They resemble scenes from another era: angry crowds, clashes with police, shots, teargas and petrol bombs. Twelve years after apartheid ended, some townships are again burning. This time the target is not a racist white regime but the African National Congress, the liberation movement which swept to power in 1994 on a wave of euphoria and the promise of a better life for all.
The ruling party is facing a serious and occasionally violent revolt in downtrodden communities, resulting in no-go areas for its members. Councillors have been beaten, shot and burned out of their homes. Party meetings have been ambushed. Several local branches have disbanded or gone underground.
”It is not safe for me. I cannot go back in the current climate,” said Papi Tselane (44) one of 14 ANC councillors forced to flee the township of Khutsong after a mob destroyed their houses. The councillors are living in a mining compound. Several councillors have stepped down, said Bobo Ndlakuza, the ANC’s election coordinator for Merafong municipality, which includes Khutsong. ”Some members think it is not worth their lives and just lie low.”
The party is being targeted in what was its heartland, the sprawls of shacks and low-cost homes where millions of impoverished black people live.
The cause of unrest is economic. People are fed up waiting for jobs and basic services such as electricity, clean water and sanitation. The service delivery protests, as they are known, flared last year and have grown in frequency and passion in the run-up to local elections on March 1. Khutsong, a township of 170 000, 64km from Johannesburg, has seen some of the worst trouble.
”We used to like the ANC because it brought freedom. But freedom is not enough,” said Solly Nyathi, an unemployed 18-year-old. As well as jobs and decent schools, he said, his community wanted fly-blown tin shacks replaced with decent houses. ”Until we get that it will be dangerous for the ANC.”
He said the ANC mayor would be killed if he entered the town. He pointed to the blackened shell of a councillor’s home. ”The protests are not over.”
Brigalia Bam, chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission, is worried that a heavy police and army presence in Khutsong on voting day could spoil South Africa’s reputation for peaceful elections. ”It will send a very bad signal.”
Paradoxically the country is richer and more stable than ever before. Growth is touching 6%, consumer confidence is surging and the country’s credit rating has been upgraded. A budget deficit of just 0,5% of GDP is the lowest for 25 years. Sales of vehicles and property are breaking records thanks to a growing black middle class.
Under President Thabo Mbeki the ANC has swept national and local elections with bigger margins than under Nelson Mandela, giving it a 70% majority in Parliament and control of all nine provinces. The party may lose Cape Town to the opposition Democratic Alliance in next month’s ballot, and its support is expected to fall in five other big cities, but it will take most of the nearly 8 000 local government seats.
Compared with apartheid’s death throes, when thousands died, the current protests are sporadic, largely bloodless and pose no immediate threat to ANC hegemony. Yet commentators say the political landscape could be shifting.
Township discontent ”scares the living hell” out of whites as well as the black elite, said Xolela Mangcu, of Witwatersrand University. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has warned of a ”powder keg”.
What lit the fuse in Khutsong was a boundary change which transferred it from the rich province of Gauteng to the poorer North West, where services are seen as worse. ”The ANC sold us. They didn’t even consult us,” said a protester.
Since 1994 the government has built 1,8-million houses for the poor and supplied millions of households with water and electricity for the first time. But that has not kept pace with numbers migrating to cities in search of work.
Incompetent and corrupt officials — the government admits that 136 out of 284 municipalities are in deep trouble — have compounded the crisis. According to official figures up to a quarter of the population — 12-million people — live in shacks, a 50% rise from a decade ago. About 16-million lack proper sanitation.
Dozens of ANC councillors have quit and are standing as independents with backing from civic associations. They will not halt the ANC juggernaut but by teaming up with South Africa’s vibrant social movements and trade unions, analysts say they could lay the foundation for a leftwing opposition.
Rattled, the ANC has mobilised. In tacit admission that local government is a shambles it culled 60% of its councillors from its list and promised that at least half of all new councillors would be women, claiming they were less corrupt and better managers than men.
Earlier this month President Mbeki, proclaiming an ”age of hope”, pledged to spend R413-billion on clean water, sanitation and electricity to all by 2012. He also pledged to replace shacks with houses.
Last week the ANC tried to reclaim Khutsong. While the party chairperson, Mosiuoa Lekota, addressed 150 supporters inside the local stadium, about 2 000 protesters gathered outside. Stones rained down on the visitors when they tried to leave, prompting police to fire teargas and rubber bullets and make 100 arrests. Solly Nyathi, his eyes stinging from the gas, predicted that Khutsong would boycott the election: ”People will vote for nothing because nothing is happening.”
In numbers
- 12-million people live in tin shacks, a quarter of the population, a 50% rise over the past 10 years
- 1% of people live below the international poverty line of $1 a day
- 26% is the official unemployment rate but trade unions claim the real rate is nearer 40%. Yet 658 000 jobs were created in the past 12 months
- 80% of homes are connected to the national grid and 68% of poor people receive a free water ration – Guardian Unlimited Â