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DA leader Helen Zille faces an uphill battle as she prepares to take over a province plagued by protests against poor service delivery. Lennox Mzukwa can’t remember how many governments have promised him a house, but he knows exactly how many years he has been waiting for one — 27. He calls his current accommodation his own “Robben Island”: a dingy, concrete, 3x5m ground-floor hostel room little bigger than the cell in which Nelson Mandela spent most of his 27 years in jail. The difference is Mzukwa’s ceiling leaks and he shares his room with his adult son. The nearest toilet is used by at least 20 people — many more when it works properly — and the outside yard has turned into a large water- logged rubbish dump overrun by rats. Abandoned Ironically, Mzukwa’s hovel is part of a crumbling hostel block called New Flats — one of several old hostel quarters abandoned during a botched housing project in Langa, the country’s second-oldest township outside Cape Town. The 63-year-old grandfather from Keiskammahoek in the former Ciskei says he has been ignored by every major South African political grouping, including the National Party of B J Vorster and the provincial ANC, until recently led by Ebrahim Rasool. Mzukwa said: “I’ve been here 27 years now in this room. Before that I was staying in Zone 15 (Langa). When they broke that to make family houses they sent us this side.” Perhaps understandably after all this time, Mzukwa is not too hopeful about Helen Zille’s Democratic Alliance: “I don’t trust her,” he sighs, tired after a long commute back home from work. “They (the politicians) are liars sometimes, they just promise something but don’t do it.” Squalid It is disillusioned people like Mzukwa who sit along the fault line of party politics in the Western Cape, a province starkly divided between the historically most advantaged and the eternally disadvantaged. The “new broom” of Zille’s DA provincial administration will be measured against her ability to make inroads into squalid corners of the Western Cape where living conditions continue to slide despite 15 years of democracy. Behind the glib election promises is the uncomfortable truth that no amount of national, provincial or local government planning has made the slightest difference to Block 902, New Flats, KwaLanga. It is the same sentiment that exploded into violence down the road in the ANC stronghold of Khayelitsha this week, where angry residents vented their frustrations at a lack of service delivery. Significantly, the protests were directed both at ANC councillors and the DA-led city administration. Politics — and not any individual party — is to blame for delivery failings in sprawling townships countrywide, the protesters said. And while this view may be a sign of growing political realism, few expect politics to get prettier in the Western Cape any time soon. Disastrous New Flats in Langa is a case in point. Initiated in 1993, the City of Cape Town Hostels to Homes project was officially stopped in its original form last year by the national government and merged into a broader Community Residential Units (CRU) project. Many say the stalled project reflects a disastrous lack of policy continuity caused by disagreement between the DA-led city council and the then ANC-led provincial government. Others say it makes no difference who is in charge; the poor continue to get poorer in this forgotten corner of the land. Pitiful In effect, what has happened is that building has stopped in Langa, leaving as many as 1500 people stranded in pitiful temporary housing, which is often little more than a windowless Wendy house. Conditions are not much better for families still living in nine large hostel blocks, now far more run down than when the renovation project started 15 years ago. Incredibly, Mzukwa is still hopeful: “I’m still hoping because they [the developers] didn’t say they won’t come back again.” Other residents are less optimistic. Thembekile Nxesi, who shares a single room in Block 902 with her seven children, believes the local housing project committee has embezzled the money. “They spend the money on themselves. It’s like that.” But the truth of the Hostels to Homes project is far more complicated than simple fraud or political infighting, according to Langa area committee members who speak of disagreement and in- fighting at almost every level of service delivery, from the national Department of Housing down to the politically aligned project committee. What should have been a symbolic victory of democracy — the conversion into viable housing stock of these apartheid-era eyesores — is an even more spectacular failure than the N2 Gateway project down the road. Marginalised The big question hanging over the incoming DA provincial administration is whether the new synergies created by a politically aligned city-province axis can translate into a new toilet for Lennox Mzukwa. City officials are hopeful: “The city has appointed consultants to do a survey to see what the state of the hostels is, so that we can start prioritising,” said Hans Smit, City of Cape Town housing chief. Still waiting But Langa area committee chairman Ayanda Mooi has heard it all before: “Even during the time of Nomaindia Mfeketo, when she was the (ANC) Cape Town mayor, they have been promising they would do something. We are still waiting.” DA heavyweight Ryan Coetzee believes marginalised people like Mzukwa throughout the Western Cape will benefit from a closer alliance between local and provincial government. “The co- ordination between city and province will be much easier for us,” he said. “We have a constitution in South Africa. Our approach would be to use the powers of the province to the full,” Coetzee said. | ||||||||||||
- The Times
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