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South Africa: battling Cape Town's
drug epidemic
June 1, 2010 - channel4.com
In Cape Town ahead of the World Cup, Jonathan Miller reports for
Channel 4 News on the disturbing contrast between the city's majestic
new football stadium and its drug-ravaged ghettos.
The explosive spread of crystal meth addiction in the suburbs and slums
of Cape Town is now the worst such drug problem in the world. Known
locally as "tik", crystal methamphetamine is highly addictive, readily
available and relatively cheap.
The drug is known to trigger psychosis, and its spread in the western
Cape has been associated with violent criminality and gangsterism.
Andreas Pluddemann, senior scientist at South Africa's Medical Research
Council, told Channel 4 News that despite the relentless spread of tik
addiction in recent years, it continues to grow rapidly, with
devastating social consequences.
In the countdown to the World Cup, we have been filming in Cape Town’s
sprawling mixed-race suburbs, less than half an hour’s drive from the
majestic stadium built for the tournament. Cape Town, with its stunning
scenic backdrop, is the poster city for the competition, which starts
next week.
But there is an extreme and disturbing contrast between this planned
celebration of "the beautiful game" in this magnificent city and the
ugly reality of life in Cape Town's murderous ghettos.
Efforts by politicians and the police to curb the tik contagion have
come to nothing and in the perception of the besieged and frightened
residents of the shanties and dilapidated suburbs, rape, murder, armed
robbery and car-jacking have grown exponentially worse as the addiction
rate has soared.
Not one of those we interviewed believed that Cape Town's hosting the
World Cup (England plays here on 18th June) would make even the
slightest difference to their lives, despite earlier expectations that
it would bring jobs and improve living standards.
"The World Cup will mean nothing to me, to tell you the honest truth,"
said Fabian Jacobs, a 31-year-old tik addict and gang leader,
brutalised after spending almost half his life in jail. "Today, we are
still waiting for better
roads, better schools. This is a very hard life."
Bongiwe Nakani, a young woman from a township called Kayalitsha, who
had broken the mould by getting a place at Cape Town University to
study opera, talked about how unsafe she felt in a neighbourhood where
tik addicts will stab or shoot you for your cell phone.
As to the Word Cup coming to her city, she said: "They have spent so
much money but people won’t be able to afford to go the stadiums
they’ve built. They will just have to watch it on TV."
Bongiwe said great resentment had built up as a result of the £1.3bn
lavished on the city in the run-up to the tournament. "People need
houses. School children need money for books. We need money for parks
and for libraries," she said.
When challenged on the apparent failure of the World Cup to meet
slum-dwellers' expectations, the provincial government boasts of the
"social legacy". It cites refurbished local stadiums and another
"Football for Hope" Fifa-sponsored stadium-cum-community centre in
Kayalitsha. And they mention the rapid transit bus system (which
doesn’t actually go as far as the townships and run-down suburbs, home
to the millions who are neither white nor rich.)
"The World Cup will not be a magic wand which will cure poverty, build
houses, schools, homes and will touch every suburb," Pieter Kronje,
from the City of Cape Town Authority, told me. "Right here in Cape Town
we have 220 informal settlements – people living in shacks," he said.
"The World Cup was never capable of solving all of that or making that
disappear."
The stories you hear from the residents of these "informal settlements"
are tales from poverty's front line, where gangs and crime and violence
and drugs merge in a hair-raising confluence of urban horror. The Cape
Flats, where many of the most deprived communities are, have the feel
of a social time bomb. Attempts to defuse things appear woefully
inadequate.
The social dysfunction is exacerbated by the demographics of the
Western Cape. More than half of Cape Town's population is of
mixed-race. Under apartheid, they were labelled "Cape Coloureds". South
Africa used to be ruled by whites. Now blacks are in charge. The
mixed-race community remains an underclass in this so-called Rainbow
Nation.
Gangs offer the sense of belonging they lack.
Tik would appear to offer a means of escape. But it traps those who use
it in a vortex of desperation and despair. In the film we air, we meet
hardened gang members who brazenly smoke the white crystals on camera
and a grandmother whose husband has sold virtually everything of value
in their home to sustain their insatiable habit.
But the most chilling interview I conducted in my week in the Cape was
with Ellen Pakkies, mother of a tik-addict son who turned psychotic and
attacked her with scissors, a breadknife and an axe – before she took a
rope and strangled him. The judge handed down a three year suspended
sentence and ruled that Mrs Pakkies, not her junkie son, had been the
victim.
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