SOUTH AFRICA Government struggles to fulfill pledge to poor

Since the end of apartheid, millions are growing impatient waiting for help.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
SOWETO, South Africa -- Soon after the end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa's new black government installed a series of communal water pumps and portable toilets for the residents of Kliptown, one of Soweto's poorest shantytowns. More was coming, the officials promised: electricity and government-built concrete-block homes with toilets and faucets.
More than a decade later, Elizabeth Khoza still scrubs her family's clothes by hand in an old tub propped near one of the communal pumps, across a muddy lane from her tin shack.
The community's portable toilets, lined up nearby, have faded after years of sitting in the sun. Wastewater, tossed out of shacks, runs in a stinking stream down the trash-strewn main road. There is no electricity and no new homes, only the same old tin shacks, their roofs held on with rocks and bricks and old tires.
"Here it's still the same. I don't see any big changes," said Khoza, 42, a mother of four, as she paused above her soapy water. "There are promises every day, but we're still waiting."
Millions waiting
After more than a decade in power, South Africa's black government is struggling to fulfill its promises of a better life for the country's legions of poor. Since the end of apartheid, millions have gotten power, running water and new homes. But millions more still are waiting, many of them increasingly impatient.
In Shoshanguve, a black township northwest of Pretoria, angry residents waged street battles with police earlier this month, barricading roads with burning tires and throwing stones to protest the government's failure to provide services, including toilets, electricity and trash removal. Several protesters were wounded when police returned fire with rubber bullets, in scenes reminiscent of the country's apartheid days.
In the coastal city of Durban, two City Council members have been slain over the last year and others' homes have been set on fire by protesters angry about unfulfilled promises and rampant corruption among local politicians. Across the country, fed-up voters -- including many in Kliptown -- have staged more than a thousand marches and protests over the last year.
There is "obvious disillusionment around the country," said John Kane-Berman, head of the South African Institute of Race Relations, which tracks government progress in building homes and providing services. "Promises about lavatories and houses and so on are easy to make," he said, but hard to fulfill.
Public works campaign
Concerned about the simmering discontent, the ruling African National Congress this month announced a new five-year, $65 billion public works campaign designed to ensure that all the country's homes have clean water and sanitation services by 2010, and that all have electricity by 2012. The effort also includes a series of new public works projects, including dam and railroad building, designed to create jobs.
"We know that the masses of our people are very keen that everything should be done to end the poverty that continues to afflict millions, both in the urban and rural areas," President Thabo Mbeki said at a rally to launch the campaign.
But fulfilling the new promises -- like the earlier ones -- may well prove difficult.
Making progress
In a few key areas, the government has made crucial progress in service delivery. The percentage of South Africans living in abject poverty -- on $1 a day or less -- has declined slightly since 2002, from 9.7 percent to 9 percent, thanks largely to efforts to get welfare grants to orphans, the elderly and those disabled, particularly by AIDS.
Unemployment -- now about 40 percent -- has fallen slightly over the same period. Since 1995, the number of people with access to electric lights and clean water has grown by 70 percent and 47 percent. And when too many children showed up for the new school term in Johannesburg this month, local officials rapidly started construction on 10 new prefabricated schools.
But well over a million of South Africa's 12 million households still lack clean water, and more than 2 million have no access to electricity, according to 2004 government statistics. About 2.4 million families still live in shacks, more than double the number in 1995, according to the country's housing minister.
On the move
One problem is that millions of South Africans in shantytowns such as Kliptown built their homes in areas without any water, power or sewer infrastructure. Millions of people also are moving from rural to urban areas in search of jobs, leaving homes behind and erecting ever-growing shack communities at the fringes of cities.
But perhaps the two biggest obstacles to improving life for South Africa's poor are corruption and a lack of skilled government bureaucrats.
After the end of apartheid, South Africa's new black government pushed out many of the country's white civil servants before they could train new black counterparts. Today "there is a desperate skill shortage of people who can turn on taps and fix drains and build houses. The problems are not conceptual but managerial," said Paul Graham, executive director of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, a policy think tank. To ease the problem, South Africa is considering bringing back some of its retired white bureaucrats and hiring help from overseas.
Graft among municipal and provincial politicians also has become such an enormous problem that South Africa's president has called on all ruling-party candidates for office to take an oath swearing to fight corruption and to "do my best to build and develop my community."
The government's anti-corruption campaign, however, wilted a little this month after opposition parties discovered that the deputy president had spent more than $100,000 in taxpayer money in December on a holiday trip to the United Arab Emirates with her family and friends. While Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka's trip was not technically illegal, it "undermines [the government's] ability to combat other forms of corruption," Graham said. "Now others [at a local level] will say, 'Maybe it's OK for me to use that car after all,"' he said.