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With its breathtaking stadiums and facility upgrades, the World Cup is putting a magnifying glass on deteriorating conditions in South Africa
CELBRATING the 16th anniversary of freedom requires us to pause and consider why South Africa's maldevelopment and worsening inequality are generating community protests with the ferocity of the anti‑apartheid era.
Within six weeks, national and international observers will find it child's play to attack Durban's city fathers ‑ and by extension, we in civil society, for letting them get away with it ‑ because of our most visible urban assets, what professionals call 'the built environment.'
One of the world's greatest sportswriters, Dave Zirin, visited the Centre for Civil Society last month and after calling Moses Mabhida the most breathtaking stadium he'd ever seen, gave us a needed reality check: This is a country where staggering wealth and poverty already stand side by side. The World Cup, far from helping this situation, is just putting a magnifying glass on every blemish of this post‑apartheid nation.
True, visitors to Cape Town and Johannesburg will likewise comment upon degenerate conditions in the Cape Flats and the Soweto or Alexandra shacklands, while Green Point stadium and Soccer City get billions of subsidies under both African National Congress and Democratic Alliance rule.
Durban, though, boasts the most memorable new sports facility (R3.1 billion worth, overrun from an original R1.8 billion budget), and we also have the country's highest‑profile sleaze and chutzpah exuding from the bureaucracy and building contractors.
Once again it's all too easy to point fingers at City Manager Mike Sutcliffe, as did Warren Ozard of the Federated Hospitality Association recently regarding the stubborn refusal to adopt Blue Flag standards:
He has his own ideas about things, and a very thick skin that helps him ward off all his critics.
The same can be said of Sutcliffe's reactions to Remant Alton's failed bus privatisation, the hated Warwick Junction shopping mall proposal, unending public subsidies required at the Point and ICC, the delusional Dube Trade Port, disastrous water/sewerage breakdowns, and an economic development strategy reliant upon sports tourism in a coming era constrained by climate change and fast‑rising air travel taxes, to mention just a few foibles.
But worst of all, as Zirin put it, To see a country already dotted with perfectly usable stadiums spend approximately R24 billion on new facilities is to notice a squandering of resources that is unconscionable.
The contradictions reach their peak when comparing Mabhida to horrendous shelters in which hundreds of thousands reside within more than a hundred shack settlements across eThekwini. Last week, for example, Cato Crest residents survived their fourth fire of 2010, with 200 shacks destroyed. Once again, a paraffin stove was to blame, because denial of affordable electricity to poor people is long‑standing city policy.
Yet pathologically self‑congratulatory officials don't seem to give a damn. Last Tuesday, municipal housing committee chair Nigel Gumede joined Sutcliffe to reject findings of the bulky National Home Builders' Registration Council report on Zikhulise Cleaning, Maintenance and Transport, which has a reported R300 million contract to built 18 000 houses, begun in December 2006.
The Council report on 1200 Umlazi houses (a third of those built so far) found three quarters were built below municipal building standards and need repairs. The lack of water‑borne sewerage in the B10 project represented a pollution and health risk, and without storm‑water drainage, there is a high possibility of mudslides.
Zikhulise owner Shauwn Mpisane reacted: I stand by what I have always said, and that is that the houses do not have any structural defects.
Shauwn's husband is S'bu, who commuted to his police constable job in a Lamborghini after turning state's evidence in a taxi murder trial in which another policeman was shot dead and S'bu allegedly drove the getaway car.
Their extraordinary lifestyle includes a R15 million mansion and R100 million automobile collection. S'bu intimidated the brave Mercury news editor Philani Makhanya, and his police docket was subsequently stolen, and only just reconstructed a few days ago.
Across our province, 49 housing projects like Zikhulise's contain more than 40 000 defective houses, according to a government forensic investigation. Human Settlements Minister Tokyo Sexwale's major accomplishment may simply be to finally begin prosecution of the fly‑by‑night tenderpreneur class.
Two years ago, Sutcliffe stated that the housing backlog would be eradicated by 2016, while an ANC campaigning document, Khuliswa Chronicle, promised that ANC members will get houses this year. Mayor Obed Mlaba justified the vote‑catching language: We are politicians. But when you make promises and don't keep them, then that is wrong.
Also wrong is a new municipal policy in which a private debt collection company will enforce R67 million in arrears from 600 council flats with dysfunctional bodies corporate. According to a municipal report, council debt collectors have already generated massive homelessness, notwithstanding tenants' attempts to try their best to pay their levies.
But last month's defence of the Mpisanes by Sutcliffe must be the lowest level a state official has yet stooped: The reports that these houses were built to sub‑standard levels are absolute nonsense and part of media frenzy. Thank goodness that KZN Provincial Human Settlements MEC Maggie Govender has the stomach to contradict Sutcliffe.
In South Durban, there is yet more controversy at the Lansdowne Housing Project. My CCS colleague Oliver Meth has long reported on the low quality of public housing and environmental degradation at the decrepit Rainbow Barracks complex on Tara Road in Merewent next to Engen's refinery complex. But well before the Barracks were demolished earlier this month, residents opposed moving to the 128 units constructed by the city at Lansdowne.
According to Meth, Residents subsequently realised they were being relocated from flats that averaged 59 square meters, to 45 square meter units built in a swamp area, near a busy road, isolated from the rest of the community. Lansdowne is far from schools, hospital, shopping centres and other necessities. The buildings are on stilts and the foundations already have cracks.
When residents complained about poor quality construction, Gumede replied, We will not give any community preferential treatment. I will say it again, those who don't want the houses can go to hell, I don't care about them. They will never again be a priority on the housing list.
So what have we got? A city elite overpopulated by Malema wannabes, quite capable of playing the race card, enriching themselves, and talking left so as to walk right. Unless something is done, the world‑scale embarrassments will pile up faster than goals against Bafana Bafana next month.
Patrick Bond directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society.
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