EDGAR PIETERSE: African countries seem consistently unprepared to manage rapid urbanisation, despite seeing millions of young people move to cities every year. Why do you think this is happening?
THEMBISILE SIMELANE: We need to look at our role in the AU-STC 8—the African Union’s Specialised Technical Committee on Urban Development and Human Settlements. Established in 2014, it’s supposed to be our consultative body for sustainable development across Africa. But it’s severely understaffed with no bold initiatives to properly resource it.
The focus remains mostly inward-looking on member states. We fail to exchange lessons because we’re not utilising the platform. We don’t leverage what it could offer us.
But the bigger problem is chronic underinvestment. Cities struggle to generate revenue—whether from the government, consumers, businesses, or households. With such limited revenue, they cannot plan effectively for current needs, let alone future growth.
Consider municipal priorities like poverty eradication and job creation. What economic activities do municipalities actually initiate to stimulate industries? I recently met with Ekurhuleni’s mayor and said: “You are an industrial city. You can’t simply complain about revenue collection. What are you doing to propel industries forward?” Cities could offer tax rebates, municipal incentives, timed benefits to attract investment. But they don’t.
EP: What are the deeper systemic challenges you’re seeing?
TS: There’s a fundamental lack of coordination. Our housing plans don’t align with Transport Ministry plans, yet we’re building houses while they build roads. The same people use both for business and residence. Without this connection, people spend excessively on transport because travel routes don’t align with where they live.
When President Thabo Mbeki initiated regional economic development, the concept was to master it domestically, then regionalise it. Asking: if you’re strong in mining, who’s using your coal? How do you maximise gold, diamonds, platinum, agricultural output?
This thinking informed how we structured metro districts, whose purpose was creating regional economies beyond municipal boundaries—but they’re not operational. District-level planning should integrate these areas, but it doesn’t happen. And without regional economic planning, we get endless duplication (technical colleges offering identical programmes, etc.).
Today, we have 44 essentially empty district shells with severely limited functions. Look at Gauteng’s Vaal
Triangle—you cannot plan as separate municipalities because it’s one integrated economic belt, but municipalities
don’t learn from each other, so they plan identically. Review our municipal development plans—they’re virtually interchangeable.
EP: What kind of skills and capacity building do you think is needed?
TS: We must intentionally participate in a skills revolution for urban planning. We need qualified people who understand
urban planning fundamentals and regional economic mobilisation. How do we engage NGOs, change-makers, academia, research institutions?
Planning cannot happen by accident—where people settle randomly and we reactively create human settlements. It requires deliberate design.
But we have a fundamental weakness in implementation. We excel at initiating discussions, signing agreements. We take trips to China or elsewhere, but two years later, we’re doing exactly the same things. We’re found wanting when it comes to actually opening up and letting others influence our policies.
The training of planners is particularly problematic—they don’t engage with economic fundamentals. The plans they produce aren’t sufficiently focused on job creation as the foundation for integrated human settlement planning.
EP: How do you see disaster risk and climate change fitting into the G20 agenda this year?
TS: While we’re not a priority sector in G20, I see enormous potential through the Disaster Risk and Mitigation Working
Group. Recent experience in Mthatha demonstrates how disasters reverse progress in addressing inequalities.
We still have people in temporary shelters—women with children, some nursing babies, whose homes were destroyed. The state cannot respond promptly due to poor planning. We lack municipal plans for formalised settlements across all areas.
We shouldn’t have lost 10 children who drowned when their transport was swept away after heavy rains. Those roads should have been closed. Municipalities know their vulnerable areas. When warnings are issued, they must monitor overnight.
We haven’t achieved resilient infrastructure standards. Our disaster financing focuses on recovery rather than mitigation. People still live inappropriately close to Mthatha Dam. We should relocate them during calm periods, but we don’t have the foresight.
Disasters cross boundaries. El Niño effects in Mozambique impact us; likewise with Lesotho. We need enhanced global cooperation, technology sharing, and capacity building from developed countries. This could be our entry point into the G20 discussions, even if we’re not directly prioritised.
EP: What gives you hope that this can change?
TS: We need to be intentional about systems thinking and long-term planning. Look at cities like Dubai—they’re planning decades ahead. New York’s basic infrastructure from the 1800s still serves the city because those planners had 100 to 200-year forecasts.
But fundamentally, we need a strong core ideology focused on building dignity for people. That’s a human rights conversation. Until we centre human dignity in our planning, we’ll keep building these empty shells instead of functional, thriving cities that serve their people.
The potential is there. We just need the political will to make it happen.
