Sara Mampane has been waiting for the African National Congress (ANC) to fulfil its promise of a new home — what she calls a “proper house”, where the only corrugated iron is on the roof and the walls are made of brick — since the party came to power with the collapse of apartheid 13 years ago.
The 43-year-old mother of three watched from her rickety two-room shack with no electricity in a squatter camp on the edge of Mamelodi township as others moved to one of the new box houses built by the government.
She was content to wait her turn and be grateful for what did arrive, principally access to clean water and a health clinic for her children. But her patience snapped last month when men in red boiler suits came to demolish her home.
The feared “red ants” descended on the camp to remove the thousands of illegally built corrugated iron shacks that have spread out from the edge of the township in recent years. The residents were so incensed that they stoned one of the men to death and injured others, and set fire to four trucks.
“They promised me a house but they say wait, wait, wait,” said Mampane. “So I am waiting. But it is not right to come and knock down the house I have before they build me a new one. This is what we expected from apartheid, not from our own government. I think they have forgotten us.”
Weeks of on and off rioting in Mamelodi over the demolitions and lack of services have rekindled memories of the township as a hotbed of protest against the apartheid regime two decades ago. Last week hundreds of angry protesters threw up barricades and burned tyres in clashes with police. Last month the residents set fire to local council offices.
The disturbances are not limited to Mamelodi. Hundreds of similar protests have spread across South Africa, fuelled by anger at the slow pace of change.
Thirteen years after the end of apartheid, the poverty gap in South Africa remains among the largest in the world — second only to Brazil by some measurements. More than 40% of South Africans live on less than R8 a day. More than one third of the working-age population is unemployed.
But it is the evident wealth of others, mostly white but including a small newly enriched black elite, that has contributed to bitter divisions within the ANC over the government’s economic strategy. The issue is expected to dominate a party conference this week.
Time bomb
Some in the ANC are warning that the wealth gap is a time bomb for the country and the party, which is losing touch with the mass of its voters and “betraying the national democratic revolution” with too much focus on creating a liberal business climate.
Trade unions are leading the attack on economic priorities they say have principally benefited the emerging black elite, and the old white one, at the expense of the poor.
“It’s like a doctor saying an operation has been successful when the patient is dead,” Zwelinzima Vavi, secretary general of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, a partner in the ruling alliance with the ANC, told a rally in the Free State this month.
Few deny that the ANC has taken significant strides towards reducing poverty. According to figures released last week, the government has built more than two million new homes since 1994, although the numbers of people living in squatter camps has risen by half over the same period.
About 85% of households have access to fresh water, up from 61% when the ANC came to power. More than 71% have inside toilets attached to the sewage system, up from about 50%. More than four million homes have been connected to mains electricity over the same period, although the price of power has quadrupled and many people have been cut off because they cannot pay the bills.
South Africa’s Minister of Provincial and Local Government, Sydney Mufamadi, has said the protests reflect the government’s successes. “As we make progress in some municipalities, the residents in other municipalities become impatient: they expect their public representatives to deliver in the same way as progress is made in other municipalities,” he told a United Nations news agency.
Unshared growth
The government’s latest strategy, the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa, seeks to halve poverty and unemployment by 2014 by continuing the significant economic growth of recent years and creating millions of new jobs.
Charles Meth, a respected researcher on poverty at the University of Cape Town, says the government is working on “over-optimistic” predictions, and that although economic growth is crucial it will take decades to eradicate endemic poverty. “The treasury is driving an agenda that says growth is going to rescue us,” he says. “It’s nonsense.
“Within the state there’s a huge amount of tension over poverty policy. On the one hand you’ve got the Minister of Social Development, Zola Skweyiya, very sensibly saying this is not going to be enough and we have to have some kind of basic grant for those people who are going to be left out by these anti-poverty policies and growth policies that you’re looking at. The Cabinet rounds on him and says ‘bollocks’.”
The government concedes that though poverty has decreased since 2000, the gap between rich and poor has not narrowed.
The poor can see it only too well. Where the fault line between the haves and the have nots once ran almost exclusively along racial lines, the ANC’s policy of black economic empowerment (BEE) has created a new class of super-rich black South Africans driving the most expensive cars and living in mansions with servants and swimming pools. Many of the new elite have links to the ruling party.
The policy’s defenders say that it is forcing a shift in economic power to the black majority that will trickle down to the poor. Some of its critics say that all too often black people have merely become the public face of white interests.
The unions and ANC left have an uphill struggle to change the policy at this week’s party conference. The leadership wants an endorsement of a document that Johannesburg’s Centre for Policy Studies has described as so “bland, uncritical and vague” that it leaves the impression that the ANC “just doesn’t care for the poor and socially marginalised groups”.
But Max Sisulu, one of the party’s economic policy strategists, says the ANC is not disturbed by the criticism.
“We are not worried about differences. We welcome them,” he says. “We can only benefit from differences.” — Guardian Unlimited Â