South Africa Exults Abroad but Frets at Home

South Africa has been savoring its new membership in the club of emerging powers now known as BRICS, with that satisfying S in the acronym recently added to prove it belongs with the far more populous nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Last week, President Jacob Zuma attended his nation’s first BRICS meeting, in China, and boasted in a speech of South Africa’s “increasingly important position in the international arena.”

It was a moment of international triumph, with Mr. Zuma representing his country — indeed, his continent — in such an elite club while larger developing nations like Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey stood on the sidelines. But this week, he is back home and facing the kind of news of self-dealing and misconduct by public officials that has eroded the confidence South Africans have in their own government and political parties — the foundations of this fledgling democracy.

With the country preparing for local elections on May 18, the cabinet member Mr. Zuma chose to oversee local government, Sicelo Shiceka, is now embroiled in scandalous reports about his profligate living at public expense. Mr. Zuma announced Sunday that he was awaiting an explanation from Mr. Shiceka that has yet to come. “It’s this flaunting of inequality and conspicuous consumption that people get agitated about,” said Ben Roberts, a researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council, which recently conducted a survey of South Africans documenting widespread disillusionment with local government.

Parliamentary leaders of Mr. Zuma’s party, the African National Congress, have asked for independent investigators in the public protector’s office to find out whether Mr. Shiceka spent more than $50,000 of taxpayers’ money to fly to Switzerland and stay in five-star hotels while visiting his girlfriend, a flight attendant, who was jailed there on drug charges, as The Sunday Times of South Africa reported.
In a follow-up article on Sunday, the newspaper reported that municipal trucks were delivering water to the building site of Mr. Shiceka’s new home in the poorest district in the Eastern Cape. His home was also slated to be among the first to get electricity. “What a disgrace!” shouted the headline. “Minister builds emperor’s palace in South Africa’s poorest village.”

Corruption and great disparities in wealth are hardly uncommon among the other BRICS countries. But the lack of basic services has touched a particular nerve here. People in Mr. Shiceka’s home district had been protesting the poor quality of water and sewerage services. And it was precisely these issues that led poor people in Ficksburg, a town in the Free State, to take to the streets last week in a protest that ended in tragedy. SABC, the state broadcaster, showed police officers in Ficksburg assaulting an unarmed, shirtless protester named Andries Tatane, 33, and thwacking his torso with batons. Mr. Tatane then looked down at his chest, streaming with blood. A haunting photograph shows him lying wounded in the arms of a friend whose face is contorted in anguish. Mr. Tatane died minutes later. “The post-mortem showed he died of gunshot wounds,” said Moses Dlamini, spokesman for the Independent Complaints Directorate, which investigates police brutality. “And he had bruises which indicated he was assaulted.” Two police officers have been charged with the murder and four others with assault, but not before enraged residents of Mr. Tatane’s township set fire to two government buildings.

An African National Congress spokesman, Jackson Mthembu, described the attack on Mr. Tatane as reminiscent of “apartheid-era strong-arm tactics” — a remarkable statement considering that the A.N.C. itself led the struggle against apartheid and has governed the country, and overseen its police force, since 1994.

The so-called service delivery protests, a phenomenon across the country, provide signs of the simmering discontent among many South Africans about how long it is taking to translate the gains of freedom into material progress. Even as South Africa takes center stage with the world’s most prominent developing nations, a majority of young black South Africans are jobless. Poverty remains widespread. A nationwide survey of about 3,200 South Africans age 16 and older, sponsored by the country’s Independent Electoral Commission, found that South Africans were most dissatisfied with local government performance on job creation, crime and housing.

The survey, released last week, documented an erosion of trust at all levels of government, with the lowest approval level — 38 percent — reserved for local government, down from a high of 55 percent in 2004. Politicians rated even lower. Only 27 percent of South Africans trusted them when the survey was conducted in the final months of 2010. The main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance — widely perceived as dominated by whites — has sought to attract more black support by highlighting its strong record in running the city of Cape Town. Helen Zille, the former journalist who leads the party, has seized on the killing of Mr. Tatane as emblematic of how the A.N.C. has “become disconnected from the people it is supposed to serve.”

But the loyalty of voters to the A.N.C., the party of Nelson Mandela, remains deep, and the survey found that those who were most unhappy with government were also the ones who said they were least likely to vote. So the question of whether discontent leads to change in the ballot box remains open.

Source: New York Times