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Mandela’s jubilee evokes joy and anger in South Africa
07 February 2010 By Bill Corcoran in Cape Town
Old political comrades and family members of Nelson Mandela gathered a this Johannesburg home last Thursday to celebrate this week’s 20th anniversary of his release from prison.
One of those was Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, a Catholic priest put in charge of the former South African president’s security for his first day as a free man after 27 years in jail.
Mkhatshwa said that those invited to the 91-year-old’s home had come to reminisce about the historic day and what had happened since.
‘‘When you look back, the way this country has become normal is unbelievable. There were prophets of doom, but life has gone on and we have done exceptionally well , even though there is still lots to do," said Mkhatshwa, who became Tshwanemayor after apartheid ended.
Nearly 16 years have passed since the country’s first democratic elections, and the ‘‘lots to do’’ that Mkhatshwa alluded to is about the need to better the lives of the millions of South Africans who continue to live in abject poverty.
In South African cities, sprawling informal settlements, in which the living conditions are appalling, dominate the outskirts.
Many people living in these settlements are still without electricity, running water inside their homes and proper sewage facilities.
It seems as if, every week, residents from these crime-ridden informal settlements located throughout the country’s nine provinces take to the streets to protest over the poor quality of basic service delivery by city and town officials.
Only last month, residents in Makhaza, Khayelitsha, a massive informal settlement on the outskirts of Cape Town, had a case taken to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) by the ANC Youth League because the outside toilets provided by the city had now alls around them.
In a letter to SAHRC, ANCYL Dullah Omar region deputy chairman Chumile Sali said residents had to cover themselves with blankets when using their toilets.’ ‘The [living] conditions to which residents are subjected are tantamount to crimes against humanity," Sali wrote.
Despite over a decade of 5 per cent annual economic growth to late 2008,unemployment remains stubbornly high, with official statistics putting it at nearly 25 per cent. An estimated one million people also lost their jobs last year due to the global economic downturn.
Since 1994, the ANC has launched a number of initiatives, including its Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policy, to redress the wrongs of the apartheid era that left South Africa’s black majority economically disenfranchised.
However, last Thursday, the country’s deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, told the first meeting of the BEE Advisory Council that the policy, which was supposed to help redistribute the country’s wealth to all former disadvantaged South Africans, had failed.
‘‘We also have to admit that the ‘broad-based’ part of BEE has seemed elusive. In the main, the story of black economic empowerment in the last 15 years has been a story dominated by a few individuals benefiting a lot," he said.
‘‘We have to think creatively about ways in which we can increase the extent to which communities, workers, cooperatives and other collective enterprises own and manage existing and new enterprises, and increase their access to economic activities, infrastructure and skills training."
Lumca Fatyela, who lives in Khayelitsha, told The Sunday Business Post that, while life for black South Africans was better in many ways since the end of apartheid, the poverty reduction everyone thought would follow had failed to materialise for many people.
‘‘People in my community are very happy that we are now free, and we will always thank the ANC for giving us our freedom. But you cannot eat freedom; it does not provide medicine or an education for my children.
‘‘Twenty years ago, being free was enough, but now we need more. But if the ANC cannot provide for us, who can?" she asked.
While South Africans like Fatyela have stayed loyal to the African National Congress (ANC), which remains in government following its landslide victory in last year’s general election, a tide of discontentment is rising among other citizens frustrated about the country’s lack of progress.
In late 2008, this discontentment manifested itself in the form of a new political movement, the Congress of the People (Cope).I t was launched by disgruntled members of the ANC who had become disillusioned with the party’s leadership under Jacob Zuma.
Although less than six months old, it won 7.42 per cent of the vote in last April’s general election. Cope and the other opposition parties have continued to warn the public that the current ANC leadership is a threat to the people’s hard won democracy, and that it is making a mess of its efforts to reduce poverty.
But Professor Dirk Kotze, of the University of South Africa’s department of political science, said that those who were over-critical of the ANC had an unrealistic understanding of the situation.
‘‘The leaders who have come after him [Mandela] have had a much harder task, as they are trying to reconstruct and develop the country economically from a very low base. This was never going to happen in a short period of time," said Kotze.
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