Fhatuwani Mulaudzi is a humorous man. He says South Africa urgently needs a minister of public toilets. I laugh, only to discover at the end of the interview that I fervently agree with him.
Scepticism about exactly why the first black chief geologist at a South African mine would leave his job, give up his double-storey house and two company cars to start a tiny toilet-cleaning business called The Clean Shop in 1996 soon subsides and turns to outrage when he tells stories about the conditions in schools.
Mulaudzi always wanted to be a teacher like his school inspector father and school principal mother. He kept a keen eye on the comings and goings at a high school close to where he worked in Carletonville. One morning he asked a group of girls in the street why they were not at school. They said that they were looking for toilets. This prompted Mulaudzi to investigate the 10 ablution blocks at the school.
“I found them so dirty I couldn’t believe it. From the door there was a pile of shit on the floor. The children had to place bricks and stones to step on, to try to find a better place to use the bathroom. The toilet bowls were full and made a heap – a heap! Even in the hand basins. There was not a single drop of water in those toilets. They were all blocked and not flushing.”
The school principal professed ignorance.
Shocked and angry, Mulaudzi spent the rest of the day cleaning the toilets himself with a spade and a wheelbarrow. “A voice just said to me: ‘This is the job you should have been doing all along.’
“I was fearful that if I didn’t do something about it and just made a huge fuss, it wouldn’t help anybody. I felt that if I ran away I would be a coward. I decided to make it my business.”
Taking the plunge
Mulaudzi’s decision that day to start a business dedicated to a “toilet revolution” may have been unusual, but he was part of a broader trend taking place after 1994.
Thousands of black artisans, middle managers and foremen left their corporate jobs to start their own businesses, believing that the time had come to do things for themselves. It was a relatively short-lived exodus based on the euphoria of the early 1990s rather than on business acumen and calculation. Almost all of these entrepreneurs were hurt badly because they discovered just how difficult small business life can be and how ill-prepared the new government was to help them.
Mulaudzi’s efforts to land a single school contract came to naught, despite evidence of the horrific conditions elsewhere.
At thousands of schools, children are compelled to leave the school grounds to look for toilets at other public places, usually nearby taverns. At primary schools especially smearmarks are common on the walls of filthy toilet cubicles because small children, unable to cope with the lack of toilet paper, use their hands.
“The opportunity to teach about hygiene is lost. One wouldn’t make any sense to anybody as a teacher [in such an environment]. A small thing such as a toilet is destroying our education. It has a huge impact,” says Mulaudzi.
The department of education fobbed him off on the school governing bodies, which at best would be content with a hapless part-time cleaner armed with only “a little broken broom and some Handy Andy from Checkers”, and at worst be in a state of utter ignorance or denial.
“Two days ago I was in Kagiso at a high school. The principal was shocked when I showed him the picture of his school. He was just saying: ‘My dear God, my dear God.’ I said to him: ‘Sir, it’s here.'”
Mulaudzi’s first six months in business “were very, very terrible. I had no income and at one stage they even wanted to take my cars away. My wife [a medical doctor] bailed me out. She applied for an overdraft.”
Starting out small
In desperation, he started a carwash in Carletonville. An Anglo executive, impressed by the service, listened to Mulaudzi’s story and gave him a small contract for cleaning an industrial change house. It was an ablution block mine workers used to change and shower when they came off and went on shifts.
Mulaudzi and his team of four cleaners made it sparkle, so much so that the hostel-dwelling miners abandoned their rather dismal change rooms for Mulaudzi’s one.
Over the next few years Mulaudzi landed cleaning contracts for Anglo-gold Ashanti worth R470 000 a month, all the offices of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the whole of the University of Venda, which pushed his workforce up to 326.
Mulaudzi says he strives to inculcate a system of self-supervision among his workers. First by employing relatives of existing workers so that his staff consists of “teams of loyal family members”. Second each worker is allocated responsibility for a specific area, and third he uses NUM structures to settle disputes and disciplinary issues.
This frees him up to spend most of his time seeking new business, which includes unremitting knocking on the doors of the education department.
But it was the Royal Bafokeng community that gave him his first break into the system by sponsoring his project in 10 schools.
He recruited three unemployed parents of pupils at each school and trained them not so much as cleaners but as educators.
“Those parents clean the toilets all the time, full-time. Every time the toilet is used, they check, they call a learner back and say: ‘Look here, young man, you left skid marks here. Here’s the toilet brush, can you please fix it?'”
Every child is given a roll of toilet paper a week to foster a sense of ownership. Bags for disposing sanitary pads are hung behind each door, solving the number-one blockage problem in school toilets.
Mulaudzi says the system costs between R16 000 and R23 000 a school every month. The bulk goes for the provision of toilet paper, which the department has to provide. The department spends millions each year on plumbing contractors to unblock badly managed toilets.
The contractors are all too ready to strip the toilets of fittings and replace them to load their bill.
Mulaudzi’s system can actually save the department money and no price can be put on the educational opportunity, says Mulaudzi.
Positive spin-offs
Malaudzi’s message may be sinking in finally, perhaps helped by the fact that he has been chosen as a finalist in the social entrepreneur category of Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year, he says.
Mulaudzi was recently contracted to evaluate 35 schools throughout Gauteng and report back to the department.
He dreams of securing cleaning contracts for unemployed parents in every school in South Africa and repositioning his business as a supplier of cleaning chemicals, equipment and, most importantly, training.
He describes the effect of his project on the Bafokeng schools: “It’s such an amazing change of attitude. The children are so cooperative these days in those schools.
“They put on clean uniforms, they don’t pee on the floor anymore, they don’t smoke in the toilets, they don’t scribble graffiti on the walls. The teachers have started using toilets with the children. That’s when I think: ‘Ah, we’ve won.'”
At least a battle or two, if not yet the revolution.