Delivery the key to nation’s success

LET’s face it, South Africa is no welfare state. Its failures fully to deliver affect the matters of old age pensions, keeping hospitals running in an efficient and caring way and getting township schools up to scratch. All these could be rectified by proper service delivery, by ensuring that the machinery of government turns efficiently, that our hospitals are properly staffed and run, that the social services help those for whom they are intended and that municipal services promote the health and comfort of all.

But the most vexed cause of discontent is certainly housing.

The Nelson Mandela Metro is not alone in having witnessed ugly scenes of protest in the past week. And the message needs to be taken extremely seriously.

This week the metro reacted rather disappointingly to the Auditor General’s report on alleged irregularities in their housing programme – which included charges of financial mismanagement and the unsustainability of the metro housing programme.

It is easy to understand the impatience of people10 years into our democracy – seemingly still mired in squalid conditions exacerbated by corruption, carelessness and even the apparent indifference of some officials who simply don’t seem to care.

Huge hopes were raised when President Mbeki visited the Nelson Mandela Metro during last year’s election campaign. He paid personal calls on people in the poorest areas – in Walmer Township, for instance – and saw at first hand how they lived.

Since then, there has indeed been some home-building in the area. But for most of the poorest of the poor in the wider metro, especially those living in sloppily built new houses, nothing has got any better.

Demonstrations in the Metro have highlighted the desperation of families crammed into single rooms in former single men’s quarters, of those confronted with the constant unpleasantness of using communal bucket toilet systems – and of those who have to steal or borrow electricity by running long leads through muddy puddles at huge risk to children in particular.

The resentment among such affected people at the slow rate of delivery in the new South Africa, for which they suffered, worked and voted must not be underestimated. The result of this is demonstrations, which are disruptive, time-consuming and costly to police who have to restore order.

But the real message has to come from the government in concrete evidence that it is getting to grips with eliminating cases of corruption which are one of the major grievances of those who want decent homes. Nobody should be enriched by housing programmes except those for whom the houses are intended. The angry scenes in the Metro and the Southern Cape are distress signals which need urgent and effective attention – in the interests of all South Africans.

SA Rugby a real circus

ALL that is missing in South African rugby is a circus tent – there are certainly more than enough clowns at the moment in the sport’s administration. But if they run short they can always call on the politicians who have helped create the fiasco, to tear our rugby apart.

However, likening the current rugby debacle to a circus is – in truth – unfair to real performers. It is doubtful any circus troupe could conjure up the kind of chaos which the South African Rugby Union has managed to create.

If the situation in our rugby was not so tragic it would be amusing. Grown men scrambling around forming alliances and then breaking them a day later with a man like Saru deputy president André Markgraaff leading from the front. One day he and president Brian van Rooyen are mortal enemies, the next they are bosom buddies. Frankly, the petty politicking and jockeying for positions of power is pathetic.

The players and fans that have made our rugby great do not deserve this circus. Neither do they deserve these clowns.

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Opinion