their use for an extended period risks inflaming tensions , and they are in any event a key component of the city's disaster management plan designed to cope with the flooding that invariably affects informal settlements in winter.
At the same time, there is no disputing that reintegrating those foreign nationals who are willing to return to the homes and communities they fled is first prize.
The only viable alternative is repatriation -- and given that most of the victims came to SA because life in their own countries had become unbearable for a variety of reasons, this is not a universal solution.
Forming new settlements for those refugees who are too scared to return to their homes, as some have requested, runs the risk of creating ghettos and setting the stage for new xenophobic conflict in future.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
