Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 1: Dust and Ashesservice – apartheid still existed” [Samson 2003: 100]. This is largely because costcuttingand privatisation has been imposed unevenly: the suburbs are generally stillserviced by municipalities or commercialised companies owned by municipalities,while townships are frequently serviced by private contractors. Cleaning streets andopen spaces are most likely to be neglected because this service cannot be charged toindividual households. Samson shows that the costs of privatisation fall heaviest onwomen, both as workers and residents.Meanwhile, poor people are still living with the dumps fed by the wastes of the richand of industry. Indeed, most dumps now have shack settlements alongside because,like other environmentally hazardous locations, this land has next to no value on themarket. It thus appears as open land on which poor people can establish a place to live.Some also find the means of a bare livelihood in picking through the rubbish.This pattern of injustice is not only a feature of societies with a history of racistexclusion. It is part of the global ordering of power relations necessary for the conductof business. State investments in infrastructure are designed to defend high valuelocations in a global competition for private sector investment and both privateand state investments are increasingly concentrated in wealthy areas. South Africa’smetropolitan municipalities are now all focused on creating competitive ‘world classcities’, producing ‘development corridors’ linking prestige industrial clusters, highvalue residential enclaves and airports, all wired up for global connection.In Bénit and Gervais-Lambony’s analysis, these spaces are produced as glittering‘shop windows’ specifically designed to attract international investments. ThusJohannesburg’s Security Strategy focuses on “areas which are visible to investors andwill have an impact on their perceptions” [quoted in Bénit and Gervais-Lambony2005: 6]. As part of ‘cleaning up’ these visible areas, the poor are driven out to spaceson the periphery where the language of ‘participatory democracy’ is invoked, withmore or less sincerity, to manage poverty in the decay at the ‘back of the shop’. Thewastes of these investments must also be cleaned away. The richest 20% of the world’speople “account for 86% of total private consumption expenditure” [UNEP 2002:35]. They consume “68% of all electricity, 84% of all paper, and own 87% of allautomobiles” [Sachs et al 2002: 19]. It follows that they produce a similar proportionof polluting waste. In Cape Town, taking residential wastes alone, the richest 16% ofWasting the Nation - groundWork - 17 -