Last time in this column, I argued that the exclusion built into township and mining-town economies is not a market failing to self-correct. It is architecture — designed, deliberate, and running on autopilot decades after the people who built it moved on.
The obvious response is to ask what a counter-architecture looks like. I am not going to answer that in theory.
I have spent the better part of two decades building pieces of it, and the pattern is consistent: title, credit, and a seat at the table before the decision is made, not after.
Start with title
In Langa, Gugulethu and Nyanga, I spent 10 years securing title deeds for 150 commercially zoned properties that tenants — my own parents among them — had occupied for 30 years without ever owning.
Getting there took a High Court order capping the sale price at R20 per square metre, a task team, a dispute resolution process the City itself had to build from nothing because no precedent existed for apartheid-era record-keeping colliding with present-day law, and — critically — a peer vetting system I devised myself, because the Department of Home Affairs could not produce the birth and marriage certificates required, for the simple reason that the apartheid state never kept them.
None of that was inevitable. It required someone inside the community to know municipal by-laws, conveyancing law, and the Deeds Office well enough to stop at least one ineligible “friend of the city” claim before it registered.
Title is not a form you fill in. It is a fight you have to be equipped to win, and most people in these towns are never given the tools to fight it.
That is the first lesson for mining towns facing the same blank space where land rights should be: untitled land is not neutral. It is a design choice that keeps a community unable to leverage, mortgage, or borrow against the one asset it actually has.
Dismantling the architecture starts with treating title as infrastructure, not paperwork — and building the institutional muscle, before the crisis, to fight for it the way I had to fight for the Ikapa Shops.
Second: credit
For years, township financial life has run on stokvels, burial societies, and spaza trade credit — real, disciplined, high-performing financial behaviour that the formal system refuses to recognise as data.
Through the Iimali Zethu network, I have been pushing a submission to National Treasury to have that informal financial history recognised under the Financial Sector Code's Empowerment Financing provisions — not as charity, but as what it is: bankable data that the system has simply chosen not to see.
The same logic extends to the mashonisa. An unregulated lender exists because no formal alternative was ever made available at the scale or speed the community needed.
Capitalising that function properly, inside a regulated structure, does not eliminate the need it serves — it takes the extraction out of it.
This is the second lesson: credit exclusion is not a data problem, it is a recognition problem.
The data already exists, in stokvel ledgers and burial society books and taxi association records.
What is missing is the willingness of the formal system to treat township financial behaviour as creditworthy behaviour, because for a hundred years it has been more profitable to treat it as invisible.
Third: the table
And this is the one mining communities cannot afford to get wrong: the table.
Right now I am running public participation sessions on the Mineral Resources Development Amendment Bill in Carletonville and Merafong, with more planned for Rustenburg, Klerksdorp and Welkom — not to comment on a bill that has already been drafted, but to get mining communities into the room while it is still being shaped.
That distinction is the entire argument. Consultation after the fact is theatre. It produces a comment period, a transcript, and a bill that changes nothing, because the architecture was already finished before anyone from the community walked in.
A seat at the table before the draft exists is the only version of consultation that actually redistributes power, because it is the only version where the community's input can still change the outcome rather than just be recorded alongside it.
From individual fights to repeatable ones
None of these three — title, credit, table — is a policy paper.
They are fights, sustained over years, that required someone from inside the community to hold the technical knowledge, the institutional relationships, and the patience that the system counts on communities not having.
That is the real design flaw in the architecture I described last week: it assumes the people it excludes will not develop the capacity to contest it.
Every one of these interventions exists because that assumption was wrong.
The Township Economy Think Tank exists to turn these from individual fights into repeatable ones — so the next community does not need its own decade-long court battle to get title, its own multi-year submission to get credit recognised, or its own scramble to get into the room before a decision is final.
Dismantling an architecture built over a century will not happen in one policy win.
But it starts exactly where this one did: refusing to wait for an invitation to the table, and building the case for why you belong there before anyone thinks to ask.
* Vusi Vokwana is the Founding Director of Kasi Catalyst and Secretary General of NAFCOC (2008). She writes a weekly Friday column for The National entitled Kasi Brief.
**The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Media Group.