Ann Eveleth
South Africa’s rural poor gave a stern warning to the government this week as the first round of Speak Out on Poverty hearings opened in the Northern Province.
Dozens of rural participants from across the arid, sun-drenched province crowded into church halls and community centres to tell their stories of desperation and survival in the face of extreme poverty.
Many of those who descended on Pietersburg’s Mankweng township and travelled through Elim’s sprawling green hills to discuss the topic of land and rural development blamed government inefficiency and indifference for their worst problems.
Caspertina Mashamaite and two neighbours from her village of Skoongesit B, near Bochum, told commissioners lead by human rights commission chair Barney Pityana that a local government councillor who is “always in a hurry and doesn’t know us” and local traditional leaders who refuse to help are their biggest stumbling blocks to progress.
“Where I stay we don’t have water, roads or electricity. When we go to town, we have to walk 3km to get a taxi. About the roads we tried to do something, but the local government said we must go to the king. When you go to the king … you are told you are not supposed to be there.
“We formed a water committee, but the local councillor is always in a big rush and he has never done anything for us. Since the new government, we have never had anything delivered to us,” said Mashamaite.
At times, Lydia Hlahla related, unscrupulous officials – or at least people feigning to be officials – had crushed women’s self-help projects by taking away crucial seed money.
“We were sewing sheets and pillow cases. But this woman came and said she was from the government and took us to Nedbank to withdraw our money. Now we are crying because we haven’t done anything since they stopped us. We don’t have money to buy material now,” said Hlahla.
Stories like Mashamaite’s and Hlahla’s made clear that women have been, and remain, the real driving force behind development in their communities.
Despite a lack of infrastructure, most female participants could recount at least one group effort they had joined to alleviate poverty.
Some male participants also exuded a strong sense of community. Daniel Motsele pleaded for the government to help his community fight unemployment. Motsele survives on piece jobs and doesn’t know how he will pay for his children’s education.
“During the apartheid government at least I was able to get about R100, but now I sometimes go three to four months with nothing,’ he said.
“This government has got a chance of beating the old government by far, but only if we can get some jobs. If it doesn’t help us, some of us will try to kill and steal to get something to eat.”
Men like Thompson Ngoboni (69), who has not held a steady job since 1984 due to mining injuries, have learnt to scrape a living from the good will of friends and family.
Ironically, while the hearings centred on land-based poverty, with subsequent hearings intended to target other issues, the collective cries of this week’s participants laid bare the extent of rural poverty in all areas of development.
As the KwaZulu-Natal-based Rural Consultative Forum argued, “Rural areas need water, housing, land and everything else more than anywhere else. [We] celebrated the birth of the new South Africa, but very soon after realised that the promises of the government were only being made for the people in the cities.”