Nonpayment for Basic Services Hobbles S. Africa

In April, a year after he cast his vote in this nation’s first multiracial election, Remigius Maleke celebrated his part in the new democracy with an unusual act of patriotism.

He began to pay his bills.

Like most other blacks in this rural township and across South Africa, the 44-year-old teacher had refused for almost a decade to pay for electricity, water, sewers or other basic services, honoring boycotts and strikes called by liberation groups to bring down the apartheid regime.

“It was part of our struggle for freedom,” Maleke said.

“But now the government is ours,” he added after waiting in line to pay $6 for a week’s electricity in his tiny home. “We’re shooting ourselves in the foot if we don’t pay. Otherwise, how can we create jobs? How can we have progress? How can we succeed?”

Unfortunately, the answers are not promising for President Nelson Mandela’s fledgling government and its ambitious plans to build roads, sewers and other infrastructure in slums where few have jobs and millions live without decent homes, running water or lights.

Despite an 11-month national advertising and education campaign called Masakhane--Zulu for “building together now”--officials say the vast majority of township dwellers still refuse to pay for housing and basic services, hobbling the government’s arduous efforts at reconstruction and development.

“It’s very difficult to overturn the culture of nonpayment,” acknowledged Spencer Malongete, a former boycott leader who helps direct the Masakhane campaign. “Sometimes we say, ‘You need to pay for services,’ and the people say: ‘You must be kidding! Pay for what? This havoc we live in?’ ”

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Sandile Busane, who has spent the last six months visiting hundreds of townships as part of a rollicking Masakhane roadshow, called it “a chicken and egg problem.”

“The people say, ‘We will pay, but we want to see services,’ ” he said. “But the government can’t provide services if the people don’t pay.”

Hope for a breakthrough came Nov. 1, when nationwide local elections removed the last vestiges of apartheid by finally putting blacks onto local councils and rural ruling bodies. Before that, right-wing whites still mostly determined how taxes were assessed and where the money was used.

The result was that most white communities got swimming pools, libraries and uniformed crews to tend lush parks and roadside flower beds. Many black townships--home to almost 75% of South Africa’s 41 million people--did not even get flush toilets or schoolbooks.

The anti-apartheid boycotts did not help. They crippled, and ultimately bankrupted, many township governing bodies, which were considered illegitimate tools of the white-minority regime.

“There was almost total collapse of local administrations,” said Tumelo Moloko, spokeswoman for the Masakhane effort. “So now you don’t have proper billing or accounting or meter systems in place. And you had corruption. The people know it. This has terribly tainted local government.”

And enforcement against nonpayment still is not easy in volatile townships.

“In your country, if you don’t pay your mortgage and the bank comes to take your house, the bank does not have a riot,” Moloko said.

To be sure, many whites are far worse scofflaws. Provincial officials said last month that residents and businesses in white areas of Johannesburg owe almost $200 million in back taxes and municipal fees that have come due since the national elections in April 1994. The city’s former townships have run up debts of $19 million during the same period.

The news is not all bad. Massive reallocation of government funding and programs has already made a huge impact in many impoverished communities.

Eskom, the national electric utility, has wired about 450,000 homes in the last 20 months, changing the lives of millions of people long used to living by candlelight. As the power comes on, entrepreneurial spirit follows, with a sudden blossoming of signs for new stores, dressmakers and welders.

Although the housing program is far behind schedule, an estimated 20,000 homes have been built with government subsidies, with 240,000 more in the pipeline, said Neville Karsen, deputy director general of the Department of Housing.

“We expect delivery to pick up substantially” in 1996, he said. Tens of thousands of former state-owned houses have also been simply handed over to former tenants.

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Water projects, tarred roads, new schools and other desperately needed infrastructure projects are also starting to appear across the country.

But Masakhane has not kept pace.

Officials say, for example, that fewer than 5% of residents pay for services in destitute Seboking and Sharpville, south of Johannesburg. In Alexandra, the teeming slum beside Johannesburg’s verdant northern suburbs, 18% of people are paying. The figure is 24% in Soweto.

Even worse, residents in blighted Khayelitsha, outside Cape Town, rioted in November when local fees doubled overnight. Other townships have simply launched new boycotts, saying fees are too high and services too meager.

Poverty is not the only reason. Here in Khutsong, a community of about 100,000 people outside the prosperous white town of Carletonville, payment levels dropped in half, to about 30%, after local officials went on strike last year.

“It really kills the budget,” said Ellen Mabile, a newly elected black member of the town council.

The problem is similar in sprawling Bekkersdal, where four Masakhane performers climbed atop a truck on a recent sunny afternoon and entertained and exhorted several hundred people for 90 minutes on the virtues of civic responsibility.

“The strategy before was to boycott payments,” an announcer explained. “Now we must work together to pay for services. As we asked you before to help destroy apartheid, now we are asking you to help build democracy.”

But, standing at the back of the crowd, Martin Rathebe, head of the local Masakhane campaign, shook his head. Several local political leaders, battling for power, recently urged residents not to pay until more services are provided, he said. Payment levels plummeted from 75% to 16%.

As in similar situations elsewhere in the country, Bekkersdal was formally incorporated with its neighboring white town, Randfontein, after the November elections.

“What we fear is as soon as the whites find out we are not paying, they won’t pay, and the council will collapse and there won’t be any services,” Rathebe said.

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Not far away, Meshak Mbambalala faces a comparable challenge. He is the new black mayor of Ventersdorp, an archconservative white town best known for right-wing vigilantes. It is now joined with the satellite slum of Tshing.

Most of Ventersdorp’s 3,000 whites are retired and pay about $100 a month for metered electricity, running water, sewers and other city services. Most of Tshing’s 11,000 blacks are jobless, and only one household in four pays the flat $7 monthly fee. Even that seems excessive to many.

The new mayor, for example, lives in a one-room Tshing shanty without electricity. He uses an outhouse and bathes with cold water drawn from a tap 20 yards away.

And while Mbambalala says his goal is to encourage more people to pay for services, he sympathizes with their plight.

“Last month, before I was elected, I didn’t pay,” he admitted. “I didn’t have the money.”