There’s a Message for City Planners in Cape Town Plumbing Poll

A mother and father stand in the doorway of their Khayelitsha home, looking on as their two young children goof around on the small patch of dirt outside.

It’s something like a front yard, only that — flanked on one side by the family’s corrugated tin shack and on the other by a public portable toilet balanced precariously on a slope — it’s a stinky and unsanitary one.

On this clear May day, though, the kids are focused on the play, not the bright, plastic porta-potty that looms over them. In Khayelitsha, the densely packed, sprawling slum in southeastern Cape Town, this scene is nothing out of the ordinary.

Chemical toilets — toilets that are not connected to a sewage system but instead store waste in small tanks that use chemicals to control the odor until they can be emptied — were designed to be short-term solutions.

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In the U.S., they are most often found on construction sites or festival grounds, but in Cape Town they have become permanent fixtures, accounting for more than 75 percent of the bathroom facilities available in some parts of the crowded settlement. And with each toilet shared by five to 20 households, many of them large and multigenerational, the chemicals are far from effective.

The one I’m eyeing has serviced this family for five years. Others have been in use for more than a decade. They pepper the township in unsightly bursts of blue. Their odor is inescapable. And perhaps worse than the sight and smell is what they signify. Residents say the chemical toilets mean they can’t even undertake basic human functions with dignity. Each trip to the bathroom is dehumanizing.

With such limited access to decent restroom facilities, sanitation is a constant challenge in Khayelitsha. The seeming impossibility of overcoming it weighs heavily on the people, who say they struggle with sanitation every single day, which makes them feel like second-class citizens in their own country.

A 35-minute drive west of Khayelitsha is Cape Town’s richest neighborhood, Clifton. The posh bayside area brims with bungalows, luxe shops and fine dining spots where a hearty meal often costs more than an entire month’s earnings for many Khayelitsha families, whose median income is 20,000 South African Rand (about $1,400 U.S.) a year. One glance from Clifton to Khayelitsha, and it’s clear why there is such social strife in South Africa. While the post-Apartheid nation heralds a world-class constitution that guarantees basic human rights for everyone, nearly one-quarter of Cape Town’s population lives in informal settlements — which are overwhelmingly black — where accessing these rights is difficult, if not impossible.

Khayelitsha is the biggest and fastest growing of the slums, larger than many midsize American cities. It clings to the outskirts of the Mother City, as Cape Town is known, like a forgotten child at a dress hem.

Residents feel disconnected from the city, they say, with many of them unaware of what services they can reasonably expect or what laws say they can expect them. “We are in a community where we don’t know our rights,” says Nosiphelele Msesiwe, a Khayelitsha resident. “We don’t know that it’s our right to get better service delivery.”

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Msesiwe, who is 33, moved to Khayelitsha’s Enkanini subsection in 2006 with her son Oyama. For seven years, she endured the inadequate sanitation, talking to her neighbors about the problem, but uncertain of how to go about changing it. Then she heard about a group of residents called the Social Justice Coalition that were asking questions about toilets — and a lot of them.

Msesiwe joined right away. “Since then, I’ve never turned back,” she says.

Established in Khayelitsha in 2008, the SJC is a member-based social movement, 2,500 strong, that aims to increase the people’s awareness of their rights so they can make informed demands of government.

A key part of this education is to vigorously, and systematically, compare what the township dwellers expect based on the city budget with what they actually experience, and then relay those disparities to the public officials with the power to address them. The process reviews official records of government-reported expenditures to determine whether that spending matches up with delivery on the ground.

This is a practice of participatory democracy known as the social audit — and now it is at the heart of two lawsuits against the city of Cape Town.

MOBILIZING A MOVEMENT

Filed in July, the SJC lawsuits against the city of Cape Town allege that city government has denied “the right of access to sanitation of poor, black and marginalized residents of informal settlements.” The sanitation struggles described in the suit’s affidavits, filed on behalf of a handful of Khayelitsha residents, represent the complaints of many in the community, as documented by the SJC’s social audits.

The concept of the social audit saw its beginnings in Rajasthan, India, when a grassroots organization called the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) was struggling for minimum wages for rural laborers in the 1990s. After finding widescale corruption in wage provisions, the MKSS suspected the government was keeping official records out of public reach to enable its secret misuse of funds.

The MKSS demanded access to the records, cross-checked them with community members’ experiences and then made the discrepancies public, reading them aloud at a hearing for everyone to hear.

This audit was seen as such a success that the process was actually embedded into Indian law, with the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) mandating one be conducted every six months.

Eight years later, Khayelitsha tried its hand at the social audit in hopes of finding similar success. With the help of two activists from the MKSS movement, as well as the support of theSociety for Social Audit, Accountability and Transparency in India (SSAAT), the International Budget Partnership (IBP),Ndifuna Ukwazi (Dare to Know), and the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Southern Africa foundation, the SJC launched its first audit in April 2013.

block_quotes_start We actually want to know: What is the city of Cape Town planning to do with us? Are we going to be taken out … in the next couple of years and thrown into some bushes where we are supposed to live? We don’t know block_quotes_end

Luthando Tokota was one of the organizers of Khayelitsha’s inaugural audit. He has been involved in all three of the toilet services audits that have come since. “[T]here is an increased emphasis on words such as public participation, transparency and accountability in government,” he says. “The social audit brings these words into life.” Tokota, who is 31, has lived in Khayelitsha since 2008. He joined the SJC in 2009.

Two months after I first met Tokota on the ground in Khayelitsha, when he was leading me around the township’s neediest areas, we connect over a crackly Google Hangout connection.

He’s with SJC colleague Bonga Zamisa, who also lives in Khayelitsha. At age 24, Zamisa has spent three-quarters of his life in the settlement, moving to the subsection known as Monwabisi Park when he was 6. He is unemployed and has been volunteering with the SJC for three years. Tokota and Zamisa are at the SJC office in Khayelitsha, busy analyzing the findings of the last social audit.

The process of conducting a social audit, after the initial preparation phase, always begins with a mass meeting. Intended to establish a mandate that is community led, the meeting asks and answers questions, plans public involvement and identifies team leaders from the community. Afterward, the surveyors who will go out in the field collecting evidence are selected and trained, and a questionnaire to document resident experiences is developed and tested.

Ultimately, the data will help the SJC make the case that the city needs a comprehensive long-term plan for sanitation in Khayelitsha.

“We don’t actually know what is next for us as the residents,” says Zamisa. “We actually want to know: What is the city of Cape Town planning to do with us? Are we going to be taken out … in the next couple of years and thrown into some bushes where we are supposed to live? We don’t know.”

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Ninety-nine percent of Khayelitsha residents are black African. Many of them have migrated from other parts of the country, primarily the Eastern Cape, in hopes of finding a better life in Khayelitsha, which in Xhosa means “new home.” In just over 30 years, this new home has swollen from the small tented town it was in the mid-1980s to the sprawling, dense settlement it is today. So many people have come that no one knows for certain how many live here. Some estimates say 400,000, others more than 1 million. But as the township’s population grows bigger, inadequate resources are stretched thinner.

Meanwhile, the city’s sanitation budget for informal settlement households has gone down, the SJC alleges — from R18 million (about $1.25 million U.S.) in 2015 to R15 million (just over $1 million U.S.) in 2016, even though the overall budget has gone up.

While Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille strongly refutes this, saying critics unfairly isolate permanent-toilet spending while ignoring all other sanitation spending, like expenditures on wastewater treatment facilities that also service informal settlements, the SJC finding is supported by an independent analysis by the International Budget Partnership, a nongovernmental organization that promotes transparent and inclusive government.

The IBP found that Cape Town allocates a disproportionately low portion of the total water and sanitation capital budget on informal settlements — just 1 percent for 21 percent of the Cape Town population.

Ayamda Qhora is part of that 21 percent. He was 32 when he moved his wife and kids from the Eastern Cape to Cape Town so he could find work. What he found, though, were nearly unlivable conditions. Too poor to settle in the city center, the family settled in Khayelitsha. Twelve years later, they’re still here. Last fall, his daughter Sipokazi, only 15, died from infection. “We are very angry because we deserve the same basic services like anyone else,” he says.

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In the case of residents like Qhora, who have little reason to be optimistic, it can sometimes be hard to make a convincing argument that they should participate in a social audit.

Because there is nothing about an audit that enforces its recommendations, or holds the government accountable to the commitments it makes, there is no guarantee that volunteering their time and energy will improve their lives in any tangible way. There is no promise they’ll come out the other end with a cleaner, safer toilet.

Yet there are people who haven’t given up hope and they are the people who find themselves counting toilets and asking questions, sometimes intimate ones, of their neighbors. Overwhelmingly, this group is young and female. As longtime community members — a majority have been living in Khayelitsha for more than 10 years, says Tokota — they have a vested interest in making it better for the future.

LOCKED OUT OF A BASIC RIGHT

“What kind of toilet does your household use? How many others use it?” asks a surveyor while gathering evidence on a social audit. The surveyor writes down resident experiences and inspects toilet facilities, plotting them on maps and snapping photographs.

“A Mshengu toilet,” the typical Khayelitsha resident might answer, referring to the private company commonly government-contracted to provide chemical toilet services to the community. “This one toilet is shared by five families. It is used by everyone who’s passing by, even strangers,” the resident might add.

“How often is the toilet cleaned? Do you feel safe using it?” asks the surveyor.

“It hasn’t been cleaned at all this week. It isn’t safe.”

When social audit participants go door to door to interview their peers, the experiences they collect are horrifying, but routine — and perhaps the real horror stems from just how routine.

Data from Khayelitsha’s first social audit, conducted in April 2013, found a severe shortage of toilets. Sixty participants interviewed 270 residents and inspected all 256 communal toilets. Their fieldwork found that although government records reported 346 toilets for the area, 90 were missing. Meanwhile, the government’s targeted household-to-toilet ratio of 5-to-1 was far exceeded in each of the four Khayelitsha subsections surveyed, ranging from 10-to-1 in the section of Green Point to more than 25-to-1 in Emsindweni, another area.

The April 2013 audit also revealed widely and wildly unsanitary conditions. Across the settlement, auditors found that toilets were not receiving the daily cleaning mandated by government contracts and 32 percent of them had not been emptied at all in the preceding week, despite contracts stipulating that waste removal occur three times per week. More than 65 percent of the toilets were damaged, and 54 percent were in a totally unusable state.

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The wide variance could be in part due to how the toilets are serviced — instead of falling under the oversight of the city sanitation workers who handle the job in mapped parts of the city, the work is outsourced to private contractors who are allegedly monitored to ensure they are properly cleaning, removing waste and making repairs.

Security concerns aggravate the problem. While locking toilets is a good way to improve safety and protect them from overuse, there are not enough keys to go around, leaving some people — including janitors — locked out unless they can track down a key-holder.

The data also points to the government’s over-reliance on temporary solutions for a permanent population. A quarter of Khayelitsha’s population has no access to permanent full-flush toilets, according to SJC estimates.

Of the 75 percent who do, many say their access is extremely limited. Indeed, one of the affidavits filed in the pending lawsuits against the city allege about 500 families share just seven toilets.

As of July 2015, about three-quarters of the total number of toilets provided by the city since 2007 were temporary, according to government data cited in SJC literature, despite the fact that a majority of Khayelitsha’s informal settlement clusters are far from temporary, with 80 percent older than 10 years and 66 percent older than 15.

Most alarming is how dangerous these facilities are, residents say, not only because they’re dirty but also because they’re placed haphazardly and without a plan. The ones too close to families’ living spaces risk contamination and infection; the ones too far spark fears of being mugged, raped and murdered.

And when residents without toilet access are forced to openly defecate, they feel at risk to the same dangers. Many people are outright afraid to go to the bathroom. Their worries, statistics prove, are not unfounded.

In a township where many crimes go unreported because people have no faith in the justice system, it’s hard to come up with exact figures. But, in 2015, more than 300 murders were reported, earning Khayelitsha the moniker the “murder capital” of South Africa. The same year, 543 sexual offenses were documented. To handle all of this, the township runs just three police stations, and of the crimes reported, only 1 percent result in conviction.

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The most dangerous time for bathroom-related crime is after the sun sets, when many residents are forced to walk in the dark to get to the toilet or the bush. Many women in Khayelitsha say either they themselves or someone they know have been victimized while going to the bathroom at night. Meanwhile, they say, the city refuses to install or repair lighting in the area.

“Every day, someone gets raped in our community, someone gets murdered,” says community advocate Nomthetho Kilo. Kilo assists rape victims in following up on their cases with law enforcement as part of the SJC’s safety and justice program.

There is one story that comes up again and again in Khayelitsha. In March, 19-year-old Sinoxolo Mafevuka was found raped and strangled, her dead body left inside a communal toilet. Her genitals were exposed, and her head was stuffed into the toilet’s cistern. According to a witness, two men, reportedly cousins of her boyfriend, dragged her there.

PUTTING IT TO THE POLITICIANS

On a hot summer day in 2015, a few hundred Khayelitsha residents filed into a community high school to attend a public hearing on the results of the SJC’s third social audit of the community’s toilets.

Only a handful of the residents came to testify. The others were there for the question and answer period that would happen after the hearing. They’d been waiting for answers from the public officials who represent them in City Hall.

Voices rang out in the auditorium: Why does the city award huge contracts to service providers that do not fully deliver those services? Why won’t the city allocate a bigger portion of the sanitation budget to informal settlements like ours? Why can’t the city provide our community with permanent toilets, especially considering they’re cheaper in the long run than the blue Mshengu toilets? (That final point has been corroborated by a 2016 study commissioned by the IBP and the SJC. The study, by Cornerstone Economic Research, an independent South African consulting firm, found that a single outsourced temporary facility costs almost nine times more than a permanent full-flush one.)

Like many public meetings, this one ends with many questions unanswered.

“When the city of Cape Town and the providers of the toilets were asked to come to the public hearing, most of them were not there,” Zamisa says. “The city officials are probably scared to go there because they know that they are the problem behind the poor sanitation.”

This article first appeared in Next City