South Africa is well on its way to meeting its Millennium Development Goals (MDG), according to the government’s report card released this week. The report will be presented to the United Nations world summit in New York next week.
The country has been doing well in, among other things, decreasing the proportion of poor people, higher rates of enrolment in primary schools, equal participation of boys and girls in schools and eradicating malaria.
But civil society disputes many of the gains, and has complained that it should have been part of the deliberations. In many countries, civil society representatives are included on report-card committees.
The MDG states that by 2015 government must halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and that by 2020 there must be significant improvement in housing at least 100-million slum dwellers across the globe.
The South African government said that between April 1994 and March this year 1,74-million housing units were built. But omitted in the statistics were that at least half of those houses had once again been sold, as studies had shown.
The proportion of households with access to clean water increased from 60% in 1995 to 85,5% in 2003, and by December 2004 10-million people had gained access to a basic clean water supply. Access to sanitation increased from 49% percent of households in 1994 to 63% in 2003. But this does not figure in the high number of water cut-offs, which would make the figures look much lower.
“South Africa is well set to accomplish the MDG in time. This is largely attributed to the hard work by government and all social partners aimed at improving the material conditions of all South Africans,” the report states.
Unemployment, covered by Target 16 of the MDG, states that strategies should be developed and implemented for decent and productive work for the youth. The government indicates in its report that the youth unemployment rate actually worsened from 47,4% in 2000 to 51,8% in September 2004.
HIV/Aids is another area challenging the government, which estimates that at the end of 2003 at least four million people were HIV-positive, an increase of 300 000 on the previous year.
The government report states that it has already met some of the goals. “This may be related to the fact that when the new democratic government came into being in 1994, it set itself many targets similar to those articulated in the Millennium Declaration,” the report said.
But South African civil society has described as misleading some of the statistics released in the government’s report. “I can tell you now that there will be conflict around the statistics in the report,” Hassan Lorgat of the South African National NGO Coalition (Sangoco) told the Mail & Guardian at the release of the report. “We [civil society] were not included in drawing up this report to give our input. The government must give us the stats much earlier, so that we can check it and so have ownership of the report and the statistics in it.”
Lorgat said that several attempts to discuss the report with the government before its release last week came to naught. Civil society is particularly worried about the references to the country’s performance in the health sector, especially in relation to the infant mortality rate, HIV/Aids and hospital care.
Target six of the MDG is to reduce the infant mortality rate by three-quarters by 2015. The government’s official statistics estimated that in 1998 the neonatal mortality rate was 20 deaths per 1 000 births, and put infant mortality at 45 deaths per 1 000 births. The government says measurements in 2003 show that the figures have remained relatively constant.
But Lorgat insists that the Health Systems Trust reported 59 deaths in 1 000 births, showing that the situation has deteriorated. “Who do you believe?” asked Lorgat, to underscore his critique.
Sangoco is adamant that the MDG is a “minimal programme” to measure development, and that the South African government should instead be rated on the Reconstruction and Development Programme targets it set in 1994. “Where is the free education that was set as a goal in 1994?” he asks.
But using the MDG in their current form is under threat, since the United States is spearheading efforts to redefine the goals. The world’s largest anti-poverty campaign, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), has written to the 53 African heads of states calling on them to resist attempts to edit out wording designed to end poverty.
“Should our leaders allow it, the World Summit could go down in history as the meeting where the most powerful people in the world turned their backs on the poorest,” said Zanele Twala, a GCAP campaigner.
“It is ironic that citizens of [Japan, Germany and the US], not their leaders — who signed the MDG in the first place — are showing greater commitment to fighting global poverty,” said Kumi Naidoo, another anti-poverty campaigner. We in Africa must keep up the call for these leaders to wake up and not betray our common global humanity.”
On Saturday, the GCAP will raise white ribbons across buildings, ring alarm bells and hold marches to draw world attention to their campaign.