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No Reservations

The local government elections have come and gone, but the debate about services delivery rages on. In the midst of the hullabaloo over the elections, Statistics SA quietly released a comprehensive survey on services delivery. Does its General Household Survey (GHS) have a role to play in the debate?

Some would immediately say no – partly because it’s a Government-produced document. It also contains such gems as 84,6% of users of public healthcare facilities were satisfied with the services they received. Surely that figure is rather high if you take into account the horror stories that regularly emanate from public hospitals. Most recently, a team from the Gauteng health department was sent to the Natalspruit Hospital after reports a three-month-old baby died in a queue. The mother of the baby was quoted as saying that, on her first visit to the hospital, the doctor gave her Panado when her baby had diarrhoea.

On the vexed subject of toilets the GHS is also not very useful. It finds that – countrywide – the percentage of households with no toilets or bucket toilets decreased from 12,6% in 2002 to 5,9% last year. Provinces with the highest percentage of no toilet facilities/bucket users include: Eastern Cape (16,3%), Limpopo (8,6%) and Northern Cape (6,8%). You assume the communities that received unenclosed toilets were counted among those with proper facilities. Either way, there’s no mention of the unenclosed toilets in the survey, which surely must be an omission to be rectified.

But the GHS doesn’t just paint everything with a rosy glow. Take water access and use. It notes satisfaction with water quality has been eroding steadily since 2005 and 2007, when the percentage of users who rated the services as good were 76,3% and 72% respectively. The percentage of users who rated water services as merely average increased from 15,8% in 2005 to 31,9% in 2009, before dropping to 27% last year.

Residents of the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga have consistently been least satisfied with the quality of water. Last year, 28,5% of households in the Eastern Cape felt their water was unsafe to drink, compared with 22,5% in KwaZulu-Natal and 13,9% in Mpumalanga. Having water that’s not clean was a problem for 21,6% of households in the Eastern Cape and 16,8% in Mpumalanga. Water that didn’t taste good was a problem for 23,9% of households in the Eastern Cape, against 17,1% in Mpumalanga and 14,8% in the Northern Cape. More than 28,5% of households in the Eastern Cape felt their water wasn’t free from bad smells compared with 22,5% in KwaZulu-Natal and 13,9% in Mpumalanga.

Those figures send a clear wake-up call to Government to sort out the country’s water supply. That they come from a Government-sponsored agency makes it likely the true situation is even worse.

The situation with refuse removal is also dire. The percentage of households that used their municipality’s refuse disposal services fell back to 57,7% last year – below 57,8% in 2002, the first year that the GHS was conducted. Access and use of refuse removal services were the lowest in Limpopo, where only 11,6% of the population had their refuse removed by their municipality.

The GHS also provides figures for housing. The percentage of households living in fully-owned formal dwellings increased from 53,1% in 2002 to 58,1% last year. North West has shown the least progress related to housing provision. Although a significant increase in the percentage of shack dwellers to 23,7% in 2008 was followed by a decline to 18,8% last year, that’s still higher than the 2009 level.

Interestingly, the GHS also surveyed satisfaction with RDP houses. Around 17% of those surveyed said the walls were weak or very weak, while 17,9% regarded the roof as weak or very weak.

The GHS probably paints a rosier delivery picture than the reality. However, it doesn’t shy away from reflecting dissatisfaction. It has a role to play in SA’s services delivery debate.

 
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