You Are Being Bamboozled
Thoughts on The CCID’s Not My Forever Campaign
by Roger Young
Disclaimer: This shit makes me very angry.
“A partnership with the CCID is more than a donation. It’s an investment in a safer, more dignified city centre for your staff, customers and clients. Your support directly funds the outreach and reintegration programmes that turn small first steps into lasting change. It provides your brand with a visible, meaningful commitment.” — Cape Town Central City Improvement District, Not My Forever campaign page
In September the CCID launched Not My Forever, a digital storytelling campaign built around people who have lived on the streets of Cape Town’s CBD. Four of them speak to camera about family deaths, abuse, addiction and losing their children. Their trauma is shot beautifully in black and white. Let us be clear here: they are just doing what it takes to survive. They have been asked to tell their stories, and their stories are true and heartbreaking. A fifth person, who now works for the CCID, is presented as what they could become.
The stories run as video on the campaign website and on digital LED billboards around the city, between the ads for everything else. “Behind every person experiencing homelessness in Cape Town is a name, a history, and a future still being written,” and the invitation is to see the person, not the stereotype. I can just imagine the person sleeping in a doorway somewhere off Loop Street, their sleep interrupted by the flashing face of a success story, taunting them for their lack of initiative.
The CCID is a non-profit funded by the CBD’s property owners, set up in 2000 to lift the city centre out of what it calls “crime and grime.” Its own pitch is a world-class place to live, work, play and stay. Social development is one department among those. At the City’s last count, in 2018/19, 6,175 people were living on Cape Town’s streets or in its shelters; researchers say about 14,000. There aren’t enough billboards in Cape Town for every person experiencing homelessness.
So while this campaign might be materially and socially helping a fraction of those on the streets, and those on the billboards, the CCID is not mandated to solve homelessness as a wider social issue. Forgive me for being cynical here, but as a former homeless person in the city of Cape Town, I wonder if we, the unhoused, are so used to getting beaten down by the CCID that we are willing to treat whatever scraps they give us as a blessing, a break from the demeaning bullshit we have been subjected to.
Through Straatwerk – partially funded by the CCID – redemption is conditional on labour: sweeping the city clean and safe for business. When I was there in the 2010s, if you didn’t sweep you didn’t get a bed. You swept, you got a meal and a bed. I cannot remember if we were paid in cash and it was deducted; I remember that we got no cash.
In 2018, GroundUp reported that Straatwerk’s Jesus Saves programme in Sea Point paid R50 for a four-hour shift, less a 20% administration fee. That works out to R12.50 an hour before the deduction, or R10 an hour after it. The national minimum wage of R20 an hour came into effect nine months later, on 1 January 2019. Straatwerk’s manager told the paper that the people on those shifts weren’t workers but members of a “school of life.” That seems like a neat trick for avoiding paying the homeless minimum wage to do a job that the City of Cape Town should be responsible for.
Also, “Jesus Saves”.
In Johannesburg, OUTsurance and Easybet put their names on the pointsmen directing traffic, and the logos are on the vests. Everyone can see who is paying for what. Johannesburg is a city whose municipal management problems are widely acknowledged, and I’m not offering this as a model. But Cape Town claims to be a functioning municipality, and here the same arrangement — business paying for work normally associated with the state — gets presented as welfare.
When I lost my apartment in 2018 after a sudden rent increase of 20% coincided with a relapse, I ended up living from couch to park bench. One afternoon I was sitting in the park across from my old apartment building, in the place where I used to have lunch every day, as I had nowhere else to go, and I was told to move on by the CCID because I was making the tourists uncomfortable. Because there were tourists watching, the CCID were extremely nice to me. They drove me out to Blikkiesdorp, thirty kilometres outside of the city.
During COVID the homeless were removed from their sparse populations on the mountain above Vredehoek and moved into the densely populated, unsanitary conditions of Strandfontein, where the food was thin and information was non-existent. The reason given for the move was that the unhoused might infect the residents. We were not seen as residents.
So when I see the billboards of Not My Forever, I have to wonder if this is not just virtue signalling by the CCID to make the tourists feel comfortable while they remove the homeless elsewhere.
Of course, social change is not the ambit of the CCID; they are here to make the city safe and clean for business and high-value renters. It is the CoCT’s failure to build low-cost housing, suitable harm-reduction interventions, and unconditional access to shelters, skills development and rehabs that has left the CCID doing social-development work in the first place.
The Constitutional Court has now found the City’s housing programme unconstitutional in part because it failed to provide temporary emergency accommodation in the inner city and compounded the legacy of spatial apartheid. The DA-led CoCT has, over the course of its tenure, failed to adequately respond to the problems of homelessness, spatial inequality, and the lack of access to work opportunities that, combined, lead to high instances of substance dependence.
There should be no private-public partnership managing the unhoused of Cape Town. They are people, not things to be managed. And while at face value the CCID department of Social Development may seem to be leading well-intentioned interventions, their corporate mandate is at odds with their brand messaging.
There are signs in the CBD of Cape Town that state NO BEGGING in pictorial form. Can I tell you what it’s like to be hungry on the streets, and someone walks past you with a fucking artisan boerewors roll, and when you ask them for help they grunt and point to a no begging sign? Your hunger is not allowed. Here’s a suggestion: don’t make begging illegal, make it unnecessary.
After the institution of the CCID, homeless spikes, hostile benches and no-begging signs became conventional features of the CBD. Now that same CCID has a department of Social Development. I remain skeptical.
One of them says he’s working on himself, preparing for a different future. His redemption becomes evidence of the CCID’s success. In this format relapse wouldn't be a part of recovery, it would land as a breach of the brand. Everyone who has seen his face in the CBD has been told how his story ends, and if it doesn’t end that way, the failure will be his alone. His redemption story is his permanent Not Forever to be measured against.
Researchers who study recovery stories in mental health services have a name for this. Angela Woods, Akiko Hart and Helen Spandler describe the Recovery Narrative as a genre: a highly circumscribed kind of storytelling, shaped by a “positivity imperative” that lets some stories through and silences the rest. Another review, “Eliciting Recovery Narratives in Global Mental Health: Benefits and Potential Harms,” finds that the institutions collecting these stories shape who gets chosen and how they’re coached for their audience.
In the video for the Not My Forever campaign, one of the people who was formerly homeless and now works for the CCID says the phrase “Not My Forever” in a way that, to my ear, sits uncomfortably in her mouth. You can imagine the tone deaf brand bro saying, “PERFECT,” between sips of his R90 flat white.
There is another beautiful shot of a homeless camp under a bridge, the golden evening light filtering between the two aerial freeways onto the tents. A voice-over explains that there is nowhere to sleep in the city, and that they sleep under the bridges to stay dry. It almost looks idyllic. But the message being reinforced is brutally simple: there is nowhere to sleep in the city. Do not even try.
However, there are plenty of places for people to sleep within the city, but that space is available only to a certain class of people — property owners, highly paid professionals, and tourists. Everyone else must catch a bus to work, and the MyCiTi prices keep on rising.
One of the people featured in the campaign talks about his time as a 28. We cut to aerial shots of the Cape Flats, then to a man standing with his back to camera outside a housing project as a police van passes. Again, the implied framing is clear: the places where “the Coloureds” live are associated with crime and the destruction of lives. But there is no context for why these areas are like this, or any clear accountability for the conditions that produced them. The failure is individualised and racialised across class lines. There is no context for the systems in which those failures happen.
Side Note: CoCT has launched its programme for aerial surveillance and SWAT units to support the gang units in the Cape Flats. That’s on brand.
Another person in the campaign hopes to help other addicts and street people find their way to better lives. According to Not My Forever, the way to a brighter future is to help other people out of homelessness. The video’s final payoff is… maybe you can get a job with the CCID helping get other people off the streets, or maybe you can use your experience to help other people get free of addiction.
While these might be noble ideas, they are being employed to legitimise a private-public partnership whose core function is to make the city safe for business, not people. Besides, are there even enough jobs for every homeless person to aspire to work for the CCID?
According to the CCID’s own news page, field worker Mark Williams “anticipates that as many as 30 of his clients may not survive” each winter. If we had unconditional access to shelters, even if just in winter, this might indicate that the CCID actually cares about the homeless.
The CoCT and the DA keep creating conditions that churn out a new supply of homeless people pretty much constantly. If they don’t die in winter, there are streets for them to sweep, at below minimum wage.
In the framing of the Not My Forever campaign, the message seems to be: to get out of the conditions of homelessness (that the CoCT has helped create) you must work for business doing the job of government, for the sake of building brands, and perform redemption forever.