COLUMN ONE : High Hopes, High Stakes in S. Africa : Will the long-awaited arrival of black rule meet the great expectations in the townships? The ANC proposes an ambitious agenda of changes, but some fear it is little more than a wish list.

As the stench of raw sewage wafts over her home, Grace Phaka knows exactly what she wants when the long-dreamed-for day of liberation finally arrives here on the edge of South Africa’s oldest black township.

“A real toilet,” she said firmly. Then she points to the outdoor tap that she and her husband share with 20 other families. “And clean water.”

Their house is a two-room shanty with no windows, across from a weed-filled graveyard used as a trash heap and dumping ground for outhouses. “We want to leave the shack and get proper housing,” she declared.

Then there’s her hope of finding a job, learning to read, getting electricity, leaving this grim squatter camp and finding a better life.

“There’s no clinic, there’s no school,” the shy 31-year-old woman added softly. “Is that possible?”

The possibilities--and more importantly, the needs--seem endless here in Alex, as Johannesburg’s only official township is called. An estimated 350,000 blacks are crammed into a kilometer-square warren of tiny homes and hovels, many living in medieval squalor, less than a mile from the city’s most opulent white suburbs.

Hidden from whites behind an imposing fence dubbed the “Berlin Wall,” violent crime and unemployment are soaring. Tuberculosis and other infectious diseases are endemic. Schooling has largely collapsed, and hundreds of families have lost loved ones to factional fighting in a neighborhood so bloody it is called “Beirut.”

Alex is a microcosm of black South Africa, so what happens here will be key to judging the success or failure of the policies of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress if, as expected, that party sweeps the national and provincial elections next week to become the first black-led government in the nation’s troubled history.

Many blacks have great expectations, while many whites have great fears. Balancing the two may be Mandela’s biggest challenge, especially since the odds for success, some say, are slim.

The ANC plans an ambitious program of reconstruction and development aimed at areas such as Alex. Over the next five years, according to the latest draft of a still-evolving agenda, the ANC promises to build at least 1 million houses with sanitary facilities, electrify 2.5 million homes, create 2.5 million jobs in a public works program, and provide children with free health care and 10 years of free compulsory primary schooling, among other pledges.

Trevor Manuel, the ANC’s chief economist, puts the cost of the five-year program at about $11.5 billion, with a target of $2.6 billion the first year. But he promises the money will come from squeezing savings and redirecting existing allocations in the $34-billion annual budget rather than from raising taxes or borrowing money.

“You don’t need higher taxes,” he said. “You don’t need an increased budget. You need far greater efficiency in the way money is spent.”

Manuel argues, for example, that the new government can slash the $3.1-billion defense budget. Other savings can be found, he said, by consolidating the 14 education departments set up under apartheid.

“You need a single education department,” he said.

Another target, he said, is $1.1 billion in what he scorns as “apartheid infrastructure,” including lavish embassies maintained in London and Paris by the now-defunct homeland of Bophuthatswana.

“We don’t say we can solve all this overnight,” Manuel added. “But these are reasonable targets.”

Many economists, business people and diplomats, however, are dubious. Even ANC supporters fear that the program is more a wish list of social goals than a hard outline of budgets and schedules.

“The price tags are something short of meaningless,” said a sympathetic Western economist here who has studied the ANC proposals. “It’s difficult to see how all this is going to happen, partly because the ANC has not spelled out how it’s going to happen. . . . There is no real economic data on what each program will cost, let alone whether it can be carried out.”

Skeptics warn that much of the promised post-apartheid savings may be as elusive as the so-called peace dividend has been in the United States since the end of the Cold War.

Defense cuts here, for example, will be partly offset by training, outfitting and deployment of the new 4,500-member National Peacekeeping Force, the new army of former black guerrillas and South African soldiers.

And efficiencies may be elusive. For example, the new country will have nine provinces, not four, so an infrastructure to support new capitals and departments will be required.

The ANC has repeatedly pledged to pay salaries and pensions for the 1.7 million civil servants, as well as create 2.5 million jobs. Then there’s the party’s commitment to affirmative action. So cutting payrolls will not be easy.

Derek Keys, the finance minister in the lame-duck government of President Frederik W. de Klerk, warns that the ANC program is “not responsible” and can’t be achieved in less than 10 to 15 years. The Development Bank of Southern Africa has given a similar assessment.

“There certainly will be a great many very disappointed people,” Keys said. “The delivery system will not be adequate.”

Last year, for example, the government built about 20,000 low-cost homes--far fewer than its budget called for--blaming violence in the townships. Building 10 times that number each year will not be easy, even if peace breaks out. For one thing, not enough contractors and builders exist in the townships today.

Electricity may be the easiest service to deliver. The country has a surplus, and Eskom, the self-financed national utility, has said providing power to 2.5 million homes is possible providing it can raise the money on international markets. An Eskom official has already moved to London to seek financing.

And the ANC hopes that millions of blacks who protested apartheid by refusing to pay taxes or for such services as electricity will pay their fair share. But economists warn that projecting spending on improved tax collection is a dubious way to plan.

Moreover, there is the harder question of how quickly an untested ANC government, largely led by people who spent decades in exile or prison, can master the sheer morass of bureaucratic and economic challenges that lie ahead.

ANC officials insist that the promises can--and will--be kept to match fast-rising expectations. Apartheid’s systematic racial segregation in everything from education to employment has left 17 million people, in a population of 40 million, in extreme poverty. An estimated 12 million have no access to clean drinking water, 7 million are homeless, and millions more live without decent schools, basic health care or real jobs.

“We have to be able to deliver in a significant way,” said Willie Hofmeyr, an ANC strategist. “If, after five years (when another election will be held), we have empty hands and broken promises, we’ll have very big problems from the left.”

ANC information chief Pallo Jordan agreed. “The price of failure would be a curse to South Africa. If you can’t place goods of freedom in the form of housing and so on before the people, you won’t have stability. In the absence of stability, you jeopardize democracy,” he said.

But Eugene Nyati, an analyst at the independent Center for African Studies here, believes that the ANC will win a lengthy honeymoon after it takes office. He says most poor blacks are voting for liberation, not instant material goods.

“This election is not about issues,” he said. “It’s about symbolism, history and race.”

But some issues may cause problems. Land is especially sensitive.

Whites have forced blacks from their homes and land since colonial times. The evictions accelerated after 1948, when the National Party invented apartheid. Millions of families were dumped in desolate reservations called homelands. Others were bulldozed out of their homes and trucked to crowded townships under a policy that removed “black spots” from “white areas.”

Whites now control 87% of the land, including farms that produce nearly all the food. The ANC has taken pains to reassure nervous whites that their property is safe.

“No one’s land will be forcibly taken away from them,” said Jay Naidoo, who is in charge of the ANC reconstruction plan.

But the ANC also promises to redistribute 30% of the agricultural land to the dispossessed within five years. Land courts will adjudicate claims for those displaced under apartheid, government land will be distributed, and other property will be bought at market value, Naidoo said.

Aninka Claasen, a land policy expert formerly with the Center for Applied Legal Studies here, says the program is unworkable. A last-minute change in the new constitution guarantees rights of existing land owners and limits legal expropriation of land only to such public uses as roads, dams and the like.

“How do you not take away anyone’s land, yet redistribute a third of the land?” she asked. “It’s a contradiction. . . . The first expropriation of land will be challenged as unconstitutional.”

Other contradictions abound. Once famed for its Communist-inspired populist rhetoric, the ANC’s official goal now is a Keynesian free-market economy with a strong state role, not unlike social democratic governments in Western Europe.

And as the election nears, Mandela, the former Marxist revolutionary, has publicly pleaded with the country’s leftist trade unions--who are among his most fervent backers--to resist strikes and other militant job actions that helped propel him to power.

At an appearance Friday at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the world’s 10th largest, Mandela pledged to “restore economic stability” after the election. He promised it would be built on “sound market principles,” with development driven by economic growth and an open door to foreign investment.

“If you look at our program, there’s not a single sentence about nationalization,” Mandela said, hoping to reassure nervous business executives and investors here and abroad.

Actually, the 147-page ANC plan does refer to nationalization as one of several potential ways to “increase the public sector in strategic areas.” But Manuel and other top ANC leaders insist that the ANC has no plans to take over lucrative gold and diamond mines, or other industries.

High finance, of course, is a long way from the hard times and tin-topped shanties of Alex. Here, hidden in a hollow close by the richest residential belt in all Africa, the concerns are far more basic.

Half the adults do not have jobs, so knots of men spend their days drinking beer and playing checkers. Most children never attend the overcrowded schools, which usually lack books and equipment. The poorest area is the graveside squatter camp known as Stjwetla, where hovels are jammed together in a patchwork of packing crates, tin and broken bricks.

In one shack, 55-year-old Sina Mogolapa stood in a torn housedress under a low tin ceiling with plastic bags jammed in cracks to keep out the rain. The tin house is an oven in summer, a freezer in winter. The front room has a grate but no chimney, so it fills with smoke if Mogolapa lights a fire.

There is no electricity, but a small TV is wired to a car battery. One daughter works, and another goes to school. It costs nearly $15, a fortune here, to take a taxi to the nearest medical clinic.

“We haven’t got any money,” Mogolapa said. “Nothing, really.”

But her hopes are high as she prepares to vote for the first time next week.

“Perhaps after the elections we will see some changes,” she said with a smile. “Perhaps we’ll see a little help from the ANC.”