Cape Town, South Africa – Thandi Jolingana, 46, beams with pride as she shows off the bathroom she built in her corrugated iron shack, after her husband was robbed at gunpoint one night while using a communal toilet. Jolingana lives in a shantytown known as Taiwan on the edge of Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township – a place where a private toilet is considered a luxury.
“I’m a rich girl,” she jokes, pointing out that she could be living more comfortably if she did not have to financially support several unemployed relatives in addition to her two children. She 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.
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 deter criminals along the N2 highway, which abuts a series of townships, including Cape Town International Airport. “I’m surprised they’ve got money for a wall but no money to buy land,” Jolingana said, referring to promises to relocate her community to an area with proper housing.
Jolingana is so dissatisfied with services in Khayelitsha that she only accepts work in better-equipped, formerly white suburbs through her employment agency. When her five-year-old son is ill, she travels over 20km to Bellville – one such formerly white-only suburb – to avoid long queues and overcrowding at the nearest day hospital. “At the trauma ward, you will see people lying on the floor, sitting since yesterday, so I can’t take it,” she says.
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 indicate the project could actually cost up to 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.
Khayelitsha and surrounding townships have long been plagued by crime, recently prompting President Cyril Ramaphosa to deploy the army to curb a wave of gang-related violence in the Western Cape, but residents allege that authorities only pay attention when middle-class motorists are victimized. Residents argue that the city’s funds should be used to address such core issues rather than building a costly wall.
Source: www.aljazeera.com