In his latest blog, Lashias Ncube argues that locals deserve the effort that went into making Diego Maradona's stay more comfortable.
Lashias Ncube argues that locals deserve the effort that went into making Diego Maradona's stay more comfortable
When Diego Maradona demanded that the toilet in his suite at Argentina's World Cup base in Pretoria be revamped and customised to meet with his aristocratic tastes we chuckled - rib-cracking chuckles - and put the demand down to the Argentine's eccentricity.
By contrast, there is nothing remotely amusing about the violence concomitant with the 'toilet riots' witnessed in Cape Town this week.
Residents of Makhaza in Cape Town's Khayelitsha Township, home to thousands of poor black people, were this week involved in running battles with the police. The protestors barricaded roads with burning tyres and hurled an assortment of objects at Metro Police officers, who were themselves forced to fire rubber bullets in a bid to quell the angry crowds.
The riots were provoked by disagreements over the aesthetics of lavatories: prefabricated corrugated iron or concrete toilet enclosures for the residents of Makhaza?
In an early-morning raid on Monday, Cape Town City Council staff demolished all open toilets in Makhaza and loaded the severed cisterns, water tanks and toilet seats into waiting trucks, leaving many households with no toilets. Predictably, tempers flared.
Apparently, when the city council decided to build the open toilets a couple of years ago it was with the caveat that the residents would build the enclosures themselves. However, when some residents failed to keep to their end of the bargain city, authorities erected prefabricated corrugated iron enclosures around the open toilets last week.
Residents took umbrage at the move. The corrugated iron enclosures offended their sensibilities. They hand a hint of apartheid development policies about them, the rioters argued. They made their rejection of the structures demonstratively clear by demolishing them, demanding concrete walls around the toilets instead.
The city council responded by removing the exposed toilets altogether in a move that has been widely criticised as an unmitigated assault on the dignity of the residents and an infringement on their basic human rights. As one angry resident asked: "Where are we supposed to relieve ourselves?"
Sadly, the demolitions are being carried out in the name of the World Cup as efforts to sanitise local conditions so that they meet with the approval of the visitors to the showpiece intensify.
Unsightly
A friend remarked the other day that Harare was the cleanest he had ever seen it during Queen Elizabeth II's visit in 1991. The city had been cleared of all unsightly structures and embarrassing 'eyesores', including street beggars, homeless kids and pavement vendors.
Justifying the demolition of the toilets, Cape Town mayor Dan Plato made it clear that, with the eyes of the entire world transfixed on South Africa in the next few weeks, the city could not afford to let visitors to our shores see open toilets!
Protests of this nature have become par for the course in the run-up to the World Cup. The major worry, however, is that the 'toilet riots' are morphing into mass protests, conflagrating beyond grievances around lavatories.
There is a renewed groundswell of unhappiness over poor levels of service delivery and inadequate sanitary amenities in general. And as we have come to expect these days, protesters are threatening to continue with their 'struggle' throughout the World Cup until their demands are met.
So, on the eve of the World Cup, these riots have reignited dormant debates about South Africa's priorities. Old questions about the wisdom of a country emerging from the ravages of decades of unequal, race-based social and economic development policies committing hefty resources to a luxury sports project are again being regurgitated.
Residents of Makhaza and many others of their ilk around the country are aggrieved that improving their living conditions, a key imperative of post-apartheid governance, has been sacrificed on the altar of a misguided World Cup project.
Bidet toilets generally do not retail in South Africa. But notice the lengths Maradona's World Cup hosts went to, to make his stay comfortable. After scouring far and wide, "in the end we managed to track down a seat which has bidet nozzles, but to make it fit we ended up having to replace the whole bathroom too," said Colin Stier, manager at the High Performance Centre, Argentina's World Cup base.
"Of course we were happy to do so. If it makes Diego more comfortable during his stay then it's worth the effort."
If we can go the extra mile for Maradona, surely we can do the same for our fellow citizens, who are not asking for state-of-the-art toilets with heated seats and warm air blow-dryers. They just want decent ablution facilities.
