/ 16 April 2004

‘I pray to God to take away this poverty’

Bonani Mayixhale, who lives near Lusikisiki, sums up the problem: ''We would like any toilet, but without a plumbing system and running waler the best we can have is the govern­ment one.'' Paul Botes/M&G
Bonani Mayixhale, who lives near Lusikisiki, sums up the problem: "We would like any toilet, but without a plumbing system and running waler the best we can have is the govern­ment one." (Paul Botes/M&G)

The Eastern Cape has some of the poorest districts in the country, according to Statistics South Africa. Nawaal Deane went to investigate 10 years after democracy, and found three scenarios of survival.


1. System failure

Standing is a strain for Nonyaniso Mayixbale (27), who lifts her body into the wheelbarrow that acts as her transport on the hour-long journey home from the Goso Forest clinic near Lusikisiki in the Eastern Cape. ”I had a stroke last week,” she says as her mother drapes a blanket over her shoulders. A stroke for someone Nonyaniso’s age seems unlikely, but her shrunken body and grey skin sug­gest a weakened immune system.

”I have to come back next week for my results [HIV tests].” She is quick to say she does not know if she has Aids, but is hopeful that the clinic will assist her in accessing the disability grant.

The clinic has revitalised health ser­vices in the area and is one of seven that has begun to roll out anti-retroviral therapy as part of a collaborative effort between the Nelson Mandela Founda­tion, Medecins sans Frontieres and the Department of Health.

The villages around Lusikisiki are some of the poorest places in the country. Here there is an almost com­plete failure of delivery: electricity, adequate roads, free education, run­ning water and food parcels are elu­sive ideals. Without child-care grants, many families would not survive.

The two-roomed, mud-stained house we eventually reach is built on a slope overlooking the lush green valleys, but is the only one that has no electricity because the family moved in after the area had been allocated this service. Toe only decoration inside is a picture of Jesus alongside a black plaque with the words Nale Ingxaki Endikuyo Iyedlula [The problems will go away].

”It is beautiful [the scenery] but have you ever slept without food?” asks Bonani, a mother of seven daughters and grandmother to babies aged from one to eight. The family survives on two child-care grants (of R170 each) and R200 from the two daughters who work as domestics in Kokstad. The R540 has to feed and clothe the children and pay for their school fees. ”I go to the neighbours [to ask for food] because I don’t want the Little ones to go to bed with empty stomachs.’

Bonani has been trying to get her pension for the past year, but she had problems with her identity document. ”If we can get the disability grant and my pension then we will be better off.”

Bonani’s daughter Zandile collects water from a small stream below the vegetable garden. ”I carry the water twice a day for cleaning and cooking;’ she says with a toothy smile, her six month-old baby strapped to her back.

Like most families in the area their food supply is dependent on rain. The vegetable garden, where Bonani grows yams, mielies and beans, is too big to water from the stream. ”Mielies and beans, mielies and beans — that is all we eat, every day,” she says crinkling her nose.

The only protein the family gets is from eggs, but this is not enough to cure Nonyaniso’s baby of malnutrition. The baby’s eyes follow her mother as Nonyaniso gets up from the mattress holding an orange dish to use as a toi­let because she is too weak to go out to the tree where they have to dig a hole.

But even the daughters who work cannot lift the household out of poverty. Ntombentsha, one of the two employed daughters, says in Xhosa: ”There is a problem; we can’t speak English because they did not teach us at school.” Speaking English is the ticket to a better life, but the stan­dard of English is not high and most matriculants are not fluent enough to hold down a job.

Ntombentsha and her sister work for government officials who pay them R350 a month, despite the R800 minimum wage set by the department of labour. ”There is nothing I can do about it.” When Ntombentsha asked for more she was told someone would be found to replace her.

While the children’s hair is being cut the household bubbles over with life. But there is pain in Bonani’s eyes when she talks about the govern­ment. ”I want to see him [President Thabo Mbeki] face to face. He did not do anything for poor people. I will ask for water, toilets and food.”

Despite this she is committed to supporting the government. ”They are our fathers, how can we not?” She looks into my eyes and says: ”I prayed to God to take away this poverty and suffering and then you came to visit.”

2. The disconnected economies

”My life is a struggle but at least I have the skills to plough the land.” Nkosana Duna (51) painstakingly drops tiny grey cabbage seeds into holes he has measured with a broken ruler. ”Now all I need is a tractor.”

The tractor symbolises the dream of a profitable life for Duna, pulling him out of abject poverty. ”If I can have a tractor then I can help the community plough their fields:’

It costs community members R150 an hour to.rent a tractor to plough their fields, but Duna says he would charge less. Without a tractor the community has to work the fields manually, which takes days and delays planting.

But making sure he has enough vegetables to eat and sell is Duna’s imme­diate priority. He planned on planting both beetroot and cabbage seeds with the R20 he made from selling pota­toes, but his transport to Idutywa cost R6 and the cabbage seeds were Rll. ”So I could not afford the beetroot.”

In the village of Sofutha where he lives, Duna is well-known for his view that hard work pays off. He abhors anyone who blames the government for their poverty. ”Most people sit back and wait for the government to give them jobs. We must start our own projects, then the government can help us fund it.”

Despite his conviction Duna has found that the system does not favour the poor. The old adage of ”you need money to make money” has come back to haunt him. ”I am being denied by the bank [to get a loan for the tractor].” Duna applied for loan of R250 000 to buy the tractor, but the bank declined his application because he has no secu­rity. ”I don’t have title deeds for this land so I can’t use that as collateral.’

He is angry because the advertise­ment of the bank promises that if any person over the age of 18 has an iden­tity document, they can apply for the loan. ”That is a lie.”

Duna says the administration of the country does not work for the poor people. ”We don’t know who to go to if the banks turn us down. The banks and the institutions have not changed with the government so they will not invest in poor people:’

Duna is part of New Town Commu­nity, an agricultural project that received funding from the United Nations to grow cabbages. ”We lacked the marketing skills so our harvest was rotting in the sun.”

The community has also been waiting for the windmill to be fixed and toilets for the past decade.

Duna’s plight echoes that of many: despite their own economic initia­tives, they cannot access the larger economy of marketing and finance and so remain trapped in poverty.

In the same village a group of women have formed the Khanyise project, where they create intricate, colourful patterns for necklaces, ear­rings and belts. But the women are despondent because they have a box of completed designs that they can­not sell. ”It is all about marketing,” says Epainette Mbeki, the president’s mother, who initiated the project.

But their passion and enthusiasm have not translated into money. ”People who live around here cannot afford to buy this jewellery,” said Son­dezwa Mfiki. The prices range from R25 for a beaded badge to R200 for an intricate Xhosa necklace. But for Mbeki the problem with delivery lies in the administration. ”We do not know who to communicate with in the government. Here at grassroots these people don’t know who to approach for answers on all these things [access to water, better roads, toilets].” She says the municipal sys­tem is failing the people because there is no accountability.

3. Measures of poverty

The rubbish dump is a place of trea­sures for people who live in rural vil­lages around Idutywa, a small town on the newly tarred N2 that cuts through the Eastern Cape.

Boys search for empty polish tins to convert into toy cars, while a little girl stumbles upon an old bottle of sham­poo with a few drops of liquid she can take home. This is also where Man­gekila Zilana is loading old pieces of wood on the back-of an old car con­verted into a trailer pulled by two oxen.

The stench from a rotting dead dog nearby makes it difficult to breathe. The municipality only collects the rubbish from the town, so villages in the area are forced to bury their dirt or just throw it out.

The landscape towards his house in Auckland is littered with plastic bags and tin cans. But walking into Zilana’s property I was amazed by the two well-built houses instead of the half-­built wooden shack I expected him to be living in. Nobongile, his wife, was fetching their cattle in the pastures.

”They are not poor,” said Lwandile Sicwetsha, the interpreter. ”Look they have pigs, goats, cattle and mielies here. He has a big house, a cooking house and now he is building a shack!’

Nobongile laughs when I ask if she thinks they are rich because they have cattle and two houses. ”If you have many cattle you can sell one: slaughter the others, but we only have three and need them for ploughing.”

Like most families in the area they cannot afford the R150 a year for their children’s school fees.

Further along we meet up with Siyabonga Cetywayo (18), a grade 9 pupil at Mangati School in Bongweni location. He is wearing brand-named sneakers and a new tracksuit, resem­bling most teenagers in urban centres. But his clothes have been sponsored as part of development cricket.

Siyabonga takes us to his school, which is closed from the Easter break.

He opens the door of a building stand­ing in the middle of field. The class­room has broken windows with tables and chairs turned over. A layer of dust covers every surface, and there are no posters of the alphabet or numbers on the wall. ”I cannot afford the school fees and we must buy a school blazer, which is R300. About 120 children between 10 and 19 get taught in the two classrooms.”

Most people in the village agree that their life is far better now than it was during the apartheid years, despite the poverty. The child-care grant, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses, electricity and clinic services – especially anti­retroviral treatment – have people reasoning that if they support the African National Congress their grants and services will be secure; another party might take them away.

”My life has gotten better since I get R170 for the three children,” says Vuyiswa Nqanda. ”They [the ANC] care about us. I see more women having babies because they know they can get this [child-care] grant.”

But the government has a long way to go before people are satisfied, even when they do get a house, running water and electricity.

Letitia Rwanqa, an unemployed woman who received a 45m2 brick RDP house in the Amalinda township out­side of East London for R2 500, is un­happy about the quality of the house. ”The bricks.are falling out in the roof and there is no electricity or running water, even though they promised us we will have it connected.”

In the area these grey houses have sprouted, with workers taking up to two weeks to complete one house. Rwanqa’s neighbours come forward to show us missing gutters, broken tiles, non-existent taps and badly con­structed doorframes. But Rwanqa says: ”I will vote for this government because now I have a disability grant and a house, even though I do not have the money to fix it up properly.”

Seeing poverty in the faces of people of all shapes and sizes, I was struck by the vast numbers who need support from the government. I left the area with great sympathy, not only for the people, but for the non-government officials who have tried to alleviate poverty, and anger at the present government. Overall, I left with the impression that against all odds the poorest people in our country do sur­vive, they do laugh, they do share – and they do hope.


Thanks to Mphumzi Zuzile and his team from the Daily Dispatch; and to Lwandile Sicwetsha, Noyise and Lulama Masala for their patience in translating from Xhosa to English.


In search of a flush toilet in the Eastern Cape

Finding toilets that flush is like looking for extinct animals in the poorest villages of the Eastern Cape.

So what do rural people use? The version of toilet they expect the government to supply is the grey plastic model found at most concerts. It’s made up of a cubicle with a plastic seat where a blue liquid flushes out the waste, and there’s a little chim­ney for ventilation.

The toilet delivery business is dismal portfolio to manage. Ronnie Kasrils, Minister of Water and Forestry, inherited a back­log of more than 18-million people in three million house­holds who lacked adequate sani­tation in 2001. He announced that by 2010 the government would have cleared this back­log, and mobilised about R360-million for this purpose.

last year his department allo­cated R120-million to providing 55 000 toilets for 430 000 people. But many Eastern Cape locals still have to make their own arrangements.

Cynthia Mosana is amused by my fascination with her home­made version of the government model. ” My husband dug a hole and then built the zinc shack around it.” Her little girl opens

the door to reveal a neat seat with a hole at the centre. It appears to be quite cosy because of the rubber trimming.

”But it is getting full,” she said, pointing to the side of the shack where a gap shows that the waste ls a couple of metres from the top.

”The government has given those people [pointing to another village] over there toilets so I have hope we will get ours soon.” The municipality, she said, is supposed to dig the holes for these toilets for free. ”Now I heard they want to charge us R200 for the hole.”

The first time Siyabonga Cetywayo (18) ever used a flushing toilet was a year ago in Cape Town. He does not think the area where he lives, outside ldutywa, is ever going to get flushing toilets. The local school had no toilets until the commu­nity raised money to build a zinc version similar to Mosana’s.

Digging a hole — or resorting to a nearby tree — is still the most commonly used method. So it is with pride hat Mboniswe Magangane, the father of six, shows off his toilet. Instead of a door it. has a brown checked blanket covering the front. Built In a mielie field it is not the type of toilet you would want to visit at night — and most locals tend to use a bucket at night any­way rather than venture out in the dark.

Magangane is considered a rich man because he owns nine cattle. He built the toilet in 1996 and only now is it getting full. The government could take a few design lessons from him: instead of a high cubicle shape, his is almost boxlike, with a neat seat. He made the sides of the toilet out of zinc, giving it a sturdy appearance. ”I expected to get a toilet from the new government, but soon I will have to make a new one.”

From hut to hut we travelled in search of a flush toilet, but to no avail. Unless poor people sneak into a B&B or petrol station, the convenience of a flush toilet is still an experience most will live without.

Bonani Mayixhale, who lives near Lusikisiki, sums up the problem: ”We would like any toilet, but without a plumbing system and running waler the best we can have is the govern­ment one.”

I left with a deep appreciation of and affection for my own flushing toilet at home. —Nawaal Deane 

 

M&G Slow