This is a paid article which your subscription is allowing you to read.

A battle is under way for South Africa’s cities, particularly its eight metro authorities. Each of these metros commands a large budget – usually far larger than that of the provincial government under which it falls. And since South Africa is already two-thirds urbanised and most of its economic activity is centred in the cities, the question of which party controls the cities has major implications for the country’s centre of gravity.

At present only one metro (Cape Town) is controlled by the Democratic Alliance (DA). Nonetheless, there is considerable speculation that several more metros could slide into the DA camp after the November local government election – Johannesburg, Tshwane, Ekurhuleni and Nelson Mandela Bay, and even eThekwini are mentioned as DA targets. Should the DA win all or most of these contests, the African National Congress (ANC) would become a primarily rural party.

Only once before has South Africa been ruled by a mainly rural party – in the years immediately after 1948, when the National Party (NP) gained power nationally but was still mainly a party of the platteland, though in those days South Africa was less than 50% urbanised. (This situation was partially enabled by a constitutional bias that greatly exaggerated the political significance of rural areas by a form of legalised gerrymandering.) Gradually, however, the NP expanded from its rural and small-town base to win power in a number of major cities.

In 2026 the struggle for power is further dramatised by the fact that where the ANC has held power it has systematically run those cities into the ground. The results are dramatic – a major fall in property prices in ANC-held cities and the flight of population and enterprises towards better-governed areas. Indeed, the damage done by ANC misgovernance is so great as to actually threaten the future survival of some cities.

How should one think about this situation?

Predictable

It should be realised that the advent of “black majority rule” has had predictable effects on demographic patterns, visible elsewhere in white-ruled Africa well before 1994. Essentially, the advent of majority rule caused the white population to concentrate more in major urban areas.

In some cases, this may have been due to concerns about security but usually education was a more important factor. With schools now fully integrated, white parents moved to areas where there was still a sufficient concentration of white and Asian families to guarantee the existence of schooling to a reasonable standard. More generally, such families also wanted to be in areas where there was a sufficient concentration of similar families to guarantee a more general cultural continuity.

And, of course, once such movements got under way the hollowing-out of white communities provided incentives for those who remained behind to move as well.

This process was visible in Zimbabwe soon after 1980, as local whites deserted small-town/rural areas for Harare and Bulawayo. Quite soon, the small towns became virtually all black and they also lost much of their economic activity as white professionals and small-enterprise owners migrated away. The same process was visible in much of small-town South Africa after 1994. As a town lost its doctor, lawyer, dentist, small builders, garage proprietors, and so on, it quickly lost its community life as churches, NGOs, and other organisations withered.

This process was particularly noticeable where white settlement was already sparse. In South Africa, Limpopo province was a test case. After 1994, parents who wanted Afrikaans-language tuition for their children hastily relocated to Pietersburg (renamed Polokwane) or even to Pretoria, and fewer and fewer white residents lived north of Polokwane. But the same trend was seen in other areas of sparse white settlement.

Only occasionally did small towns buck the trend – usually where they were particularly attractive or historic or tourist draw-cards (e.g., Prince Albert) or had a strong economic base (e.g., Empangeni-Richards Bay). In general, this movement of whites and Asians saw economic activity further concentrated in larger urban centres. The small towns left behind by this process became virtually all black and simultaneously lost much of their economic activity, so the burgeoning black population had to live on welfare or from informal trading.

Simultaneously these towns would start falling to pieces through lack of maintenance. Many of the smaller towns in the Transkei exemplify this trend.

Nuclear Option

In the 1950s the possession by the two superpowers of nuclear – and then thermo-nuclear – weapons led to the rise of a school of nuclear strategising in which analysts such as Herman Kahn tried to work out how this new situation of nuclear threat and deterrence could be understood and controlled. Kahn, in particular, worked out multiple stages of escalation towards an all-out nuclear exchange (which Kahn called a “wargasm”).

The examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed how whole small cities might be wiped out and the advent of the hydrogen bomb meant that this threat now extended even to large cities. Kahn talked of how each side might “take out” major cities on the other side, suffering similar losses of major cities of its own, but at various points the slaughter might be stopped and de-escalation achieved, though only after millions of deaths.

Thomas Schelling was by far the most sophisticated strategist to emerge from this debate. Indeed, most of the concepts still used to describe the nuclear balance – massive retaliation, mutual deterrence, first and second-strike capability, counterforce, and so on – originated with Schelling. Schelling was particularly concerned with the fate of cities.

He believed that while escalation in a crisis might go through many phases, the crux came with attacks on cities. “Once cities are destroyed, there is nothing else to lose,” he wrote. Nuclear attacks on cities (or threats thereof) were “a massive and modern version of an ancient institution: the exchange of hostages”. Once an enemy killed the hostages in his keeping, there was no going back and a war of extermination would follow. And what the keeping of hostages showed was that keeping something of value vulnerable was a way of enforcing good behaviour or at least preventing a descent into barbarism. So, while an enemy might menace Chicago or Los Angeles, he would stay his hand, knowing that if he didn’t, St Petersburg and Moscow would pay the price.

Interestingly, McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser under both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, was rather contemptuous of the way these theorists of nuclear war talked of losing this or that city in an escalatory process. In practice, he said, neither American nor Soviet leaders would ever want to start a nuclear exchange. In think tanks strategists theorised about “levels of acceptable damage”, sometimes assuming the deaths of millions and the loss of multiple great cities. But anyone who knew the political leadership on either side knew this was nonsense.

“A decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one’s own country would be recognised in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history.” In other words, cities were even more important than realised. They were part of the definition of a country. One could not even imagine America without New York, Britain without London, or France without Paris. Even the notion of nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran or North Korea has not blunted that insight.

As Deadly As a Nuke

Hence the drama of the present situation, because ANC rule has been almost as deadly to South Africa’s cities as nuclear weapons. To read Helen Zille’s summary of Jo’burg’s financial situation makes one truly wonder whether that city can be saved.

It’s going bust and has already defaulted on something as crucial as its payment for electricity. Money is being wasted on non-essentials while essential capital spending is neglected. Corruption is omnipresent. Citizens may pay their electricity bills, but municipal politicians steal that money rather than paying Eskom. The city can no longer borrow and will be forced to pay higher and higher interest rates. The city’s accounts for the last year haven’t even been published, and no one knows why. The city now makes those who supply it wait up to five months to get paid so no one wants to do business with it. The city is failing even to collect the money it is owed. It is a catalogue of disaster, and all the ANC can say in return is that the DA in Cape Town favoured the wealthier suburbs and neglected the poor ones.

Apart from the fact that it’s many years since Zille was mayor of Cape Town, this well-worn ANC myth is the opposite of the truth: three-quarters of Cape Town’s infrastructure spending is in poorer areas. ANC politicians keep repeating this yarn because it gives them comfort and because they are simply too ignorant to know the truth.

Or take eThekwini. When it was handed over to the ANC’s care it had zero debt, despite having just built and paid for the International Convention Centre. Today it too is virtually bankrupt – and yet where did the money go? There is almost nothing to show for it.

The city has two principal sources of economic activity: the port of Durban and the tourist industry. The ANC is killing them both. Under the control of Transnet, Durban, once Africa’s biggest port, is now ranked almost plumb last in the world, so passing ships try to avoid it. Meanwhile it has been overtaken as Africa’s biggest port by Tanger Med (Morocco), and many other ports are taking slices of Durban’s business. Meanwhile, the ANC-controlled council failed to maintain the storm drains so when heavy rains came there were floods and the whole water and sewage system broke down. Years later, it has still not been properly restored, and the result is still flooding in parts of the city and the contamination of the beaches, driving tourists away. The whole centre city has decayed.

Thabo Mbeki was always haunted by the refrain that “Africans can’t govern” but as one looks at the ruination of Jo’burg and Durban it is impossible not to hear the echoes of that refrain.

Politicians such as Zille will insist that the battle is not yet fully lost and there is a kernel of truth in that. But people don’t wait to hear the final whistle or the funeral dirge. It is profoundly distressing to live and work in a city that is dying and thus many people bail out long before the end, moving away and taking their businesses with them. This weakens the city they leave, further increasing its problems.

And what one says of Jo’burg and Durban can be repeated in varying measure about almost all towns and cities outside the Western Cape. This is puzzling in that African nationalism has swept through the entire continent but nowhere else has it been quite so destructive of urban life as in South Africa. True, the ANC is ideologically more extreme than almost any other form of African nationalism but there is nothing specifically anti-urban about its ideology.

The answer would seem to lie in the common African misapprehension that “South Africa is a rich country”. In fact, South Africa is sliding backwards towards being a lower-middle-income country: really rich countries have GDPs per capita ten or more times higher than South Africa. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), South Africa in 2026 has a GDP per capita of $7 503, Switzerland $126 177, US $94 430, Australia $75 648, and Israel $69,804. Indeed, on IMF figures South Africa sits at 104th place out of 194 countries.

Yet the potent fact under apartheid was not just that inequalities were very great but that there was a far larger white population than anywhere else in Africa. Accordingly, Africans in South Africa were deeply conscious of the extensive and wealthy white suburbs, replete with nice cars, swimming pools, and other accoutrements of the good life. Elsewhere in Africa there were only small pockets of such striking inequality.

Many Africans understood life under apartheid as an artificial way of denying them access to the good life that they could see in those “leafy suburbs”. Accordingly, their expectation was that the end of apartheid would not only bring political freedom but access to that good life as well: what the Economic Freedom Fighters calls “economic freedom”. This was, of course, a complete misunderstanding: what stands between Africans and that good life is not white resistance or the continuation of apartheid. It is their lack of a good education or professional qualifications together with a host of socially transmitted cultural disadvantages.

Feeding Frenzy

Nonetheless, the conviction that South Africa was a rich country and that Africans now had a much better chance of securing that “good life” was an immensely powerful motivation. Hence the key characteristic – and besetting sin – of African nationalism in South Africa: ever since 1994 we have been living with the consequence, a huge feeding frenzy.

This is, of course, visible in the behaviour of the ANC’s national and provincial elites, but it is true, too, of the ANC grassroots, the urban activists who have ransacked the country’s towns and cities. It is only now, when the results of their behaviour have been to immiserate the vast bulk of the ANC’s urban supporters – who in return are simply withdrawing from political activity or supporting other parties – that the ANC is starting to pay the price for this wild feeding frenzy.

Yet it is trapped by the contradiction: it doesn’t wish to disavow or punish its own activists – whose support it needs – yet unless they cease their municipal looting there is no hope for the ANC as an urban party. Thus far the ANC is simply trying to ignore the problem: it is too painful even to admit its true nature. But ignoring it will not make it go away.

Instead, what we have seen is the ANC’s national finance minister strongly reprimanding the ANC administration of Jo’burg for its irresponsible mismanagement of the country’s largest city. But of course, the ANC’s local politicians know perfectly well that much looting has gone on at national level too, so they are not minded to accept such reprimands.

Now that Dada Morero, Jo’burg’s mayor, faces a huge unpaid debt to Eskom and the threat of the whole city having its power cut off, his response is to say that he will get together with the national minister for electricity and together they will solve this problem. This can only be achieved if the minister finds the money with which to pay Eskom or if he can prevail on Eskom not to cut off power. It’s a game of pass the parcel with no real happy ending in sight…