Joseph’s House
A small concrete home in the Masiphumelele township near Cape Town says so much about the current state of South Africa.
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It’s a cold winter evening in Cape Town. Fifteen of us are crammed in the tiny living room of the Thetha family shack, an NGO-sponsored concrete build in the Masiphumelele township, watching the slightly-fogged television in the corner broadcast images of the first snow to fall on Table Mountain for many years.
We’re here in this cramped but convivial room to celebrate Sipho Thetha’s 30th birthday. We sit and stand as best we can in the small space that is home to a family of nine, split between two bedrooms and a living room-cum-kitchen. Beneath the television lies a rumpled blanket and pillow. They belong to Joseph, the soft-spoken eldest son of the Thetha family and paternal figure to a family that never knew their father. He’s been sleeping here since May when a large fire gutted his and over 1000 other shacks and concrete builds in the northern part of the township.
Joseph sits quietly, waiting for the lounge to clear so he can roll out his mat and sleep before his early shift working security at the local mall. He earns 2500 rand a month and works six days a week and his wage is just one of three that service this family home. I ask how things are going with the rebuild and it’s soon apparent that he’s heard nothing. He offers a smile and a resigned shrug.
It's crazy how a man’s house can be destroyed by a well-publicised fire, one which drew significant media attention and international aid, and yet several months later still nothing is done. But, unfortunately, this inertia in Masiphumelele is just a reflection of the current state of South Africa.
First convened in 1992 as a bunch of shacks in the bush, Masiphumelele was an initial beneficiary of Nelson Mandela’s Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP) – a revolutionary programme designed to give South Africa a modern day welfare state and drag it out from the legacy of Apartheid rule. The concrete houses were built, dirt paths were tarred in to roads, a primary school was built and a clinic installed for the then 8,000 settlers.
RDP is still a common term in South Africa today and is often used by the residents of Masi when referring to the new builds still going up around their community today, replacing the shacks that continue to sprawl around the township’s fringes as more and more people sweep in from the countryside seeking education for their children and jobs (unemployment in many Eastern Cape towns is now touching 90%). Indeed, Joseph called his own home ‘RDP’ and, like many in this Xhosa community, he sees it as a gift from the ruling ANC party and part of the emancipation of a people disenfranchised by apartheid. Like the majority of his community, he voted ANC in the recent elections. And yet his house still sits in ruins and he doesn’t know why.
But Joseph’s house wasn't built by the government. It was built as part of a housing initiative lead by an international NGO, one of several that has been working in the Western Cape to meet the significant shortfall on public housing in the face of reduced government spending. The reason Joseph's house is still in ruins is because the NGO doesn’t have the budget to rebuild it and no South African insurance broker will accept the cost. This is just a small part of the current economic policy in South Africa, where any semblance of a welfare state has been sold out in favour of something far more destructive.
The RDP went out of the window in 1996 when Thabo Mbeki, a self proclaimed Thatcherite, took over the presidency and was quick to embrace the free market, the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund, and turned South Africa into the continent’s first neo-liberal experiment. This saw an end to pubic spending, the dismantling of worker’s rights, open trade borders and a stock market now open to foreign investors. Globalisation arrived in South Africa and it became clear that where the National Party had once drawn its lines across racial borders, so the ANC was now prepared to wage a new war based on profit margins and windfalls against the very people who they claimed to represent.
And so markets opened up, foreign money flooded in, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The world’s press celebrated the true liberation of the rainbow nation and the creation of Africa’s first real economy, seemingly blind to the irony that it was still the former Nationalists that were profiting all along by selling the state’s assets, assets they still owned, to the highest foreign bidder rather than passing them onto the new ruling ANC.
So where does Joseph fit in? The ANC may once have justified the free market as a way to solve the overwhelming apartheid debt passed on in 1994 and the RDP impossible, but now it seems that the compulsive greed that comes with it has replaced any revolutionary zeal and a duty of commitment to a loyal electorate.
South Africa now possesses the highest wealth divide and violent crime rate in the world. South Africa’s adult illiteracy rate is also one of the world’s highest, unemployment reaches over 50% in many townships and HIV rates continue to touch the 30% mark amongst adults over 30. Understaffed hospitals and oversubscribed schools are the norm for those without the cash and private security, private health care and gated communities are the norm for those who can afford it.
Take another look at Masi. This community of 40,000 only has one high school, one primary school and one clinic. There's no police station or no fire station (all the more shocking given the recent fire). I recently waited six hours at the local public hospital with a young boy who had been run over. Arriving at the hospital he lay on a wooden bench in obvious pain with a large graze on his side and laboured breathing until the single doctor on call was able to see him and administer a pain-killing injection and a course of paracetamol.
"If the pain in your leg is still there in a week, come back and we’ll give you an x-ray," said the doctor.
A week later, driving through Masi, I was stopped by the father of the child. In his hand he held the bill from the public hospital which he couldn’t afford. It reminded me of the regular evictions from informal settlements for people falling behind on their electricity payments due to continued price rises.
Back in June, I attended an Equal Education conference in Khayalitsha where a 17-year old girl stood before a packed auditorium which included the minister for basic education and berated her about the condition of her school. The school lacked not only text-books and whiteboards but windows and functioning toilets.
Consider all this, and then think back to a 2010 World Cup that cost South Africa 400billion rand of public money. A World Cup that, in reality, was convened to inspire investor confidence in South Africa, to boost the flow of foreign money into a market that sees so little go to the people who need it.
So what’s next for South Africa? The ANC continues to march to victory in the polls despite the growing discontent of a people seemingly ignorant of the true cause of their pain. It is in this maelstrom that the outspoken and highly controversial figure of Julius Malema has been warmly embraced amongst the poorer communities as the rising star of South African politics, preaching his gospel of privatisation and land redistribution against a backdrop of corruption allegations. Whether he will succeed in rising to the top of South African politics is a matter of time and the ANC seems increasingly inclined to keep him at arms length. But history proves that it’s hard times that open the door to extreme politics. And for many in South Africa today, Joseph included, these are the hardest of times.
"Ya, Malema can be good for us," affirms Joseph as we leave the house for the evening. "He speaks the truth and there are no lies with him."
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Joseph’s House (text) by Tim Conibear is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (2)
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl.....4709570
For information on the occupation of Parliament gardens please see
http://occupycapetown.org/
see you there.