Going home to starve

Press, 6 September 1980, Page 14

Going home to starve

By the South African correspondent of the “Economist,” London

South Africa’s Prime Minister, Mr P. W. Botha, is having a bad time of it. On top of the other troubles with his reform plans, a. reoort has now landed on his desk telling him that the centrepiece of the Government’s whole race policy — the, division of the country into separate tribal “homelands” has flopped. Far from becoming States where black South Africans can enjoy their “separate -freedoms,” the report gives warning,, the development of these homelands has fallen so far behind that they have become poverty-striken backwaters which threaten to become breeding grounds for violence. • The reason for the failure of the “homelands”. policy has been predicted since its inception in the mid-19505. A Commission of Inquiry warned, the Government at the time that. there would' have to be massive expenditure to consolidate and de* velop the fragmented homelands if they were to develop into viable States and be . able to accommodate even their own natural increase in population. The Government ignored the commission’s report. It merely tinkered with consolidation, and spent only a fraction of the recommended sums on development. However, it continued to plan on the basis that the black tide to the “white” cities had to . be turned back to ; the “homelands.”As a result the homelands were turned into dumping grounds for hundreds of thousands of blacks pushed out of the white areas under the influx control regulations. The growing crisis in these sprawling rural slums has ' been highlighted recently by a severe drought in the largest of them, Kwazulu. Malnutrition and even starvation are rife. Life in . the - other ; homelands, ■- ..is■hardly: better.? - The ; ' .report ’• on these “homelands” comes from the semi-official Bureau, for Ecoiriomic- Research, Co-oper-ation? and Development. It .points.out that?these territories were, able to absorb. horily. 14.8 per cent of the; new work-seekers that their

own population growth generated between 1972 and' 1975. Development has been so • poor that Collectively > they have had a gross national product lower per head than all but 10 of the member States of the. Organisation of African Unity. To improve things the bureau recommends “drastic structural changes,” includ* ing the redrawing of homelands’ boundaries to include some major towns and cities as growth points. But even if that were done, the report argues, “the solution to the problem of race relations in

South Africa does not lie in the creation of a number of separate economies.” Even so, both the bureau and the Government are sticking to the idea of political separation. They now talk of a “confederation”: of having one central economy linking all South Africans, but with separate, sovereign political 1 institutions for the different races and ethnic groups. In the meantime the blacks are , shipped back daily to survive as best they can in the “homelands.”