It’s a cold winter evening in Cape Town. The news reporter on the T.V propped in the corner of this small concrete house is busy concluding her report with images of the first snow to fall on Table Mountain in many years. The TV is slightly fogged from the breath of the 15 or so individuals packed into the tiny living room of this NGO sponsored concrete build that recently replaced the Thetha family shack, their home since arriving in Masiphumelele Township in 1991.
We’re here to celebrate Sipho Thetha’s 30th birthday. It’s cramped but convivial with Sipho’s ageing mother wrapped warm in the corner whilst his young niece and nephew, now fostered by the Thetha family following the death of their parents, weave in and out of legs stealing crisps and giggling. We sit and stand as best we can and try to fit into the small space that is home to a family of 9, split between two bedrooms and a living room cum kitchen.
In the corner, beneath the TV now dripping with condensation, lies a rumpled blanket and pillow. They belong to Joseph, the soft-spoken eldest son of the Thetha family and paternal figure to a family that never knew their father. He’s been sleeping here since May when a large fire gutted over 1,000 shacks and 16 concrete builds in the northern part of the township, including his own.
Joseph sits quietly, chatting idly and waiting for the lounge to clear so he can roll out his mat and sleep before his early shift working security at the local mall. His is one of three monthly wages that service this family house. He earns 2,500 rand a month and works 6 days a week. I ask how things are going with the rebuild and it’s soon apparent that he’s heard nothing. He offers a smile and a resigned shrug as he begins to clear an area to sleep and we file out into the cold.
Driving out of Masi, passed the weather beaten shacks, red brick builds of old and more recent cement shells now going up, I wander how it can be that a man’s house can be destroyed by a well-publicised fire, one which drew significant media attention and international aid, and yet several months later still nothing is done. So I begin to read up and am met with a worrying and revealing insight into contemporary politics in South Africa.
To walk through Masi, this small Oceanside community of 40,000 or so inhabitants, is to take a stroll through South Africa’s recent past. First convened in 1992 as a bunch of shacks in the bush, this community was an initial beneficiary of Nelson Mandela’s RDP plan – a revolutionary programme designed to give South Africa a modern day welfare state and drag it out from the legacy of Apartheid rule. Concrete houses, ‘RDP houses’, went up, dirt paths were tarred and became roads, a primary school was built and a clinic installed for the then 8,000 settlers.
RDP is still a common term in South Africa today and is often used by the residents of Masi when referring to the new builds still going up around their community today, replacing the shacks that continue to sprawl around the township’s fringes as more and more people sweep in from the countryside seeking education for their children and jobs: unemployment in many Eastern Cape towns is now touching 90%. Indeed, Joseph called his own home ‘RDP’ and, like many in this Xhosa community, he sees it as a gift from the ruling ANC and part of the emancipation of a people disenfranchised by Apartheid. Like the majority of his community, he voted ANC in the recent elections. And yet his house still sits in ruins and he doesn’t know why.
Joseph’s house is actually the product of a housing initiative lead by an international NGO, one of several that has been working in the Western Cape to meet the significant shortfall on public housing in the face of reduced government spending: money coming from overseas donors and converted into liveable homes for South Africa’s poorest. The red tape surrounding Joseph’s ruins lies here, as the NGO doesn’t have the budget to rebuild and no South African insurance broker will accept the cost. This seems a reality more consistent with contemporary economic policy in South Africa, where any semblance of a welfare state has been sold out in favour of something far more destructive.
The fact is there’s been no RDP housing in Masi for a long time. Take a walk down the main street and you’ll soon see that most of the brick builds carry names like ‘Habitat for Humanity’ or ‘Mellon Foundation’: NGO’s filling the void. RDP and any semblance of the welfare state it once promised went out of the window in 1996 when Thabo Mbeki, a self proclaimed Thatcherite, took over the presidency and bought with him the new GEAR policy, an open embrace to the free market, the WTO, the IMF and which effectively turned South Africa into the continent’s first Neoliberal experiment. Cue an end to pubic spending, the dismantling of worker’s rights, open trade borders and a stock market now open to foreign investors. Globalistion arrived in South Africa and it became clear that where the National Party had once drawn its lines across racial borders, so the ANC was now prepared to wage a new war based on profit margins and windfalls against the very people who they claimed to represent.
And so markets opened up, foreign money flooded in, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The world’s press celebrated the true liberation of the rainbow nation and the creation of Africa’s first real economy, seemingly blind to the irony that it was still the former Nationalists that were profiting all along by selling the state’s assets, assets they still owned, to the highest foreign bidder rather than passing them onto the new ruling ANC.
So where do we find South Africa today and where does Joseph fit in? Where the ANC may once have justified their open embrace of the free market as a last gasp in the face of an overwhelming apartheid debt (passed on in 1994, not written off) that rendered the RDP impossible, it seems that the compulsive greed that comes with an unfettered capitalist economy has replaced any lingering revolutionary zeal and a duty of commitment to a loyal electorate.
South Africa now possesses the highest wealth divide and violent crime rate in the world. South Africa’s adult illiteracy rate is also one of the world’s highest, unemployment reaches 50%+ in many townships and HIV rates continue to touch the 30% mark amongst adults over 30. Understaffed hospitals and oversubscribed schools are the norm for those without the cash and private security, private health care and gated communities are the only alternative for those that can afford it.
Take another look at Masi, a community of 40,000, which benefits today from one high school, one primary school and one clinic. No police station, no fire station (all the more shocking given the recent fire). I recently waited six hours at the local public hospital with a young boy who had been run over. Arriving at the hospital he lay on a wooden bench in obvious pain with a large graze on his side and laboured breathing until the single doctor on call was able to see him and administer a pain killing injection and a course of paracetamol.
‘If the pain in your leg is still there in a week’ he said, ‘come back and we’ll give you an x-ray’.
A week later, driving through Masi, I was stopped by the father of the child. In his hand he held the bill from the public hospital. Which he couldn’t afford.
I think back to the Equal Education conference I attended at Oliver Tambo hall in Khayalitsha in June, where a 17-year old girl stood before a packed auditorium which included the minister for basic education and berated her about the condition of her school. A school which lacked not only text-books and white boards but windows and functioning toilets. And this was a city school, the state of the country’s rural schools, many without water or electricity let alone a functioning and equipped teaching staff, is one major contributing factor to the mass migration to the city. I think about the regular evictions from informal settlements for people falling behind on their electricity of rent payments as prices from Eskom, South Africa’s single electricity provider, continue to raise rates.
Then I think back to a World Cup that cost South Africa 400 billion rand of public money. A World Cup that, in reality, was convened to inspire investor confidence in South Africa, to boost the flow of foreign money into a market that wages open war on the poor by keeping public spending down and government intervention in the economy to a minimum. One also wanders of FIFA’s intentions as it looks to Brazil for 2014. No 2 on the World’s inequality list.
So what’s next? The ANC continues to march to victory in the polls despite the growing discontent of a people seemingly ignorant of the true cause of their pain. It is in this maelstrom that the outspoken and highly controversial figure of Julius Malema has been warmly embraced amongst the poorer communities as the rising star of South African politics, preaching his gospel of privatisation and land redistribution against a backdrop of corruption allegations. Whether he will succeed in rising to the top of South African politics is a matter of time and the ANC seems increasingly inclined to keep him at arms length. But history proves that it’s hard times that open the door to extreme politics. And for many in South Africa today, Joseph included, these are the hardest of times.
‘Ya, Malema can be good for us’, affirms Joseph as I turn to leave.
‘He speaks the truth and there are no lies with him’.
