Millions of people camped in informal settlements are transforming the country’s industrial heartland. Mungo Soggot and Tangeni Amupadhi report on the urban time bomb
THEY often strike in the early hours of a cold winter’s morning. Groups of men armed with bags of chalk and a flag assemble on empty land. They mark out plots with the chalk, sometimes leaving space for a soccer field.
In a matter of hours they will have mapped out their new home. They then erect the flag – often the national colours – name the camp after a prominent political leader and quickly bring in as many women and children as possible.
These are the shock troops of a movement that is fundamentally transforming South Africa’s industrial heartland. Thousands of people are pouring into Gauteng every month – most estimates put it as high as 20 000 – creating new settlements, swallowing up empty tracts of land and placing an unbearable strain on public resources.
Conservative estimates put the population of the Gauteng urban conurbation – both Greater Johannesburg and Pretoria – at more than eight million, but the provincial government says there are 11-million.
It is now the second-largest metropolitan spread in Africa after Cairo, and possibly the fastest-growing emerging city in the world.
“If you sit down and think soberly about the problem, you won’t even start to tackle it,” concedes Dan Mofokeng, the Gauteng MEC for Housing and Land Affairs on whose desk this monumental problem falls.
“The other day I was visiting a friend in Benoni,” adds Mofokeng, sketching the rapidity of the process with his hands. “The next day when I came back there were so many shacks on both sides of the road, almost overnight.”
These new city dwellers are flocking in from KwaZulu-Natal, North-West, the Free State and the Eastern Cape, but there are also many thousands from beyond South Africa’s borders attracted to the industrial magnet of Gauteng.
The mushrooming informal settlements, which provincial government officials estimate house three million, are populated not only by those fleeing rural poverty but also by residents of “backyard shacks” from existing townships – who are believed to mastermind the invasions.
The challenge that the new wave of urbanisation poses to the authorities is not simply one of resources but whether the state will be able to govern them – whether the new residents will become taxpaying citizens who benefit from schools, roads and clinics, or whether they will continue to live in a world apart.
The government is grappling to construct a coherent urbanisation strategy while faced with a dearth of reliable statistics describing the scale of the problem. Estimates of the population of Soweto alone range from one million to six million.
The current wave started after the 1994 democratic elections. “The people wanted a big city life,” explains Mofokeng. “In the first two years there was a huge crisis. It is only now that we are beginning to plan properly.”
Many of Gauteng’s new residents live in wretched conditions: they rarely have access to water, sewage facilities or rubbish removal. In Bekkersdal on the West Rand, about 80 000 residents of a camp are served by seven taps. It is one of several camps in the region perched on dolomitic ground, which can contain massive and dangerous sinkholes.
If not for the energetic taxi system, most settlements would remain cut off from the rest of the country. It took just two days for a taxi route to start serving the Johannesburg settlement of Diepsloot.
Most shacks are assembled from scrap metal and wood, but a few squatter camps provide prefabricated units which sell at R800 each.
The Nokhipa family, who live in a two- roomed shack in a Mamelodi settlement, use a paraffin stove for cooking and a candle for light. The children walk about 2km to school. Both parents are unemployed and survive from relatives’ hand-outs.
The children sleep on the kitchen-cum- living room’s cement floor (many squatters quickly stake their claim by throwing a cement floor on to the bare veld). In winter, two blankets shield them from the cold. The staple food is maize porridge and chicken giblets or sour milk. Bread is a luxury. And going to bed without a meal is common.
The land invasions highlight the failings of the national government’s ambitious mass housing strategy. They signal that the challenge of homelessness will not simply be met by building brick houses, but by concentrating on more land and services for South Africa’s most marginalised people – the new immigrants to the city and those spilling out of townships.
Apart from a scattering of nine pilot projects, the Gauteng government and local councils cannot provide most settlements with basic services – let alone schools and clinics. Most camp children do not receive any formal schooling.
Mofokeng says the education department only has enough money for the salaries of teachers in existing schools.
But the provincial government wants to provide even less support to these settlements. Mofokeng says he wants a larger slice of his budget to go to housing – as opposed to services for squatters – and that it is the duty of local authorities to cater for the settlements.
“Local authorities are folding their arms and waiting for provincial government to deal with the problem,” he says.
However, the executive director of the Centre for Development and Enterprise, Ann Bernstein, warns: “The only long-term mass housing solution for South Africa is the provision of subsidies for land and services.”
Gauteng provincial authorities are concentrating, through the Operation Mayibuye programme, on finding and upgrading suitable sites to resettle the squatters – but this is far too little to cater for the tens of thousands flocking in.
The provincial government also monitors the sprouting of new camps and the growth of existing ones. Seven employees patrol the entire greater Johannesburg area every day, while four do the same in Pretoria. Like a human radar screen, they tour camps, counting the number of shacks and multiplying them by 6,1 – what they believe to be the average shack household – to come up with a population estimate.
The government does not even know what land it owns. It is poring over the sketchy records bequeathed by its predecessors. Mofokeng wryly comments that one of the ways his department discovers what it owns is if the land is invaded: “They only go for government land.”
Mofokeng says the department is compiling a data base using information from its homeless waiting list, which at the last count stood at 350 000 families. The list is designed to discourage land invasions.
Although the illegally occupied land is usually state-owned, the authorities are reluctant to evict, particularly in winter. The land invaders are rarely sloppy trespassers; they are often highly astute planners who are aware of their rights and of the reluctance of government and local councils to fight them.
The inflow into the province coincided with a revamp of the old laws which allowed officials to erase new settlements with bulldozers. Now, a magistrate presides over an application for evictions and there is an investigation into whether suitable, available land exists to which the squatters can be transferred.
Although many residents of suburbs complain that Gauteng’s new settlements are crime dens, there is little evidence to back this view.
The provincial land department’s director of land affairs, Carin Engelbrecht, says it is more the case that the police are unable to access these areas – either because there are no roads or because they are too frightened.
Those settlements provided with basic services by the provincial government or the council appear to run smoothly.
Johandeo, a settlement near Sebokeng, which is one of the Gauteng government’s jewel pilot projects, is so clean that on the day the Mail & Guardian visited it children from the school were burning rubbish.
But already, separated only by a field, a new squatter camp has arisen.