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DEVELOPMENT-SOUTH AFRICA: “The Reality of Poverty Is Everywhere”

JOHANNESBURG, Oct 16 2006 (IPS) - Twelve years after the demise of apartheid, poverty remains one of the main challenges facing South Africa – although opinions vary about how widespread it is.

Twelve years after the demise of apartheid, poverty remains one of the main challenges facing South Africa – although opinions vary about how widespread it is.

“Poverty has increased in all the racial groups. A lot of people in each of these racial groups experience the same problems,” Hassen Lorgat, in charge of campaigns and communications at the South African National NGO Coalition (SANGOCO), told IPS. This body is headquartered in the financial hub of Johannesburg.

Greg Ruiters of the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University, in the Eastern Cape province, has a slightly different view.

“Absolute poverty is not as bad as it used to be under apartheid,” he said in an interview with IPS. But,”Relative poverty between the rich and poor is increasing. This is worrying.”

The Congress of South African Trade Unions links poverty to joblessness.

“Unemployment, whether you take the strict figure of 27 percent which excludes those too discouraged to look for work, or the more realistic expanded definition of 41 percent, is still far too high,” Bheki Ntshalintshali, deputy general secretary of the organisation, told the South African Municipal Workers Union in the coastal city of Port Elizabeth this August.

“Too many of our families and communities suffer the misery of grinding poverty simply because there are no jobs to bring in money to put food on the table.”

Poverty levels also result from the lingering effects of institutionalised segregation, which locked black South Africans out of the economy to a large degree.

“I don’t think the situation has changed,” Cathy Gush, director of the Centre for Social Development at Rhodes University, told IPS. “From experience in the communities we work in, the situation hasn’t improved.”

A discussion document, the ‘Macro-Social Report’, published by government in June, also highlights the challenges that lie ahead in helping majority blacks to escape poverty.

“While there has been a significant and rapid advance of Africans into and within the middle strata, the reality is that the population belonging to the strata among Africans is 7.8 percent, while it is 15.6 percent for coloureds (mixed race), 20.7 percent for Indians and 33 percent for whites,” the report notes.

Blacks make up 78 percent of South Africa’s population of 46.9 million people, whites 9.6 percent, coloureds 8.9 percent and Indians 2.5 percent, according to official statistics.

The factors underpinning poverty in South Africa and other parts of the world will come under the spotlight Tuesday, during the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

In the run up to this commemorative day, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), an umbrella organisation for a wide variety of civic groups, organised a campaign dubbed ‘Stand Up Against Poverty’, which aimed to set a world record for the number of people physically standing up against poverty at the same time from Sunday, Oct. 15 to Monday, Oct. 16.

Laura de Lange is one of those who supported the GCAP initiative, helping to rally people behind it in South Africa.

“I am a 16-year old white, middle class female. You may not find that relevant but it is sad how it affects my daily life,” de Lange told IPS, noting that she saw poverty every day.

“When I climb into my parents’ car and drive to school, when I walk to the nearest coffee shop with my friends, when I do community outreach work – I see people living in the pieces of open ground where the wealthy developers have not built yet,” said the student at Sutherland High School in Centurion, near the capital of Pretoria.

“I see their houses made from plastic and rubbish. I hear their soft talking or animated voices as they wait for their turn to get soup from the big can. I feel their rough hands as I hand over the plastic cup filled with soup that probably means they will live a little longer,” she added.

“And I know this has to stop.”

Her words were echoed by another campaigner, 16-year-old Sarita Pillay.

“It’s not easy to simply close your eyes when the reality of poverty is everywhere. A child and mother begging at the side of a BMW at a robot (traffic light) is a common occurrence in South Africa,” said the pupil from Sagewood College in Midrand, near Johannesburg.

“It’s unfair that we live in a country where a person living in a shack and barely making ends meet can live a few kilometres away from a person living in a mansion with three cars,” she added.

“Poverty shows an unequal distribution of the world’s resources, when it has been proven that it is an issue which can be addressed. The problem of poverty has to be tackled head on and not brushed aside.”

Noziphozonke Hlophe, a 21-year old volunteer coordinator at the Oaktree Foundation, an NGO, supported the ‘Stand Up Against Poverty’ initiative in the Indian Ocean port city of Durban.

“We want to tell the government, which has made promises under the United Nations Millennium Development Goals to halve poverty by 2015, to honour its pledges. The government is moving very slowly,” she told IPS.

SANGOCO’s Lorgat believes that business needs to play a bigger part in poverty alleviation efforts.

“I think the government has tried to reduce poverty. But the government in itself is not as strong as the private sector. The private sector is failing the nation,” he said. “The government must set conditions to ensure that the private sector delivers.”

Gush agrees that social benefits, such as the 25-dollar grant that government allocates to needy children each month, are making a difference in the lives of the poor. But she also has reservations on this score.

“The problem is that sometimes people abuse the grant by buying alcohol with the money. Reliance on grants also kills initiative,” she said.

“I’m not saying that grants are bad. But they don’t generate initiative to address poverty. It causes dependency syndrome.”

In his budget speech in February, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel said government was paying out 9.3 billion dollars a year, 3.4 percent of gross domestic product, to more than 10 million beneficiaries. “Social grants contribute more than half of the income of the poorest 20 percent of households, and have doubled in real terms over the past five years,” he stated.

Speakers at a conference held last week near Johannesburg also noted that cash transfers were shown to have improved the lives of beneficiaries, and the state of local economies. The meeting was organised by Oxfam Great Britain, the Southern African Regional Poverty Network – a non-profit based in Pretoria – and the Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme, This Johannesburg-based initiative receives support from the British and Australian governments.

Gush also claims that greater coordination amongst government departments is essential to fighting poverty more effectively.

“Different departments such as education, labour (and) health are working independently. There’s no holistic approach of addressing the problems by all the…departments coming together,” she noted.