The men of the Magobeni family sit hunched on two wooden benches outside their family home in Hanover near East London and take turns sipping umqombothi (traditional beer) from a metal bucket.
“All of us here are unemployed,” says Nceba Magobeni (33). “We are drinking and praying to our ancestors for jobs.”
As with many families in the rural Eastern Cape, the only steady source of income for the 100-member Magobeni family is 83-year-old Wilton Magobeni’s monthly pension of R640.
Besides this income, the family survives on the produce of their little kitchen garden.
“We grow pumpkin, spinach and tomatoes, which our mother cooks with mealie meal,” says Nceba.
This is the poverty-stricken Eastern Cape, a province that has been turned into a virtual economic wasteland by the legacy of apartheid’s bantustans and by the misgovernance of the current administration.
The dire poverty, coupled with the province’s tradition of political militancy, has made it the main battleground in the run up to the African National Congress’s national conference. Leftists say the government’s market economic policies compound the levels of poverty in places like the Eastern Cape, but national ANC leaders blame the incompetence of the mostly left-leaning provincial leadership for the problems.
In recent weeks, the ANC’s Luthuli House headquarters has overseen a crackdown on the province: nullifying a provincial congress, ordering a purge of MECs, and dispatching a national task team to overhaul local government structures and procedures.
Many in the province believe there is more to the crackdown than the national leaders’ concerns about service delivery. The province was supposed to send the biggest delegation — more than 600 — to the ANC’s conference and many felt that national leaders were concerned delegates would back leftist candidates for the national executive council (NEC).
Relations have become so strained that those loyal to the national leaders now describe themselves as the “pure ANC”.
The political shenanigans are far from the minds of the Magobenis, who feel they have been failed by those they entrusted with improving their lives.
As they sit around the homestead, they gaze forlornly at the landmark buildings of the provincial capital Bisho, 10km from the village.
“We voted for the ANC because we trust them. But the leaders have failed us,” Nceba says.
Elliot Magobeni lost his job earlier this year after the owner of the shop where he worked in Bisho vanished from the town, apparently because of financial problems.
Elliot’s son Siyanda completed matric last year, but has spent the year loitering , unable to further his education and unable to find a job.
“I have no money to send him to college now,” says Elliot.
Nceba has also withdrawn his 13-year-old daughter from an English-medium school in the town. “She will now go to a Xhosa school and she is not fluent in that language,” he says.
Almost 90% of the village’s population depends on pensions and grants, says Rommel Roberts, who runs an empowerment centre in Hanover.
But not everyone in these parts is prepared to be the victim of the provincial government’s failures.
In the village of Tyityaba, 63km outside East London in the Komga region, the teachers at Fort Warden farm school are doing their utmost to ensure that education goes ahead despite government neglect.
The school boasts two classrooms built of cement and bricks, which accommodate about 80 children in grades 1 to 7. The school has no water and no electricity. The teachers have built another classroom of mud and wood, which was damaged by heavy downpours and is crumbling.
Ntombohlanga Naam says little has changed in the past 10 years.
Teachers from 13 farm schools in the Komga region banded together to raise funds for a new building. Gumba says they raised R17 000 for a prefabricated structure that will accommodate 700 students and be set up nearby next month.
The national crackdown on the Eastern Cape has not gone down well among rank-and-file ANC members. They feel that national leaders are fuelling divisions between unions and the party in a province where almost every trade union member also belongs to an ANC branch.