Charlene Smith
Barely a week after the pensions crisis in the Eastern Cape, a nationwide, million- rand inquiry into poverty is to be launched, where the poor will be asked to testify about the gravity of their situation. This will follow the first government report on poverty, which will be released by Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s office in the next six weeks.
In a separate move, three human-rights groupings, with the co-operation of most government departments and the backing of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), will launch a three-month commission to each province as part of their “War on Poverty”, manned by six to eight commissioners.
Government ministers and Mbeki, alarmed by the social security crisis in the Eastern Cape which saw 600 000 pensioners go for a month without being paid and some welfare organisations collapse, met this week to discuss possible solutions for other regions, especially in the Northern Province, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal, which are all struggling to supply social services.
Many rural schools in the Eastern Cape and provincial offices are without electricity as the province has run out of funds in so many areas and still has three months left before the 1998 budgetary allocations from central government. Questions are being asked about whether or not some poverty alleviation programmes fulfil that function, or make matters worse.
Ann Githuku, assistant president and representative of the UNDP poverty programme, which has set aside R250 000 for the new commission, said the UNDP had also helped to fund the report from the deputy- president’s office.
“But it is mainly philosophical. The researchers were academic and did not necessarily have a strong grounding in the issues, not having lived or worked in poor communities. That document will be a useful reference, but civil society organisations did not participate in the process,” Githuku said.
“There is a major vacuum concerning poverty in this country. We tried to analyse where poverty eradication is on the government agenda — there is lip service, but it needs to be clear what the real issues are and what people can do. South Africa has dealt with all the issues of rights, but not the right to development.”
Githuku said the hearings would be followed by a summit on poverty in mid-June, but it was not yet known which organisation would host it.
According to Goolam Abu-Baker, economic adviser in Mbeki’s office, the government poverty report was first planned by the former Reconstruction and Development Programme office. After that closed, it fell under the authority of Mbeki. The report tender was won by Data Research Africa.
“The report tries to look at the extent of poverty, who the poor are and where they live. It examines various poverty alleviation programmes and draws some conclusions,” said Abu-Baker.
He added that “although poverty is already extensively documented in South Africa”, the 300-page report generated “valuable information and insights and may influence government responses to poverty”.
Poverty researcher Professor Lawrence Schlemmer said that although almost 40% of adults are unemployed, in many families someone is employed, but in many others there are people with no income.
“If you take the level above that, there are people earning R700 or R800 a month. Telkom is marketing telephones to them, Eskom has supplied electricity and there are irresistible temptations to buy on credit.
“These people have huge debts and huge electricity accounts and there is no family budget to pay service charges. They have to make a trade-off, and one of the things lacking in the Masakhane campaign is a careful calculation as to how many people are in this situation.
“We have to adjust. In the Philippines, as an example, people may have electricity but seldom running water. There are more economical refuse and sewerage charges, which means that service charges are lower than ours.
“The emergent middle class is growing rapidly, but the poverty class is growing at half the rate of that again.”
The World Bank paints a rosier picture of our economic capacity than many South African researchers, with a gross national product (GNP) of $130,9-billion in 1995 and a per capita GNP of $3 160. But this is seriously skewed as massive wealth is held in the hands of a few.
The Congress of South African Trade Union’s September report, released late last year, stated that 95% of African households live in poverty, the poorest 53% of the population have no access to electricity, while 70% have no access to piped water.
Niresh Ramklass of the National Welfare, Social Service and Development Forum noted: “Although we talk about social development in this country few resources have been put forward. Gear [the growth, employment and redistribution strategy] says cut down, make the civil service efficient. That is good, but no one deals with ways to assist the unemployed, who account for almost half of the population.
“The absolute number of rural poor, and poor generally, is increasing, while the physical circumstances for the survival of our people is decreasing. I have not seen sufficient houses being built to cope with the numbers of people squatting; even when houses are built few can afford them. We need economic opportunities for millions of people, especially those in rural areas.”
But a year before national elections we can expect more speeches about poverty, and not a whole lot of action, while the situation of the poor deteriorates.