20120103
AFP
The cradle of the anti-apartheid movement, Soweto is no longer the ANC bastion it once was, with locals disillusioned by poor service delivery and constant squandering of public money.

Even after 17 years of unbroken African National Congress rule, and as the party prepares for its 100th birthday this week, South Africa still remains one of the world's most unequal societies.

While the ANC has built 2.8 million homes since taking power in 1994, around 20 percent of South Africans still have no electricity and 10 percent no running water and service delivery protests are frequent.

Grim statistics like those and frustration with the pace of delivery of basic services has seen some of the party grassroots lose faith in the leadership, even in Soweto, once home to anti-apartheid icons Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Open criticism has replaced the cheers which once greeted the party here.

"The ANC is not what it used to be. They are corrupt to the core which is unacceptable," says Zoliswa Jayiya, 23.

"They did a great service but that is the past and we cannot live in the past. They are resting on their laurels."

The young university graduate works near the memorial to the Freedom Charter, a document ANC and other anti-apartheid groups published in 1955 to demand equal rights to education, work, wealth, and a decent living.

"South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white," the Charter claimed at the height of white minority rule, which ended when Nelson Mandela's ANC swept to power in the country's first democratic elections in 1994.

In a public square flanked by a hotel and a market, the manifesto's words are engraved for posterity on a circular concrete stone.

But race still defines many people's thinking, says Jayiya, and the economic divide is as large as ever. A new complacency has taken hold, she says, and many of her peers don't even bother to vote.

"It is like a rich kid who loses things and knows that his parents will buy another one. It's easy to forget that we didn't have these voting rights 20 years ago."

Disillusioned voters might turn to the political opposition over "these guys who fly to Dubai or Switzerland to see their girlfriend," she says, referring to an ANC minister who travelled at the state's expense to visit his girlfriend in a Swiss prison. The minister, Sicelo Shiceka, was sacked last October.

"Quality and standards are horrible," says an exasperated Jayiya.

Party stalwarts like Soweto resident David Meyers are stung by the internal criticism, but agree that money set aside for a lavish ANC birthday party in the city of Bloemfontein could be better spent.

"For the centenary, they should have given grants to young people for education or doing business and improving life for the next centenary."

Corruption among government officials has made international headlines, but Meyers blames individuals who weren't ready to handle large sums of money rather than the party.

"It's like a bumped car, they just have to fix it. There are people they have to sort out."

But he was surprised that all Sowetans didn't agree with him in local elections last May, when the ANC predictably topped the poll in Soweto but lost the ward where the Freedom Charter was launched, to the opposition Democratic Alliance.

Even Meyers admits that people tell him: "We are fed up. They are eating the money."

But like so many, Meyers sees the ANC as the way forward for South Africa, with no alternative in the opposition for voters.

The party was "the first to develop my ability, to let me think and not to be afraid," the 51-year-old said.

"We grew up in trauma. For us, it was the lifestyle to suffer, to be nobody, and beaten by the police. You couldn't even go from Durban to Johannesburg, you had to ask a permit. What I like with the ANC, they see every man on the street as a potential director."