Life in South Africa’s townships is tenuous at best
SOUTH Africa offers as much hope to its poor as does Kenya to its refugees in Dadaab.
The complex of refugee camps is almost a quarter-century old and, with a population of over 330 000, is one of the largest cities in Kenya.
Located in the middle of a dry and desolate area, 100 kilometres from the Somali border, the only building materials are the thorn bushes which grow in the desert.
The camps are terrible places, filled with people denied any official status by the Kenyan government, with no right of residency, no title to the land they live on, and no right to earn a living.
Worse, the Kenyan government recently declared they want to demolish the place and force its residents – all officially recognised as refugees by the UN – to return “home”.
In Ben Rawlence’s close study of nine individuals living and surviving in Dadaab, City of Thorns, he describes a world made stable by networks of family and tribes, smuggling and transient businesses, a lack of legal representation or police support, and a crippling dependency on international donors for meagre reward.
I have never worked in a refugee camp, but reading his account felt remarkably familiar. It sounded like any South African township.
How could it be that poor South Africans live in conditions that are equivalent to those of Somali and Sudanese refugees in Kenya? After all, South Africans have legal and political representation, property rights, access to economic opportunities, and – ostensibly – a constitution that guarantees accountability from the state.
Except that these rights seem to stop at the border to places like Khayelitsha, Tembisa, Sebokeng, and Alexandria. Outside of carefully controlled areas, people put down extremely shallow roots, rendered transient in their homeland.
For life in South Africa’s townships is tenuous at best. What good is a home, even one paid for by the state, if there is no security in it? How does one start a business when theft and corruption are rampant? How does one put down roots when the only “proper” jobs require hours of travel and the only people left behind during the day are those without work?
What is tragic is that people are driven to improve their lives and invest in their future, even as they suffer tremendous hardship to achieve that.
Khayelitsha could be as productive and wealthy as Century City. All it takes is infrastructure and consistent rule-of-law. Even the most stable of countries can turn themselves into failed states if they are cavalier with their history.
We’ve stared with amazement at the incoherence of the US Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump; at his obsession with defending himself even to the extent of using his campaign to launch vendettas at those he feels insulted by.
And, unfortunately, that’s the government we’ve ended up with. Thin-skinned, perpetually defensive, locked in court battles over the behaviour of its leadership, and genuinely believing that to declare a thing means it is as good as accomplished.
As we head into the August municipal elections, it seems it isn’t only the politicians who are phoning it in. Ambiguous and patronising compromises are simply fuelling anger and resentment.
Voters are disengaging from the leading parties and fleeing to dangerous and corrupt autocrats, like Julius Malema. We stand on a knife-edge. In the one direction lies the economic collapse and social ruin that will see the country reduced to the poverty of our meanest townships.
In the other is the difficult but optimistic rise of the poorest. Or, we could try do what we’ve always done, persistently push the hard decisions into the future.
Gavin Chait is a data engineer and development economist at Whythawk. gchait@whythawk.com