In his state of the nation address (Sona) last week, President Cyril Ramaphosa introduced us to “Tintswalo”. One of South Africa’s “born-frees”, she grew up in a constitutional democracy that, among other things, guarantees the right to dignity. She lived in a house with basic water and electricity, provided by the state. She attended a fee-free school and received a child support grant to meet her basic needs. As a result of the state’s assistance she graduated from high school, going on to achieve a TVET qualification funded by the National Student Financial Aid Scheme. Today, courtesy of employment equity and BEE, she has a job.
Ramaphosa’s Sona was a paean to Tintswalo — the epitome of the young South African. It was also — like Sonas before — an exercise in cherry-picking: a gloss over the challenges, a dash of blame, while flagging select interventions and points of success.
This year, Ramaphosa had more to work with than most, being able, as he was, to point to progress made in 30 years of ANC rule. And to blame a growing list of bogeymen — the 2008 global financial crisis, Covid, state capture, the July 2021 riots, adverse climate events, the war in Ukraine — for an ongoing lack of momentum in his own term.
It’s not quite a “smart city” flight of fancy of yore, but it is putting lipstick on a pig, given realities on the ground.
Reality check
Take reports that appeared last week about 92-year-old Gogo Maswelekile Petshana. She would have been 60-odd when Tintswalo was born. Her home? A mud hut with cracked walls that she feared would collapse on her. She lived there with her daughter and six grandchildren, supporting them on her R2,110 old-age grant and an additional R500 special hardship grant. She waited almost 25 years for running water, a flushing toilet; the government house she’d been promised. When she died last week, she did so on the floor of her leaking hut; her bed had been lost to one of the floods and disasters to beset the Eastern Cape village of Cwebeni. She never got her government house.
So much for the right to dignity.
Less than a kilometre down the road, the SABC tells us of Solam Mthabatheki. Like Tintswalo, she’s a born-free. Only, she never finished school; she had to drop out when her mother died. The 23-year-old has no job. The family is often forced to rely on the kindness of strangers; some nights they go to bed hungry.
The problem — easily glossed over by Ramaphosa — is that for every Tintswalo, there are multiple Mthabathekis; multiple Gogo Petshanas. Multiple South Africans failed by the state.
It’s perhaps worth looking a little more closely at their reality.
Cwebeni, home to Petshana and Mthabatheki, is a nondescript dot on a map. Its only claim to fame, it seems, is being a poor village in one of South Africa’s poorest 10 municipalities (Port St Johns), in one of its four poorest districts (OR Tambo), in its poorest province (the Eastern Cape).
Disaggregated figures for Cwebeni aren’t available, but there are about 313,000 households in the broader OR Tambo municipality (about 30,000 in Port St Johns), many of them headed by children. In 2019, 66.5% of the population in OR Tambo lived below the lower-bound poverty line of (then) R785; in Port St Johns that figure was 73.5%, according to a 2020 overview by the department of co-operative governance & traditional affairs.. Unemployment in 2018 was 37.7%, against a national average of 27.1% in the last quarter of that year. Just 19% of houses in Port St Johns have flush toilets, according to the 2022 census; not even 25% have piped water in their property.
Hunger stalks the province. Last year, an inquiry by the human rights commission found that 116 children in the Eastern Cape had died as a result of severe malnutrition between April 2021 and March 2022. Two hundred and two children were hospitalised in OR Tambo municipality alone — the highest number in the province; 22 died there. In her excellent coverage of the Eastern Cape, Daily Maverick’s Estelle Ellis tells of grandmothers walking 5km to scrounge food for their families at traditional ceremonies; of an infant fed cooldrink powder to keep her alive; of mothers searching dumps for food.
Then there’s Cwebeni. As Ellis reports, the local community forum earlier this year sent a plaintive plea to premier Oscar Mabuyane and Ramaphosa, saying: “The village has not had access to clean water in six years. There are 20 communal taps in the village but none of them have water … Over a hundred families said they did not have enough food. Forty families had no toilets. The terrible condition of the roads leading to and from the village makes it difficult for ambulances and school transport to reach them.”
This is the reality that doesn’t make it into Sona speeches. Cwebeni, Port St Johns, OR Tambo — they’re a microcosm of the morass of failure plaguing the government. Their omission points to the vapidness of Sona. Ramaphosa can parade the Tintswalos all he likes. But that belies the disdain — the indifference — shown towards Gogo Petshana and so many like her. To those who stood in snaking lines to make their vote for the party 30 years ago, believing in the promise of “a better life for all”.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.