Thandi Jolingana, a 46-year-old resident of the 'Taiwan' informal settlement in Cape Town's Khayelitsha township, beams with pride as she shows off the bathroom she built in her corrugated iron shack, after her husband was robbed at gunpoint while using a communal toilet one night. Her home is located on the edge of Khayelitsha, where a private toilet is considered a luxury.
Jolingana works as a nurse's assistant and, with her public servant's salary, is one of the few in the informal settlement who can afford indoor plumbing. Meanwhile, her neighbours make use of a row of outdoor toilets that city authorities supply at the rate of about one cubicle per every 10 households. For Jolingana, the public facilities are a constant reminder of the municipality's broken promises.
The lack of services in the settlement has again come under scrutiny after Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis announced controversial plans to build a wall to keep criminals at bay along the N2 highway, which abuts a series of townships, including Khayelitsha, along with Cape Town International Airport. Jolingana said, 'I'm surprised they've got money for a wall but no money to buy land,' referring to promises to relocate her community to an area where they would be provided with proper housing.
Such is her unhappiness with services in Khayelitsha that she only accepts work in better-equipped, formerly white suburbs via the agency that employs her. When her five-year-old son is ill, she travels more than 20km to Bellville – one such formerly white-only suburb – to avoid long queues and overcrowding at the nearest day hospital. She says, 'At the trauma ward, you will see the people lying on the floor, sitting since yesterday, so I can't take it.'
Mayor Hill-Lewis, a member of the Democratic Alliance (DA) party that is part of the national unity government (GNU), told the city council on January 29 that Cape Town intends to spend 108 million rand ($6.5m) on the crime-fighting initiative known as the N2 Edge project. However, local media reports say the project could actually cost as much as 180 million rand ($10.8m). Besides the wall, the project also includes security cameras, improved lighting, safety barriers for recreational spaces, and metro police patrols, the mayor said.
Khayelitsha and surrounding townships have long been plagued by crime, recently prompting President Cyril Ramaphosa to deploy the army to staunch a wave of gang-related violence in the Western Cape, but residents say authorities only pay attention when middle-class motorists are the victims. One particular incident in December drew national headlines after robbers stabbed a retired white teacher, Karin van Aardt, 64, to death on the notorious N2 road shortly after she and her husband had landed in Cape Town for a holiday from another province. Weeks before, members of parliament had spoken out about the dangers travellers to Cape Town face near the airport.
Source: www.aljazeera.com