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Posted on 02/18/2002 2:42:42 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - Comson Ramangone last worked two weeks ago, earning less than nine dollars for two days' work as a plasterer's mate on a building site.
Since then, he has stood every day by the side of the highway nearest to the one-roomed wooden shack he shares with his wife, Sylvia, and their five small children.
Each day, Ramangone, 44, has been elbowed aside by younger, fitter men to board the few trucks that pull up and load the first two, five or 10 men for a day's back-breaking labor and 50 rand ($4.36) in pay. Two days' work a month is his average.
Ramangone and his neighbors on the sandy lot under the flight path of Cape Town's international airport are the urban face of the poverty that President Thabo Mbeki cites repeatedly as the true challenge to post-apartheid South Africa.
They live an hour's drive, but a long day's walk from the five-star beachfront hotels, the glittering craft shops and the mountainside vineyards that have made Cape Town a mecca for tourists from around the world.
With nothing to spend and no skills to offer in the labor market of the city, it's not a walk worth making.
Isobel Fry of the Black Sash human rights group said in an interview that 29 percent of the population or 11.7 million people live on 98 rand ($8.55) or less a month. Fully 74 percent live below the poverty threshold calculated by different agencies at between 352 and 390 rand per person per month.
The government's 1996 census showed that 17 percent of households -- two adults and two children -- spent less per month than the 600 rand it would cost to take that same family to dinner in a mid-range Cape Town restaurant.
``Poverty is in crisis and it's getting worse every day. Poverty is people dying now, but because it robs people of their schooling, their health, it is also a further generation of unemployable people who will be left behind,'' Fry said.
Ramangone voices no anger or even surprise at his lot. Just a deep weariness.
``I am sick with my chest,'' he says. ``It is a dirty place this.''
Speaking a mixture of Xhosa, English and Afrikaans, he explains that the state clinic is too far for him to walk for treatment for his tuberculosis, one of the most common manifestations of the HIV AIDS virus already carried by one in nine South Africans.
CLINIC THERE, BUT EMPTY
A clinic has been built close by, but it is empty and locked. The neighborhood watch uses it to keep the casualties of the alcohol-fueled Friday night fights and for community meetings about gangsterism, drug abuse and strategies to win state funding for proper homes.
Disease has sapped most of Ramangone's strength and with little food in the house, the easiest place to spend the day is on the single bed behind the door of the low shack in Kalkfontein, about 25 miles east of Cape Town.
Mansion Ntlangeni, a feisty Rastafarian who has built a little compound of tin huts and wooden shacks for his family of six, lets the Ramangones use his outdoor toilet and helps them out from time to time with a little maizemeal or a loaf of bread.
He no longer has ambition for himself, but is paying off the 200 rand ($17.50) annual school fee for each of his four daughters in installments to ensure they get an education.
``I will stay here. It's okay. But my children will do better than me. I want one to be an engineer and I want one to be a novelist. Then we'll see,'' says Ntlangeni, who has a regular job mixing concrete for a builder.
As he talks, a battered van bumps along the dirt track through the littered shantytown that is home to about 500 people.
In the back is a pile of bloody offal and a row of cow's feet from a nearby informal slaughterhouse -- for sale for a few cents to cook over the open braziers that flare up as the sun settles behind Table Mountain.
Mbeki's office is weighing proposals from civil rights groups for stronger action to eradicate the poverty that is the most visible legacy of over three centuries of white rule.
An aide said the government contested the popular analysis that eight years of majority rule had done nothing for the poor.
The private economy has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs since the transition to democracy in 1994, but government programs had created a million jobs in that time, he said. ``
We have connected 7.2 million people to running water, electricity has been connected to 3.5 million homes and more than 30,000 people have had land that was taken from them under apartheid and returned under a land restitution scheme,'' the aide said.
SOCIAL WAGE
These benefits as well as new grants, allocations of free water and electricity and a program of free health care for pregnant women and children under seven constituted a ``social wage'' for millions of South Africans that was denied them under the exclusive rule of the 10 percent white minority, he said.
Mbeki is expected in his state-of-the-nation address on Friday to put the plight of the poor high on his agenda, but government sources say he is not ready yet to announce a major social welfare project that will put food or cash into the hands of the poor majority.
He is expected to confirm plans for a national summit on economic growth and to call for a social compact between government, business and labor to help the economy break free of its apartheid legacy and make life for people like Ramangone a little better.
"We intend, within the next three years, to complete the land restitution process, which is a critical part of our land reform programme," Mbeki said in the text of a speech prepared for delivery to parliament.
Last week the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights said 36 354 land claims were projected to be settled in the three years to the end of March this year. Some 69 000 claims have been lodged with the commission.
The commission, hamstrung by a shortage of funds, has been criticised by opposition parties and landless blacks for moving too slowly to restore land taken from them by the white-minority government under apartheid, raising fears of a Zimbabwe-style land grab. [End Excerpt]
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Mugabe appoints Zimbabwe intelligence chief head of emergency food task force
Really, just see any article about present-day Zimbabwe to see where Sud Afrika is headed, and soon. I expect no more than 5-6 years, others think 10.
But then you already knew that; others may not.
How is your wife feeling?
South Africa was once the jewel of all of Africa . It was also pro-America !
Blaming everything on whites and / or Apartheid, and doing worse than NOTHING to improve the living standards of all, just doesn't cut it . Those with important skills, ( boh white AND black ) who can manage to leave , have and are doing so. That leaves a country filled with mostly those who are only a drain on society and the corrupt black " leaders ". We all know what THAT leads to.
Bump!
I will drag her to the ER if more acute signs ( fever, shakes, upset gut, lethargy ) re-appear.
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