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From racial to class apartheid: South Africa's frustrating decade of freedom

Monthly Review, March, 2004 by Patrick Bond

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Fourth, virtually all local governments turned to a 100 percent cost recovery policy during the late 1990s, at the urging of the central government and the World Bank, largely to prepare for a wave of water and waste commercialization. Attempts to recover costs from poor communities inflict hardships on the most vulnerable members of society, especially women and those with HIV positive family members susceptible to water-borne diseases and opportunistic AIDS infections. Although water and sanitation privatization applies to only 5 percent of all municipalities, the South African pilot projects run by the world's biggest water companies (Biwater, Suez, and Saur) have resulted in services that are overpriced and a public that is underserved. Contracts have been renegotiated to raise rates because of insufficient profits; services have not been extended to most poor people; many low-income residents have been disconnected; prepaid water meters have been widely installed; and sanitation has been substandard. Across South Africa, the dogma of 100-percent-cost-recovery led to the continent's worst-ever cholera outbreak, catalyzed by mass disconnections of rural residents in August 2000.

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As a result of this consistent failure to deliver, alienation and discontent are obviously increasing. According to a late-2002 survey conducted by the liberal Institute for Democracy in South Africa, the number of black people who believe life was better under the apartheid regime is growing. Tragically, more than 60 percent of all South Africans polled said the country was better run during white minority rule, only one in ten people believed their elected representatives were interested in their needs, and fewer than one in three felt the current government was more trustworthy than the apartheid regime. Black people were only slightly more positive than white and mixed-race groups about the government, with 38 percent deeming it more trustworthy than before. Only 24 percent of black South Africans agreed with the proposition that the current government is less corrupt than the apartheid regime.

For the 10 percent or so wealthiest whites and a scattering of rich blacks who enjoy segregation and insulation from the vast majority, lifestyles remain at the highest level in the world. This is evident to any visitor to the slightly-integrated suburbs of South African cities. Racial apartheid was always explicitly manifested in residential segregation, and after liberation in 1994, Pretoria adopted World Bank advice that included an avoidance of public housing (virtually no new municipal or even cooperatively-owned units have been constructed), smaller housing subsidies than were necessary, and much greater reliance upon banks and commercial developers instead of state and community-driven development. The privatization of housing is, indeed, one of the most terrible ironies of post-apartheid South Africa, not least because the man taking advice from the World Bank, Joe Slovo, was chair of the SACP. (Slovo died of cancer soon thereafter and his main ANC bureaucrat, who was responsible for designing the policy, now works for a World Bank subsidiary.)

From racial to class apartheid: South Africa's frustrating decade of freedom

Monthly Review, March, 2004 by Patrick Bond

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