TOILETS should be a private matter, but in South Africa they have become a public barometer of the deep inequities that persist 18 years into democracy.
More than 50,000 households in the Western Cape have no toilets at all and almost 60,000 households use the bucket system, according to the 2011 Census.
In areas such as Khayelitsha, thousands of people are forced to relieve themselves in extremely awkward conditions, a depressing reality described elsewhere in this newspaper today.
Even households with access to communal flush toilets in informal settlements are not spared daily indignity. The janitorial service that mayor Patricia de Lille established for these ablutions – after persistent campaigning by the Social Justice Coalition – has been beset by problems.
Although the Western Cape has borne the brunt of criticism on sanitation issues after the heavily politicised open toilet scandal that made world news a few years ago, this is not a peculiar failure of the DA-run province.
The 2011 Census found that almost 750,000 households countrywide had no toilets. And in September a national study by the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation found that more than a quarter of households countrywide have access to toilets that stopped working soon after they were installed.
After this discovery, a cabinet lekgotla decided that sanitation would form part of a strategic project, along with the 17 other major projects that make up the multibillion-rand infrastructure programme announced by President Jacob Zuma in his State of the Nation address in February.
Also in September, the then Human Settlements Minister Tokyo Sexwale announced that he would request the Special Investigating Unit to probe the “stink” of corruption and financial irregularities found by the special ministerial sanitation task team.
Sexwale said the report revealed “sloppy work by people who should have known better… It is clear there have been some people who have taken advantage of this government, some people who thought we were an ATM just to corrupt,” he said. “They are stealing from the poor.”
The poor state of sanitation in the country has been clear for some time.
It has become a national disgrace.
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