Model city to murder city: public housing, progressive policymakers and clientelistic city-hall politicians in post-apartheid Durban, South Africa

This paper analyses the unstable ‘political settlement’ that underpinned the remarkable rise and fall of a clientelistic city-hall machine in post-apartheid Durban, a city of 3 million on the east coast of South Africa. Emerging from the rubble of apartheid and the destruction of a near civil war that came close to derailing South Africa’s democratic transition, the incoming African National Congress (ANC) government attempted to embed its authority in the poor, unequal, politically volatile cities of South Africa by developing one of the largest public housing programmes in the world. With significant powers devolved to municipalities, city-halls were crucial. Durban features as a case study because in the 1990s and 2000s it was considered a ‘star performer’: in the wake of a brutal civil war, capable city-hall officials developing award winning public housing polices that delivered 150,000 homes in fifteen years, which in turn were distributed to a loyal voting public by a well-organised patronage machine run by ANC urban powerbrokers. Yet in this article too, we will note the factors of persistent inequality and economic exclusion that unravelled this city-hall political machine, such that by the late 2010s Durban was renowned for a centrifugal form of competitive clientelism, synonymous with murderous squabbles over construction contracts and the killing of housing activists. In consequence – unlike many classic case studies of urban clientelism that profile stable systems of political patronage – Durban is renowned in South Africa as a murderous mafia-city dominated by unstable, localised syndicates.