Homeless sector unites to make voices heard
IT WOULD be too easy to shrug off the municipal elections as a minor sideshow between now and Christmas. After all, isn’t this the “lowest” level of government? Does it matter who is in charge? And does anyone even know who their ward councillor is?
And yet, the actions or inaction of our municipalities have a direct impact on the lives of all of us in ways that we feel day to day: Are the parks clean? Is the rubbish collected? Is there recycling? Are the streets well lit? Do I have access to clean water? Do I feel safe in my own city?
Of course municipalities matter. We invest in our local government a huge amount of power to do good and significant resources – not just the taxes they raise locally but the substantial share they receive of nationally collected revenue. Once every five years, we have a chance to vote into office the people we trust to do this job; or to try and keep out of office the people we do not trust.
What is more, municipal elections are the only part of the democratic system in South Africa where we can vote for a specific person – a ward councillor – who we can then actually meet and hold accountable. There are still people who say elections don’t change anything. But try telling that to someone in the UK who was for or against Brexit; or an American voter who was for or against Trump. Elections don’t change everything – but they certainly can change quite a lot.
The new municipal councils we will wake up to in November could make positive change for all the residents of our towns and cities. And there is one group in particular whose lives will be dramatically affected: our homeless fellow residents.
Curiously, in South Africa, there is no national strategy on homelessness; no department mandated to address this issue; no budget allocated to providing services. As a result, we end up with benign rhetoric at national level, (mostly) indifference at provincial level, and a random mix of policies and approaches at city level. A local politician once insisted that homelessness was not “in her mandate” and so she did not see why the municipality should address it.
But I suggested she think about who was most impacted by not doing anything. It is not MPs in Cape Town who get asked questions; it is the local councillors on the ground. Municipalities can do something, and they are the ones most impacted by the failure to do the right thing.
This became abundantly clear during the hard lockdown at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis 18 months ago. The president stated that some provision be made for the homeless and then left the municipalities to respond.
Sometimes the response was speedy; more often it was delayed. Some politicians and local government officials took advice from NGOs who understand the field, some did not, and some just ignored the advice they asked for. Many lessons were learnt from the hard lockdown and, ironically, in a number of cities improvements were made that have lasted. Initiatives that municipalities said they could not do, or did not have the budget to do, were delivered because of Covid-19. There are emergency shelters that have continued, improvements in policing practice and pilot schemes in better health care.
The National Homeless Network, which brings together the main NGOs in the homeless sector across the major cities, sees these municipal elections as a chance to consolidate this experience, to build on the good things that were achieved and to learn from the mistakes that were made.
We have created a National Homeless Manifesto which focuses on the five areas where municipalities can make most impact on the lives of homeless people: shelter, sanitation, health care, security and work. But, as they say, the devil is in the detail. So the demands of this manifesto are not broad, national demands which are easy for politicians to sign up for since they know they are too vague to tie them down. Instead, they are specific local demands, in these five areas, for each city.
Between now and the election, in each city, members of the National Homeless Network will be presenting the local manifesto to parties and candidates competing for our votes. We want to know if they are willing to commit to these demands, and if not why not. The demands are affordable, manageable and direct.
We believe that the demands of this National Homeless Manifesto will be good for homeless men and women, and they were developed in part in consultation with people directly affected. But we also believe that they are good for all citizens: better shelter provision means that you are less likely to find a homeless person trying to sleep in your local park or in a shop doorway; better systems of recycling can give homeless people access to work but also improve the state of our streets and the pollution caused by landfills.
And, because we believe that South Africa cares about the Constitution for which so many made such sacrifices, considering the needs of the poorest is a way in which we can show genuine ubuntu. So let’s make the circle bigger. Let’s vote in a way that includes the needs of the homeless who share our cities. And let’s include in that circle the politicians who share our commitment to a nation that lives up to its Constitution.