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The bare necessities
The Economist, February 22, 2001
Despite the government’s efforts, too many South Africans still lack
access to housing, water, land and other essentials of life
PARTS of KwaZulu-Natal may look like the Scottish borders and parts of the
Western Cape may look like California, but this is Africa, and most South
Africans are poor. In 1996—no up-to-date figures exist—57% were living
in poverty. That, however, may have represented progress: black household
incomes had risen by 9% in real terms over the previous five years.
The government says that, thanks to its efforts since 1994, some 9m more
people now have access to clean water and about 1.5m more households have
access to electricity. Moreover, it has built nearly 1m houses for people
who had no formal shelter before. It has provided a free peanut-butter
sandwich a day for every child at primary school, ensuring a minimum of
nutrition. And it has introduced basic pensions for the elderly poor.
It can take some pride in these figures, even if they do not tell the full
story. For a start, much remains to be done. More than 3m households (out
of 10.7m) still have no electricity, and 8m people (out of 43m) still have
no access to clean water. Moreover, too much of the water that is piped
leaks away before it reaches the tap. Too much arrives contaminated, and
too much is used wastefully because it is cheap for the rich and expensive
for the poor (though the government is working on that).
One difficulty is that South Africa is, at least nominally, a federal
state with nine provincial governments. Although seven of the nine are run
by the African National Congress (ANC), which also dominates the national
parliament (winning 266 out of the 400 seats at the general election in
June 1999), they vary widely in competence and therefore in their ability
to carry out national policy. The Eastern Cape, for instance, and
Mpumalanga, both ANC-run, spent hardly any of their capital budgets for
housing in the first six months of the past fiscal year.
A similar incapacity afflicts even parts of the national government,
notably the Department of Health. It failed to spend 28% of its budget for
hospital rehabilitation last year and, with its provincial counterparts,
allowed 12% of its allocation for the country’s nutrition programme to
go unspent. In other words, thousands of children are not getting their
daily peanut butter. Lots of pensioners, too, do not receive their
pensions, either because of incompetence or because of theft by local
officials. And though the government wants to increase the local
authorities’ spending by 15% over the next three years, it openly
recognises that they may not be able to make use of the money. “We must
not assume that the [municipal governments] will actually function,”
says the local-government minister, Fholisani Sydney Mufamadi.
In such circumstances, many South Africans will have to fend for
themselves, perhaps by doing what their forebears have done for
generations: farming. Some 46% of the population live in rural areas, and
probably most of the urban 54% have strong ties to a village or country
community. For all South Africans, therefore, the land is a matter of
importance. Yet in the days of apartheid, it was largely denied to blacks,
Indians and Coloureds: about 70% of the country—the most fertile and
desirable areas—were reserved for the 15% of the population that was
white. Indeed, if government-owned land was included, the whites owned
87%.
Righting past wrongs
South Africa’s new masters have taken a three-pronged approach to
changing all that. Their aim is, first, to redistribute white-owned land
on a willing-seller-willing-buyer basis or, where expropriation seems
justified, to pay market-based compensation. Second, to reform the tenure
system, particularly in the former “homelands” assigned to blacks.
Third, to restore land to people, or their descendants, who were
dispossessed of it in the 80 years after 1913, when the first
discriminatory Land Act was passed. Some 65,000 claims were lodged under
this restitution scheme before December 1998, the cut-off date.
Progress in each of the three programmes has been slow. Although the hope
is to redistribute 30% of the country’s farmland by 2014, only 0.81% had
been transferred to blacks by the end of last year. The mainly white
farmers’ union, Agri SA, blames bureaucracy, pointing out that about 6%
of the country’s farmland is sold each year to anyone who wishes to buy
it, the government included. The mainly black National African Farmers’
Union says that most of this land is expensive and poor, and calls for
expropriation. It has, it says, 23,000 members eager to farm commercially.
But land has not been a political priority: the 837m rand assigned to it
for the current year will not go far. Moreover, the government has decided
that the rural poor should get no more in land grants than their urban
counterparts get for housing. The consequent 15,000 rand per household
does not buy much more than a hectare (2.5 acres) of good irrigated
ground.
The tenure-reform programme has not performed much better. A badly drafted
act in 1997 greatly strengthened tenants at the expense of owners.
However, the ensuing grumbles have been trifling compared with those
generated by the restitution programme, whose first four years saw the
resolution of fewer than 50 claims, though the total has now risen to
about 6,500. Such claims have been settled through the courts, a procedure
involving legal standards of ownership that are hard to prove: tenure is
often held communally rather than individually, and usually no title deeds
existed at the time the land was taken. Moreover, even today there is much
disagreement about whether land should be held by chiefs or by
individuals.
This dispute divides many organisations, the ruling party included.
Patekile Holomisa, the ex-chairman of the parliamentary committee on land
affairs, is, for instance, at odds with many of his ANC colleagues, and at
one with many members of the mainly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party. He, like
Mr Mandela, belongs to a branch of the Thembu royal family, and heads
Contralesa, the staunchly patriarchal Congress of Traditional Leaders of
South Africa.
The good news is that a speedier restitution process is now in prospect,
after the settlement of a claim by the people of Chatha in a part of the
Eastern Cape that was once the “homeland” of Ciskei. The settlement,
last October, was reached not through a court of law but through an
“indaba”—a talk-in or pow-wow—and the signs are that this will now
become standard practice under the incumbent minister, Thoko Didiza. It
holds out hope for the settlement of many more claims involving removals
under “betterment” programmes, the name given by apartheid governments
between the 1940s and 1970s to forced resettlements in “black” areas.
Perhaps 3.5m South Africans were forcibly displaced by their government
between 1960 and 1982. Most of them are remarkably patient in awaiting
compensation. There is some pressure for more radical measures, but much
of it comes from black farmers, who simply want more land, not from the
landless, who are largely unorganised. Article 25 of the constitution
gives clear guarantees about property rights, which ministers are quick to
point to when asked about the possibility of farms being expropriated, as
they have been in Zimbabwe. And certainly, though some land encroachment
takes place, no widescale invasion seems likely in South Africa. Even so,
Zimbabwe has shown that land can stir strong emotions—and can readily be
used by demagogues as a racially divisive issue.
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