Recently, elderly Katrina Mtsweni, of Delmas’s Botleng township, received a surprise visit from President Thabo Mbeki. He waded through the decrepit township and its surrounding slums, urging people to vote for African National Congress candidates.
Mtsweni, who lives in a dilapidated shack in the Mandela B section with her two children and three grandchildren, waited for a lull in Mbeki’s sweet talk before asking him to help repair her leaking, collapsing shack. The very next day, brand-new corrugated iron sheets arrived at her door.
On Wednesday, she was up early to go cast her vote. Having lived in the area for 12 years, she, like thousands of other Mandela residents, hopes her elusive Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) house is on its way.
As the sun gave way to coal smoke, Lucky Sibiya, her 27-year-old neighbour, was on his way to cast his vote along with a friend. ”It doesn’t hurt to have hope,” he said, refusing to divulge who he was going to vote for. ”We’d like to live like other people too. We need houses and sanitation. We still use the bucket system here. They are collected about once or twice a week.”
While in the refuse-strewn, muddy shacklands of Botleng, the ANC seems to be the people’s only hope, in the formalised, potholed section of the township, most people are irate and, at the very least, divided. The divisions here are not really between the ANC and opposition parties, but whether to vote for the ANC or vote at all.
On one street corner, Thulani Motsogi (22) and Sefako Tholo (27), who had earlier voted for the ANC, were coaxing the rather apathetic Ras Mpho to cast his vote. ”We moved from apartheid to here because of the ANC,” said Motsogi proudly. ”The opposition parties were not here. Every party makes mistakes and we cannot overlook that development is slow but we must appreciate what they’ve done so far.”
Motsogi says that while last year’s typhoid outbreak left some of his siblings ill, he appreciated the fact that the ANC brought in Rand Water tankers to relieve the situation, even though the toyi-toying crowd tipped them over in anger. He said opposition to the ANC in Delmas was negligible, as all opposition candidates had done was point fingers at the ruling party. ”You don’t wait to be voted in before doing something for the community,” he protested.
Botleng Hall, on a bustling corner between Shabangu and Rakwena streets, seemed the busiest of eight voting stations in the township. Most of the action, however, seemed to be taking place outside. The only visible signs of opposition was one car doing the rounds with Pan Africanist Congress posters emblazoned on its doors, and the presence of Vusumuzi Mhlophe, a polite Democratic Alliance candidate in his mid-40s contesting for the first time.
”The people said ‘enter [the poll] because they [the ANC] do nothing for us’,” he explained. ”We’ve got a reasonable amount of members. The people here are complaining mostly about the water and services in general. The bucket system is still prevalent here.” He said the turnout was low compared to the previous elections, because of ”apathy due to ANC non-delivery”.
Beauty Moopela (36) and her friends congregated outside the hall with a group of friends. They all complained vehemently about dirty drinking water, which had not been clean since the typhoid outbreak late last year.
They also complained that they often have to fight for RDP houses, which are sometimes incorrectly allocated, and that their electricity supply is usually cut off before their cards have expired.
Linda Zwane, a young ANC candidate contesting in ward 1, said: ”Every municipality has a system of making people pay for services to be up to standard. Say you have an electricity card worth R10. R5 goes to electricity and the other R5 goes for other services like water and refuse removal because we have a culture of non-payment. People were consulted about three or four times about this to help them understand. Others hate it, but others favour it because it reduces debt.”