OVERCROWDING, HOMELESSNESS A TICKING BOMB IN OUR MIDST
IT IS A MORAL outrage and a preposterous injustice of genocidal proportions that around 7 million people in South Africa live in overcrowded slums and shanty town settlements, deprived generally of adequate and accessible clean water, sanitation, health care, gainful employment with livable earnings, and the right to decent shelter, peace and family security.
In the “Mother City”, Cape Town, over 1.5 million people of the city population of 3.5 million eke out an existence in the sprawling shacks and hovels of Old Crossroads, New Crossroads, Khayelitsha, Philippi, Mitchells Plain, Tafelsig, Bishop Lavis and other deeply impoverished and overwhelmingly overcrowded shack communities.
After the supposed formal dissolution of apartheid in 1994, 27 years ago, the same number of years Nelson Mandela spent in prison, wealthy white people from South Africa and abroad enjoy opulent living in multimillion-rand homes in the coastal areas around Cape Town – Camps Bay, Hout Bay, Marina and Clifton – while black people are confined to overcrowded slums close to Cape Town International Airport.
These deep disparities are found in all provinces of South Africa, still operating with a colonial-capitalist economy where the overwhelming majority who enjoy the bulk of ownership of land, wealth, income, private health care, privatised and well-resourced education are white.
The vast majority of the abysmally impoverished and deprived are the indigenous African majority and other black people, including millions living in rural areas of the country where medical and educational access and employment is hardly available, like the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
The twisted irony is that the youth of Soweto of 1976 who sacrificed lives and families and personal gain by accepting exile so that South Africa would indeed be a liberated and humane society free from the ravages of apartheid repression, gave their all for economic gains and material benefits for a paltry white and black elite.
Black politicians and the professional elite and business classes are all reproducing an economic apartheid where the effects are even worse, principally because the living conditions and life expectancy gaps between the majority white and tiny black elite and the black impoverished are more exaggerated and pronounced than ever.
As a former Nigerian leader noted in similar words: “South Africa is a white country with a black government.”
The fact that the ANC-led government can continue to justify its existence and leadership of South Africa while the majority of people suffer from continued inter-generational deprivation in every sphere, all the while protecting the billionaire capitalist class (all white with one black billionaire as the exception) and leaving dispossessed indigenous African lands in the hands of the elite is a neo-colonial nightmare in the 21st century.
There simply is no logical excuse or reason for this pathological state of affairs to exist in 2021, except to say that elements of the formerly oppressed and colonised have now become the oppressors and the colonisers of black life under the pretext of a sham “democracy” and “freedom” from 1990. The Covid-19 pandemic compounds this crisis because it adds to the high levels of mortality suffered by the already impoverished.
The highest rates of Covid-19 infections and deaths like in Gauteng today are in the slums and shanty towns described earlier.
The white and black South African ruling class will find their days numbered because sooner or later the sleeping giant of revolutionary youth in the likes of Soweto from 1976 will arise so that South Africa can indeed return to her humane indigenous ancestral roots with justice, caring, and sharing as the cardinal ways of living for all.
Kunnie is an internationally renowned educational activist and researcher involved in advancing the decolonisation struggles of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa and the world. This is the second of a two-part series of Youth Month commemoration