SOUTH AFRICA STRUGGLES TO BRIDGE WEALTH GAP IN TOWNSHIP
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The skyscrapers in Africa’s financial heartland cast a long shadow over Maria Zwane’s home in Johannesburg’s teeming Alexandra township, where running water and proper sanitation remain a luxury.
Few places illustrate the contrast between South Africa’s rich and poor more starkly than the ”Dark City” of Alexandra which nestles up against Sandton, home to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) and other financial houses.
Sixty-year-old Zwane has to live in a one-roomed shack with her family of five and share four makeshift bucket toilets with around 200 of her neighbours.
Despite pledges by government to eradicate the so-called bucket system by the end of the year as part of a multimillion-rand transformation project, Zwane does not expect life in Alex to change for the better any time soon.
”We don’t talk or complain about these toilets anymore … No one cares,” said the pensioner.
”I’ve dreamed for so long of having a proper roof over my head but a little bit of that dream dies every morning that I wake up and see this corrugated iron around,” she added, gesturing to her four walls.
”It seems as my life is just one old book that never changes.”
When the apartheid era was consigned to history in 1994, black South Africans assumed it would herald a brighter chapter in their living conditions.
During whites-only rule, inhabitants of Alex and other townships such as Soweto yearned for proper housing, sanitation, better health and clean environment but held out little hope of government-funded improvements.
But when the African National Congress transformed itself from liberation movement to government, townships which had been at the forefront of the fight against apartheid had good reason to expect an upturn in fortunes.
In his State of the Nation Address in 2001, President Thabo Mbeki promised that R1,3-billion ($180-million) would be pumped into Alexandra.
Six years into the seven-year project, there are signs of improvement.
The building of a new police station within the township has led to a sharp drop in crime rates. Schools have also been renovated while construction of a shopping mall and business district is under way.
The the abiding impression to visitors is of the thousands of tin shacks leaning against one another, dirty water running down the streets and the bucket toilets.
”There has been no change in my life since I voted for the ANC in 1994,” said long-time Alex resident Nomsa Soka.
”We heard about the money that was being given to the township to build us houses, but we don’t know what happened to it.
”I am still living in a shack with my kids and I’m still waiting for the house that was promised to me.”
Overcrowding in Alex, home to around 350 000 people packed into an 800ha area, is so acute that it is often difficult to walk on pavements.
According to Bennitto Lekalakala, chairperson of the Alexandra Development Forum, it is unrealistic to expect a rapid transformation in a place of such a size and with such deep-rooted problems.
”Experience has shown that you cannot develop a place like Alexandra, which has been occupied for over a century, in a period of seven years with such little money. Major cities took many years to develop,” Lekalakala told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
”Alex is too complex geographically and in any other aspects, and it needed cooperation from national government down to the person who walk the streets of the township every day”.
Lekalakala said a combination of factors, including resistance from residents, was responsible for the delays in meeting government targets.
The township is meant to become the proud host of the Nelson Mandela museum on the site where the anti-apartheid icon and country’s first black president stayed as a law student in the 1940s when he first arrived in Johannesburg.
However the site has been abandoned since December 2004, the target of vandals and thieves who have stolen much of the building material.
The transformation project has barely scratched the surface when it comes to housing with only 3 000 new homes having been built so far.
More than 50 000 shacks are still standing.
Ivor Jenkins, director at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa think tank, said a lack of political will and bad planning was largely to blame for the lack of progress in the makeover of Alexandra, which was the setting for last year’s Oscar-winning movie Tsotsi.
”There is, or was, sufficient money but lack of monitoring and political will in fixing Alex has been a problem,” Jenkins told AFP.
”There was bad planning, bad spending, bad coordination and information dissemination.
”It will not happen if the government just comes from outside and pushes the project to the people without sitting down with them and knowing what they need.
”There is a light at the end, but only if the project is owned by everyone involved in it.” ‒ Sapa-AFP