A few days ago I went to KTC, in Nyanga, to check up on the City of Cape Town's promise to reinstate portaloo sanitation services after the community had lived for ten days with overflowing toilets.
What was planned as a relatively brief inspection turned into a marathon session as members of the community led me from one desperate situation to another.
The conditions in which these citizens live are not fit for animals. They cannot escape because they are trapped in the cycle of poverty. As if things weren't already bad enough, the economic impact of the Covid pandemic has squeezed them to the point of suffocation.
Then the City of Cape Town didn't bother to re-contract the company collecting and cleaning residents' portable toilets... leaving them to drown in their own waste. Another indignity, heaped on indignity.
This kind of deprivation leads people to feel they have nothing left to lose. Their hopelessness is easily manipulated by agents provocateurs as witnessed with the looting in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.
I met a young orphaned brother & sister living in a makeshift shelter raising a two-year-old boy. Hungry, cold, lost. They need an emergency structure, and should be receiving a Basic Income Grant. But government has been dragging its feet on implementing such a grant for more than 20 years.
I met a 28-year-old man who has been so desperate for food that he has slaughtered dogs and cats to eat. His was a brutal story of hunger and destitution. He needs a Basic Income Grant. He can't understand how government can say it is unaffordable, while Billions of Rands are looted by corrupt politicians and officials.
I met a family of 11 people living in one shack. Children sleep on the floor. The elder in the home is a double amputee who hasn't been assisted with prosthetics and navigates the informal settlement on his knees. The only household income is his disability grant. His wife can't get a social grant without an ID, but IDs cost R170!
The inequality in our society is not sustainable. The suffering and neglect of good people, whose only "crime" is to be poor, shames us all.
Comments