No escape from "poverty trap"

Hope that post-apartheid economic growth will translate into a better life for the poor is dying in the expanding squatter camps that ring Johannesburg, South Africa's bustling business centre.

It's been 17 years since Sam Mkhize, 44, travelled to Johannesburg from his rural home in KwaZulu-Natal Province, in the east of the country, looking for work. All he has is a one-room tin shack in the sprawling settlement of Protea South, where raw sewage flows through trenches dug along unpaved streets and there is no electricity or piped water. He shares the space with his wife and nine children. At one end of the room Mkhize's sick wife lies under a threadbare blanket.

Although the family wonders if her sudden stomach ailment is linked to the chicken they found at the dumpsite behind the Protea Shopping Mall, they have no plans to take her to the clinic. "It is not abnormal for people to have stomach ailments here. Most of the food we eat is 'recovered' from the dump. In some cases it causes people to vomit, but we only go to the clinic if we think it is critical," said Mkhize.

A recent government discussion paper on social trends, 'A nation in the making', noted that expenditure on social grants may have helped reduce the number of poor people from 18.5 million in 2000 to 15.4 million in 2004. But it also acknowledged a vast underclass of the unemployed and unemployable, like Mkhize, who are undocumented and unreached by government programmes.

A decade ago he was a street vendor but couldn't make enough money to keep going. "I came here because I wanted to find my own place, a place where I would not pay rent since I have no money," he told IRIN. Unemployment is estimated at around 40 percent.

The poignancy of poverty in South Africa is that often the have-nots are within sight of the haves. In the case of Protea South, the settlement of 3,000 shacks adjoins the leafy suburb of Lenasia, with its large and heavily secured houses, clean streets and modern shopping complex. Most of those who can earn a living in the squatter settlement do so by collecting scrap metal or cardboard, piled into trolleys, and pushed and pulled all the way to the dealers. The less entrepreneurial forage in garbage dumps for food.

For Lenasia residents, Protea South is a source of crime, and there is an inevitable tension between the two communities. "On many occasions the people of Lenasia have openly said they do not want us near them because we are land invaders. Because we are poor, they also see us as criminals who came here to steal from the rich. Our main worry is that such islands of plenty, which accommodate a few, continue to expand at the expense of the poor," said Lucas Mokoena, a member of the Community Policing Forum, a local civic organisation.

According to Marcell Korth, a researcher at the University of Johannesburg-based Centre for Social Development in Africa, despite steady but unsensational economic growth, South Africa's squatter camps are not about to disappear.

Solid economic fundamentals have failed to make a dent in urban poverty, which grew by 5 percent between 1995 and 2000. "Squatter settlements are growing in size and number every day - they are not shrinking because of the growing wave of poverty-inspired internal migration," he told IRIN.

The government is committed to transforming a country disfigured by the apartheid legacy of poverty and inequality - basic services like water, electricity, sanitation and housing have been rolled out over the past decade - but its discussion paper acknowledged the phenomenon of "two economies in one country" and the "exclusion of the majority from the economic mainstream".

Protea South has been largely bypassed by the government's low-cost housing programme, which requires a small financial outlay from the beneficiaries. "The housing schemes are for the rich, not for the poor slum dwellers. When we go there, [the municipal authorities] demand payslips and bank statements, yet they know that no right-thinking person would live in a slum unless they were unemployed," said 50-year-old Olga Liphadzi.

The Utshani Fund, an affiliate of Slums Dwellers International, a worldwide federation of homeless people, represents pretty much the only hope for people in squatter camps to have a decent roof over their heads. Through a savings programme the organisation has turned a number of former shack dwellers into owners of four-roomed houses. "Based on set targets, members contribute small amounts of money until there is enough to build a certain number of houses. It moves in stages until all fund members have got their houses," explained Max Rambau, project coordinator of the savings programme. So far 323 houses have been built in Protea South.

The government's discussion paper, prepared by the Office of the President, accepts that though there has been improvement in the quality of life for the majority of its 45 million citizens, "the backlogs - defined still in terms of race - remain huge". "For those on the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder, there are manifestations of a poverty trap, influenced by such factors as education, gender and geographic location, and reflected in income, access to opportunities and assets - an expression of two economies in one country," the report noted.

For more on poverty: Special report on a decade of democracy - poverty alleviation