Poll victory for Mbeki assured, as poor blame apartheid past for their plight

Life in the Johannesburg slums is no better. But distrust of white leaders remains, writes Basildon Peta

Mary Khumalo cast her ballot for the first time in 1994, from her tiny tin and plastic shack in Johannesburg's slum Alexandria township. Ten years later, she will vote from the same shack. She has not benefited from the two million low-cost houses Nelson Mandela promised when South Africa buried the system of institutionalised racism and he took over as the country's first black president.

Mary Khumalo cast her ballot for the first time in 1994, from her tiny tin and plastic shack in Johannesburg's slum Alexandria township. Ten years later, she will vote from the same shack. She has not benefited from the two million low-cost houses Nelson Mandela promised when South Africa buried the system of institutionalised racism and he took over as the country's first black president.

In fact, Ms Khumalo's plight has worsened since 1994. She still shares her shack with her three children, now adults. At bedtime, she splits the tiny structure with a blanket to earn a little privacy. She and her two daughters occupy one side. Her son occupies the other.

She still has no running water, having to share a tap with hundreds of other slum dwellers. A mobile lavatory service the local council provides to give the area a semblance of proper sanitation has been withdrawn. She does not believe her 22-year-old son will ever get a job. She remains the breadwinner in the family through vegetable and fruit vending.

Three years ago, in the crime that festers in South Africa's slums, one of her daughters was raped. They know the attacker but he has not been arrested. This is a place where babies as young as five months are raped.

Alexandria is a stinking eyesore. Mounds of rubbish lie uncollected. A strong, suffocating stench emanates from the few open spaces used for lavatories and dumping rubbish. There is no proper sewer or drainage system. The overcrowded conditions worsen by the day as slum landlords build extra shacks in their tiny yards for more home-seekers, in order to generate extra cash.

In any normal democracy, slum-dwellers such as Ms Khumalo and her neighbours should provide a solid groundswell of opposition against any incumbent political system. And given South Africa's many slums, with their hundreds of thousands of voters, President Thabo Mbeki should be facing certain eviction from power. Yet the irony is that President Mbeki will most probably draw most of his support from the same slums that he has let down.

Ms Khumalo,41, says she will still vote for the ruling African National Congress (ANC) when polling in the third all-race elections opens on Wednesday. She voted for the ANC when Mr Mandela retired and was succeeded by Mr Mbeki in 1999. Her reason is simple. "We can't have these white people running this country ever again," she says. Despite the foul living conditions, Mrs Khumalo and many of her neighbours say their worst nightmare was when armoured police and South African army vehicles invaded their slums at night and brutally suppressed black rebellion against apartheid. She remembers seeing young blacks being beaten to death and ramshackle shacks being razed by apartheid-era security forces.

Benjamin Hlatwayo, Mrs Khumalo's neighbour, agrees crime levels are high in South Africa. But he dismisses any attempt to equate the astronomical rates of violence and theft to white apartheid-era repression as an insult to black people. "We have crime because many of us [black people] were denied opportunities and dehumanised by apartheid for centuries," he says. "We can't blame Mandela or Mbeki for crime. Blame it on Botha or De Klerk and their predecessors."

Mrs Khumalo and Mr Hlatwayo's views sum up the issues which will probably win Mr Mbeki an overwhelming majority when South Africans go to the polls on Wednesday: political identity rather than delivery or good policy programmes. To many black South Africans, voting for Tony Leon, the white official opposition leader, would be as good as getting back to the pre-1994 abyss. In the minds of the likes of the Khumalos and Hlatwayos, whiteness still equates to evil. Voting for Mr Leon could mean a return to the nightmares of the armoured police and army carriers manned by pot-bellied white Afrikaners. Although Mr Leon's Democratic Alliance has well-thought-out and well-articulated policies on what some see as the big four election issues - unemployment, poverty, crime and Aids - slum dwellers and probably many of the average blacks do not care. In the absence of a serious black opposition, they would rather stick to the ANC.

Ten years after the advent of democracy, voting in South Africa continues to centre on celebrating the demise of apartheid. Poll outcomes reflect racial ethos. They are not issue-driven. Mr Leon even being the official opposition leader is attributable to the six million or so whites who remained in the country after 1994 and are still an integral and economically powerful constituency of the country's 45 million. They vigorously use their right to vote.

Instead of aiming for an outright win, as many official opposition candidates would, Mr Leon has set himself the modest, yet still daunting, task of winning 30 per cent of the vote. He says this would enable him to mount a serious challenge. Out of South Africa's nine provinces, Mr Leon hopes his party can prevail in only two, the Western Cape (which houses Cape Town) and Kwazulu Natal, where his DA has forged an alliance with the tribal Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) of Mangosuthu Buthelezi.

Whenever any of the white opposition parties challenge Mr Mbeki, the South African leader is quick to remind blacks of the pre-1994 nightmare. It has worked for him.

To Mr Leon's credit, he realises there is no chance that a white person can even dream of ruling South Africa again unless they make serious in roads in the black community and dispel the perhaps anachronistic attitudes held by the Khumalos and Hlatwayos. He has started.

Mr Leon's rallies in black townships have attracted sizeable black audiences. He has tried to rally blacks around bread and butter issues. He has promised one million "real" jobs to arrest South Africa's 45 per cent unemployment. He has made fighting crime a main priority, promising to deploy 150,000 extra policemen in the streets if he wins the election.

But Mr Leon admits it is still too soon for any white to win the hearts and minds of the majority blacks.

In trying to capitalise on Mr Mbeki's main underbelly issues - HIV/Aids and Zimbabwe - Mr Leon might also be pulling the rug from beneath his feet. Mr Leon has run harsh radio advertisements denouncing Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. He has installed billboards chiding the Zimbabwe leader and condemning Mr Mbeki's softly-softly policies on Mugabe.

But this can only alienate Mr Leon from many black voters. Because of South Africa's recent past and a clear misunderstanding of the real victims of Mr Mugabe's wretched tyranny by many black South Africans, they regard the eccentric Zimbabwe leader as a hero.

Mr Mbeki, after years of prevaricating and bizarrely arguing that poverty not HIV causes Aids, has started a programme, albeit slowly, of providing Aids drugs. He has also passed a new land restitution law to ease land seizures for redistribution to blacks, in addition to legislating charters meant to transfer various sectors of the economy into black ownership.

But signs that Mr Mbeki will win by an overwhelming two-thirds majority that may empower him to change the constitution as he wishes worry many. "What we need is opposition," says South Africa's last white ruler, FW de Klerk, whose National Party founded apartheid. He says a country in which "one party has more or less two-thirds of the vote, with five or six parties fighting for the rest of the slice of cake ... is not a healthy democracy".

Yet this will likely remain the case in South Africa unless the white opposition makes inroads into the black townships and wins the hearts and minds of the Khumalos and Hlatwayos.