Down & Dependent in South Africa

I believe I promised an entry about this awhile back, so in an effort to be true to my word, here it goes. But first, a disclaimer. It’s not that I’m so busy that I can’t get around to updating my blog every week, it’s that I’m trying to keep it fresh and interesting and don’t want to bore you with the mundane details of my fairly boring life.  Some will say, ‘but hey, you live in South Africa. How can that be boring?’ Well, when you live on a farm outside of a small rural town, you only know the greetings and a few other basics in the local language and you don’t really know anybody, life get’s pretty boring. But, with our project finally getting started and only 1 month until I go home for the holidays and return with Christy shortly thereafter, I will survive.

Anyway, building a bit off of one of my previous entry about the world’s hungry, I’d like to take a closer look at how this all plays out in South Africa because this is in fact a very interesting place to implement health and development projects. I’m not saying this because the political situation here is intriguing and nobody is quite sure what will happen now that Mbeki is gone and the path seems clear for Zuma to take over the presidency during next years elections. It’s because the ruling party, the ANC, has promised that it will provide everything to a population that up until the end of Apartheid in 1994 did not have very much. This includes housing, water services and sanitation facilities to name a few. On top of this, because South Africa is a socialist country, most people rely solely on government grants for a livelihood.  These grants include pensions (elderly), orphans and vulnerable children, child (every child born entitles a household to a certain amount a month) and health/disability.

In principal, I do not have a problem with government providing these necessary services and support to their population, the majority of which remain impoverished. The problem as I see it though is twofold: 1) how can government provide these services to all citizens in a timely fashion, particularly to those that live in very remote areas or in the informal settlements, which continue to grow unabated and overwhelm service providers and 2) this situation has created a population of dependents.  Due to these two interrelated issues, everyone basically sits around waiting for government to provide. There is very little initiative to problem solve locally. For instance, instead of trying to build safe latrines, people rather build shoddy, scary toilets (granted, they use local materials which I applaud, but man, these things are terrible) and wait for government to provide the ‘higher quality’ toilets. Simple, inexpensive latrines using locally available materials can easily be constructed by local artisans. Another example is agriculture. When I ask people why they don’t plant backyard gardens, the answer is always a lack of fencing despite the availability of local options like a thorny bush that I found being used to protect a garden in one community I visited. Everyone feels entitled to receive everything from their government and expects the ‘best’ of what can be offered, thereby missing opportunities to problem solve locally.

So, the goal of our project is to see how much we, and by that I mean the participating communities, can overcome these attitudes and conditions and begin to problem solve on our own, with support from various stakeholders where necessary. It’s going to be a great challenge, but as far as I can see, even the smallest successes can translate into enormous benefits for participating communities. If government can see that they cannot continue to simply give and give without community participation and guidance, then maybe they can change their overall attitude towards service provision. It’s a lofty goal, but keep your eyes posted here to see what happens over the course of the next 1, 2, 5 years…