Shacking At SHHA

By Gale Ngakane
Correspondent | Monday February 11, 2008 00:00

To while away time, he sparingly sips Chibuku earlier purchased from Boikarabelo's shebeen, two doors down the street.

He can see his wife, Ruth, as she darts about busy preparing supper on the family stove inside the room. Bokole, who used to sit on the bed while the wife was cooking, has long thrown in the towel dodging incessant complaints from Ruth that she is unable to perform her domestic chores effectively when he is inside the room.

Here is the picture: The room, which is oblong in shape, is about eight metres by four metres. It is at the back of the big white house occupied by countless tenants.

About 80 percent of the room is occupied by a four-poster bed whose installments Tlhabologo has just finished paying at a furniture store at Galo Mall. He could not afford the headboard. So, for now, they are content with the bare wall as the headboard.

But there are times when one of them would accidentally knock his or her crown of the head on the wall.

It usually happens when the couple is engaged in horizontal exercises that require a lot of backward and forward movements. In this instance, it will either be Tlhabologo who, due to over-excitement, would have pushed the wife too strongly, such that she hits the wall with her head. Or Tlhabologo would have moved too hastily, bumping his forehead.

This usually happens in the dead of the night when they know the children are sound asleep so that they do not hear their parents' nocturnal bumping and grinding, and groaning and moaning.

The children and the maid who looks after their one-year-old baby, occupy the small spaces on either side of the bed.

Before the cozy bed came, the family shared the floor of the room. They prostrated themselves on thin mattresses. Tlhabologo does not recall where they obtained them and who brought them home.

A wardrobe occupies one corner while a stove, which is connected to a 19kg gas cylinder occupies the other corner.

Because of the chock-a-block situation inside the room, Tlhabologo sits outside sipping his Chibuku as he inhales the aroma wafting out of the room's cooking section. 

But thoughts of the simmering food are only a distraction from what really is going on in his mind. To start with, the Chibuku is an occasional treat that he cannot sustain like his drinking mates who always sit with the red and white Chibuku carton between their legs at Mma-Boikarabelo's shebeen.

With a salary of P900 as a security guard, and the P500 that his wife earns as a domestic servant in one of the Francistown suburbs, how can he drink everyday without starving his children?

From their collective income, they pay an installment of P300 for the next 12months at the furniture shop for the stove, which was a welcome relief after spending some years kindling fire in front of his room. There were times the family went hungry when it was raining because the logs were wet. His woes are heightened at the end of the month when, besides paying that installment, there is also food and toiletry to be bought.

And with escalating prices at the grocery shops, the P400 the family has always set aside for the food is hardly enough nowadays. So a bag of mealie-meal, and another one of mabele is all they can afford. For relish, they buy packets of assorted soup.

The landlord has since increased the rent to P300 from P250 after he introduced electricity to the house. They eat only once a day since both of them go out to work. The children are given food at the school during the day.

Four other people occupy the main house. But in the house, only extroverted Segametsi comes forward for a chat with Monitor.

She hails from Maun and has been staying in the house since 2006. The going is tough for her as well. She works as a clerk for a company at the light industrial site and at the end of the month, she earns only P500. Circumstances have forced her to engage in prostitution, which, she says, helps her to augment the little salary she gets from her day job. 'Otherwise how am I expected to live from P500? Imagine: I pay P300 rent. I have to buy food and clothes. In any case, I am a regular customer at the Chinese shops,' she says.

Other occupants of this Self-Help Housing Agency (SHHA) house elect to stay silent, but the truth of the matter is that life is not a bed of roses for them. It is as if they have been thrown out of this speeding train which is projected to gallop at 6.8 percent per annum for the next 10 years.

When I mentioned to Tlhabologo that Botswana's economy is projected to grow at 6.8 percent per year for the next 10 years, all he could say was: 'I did not know. Please tell them to wait for us. We would like to be in there as well. Maybe we too would be able to eat three meals a day.' When delivering the budget speech in parliament on February 4, Minister of Finance and Planning, Baledzi Gaolathe said:

'...according to the preliminary estimates from the Central Statistics Office (CSO), real GDP is estimated to have grown by 6.2 percent during the 2006/2007 national accounts year, which is from July in one year to June of the following year.

' For the 2007/2008 financial year, nominal GDP is projected to be P74.98billion. The budget estimates, which I will present later, are based on a projected GDP of P83.25billion for the 2008/2009 financial year.

'At the current population growth rate, real GDP growth rate must average about 6.8percent per annum for the next decade'.