When they talk of their government's failure, South Africans in the tangle of shacks and narrow lanes that is Alexandra point to an unfinished modern brick and steel building near the edge of the township.
The billboard out front says that the Mandela Interpretation Center should have been completed two years ago.
Neighbors gossip that corrupt officials stole money for the center.
PHOTO: AP
Julian Baskin, director of a government project to redevelop Alexandra, says the real story is that only 4 million rand (US$525,000) was set aside four years ago for a museum that has since grown to include space for cultural and social activities. Now the project is stalled as bureaucrats try to determine the real costs and how to pay for them.
The project is in many ways a metaphor for South Africa: Expectations ballooning beyond budgets, overoptimistic planning and corruption have combined to slow delivery of the “better life for all” the African National Congress (ANC) promised during the campaign for South Africa’s first all-race election 14 years ago.
Impatience with successive ANC governments since also has fed anger against immigrants who have crowded along with South Africans into Alexandra and other poorest of the poor neighborhoods.
“We don’t have houses, we don’t have jobs, we don’t have anything,” said Cyril Mthembu, a 42-year-old unemployed father of three who has lived in Alexandra for 28 years. “So, we are fighting over the little we have.”
Seven years ago, South African President Thabo Mbeki launched an ambitious program to transform Alexandra, a squalid 2.5km² just across a highway from some of the most expensive homes and shops in Johannesburg.
Originally, the budget was estimated at 1.3 billion rand. Baskin thinks the final bill will be nearly triple that.
The project is due to be completed in two years.
Trees have been planted, schools, clinics and police stations renovated. Baskin said much of what’s been done so far is hard to see — new sewer systems, reservoirs and other infrastructure that will make new homes possible.
Homes have been built for some 10,000 households, but Baskin acknowledged “there are huge numbers of people still living in shacks” and that two more years won’t be nearly enough to address all of Alexandra’s problems.
Baskin and his staff of about 30 ran into problems quickly. For instance, courts have said that until legal wrangles over land ownership are settled, they can’t touch the homes of some of Alexandra’s oldest residents, the inhabitants of the neighborhood’s original 6,000 houses.
Those older residents, many living in dilapidated homes, have watched shack-dwelling neighbors move to new houses and apartments — taking with them rent they once paid for backyard shacks.
Mbeki is credited with spurring growth in South Africa with free market policies, but the boom has yet to trickle down. Unemployment is more than 20 percent and a downturn due in part to rising global food and fuel prices — and a dire electricity shortage resulting from poor planning — will make it even harder to deliver.
After several years of growth of about 5 percent, the IMF predicts growth this year for South Africa at just 3.8 percent and cautions even that may be too optimistic.
When apartheid ended in 1994, the ANC estimated it needed 3 million homes.
South African Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu told parliament earlier this year that 2.6 million homes had been built since 1994. But with population growth, migration to the cities and other factors, the housing backlog stands at 2.1 million.
Gains have been slow and Stephen Gelb, an economist at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, said the focus on simply improving conditions in a nation where more than half the population is poor addresses only part of the problem.
Education can give the poor a chance to improve their own lives, Gelb said.
But in South Africa, most blacks are the product of an apartheid system meant to ensure they did not gain the skills to compete with whites, with black schools under-equipped and staffed with teachers who in some cases never finished school themselves.
The government has not done enough to reverse that legacy, Gelb said.
“What people are looking for is not a handout but something that points the way to the future,” he said.
Simon Maunga, a 74-year-old minister and lifelong Alexandra resident, said that however daunting the challenge may seem, there is no excuse for the despair and violence that has shaken his home township. He raised 11 children in Alexandra, though none live there now. All finished high school and two went on to university.
“People should be more patient,” he said.
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