Mavis Dlamini is 72 years old. She lives in a tin shack in the overcrowded Diepsloot informal settlement on the northwestern outskirts of Johannesburg. On her meager government pension of R700 a month she supports an aging cousin, her unemployed daughter, Nonhlanhla, and two young grandchildren. She also supports the three children of her eldest daughter who died of AIDS two years ago. Mavis gets an additional R180 a month in child support grants for three of the children, but two of them don’t have birth certificates and she has been battling to obtain these from the Department of Home Affairs. Mavis has been on the list for government housing for the past five years, and she is tired of waiting.
For a moment I am temporarily blinded, as I walk from the bright sunlight into the gloomy darkness of her shack. The windowless structure is tiny, and I am amazed that it manages to house eight people. Despite the hardships of grinding poverty, the shack is immaculately clean and tidy. Mavis boils water for tea on a small primus stove in the corner. A makeshift table, constructed from plastic crates and pieces of wooden planking is covered in a shiny oilcloth. Thin sponge mattresses rolled into coils are neatly stacked against a corrugated iron wall wallpapered with old newspapers and pages torn from magazines. A narrow bed, propped up on old paint tins seems to be Mavis’s only luxury, and unframed family photos are proudly displayed on the wall above her bed.
While Mavis, and her daughter and cousin drink from a motley selection of chipped mugs, I sip my sweet, milky tea from a white teacup taken from a cardboard box under the bed in my honour. I have also been told, in no uncertain terms to sit on the only chair, while the rest of the family perch on plastic crates. Music blaring from a nearby shack competes with the loud voice of a radio news reader in another. Somewhere nearby someone is working on a car, and I can hear the sharp tatatatata of the engine being turned over, again and again. Somewhere else a dog is barking incessantly, and in the shack next door two people are conducting a shouting match. I find the noise of human beings living cheek by jowl overwhelming, but Mavis and her family seem oblivious.
I ask Mavis about the services available to her in this section of the settlement. “No electricity, we are having to use candles, and paraffin for cooking. In winter is too cold, we must always wash with cold water, and now is raining time of year, the rain is coming inside, the children is sick and there is no money, no money for the medicine.” As if to prove her point, a small boy appears in the doorway and gazes hesitantly at me. His breathing is laboured, and thick blobs of mucous crust his nostrils.
Diepsloot informal settlement is home to 80-thousand people, but it is estimated that there is a housing backlog of around 12.5 million people in South Africa. Researchers point out that this figure is probably a conservative estimate, and that the government does not really know how many people require housing. More than half of this number have no access to basic services like electricity, running water, sanitation and refuse removal.
Government has made remarkable strides in attempting to address the backlog having delivered around 1.8 million houses since the advent of democracy in 1994. However, as Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu explains, rapid urbanisation is causing the demand for housing to grow faster than government can deliver it. Briefing the media earlier this year, Sisulu admitted that despite the massive public spending on housing of R29.5-billion over the past ten years, the number of informal settlements has grown substantially. She acknowledged that budgetary constraints coupled with growing backlogs and rapid urbanisation could mean that in ten years time the country would be in exactly the same place with the same backlog of housing for the poor.
The housing situation is exacerbated by other problems. Due to South Africa’s porous borders, the populations of informal settlements are being swelled with immigrants mainly from neighbouring Zimbabwe and Mozambique, as well as Malawi. Maladministration and corruption in the running of housing projects is rife, causing development in parts of the country to stagnate. Developers take short cuts resulting in sub-standard houses that fall apart, and people complain of having to bribe officials in order to move up on the waiting lists. However, although Lindiwe Sisulu seems genuinely committed to sorting out her portfolio, the department as a whole is struggling to stamp out the corruption that has become another major obstacle to delivery.
In the meantime, South Africans are running out of patience. Towards the end of 2004 violent protests against the lack housing and basic service delivery broke out in the Free State province and soon spread to the rest of the country. These protests have continued to take place in different regions on an almost monthly basis ever since. While the official line has been to blame the violence on political instigators, and a lack of communication between government and communities, there is a very real sense of frustration on the ground. Government seems to have taken note of this, and in recent months have announced a number of new programmes in an attempt to fast track the provision of housing and other services. Also, high level delegations including ministers of relevant departments have paid a series of visits to municipalities around South Africa in order to talk to communities and hear their complaints.
Back in Diepsloot, the sun is going down, and the air is so thick with smoke from the many cooking fires that I battle to breathe. I ask Mavis if she thinks that the government is making a new effort to finally deliver on their promises. She shakes her head and smiles wryly, “ Yoh yoh yoh, Mbeki he thinks we stupid, local elections is coming soon, now we see the government is telling us good things. I will believe when I am sleeping in my house”.
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Posted by: DFDF | July 28, 2007 at 07:52 PM