South Africa, like most African countries, has struggled with decades of challenging governance, leaving scars on its social fabric. One such indelible mark has been in the way housing and general planning of urban centres and villages in rural areas has been.

Depending on who you ask, shanty towns in urban areas are either a sign of people seeking out of poverty or just choosing where it pains less to live.

Yet every time extreme weather conditions come calling, authorities are faced with cries of help from both rural areas and cities.

Consider earlier in July for example when heavy rains and flooding in Western Cape regions wreaked havoc to shanty towns. The misery was overwhelming to dwellers of these places, which are often also crime hotspots where criminals as young as 12 do not live to see their 20th birthdays.

In South Africa, in general, the most heavily affected with shanties are the ‘mega-cities’ of Africa, notably Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, where ceaseless waves of people relocate from rural areas in an attempt to flee poverty but end up in squalor in cities.

After 30 years of post-apartheid rule by the once overwhelmingly popular African National Congress (ANC), some progress on dealing with these movements has been seen.

But sometimes it is difficult to completely tame the movement. As quickly as people are moved from dangerous places to more stable and permanent locations, new arrivals often populate the empty shacks or build new ones where the old ones once stood.

Carl Pophaim, the Mayoral Committee Member for Human Settlements in Cape Town, told the The EastAfrican, that the city “has various programmes aimed at progressive realisation of tenure.”

It does so with the upgrading of informal settlements, provision of services and formalisation of tenure rights.

This year, about $21.4 million was allocated to these processes, while in 2023 $48.3 million was spent.

“We also deliver new housing projects (with tile deeds), as part of the emphasis on progressive tenure, land reform and restitution,” said Pophaim.

Of major focus for authorities was delivery of services, plus support such as was provided during climate change driven-flooding which occurred in mid-July, with about 16,000 ‘flood kits’ issued to the affected, and “some” people relocated.

The inhabitants of those shanties tell a life of lack, from food to money for electricity, and limited essential services rendered by municipal authorities, or central government.

Nomwetu Vukube, 53, originally from Mthatha in the Eastern Cape Province, came to Cape Town in 2002 like so many before her in search of work.

Initially, Ms Vukube found a job, but has since lost it. It is a story repeated for many in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis in South Africa.

Her tiny ramshackle shack teeters on the edge of a densely reeded swamp on the Cape Flats, an area of some 200km2 of once sea-deposited sand dunes and marshes.

She lives in this 4m by 3m dwelling, barely surviving on a monthly government social grant of just $20.50, even though most of her belongings are currently soaked after a series of superstorms that displaced some 158,000 people and damaged or destroyed 14,000 similar dwellings.

One of Ms Vukube’s biggest worries is that she has no title deed to the land she lives on. The land belongs to the Passenger Rail Service or the City Council, depending on which part of Site B Khayelitsha, a Xhosa language word meaning ‘new home’, one may be talking about.

In either case, the government or the local metro could cede the land to the residents, clear the swamp, which routinely floods, and thereby vastly improve the lives and prospects of those living there.

Millions have already benefited from such steps, but in Site B, as in many other locations, the local council has not been the same party as that governing the country, and so there has been only political disputation and no resolution.

Next door lives Lydia, 38, who likewise comes from the Eastern Cape and was employed on a three-year government contract between 2019 and 2022, removing invasive alien vegetation.

Trained at the world-famous Kirstenbosch Gardens in the foothills of Table Mountain, she was replaced in this government work scheme for another person, similarly desperate for work, when her contract ran out.

“Living here is so hard,” says Lydia, asking that her family name not be used.

“Every day I wake up and wonder why I am struggling to live like this,” she adds.

Despite being a member of the local ANC street committee, she and her partner, now each receive only a government social welfare grant that allows them to eat about 10 days a month.

The rest of the month is spent scrounging the makings of bread, and getting some food from others slightly better off.

Joseph Ketsekile, 48, of the Mfengu ethnic group in the Eastern Cape, came to Cape Town in 2013 for work, which he found but lost due to Covid, and has not worked since.

Amid the recent inundations he fought off rising water in his two-room home by laying a cement floor in one room, that now drying, and plans to lay cement in the second room when he gets the chance and the money.

But he worries that the council will remove him and his neighbours, with good reason.

Pophaim admitted that the problems involved in resettling people were “complex”, and often require involving co-ordination with national government.

“A careful balance that is required, given the lack of resources and the realities on the ground,” he added.

“The unprecedented large-scale unlawful occupations during Covid-19 and the national lockdown (imposed in March 2020), created 186 new informal settlements,” said Pophaim.

Over 60 percent of new settlements were considered “high risk”, being situated under power lines, in wetlands, retention ponds, dams, low-lying land, and biodiversity areas.

Cape Town was studying various housing solutions, including using military, municipal and national land.

Eddie Nogwaxa, 50, is the local street committee chair representing RR Section of Site B.

He explains that the lack of land security is universal, and those relative few who get basic government-supplied housing are quickly replaced.

“We have been talking to the authorities for many years, since 2007. But there is no talking between the City of Cape Town and national government.

“They have told us that they will deal with the flooding – but we have had many promises, and we are still the same, with water everywhere and no security.”

South Africa’s statistics agency, Stats SA, says in its latest data that between four and five million people currently reside in informal settlements in the country, or about 12.2 percent of the country’s total population.

The numbers tell a bigger picture. The proportion of households residing in informal settlements has shown only minor fluctuations since 2002, dipping marginally from 13 percent in the last 22 years. Yet the majority – more than four-fifths (83.5 percent) – of those in such settlements now live in formal dwellings, marking an increase from 73.5 percent in 2002.

When looked at more broadly, there is less chance that those still in informal settlements can escape their misery soon. Some 2.2 million households – 14 percent of the national total – reside in what were once called ‘squatter camps’, more than three times the 630,000 households recorded in 1996, shortly after apartheid ended, according to government statistics.