Michael Komape’s mother slung her other child onto her back and rushed to the primary school as soon as the staff called. Her son was missing, teachers said.
The five-year-old was nowhere to be seen, until a little classmate made an unexpected comment.
Michael had fallen into the toilet, the little boy said. While searching where the boy indicated, the teachers noticed Michael’s dead hand visible in the pit of human waste beneath the dilapidated toilets.
“I said at the time that my child died asking for help,” Michael’s mother said during a compensation trial three years later.
The death of Michael Komape in 2014 in a school toilet near Polokwane, Limpopo province, shocked South Africa.
The fact that more than two decades after the end of apartheid, thousands of schools still had such dangerous toilets became a new symbol of inequality in a country awash in inequality.
Some pit toilets consist of a toilet seat placed above a hole in the ground. They are well built and meet the new standards, but many of them are not and are dangerous and unsanitary.
South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has pledged to replace its worst party by 2016.
Instead, ten years after Michael’s death and with the target date long past, more than 3,932 schools – or 17 percent – still have unacceptable pit toilets, according to human rights campaign groups tracking the issue.
Some of those schools have a mix of acceptable and unacceptable toilets, but 728 schools have nothing other than toilets that should have been banned and replaced.
Such toilets are often dilapidated efforts of the local community. They are dirty, unsafe and the youngest children are at risk of falling into them. They can be so bad that children prefer to leave school and relieve themselves outside in the woods or bush.
“There is a danger to life, but these toilets are also often in a disgusting state,” said Motheo Brodie, a candidate lawyer with the Section 27 campaign group.
“They are completely unhygienic and pose a threat to the health of students. In some cases, these toilets are so dilapidated that they no longer have doors.”
The existence of such toilets in schools in poor townships and rural areas is a stark example not only of inequality, but also of the government’s inability to address it.
South Africa is the most unequal country in the world according to rankings by a statistical measure called the Gini coefficient, which assesses how income is distributed across a population.
The rich have a lot, the middle class is relatively small and the rich have very little. About 18 million people in South Africa live on less than £1.50 a day. Unemployment drops to 30 percent.
Campaigners say the problem is shaped by the country’s history, but no solution has been found by the current government.
The most deprived areas in 2024 were also deprived under apartheid.
But the ANC is also guilty. In its thirty years in power, the party has been accused of not making changes; held back by her own lack of will, her mismanagement and corruption.
As voters go to the polls in May to elect the government, the ANC’s failure to reduce this inequality and deliver even basic services will remain high in the minds of many poor voters.
“It is a huge illustration of the inequality in South Africa that there are still pit toilets,” said Cassandra Dorasamy of Amnesty International.
“It is difficult not to say it is a lack of political will on the part of the government, while at the same time recognizing that these problems have deep roots in the inherited system of apartheid.
“But if you look at the way the budgets are being cut, or how they are underspent, there are post-apartheid delays in their implementation.”
Mr Brodie said central government had made money available to replace dangerous pit toilets, but poor local government performance meant the money was not spent.
He said: “They have had 30 years and certainly more could have been done.
“Education is one of the best-funded sectors in the country. Money has been allocated for the eradication of pit toilets, yet we see underspending in education departments. You can’t even blame the lack of resources for more progress.
“It’s actually a lack of political will, as this is an issue that has been hot for so long.”
A lawsuit by Section 27, a Johannesburg-based public interest law centre, has forced the Limpopo province, where Michael Komape died, to set targets to remove pit toilets. The province has reduced the number of schools using unacceptable toilets, but again missed a deadline last year for their total removal.
Other provinces are moving more slowly to remove them.
President Cyril Ramaphosa last month praised the ANC’s achievements over the past three decades, ahead of the May 29 elections.
Political commentators widely predict he will face an uphill battle as the country faces its most crucial election in three decades.
Disenchantment with the ANC, with rolling power cuts, crumbling infrastructure, a bloodless economy, lack of services and persistent corruption, is expected to see the party lose an outright majority for the first time since the elections.
If the party fails to win 50 percent of the vote, its three-decade period of absolute dominance will end and usher in a new, uncertain era of coalition politics.
Convincing poor voters that the ANC has worked in their interests and delivered improvements over the past thirty years will be crucial to the party’s electoral strategy.
Yet the spectacle of the country’s school toilets is just one example of where they fall short.
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