Township life

I was wondering, during the visit to Kliptown, what it must be like to live without running water and electricity - or with poor "service delivery" as it's described by the media. Yesterday the SA Sunday Times carried a story about Nothemba Fazzie, 81 years old, who lives in "informal housing" in Duncan Village, East London - a collection of some 10,000 shacks and 120,000 people - who has been waiting for twelve years to be relocated to government-supplied housing with proper services. "Mama Fazzie" lives on her pension of seventy pounds a month; she has to walk an hour to get to the settlement's only female toilet block - only women bother to use these facilities, apparently, most men just do what they have to do in the stream that runs through the township - this stream floods Mama Fazzie's shack if there's too much rain. The residents of Duncan Village who are lucky enough to have their own "long-drop" toilet (you can imagine what this is) rent this facility out at two pounds a month per person. Fazzie also has a daily slog to collect water from a standpipe and carry it home in buckets.

The article points out that the particular irony of Mama Fazzie's predicament is that she lost two sons during the struggle against apartheid, sons who worked for the liberation movement - she has plaques on her wall from the ANC to commemorate her sacrifice. Is she disappointed in progress over the past 14 years? Yes she is. She says: "The ANC has given us only pride, but I cannot live only on pride. I need a house."

In the meantime, a group of five supreme court judges today gave the go-ahead for Jacob Zuma, the ANC's candidate for the next President of the country, to be tried for corruption; he's alleged to have taken massive bribes in an arms deal involving a French company. It's pretty unlikely that Zuma has had to carry any water in buckets recently.