Today The Common Sense carries two reports about cities. South Africa’s three biggest cities account for more murders annually than the entirety of the European Union (EU), and people within those cities are murdered at a rate 60 times higher than the average for the EU! The second story covers a report from veteran analyst Ann Bernstein on the dire financial management of Johannesburg, where infrastructure investment per resident is down 70% since 2014-15.

But inside the best-organised private enclaves, a very different reality plays out. There is no single coherent data set, but from talking to people who run these private residential and office estates, it emerges that their murder rates are basically on a par with that of the EU. And in terms of infrastructure, private water and electricity provision is of an excellent standard. Of course, those enclave residents must still run the gauntlet whenever they pass through the gates of their secure estates, but at home they enjoy a relatively civilised standard of living. And many of these estates are evolving to contain residential, leisure, education, healthcare, and office facilities all within the walls.

Earlier this week, this newspaper ran interesting data on the sentiment that sits behind such private provision, finding that it extends well beyond the wealthy middle-class elite.

The data found that 80% of South Africans believed that, where they lived, communities were beginning to take over the responsibilities of the government. Only 19% disagreed with that. The racial split was that 90% of white people agreed, as did 78% of black people. In terms of politics, 85% of Democratic Alliance voters agreed, as did 71% of African National Congress (ANC) voters.

There is something important in those data. In the 1970s and the 1980s, South Africa was not liberated by the ANC or by any other movement as much as it was by ordinary people standing up against the state. A proper understanding of that history is that the ANC got a fright after 1976 that the country was liberating itself, and that the party had to hurry up to catch up to that and then take control of the process. In those decades, the context was different, of course, and community activism had to be applied to the primary objective of political liberation. Now many of the primary issues are much more domestic in nature: security, water, and living standards more broadly.

The wealthier end of the middle classes may have led the way towards enclave formation in South Africa, but the sentiment and potential for poorer communities to follow suit and replicate some of those successes is considerable, must be encouraged, and will go some way to practically improving the standards of living of millions of people.