Sara Mampane has been waiting for the African National Congress (ANC) to fulfil its promise of a new home -- what she calls a "proper house," where the only corrugated iron is on the roof and the walls are made of brick -- since the party came to power with the collapse of apartheid 13 years ago.
The 43-year-old mother of three watched from her rickety two-room shack with no electricity in a squatter camp on the edge of Mamelodi township as others moved to one of the new box houses built by the government. She was content to wait her turn and be grateful for what did arrive, principally access to clean water and a health clinic for her children. But her patience snapped last month when men in red boiler suits came to demolish her home.
The feared "red ants" descended on the camp to remove the thousands of illegally built corrugated iron shacks that have spread out from the edge of the township in recent years. The residents were so incensed that they stoned one of the men to death and injured others, and set fire to four trucks.
"They promised me a house but they say wait, wait, wait," Mampane said. "So I am waiting. But it is not right to come and knock down the house I have before they build me a new one. This is what we expected from apartheid, not from our own government. I think they have forgotten us."
Weeks of on-and-off rioting in Mamelodi over the demolitions and the lack of services have rekindled memories of the township as a hotbed of protest against the apartheid regime two decades ago.
Last week hundreds of angry protesters threw up barricades and burned tires in clashes with police. Last month the residents set fire to local council offices.
The disturbances are not limited to Mamelodi. Hundreds of similar protests have spread across South Africa, fueled by anger at the slow pace of change.
Thirteen years after the end of apartheid, the poverty gap in South Africa remains among the largest in the world -- second only to Brazil by some measurements. More than 40 percent of South Africans live on less than 8 rand (US$1.14) a day. More than one third of the working-age population is unemployed.
But it is the evident wealth of others, mostly white but including a small newly enriched black elite, that has contributed to bitter divisions within the ANC over the government's economic strategy. The issue is expected to dominate a party conference this week.
TIME BOMB
Some in the ANC are warning that the wealth gap is a time bomb for the country and the party, which is losing touch with the mass of its voters and "betraying the national democratic revolution" with too much focus on creating a liberal business climate.
Trade unions are leading the attack on economic priorities they say have principally benefited the emerging black elite and the old white one at the expense of the poor.
"It's like a doctor saying an operation has been successful when the patient is dead," Zwelinzima Vavi, secretary general of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, a partner in the ruling alliance with the ANC, told a rally in the Free State this month.
Few deny that the ANC has taken significant strides toward reducing poverty. According to figures released last week, the government has built more than 2 million new homes since 1994, although the numbers of people living in squatter camps has risen by half over the same period.
About 85 percent of households have access to fresh water, up from 61 percent when the ANC came to power. More than 71 percent have inside toilets attached to the sewage system, up from about 50 percent. More than 4 million homes have been connected to mains electricity over the same period, although the price of power has quadrupled and many people have been cut off because they cannot pay the bills.
Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi has said that the protests reflect the government's successes.
"As we make progress in some municipalities, the residents in other municipalities become impatient: They expect their public representatives to deliver in the same way as progress is made in other municipalities," he told a UN news agency.
The government's latest strategy, the accelerated and shared growth initiative, seeks to halve poverty and unemployment by 2014 by continuing the significant economic growth of recent years and creating millions of new jobs.
Charles Meth, a respected researcher on poverty at Cape Town University, says the government is working on "over-optimistic" predictions, and that though economic growth is crucial it will take decades to eradicate endemic poverty.
"The treasury is driving an agenda that says growth is going to rescue us," Meth says. "It's nonsense."
He continued: "Within the state there's a huge amount of tension over poverty policy. On the one hand you've got the minister of social development, Zola Skweyiya, very sensibly saying this is not going to be enough and we have to have some kind of basic grant for those people who are going to be left out by these anti-poverty policies and growth policies that you're looking at. The Cabinet rounds on him and says `bollocks.'"
The government concedes that though poverty has decreased since 2000, the gap between rich and poor has not narrowed.
FAULT LINE
The poor can see it only too well. Where the fault line between the haves and the have nots once ran almost exclusively along racial lines, the ANC's policy of black economic empowerment has created a new class of super-rich blacks driving the most expensive cars and living in mansions with servants and swimming pools. Many of the new elite have links to the ruling party.
The policy's defenders say that it is forcing a shift in economic power to the black majority that will trickle down to the poor. Some of its critics say that all too often blacks have merely become the public face of white interests.
Smuts Ngonyama, a former spokesman for President Thabo Mbeki, when asked to explain why he received shares in a private company while working for the government, said he did not join the struggle against apartheid to remain poor.
Tokyo Sexwale, one of the few ANC leaders to have declared he is running to succeed Mbeki, has also been forced to defend his extraordinary accumulation of wealth.
The unions and the ANC's left have an uphill struggle to change the policy at this week's party conference. The leadership wants an endorsement of a document that Johannesburg's Centre for Policy Studies has described as so "bland, uncritical and vague" that it leaves the impression that the ANC "just doesn't care for the poor and socially marginalized groups."
But Max Sisulu, one of the party's economic policy strategists, says the ANC is not disturbed by the criticism.
"We are not worried about differences. We welcome them," he says. "We can only benefit from differences."
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US