The state of basic services

Monday, 10 May 2010 09:38

The number of South Africans with access to electricity has risen to 83 percent, according to Statistics South Africa (Stats SA). In the 2009 General Household Survey, 83 percent of the country's citizens had electricity connections compared to only 77 percent in 2002.

The survey was started in 2002 to help assess the state of development and the perfromance of specific programmes and projects on a regular basis.

Although there was a general trend of improvoing access to electricity, Stats SA said that this was not the case throughout. In the Western Cape and Limpopo, connectivity decreased.

The study found that the use of wood and paraffin for cooking decreased consistently in most provinces between 2002 and 2009. Limpopo and the Eastern Cape had the highest rate of paraffin and wood use at 54.4 and 40.8 percent respectively.

Access to water dropped from 765% in 2005 to 58% in 2009 while the percentage of households which received piped water from their municipalities increased from 78.2 in 2004 to 83.3 percent in 2009. The study also found that the percentage of households with no toilets or the bucket system decreased from 12.6 percent in 2002 to 6.6 percent in 2009.

Stats SA's Deputy Director-General Kefiloe Masiteng said the Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and the KwaZulu-Natal provinces had the highest percentage of people who were unhappy with their water quality.

With housing, it was found that the number of people living in informal houses decreased from 16% in 2005 and 15% in 2007 to 13 percent in 2009. According to the survey, 37 percent of households lived in dwellings with six or more rooms while 13 percent of citizens lived in state subsidised housing.

The study also indicated that 16.1 percent of people residing in RDP or state subsidised houses reported unhappiness. They said the walls of the houses were weak or very weak while 14.9 percent of people said their roofs were weak or very weak. These problems were most prevalent in the Western and Eastern Cape provinces.

Source: Buanews