In the satellite image, Tyefu police station looks as remote and undistinguished as an abandoned farmstead, a modest block and a few outbuildings beside a dirt road on the parched-looking crest of a hill rising steeply from a wooded ravine and the snaking beginnings of the Kwanqwelo River.
For all its appearance as a trifling and forgettable outpost of state in the rural backwaters of the Eastern Cape – in the Peddie district, some 40km north-east of Grahamstown – to the people of the nearby villages of Kwa Ndwayana, Qamnyana and Ndlambe, Tyefu police station represents much more than the picture from space could possibly convey.
Last Sunday, they showed how much it meant to them – and how strongly they felt about the contemptuous disregard they had been shown in return.
An angry crowd descended on this desolate symbol of rickety governance and lacklustre law and order, harangued the six occupants about how ‘useless’ and ‘unreliable’ they were, padlocked the officers inside, and left. There was talk of damage to property – though only a flagpole has been mentioned.
By the early hours of Monday morning, the local police had, for once, bestirred themselves, arresting four suspects, two men and two women between 28 and 62. They were charged with public violence and malicious damage to property, and will also apparently be charged with contravening disaster management regulations governing Level 3 of the Covid-19 lockdown.
The four were let out on bail after a brief court appearance, and are due back in the dock on 18 February.
That’s unlikely to be end of it.
A News24 report quoted a protester, ‘who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal’, as saying that that slow response times and excuses from the police for the unavailability of vehicles from local police stations had angered residents.
‘Crime is rife here in Kwa Ndwayana, Qamnyana and Dlambe villages,’ he said. ‘Our police officers, who are paid with our public money, doze off and leave us to fight criminals ourselves. Enough is enough. Every weekend there is an incident here, armed robberies are out of control. We are tired of useless and unreliable police officers.’
Quality of life
My interest in this far-away drama was piqued by the release a few days later of the latest Quality of Life (QOLI) Index by the Centre for Risk Analysis (CRA) at the Institute of Race Relations.
Devised in 2017, the QOLI Index enables users to benchmark South Africa’s progress in improving the quality of life of its residents, and to draw comparisons between South Africa’s provinces as well as the different race groups.
It calibrates the following 10 weighted indicators as a score of between 0 and 10: the matric pass rate, unemployment (on the expanded definition), monthly spending of R10 000 or more, homeownership (houses owned but not yet paid off), access to piped water, electricity for cooking, and basic sanitation, irregular or no waste removal, medical aid coverage and the murder rate.
What it reveals is a vivid picture of how South Africans live.
Here’s a quick summary:
- The national average is 5.7
- The best quality of life is in the Western Cape (6.5)
- Gauteng is second (6.4)
- The worst quality of life is in the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga (they tie at 5.0)
- White South Africans have the highest standard of living (7.8 when the murder rate is excluded, or, including the murder rate, 7.7)
- Coloured South Africans score (6.5, 6.5)
- Indian South Africans score (7.3, 7.2)
- Black South Africans score (5.3, 5.4)
The first stand-out feature, notes CRA analyst Gerbrandt van Heerden, is ‘a clear urban/rural split … with Gauteng and the Western Cape being the only two provinces where a relatively high standard of living is attainable’.
The numbers show that people in the Western Cape ‘are four times more likely to spend more than R10 000 per month and twelve times more likely to service a bond than those in Limpopo. A quarter of people in Gauteng have medical aid coverage, compared to just a tenth of the populations of the Eastern Cape and Limpopo.’
The second is the sharp racial disparity in quality of life, with the majority of South Africans still scoring low two and a half decades after the end of apartheid.
‘Policy environment’
Notes Van Heerden: ‘This is indicative of a policy environment that has inhibited investment-led economic growth, and, therefore, job opportunities and wealth creation.
‘South Africa continues to battle deep inequalities between the different races and the nine provinces. Unless prospects improve, civil unrest remains a real threat and poorer provinces risk losing their young and skilled residents to better-performing regions. Only a policy environment conducive to investment and economic growth can lead to a better quality of life for all.’
Considering the events in the Peddie district last weekend, let’s look a little closer at the Eastern Cape.
Van Heerden writes that, based on the expanded definition, ‘the majority of people in the Eastern Cape are unemployed’ (52.8%, giving the province a QOLI score of 4.7 against the national score of 5.8).
This is nearly twice the unemployment rate in the neighbouring province of the Western Cape (27.3%), the only province in the country with a rate below 30%.
Just 9.8% of Eastern Cape households earn R10 000 or more (compared to the Western Cape’s 35.9%).
It is no surprise then that the number of households living in houses being paid off to a bank or financial institution (an indication of people who are in a position to service a bond) follows a similar pattern.
The Western Cape is the best-performing province, with 14.5% of households living in homes under mortgage (Gauteng performs second-best with a proportion of 10.5%). While Limpopo is the worst-performing province, with a proportion of only 1.2%, the Eastern Cape is the next poorest performer, with 3.1%
The availability of water through clean and convenient means is a good measure of service delivery and contributes to the overall assessment of the quality of life in various areas, Van Heerden points out.
Here, again, the Western Cape is the best-performing province, with 98.5% of households having access to piped water, followed by Gauteng with 97.6%. Limpopo is the worst-performing province, with a proportion of 70.1%, and the Eastern Cape once again is the next poorest performer, with 73.9%.
Nub of a protest
Interestingly, water was the nub of a protest in the Peddie district last July.
According to a Mail & Guardian report, villagers said they had not had a reliable source of water for up to 10 years.
The report quoted 30-year-old Athini Ngxumza of the Umtapo Centre as saying: ‘We have sent numerous letters and emails. No communication, just being brushed off like we are nothing.’ The Umtapo Centre was founded four years before Ngxumza was born – to fight for peace, justice and human rights under apartheid.
It is somewhat ironic, then, that as last year’s protesters held up ‘bottles of brown water from their taps and rivers … to show the futility of washing their hands [during the lockdown] with the dirty liquid’, they attracted a swift response from the police, who fired rubber bullets at them, and arrested two.
Well, a luta continua … though vitória is not wholly certa, it would seem.
There will, of course, be those who will find a perverse justification in South Africa’s quality-of-life profile for the very policies that actually sustain the disparities.
They will say that race is the source of the problem, and must be the source of the solution, and they will argue that a redistribution of assets and opportunities away from the haves is the answer to reducing the sum of have-nots.
One can appreciate the appeal of this logic, which is essentially the logic of morality. Or is it?
Two decades ago it might have merited consideration, but in 2021 we are in a position to judge the morality of persisting with policies that not only demonstrably fail to help the poor, jobless and poorly educated, but also actively undermine their efforts to escape poverty – and, increasingly, their hopes of ever succeeding.
Far from being reformed, these policies are only being intensified, from BEE and empowerment edicts to labour regulations and expropriation without compensation. All of them deter investment, stifle enterprise and entrepreneurialism, erode confidence and hobble the economy.
As fellow Daily Friend writer Terence Corrigan put it on Friday: ‘If the government is serious about the participation of the hitherto (and currently) excluded in the economy, it needs to recognise that this will not be possible without a growing economy. For this, it must acknowledge the indispensability of every entrepreneur and the imperative of seeing more emerge – irrespective of their demographics. There is no other possibility of expanding the pool of employment and business opportunities.’
‘Ensuring continuing exclusion’
He added: ‘Existing empowerment policy will, if anything, make this impossible. There is an irony in this: in seeking, at least nominally, to promote inclusion, it is ensuring continuing exclusion.’
At the heart of it is the same contemptuous disregard for people’s needs and ambitions – and their rights to choose, decide for themselves and judge what’s best –that the villagers of Kwa Ndwayana, Qamnyana and Ndlambe objected to so forcefully last weekend.
As the IRR pointed out in a statement on Friday, ‘(it) is precisely because of the reality that communities are more invested in their own safety than a remote government can possibly be that the IRR takes the unequivocal stance that all policing must be community-centred rather than government-centred. Where government failures have cost lives, communities must be empowered to save lives’.
A responsive government willing to face reality squarely, and to acknowledge the moral burden of adjusting its conduct accordingly, would have no difficulty in taking the IRR’s Community Safety Charter seriously and end cadre and crony appointments in the police, give citizens the right to elect station commanders – and fire them if they fail to perform – and, in a country with shockingly high levels of violent crime, make sure that the police service is provided with only the best expertise, and staffed by proficient, incorruptible officers.
The people of the Peddie district have every reason to expect nothing less, and demonstrated as much last weekend.
Their storming of the Tyefu police station did not shake the country, but it has a greater South African meaning.
What it symbolises is wilful error of national proportions – and the risk less of revolution than unchecked decline.
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