In South Africa, a community struggling for clean water reflects wider discontent ahead of election
The struggle starts early in the Hammanskraal area of South Africa as people queue some mornings to fill buckets with water from a tank provided by an aid agency
HAMMANSKRAAL, South Africa. (AP) — On days when a municipal truck comes to Hammanskraal to deliver drinking water, a queue of South Africans starts forming early in the morning to fill their buckets.
This is not a distant, rural community, but a township on the edge of the administrative capital city of Africa's most advanced economy. It's barely 30 miles from the government buildings in nearby Pretoria.
Hammanskraal's problems — a lack of clean water, a shortage of proper housing and high unemployment — are a snapshot of the issues affecting millions and driving a mood of discontent in South Africa that might force its biggest political change in 30 years in next week's national election.
The African National Congress, once led by Nelson Mandela, has been in power ever since the end of the apartheid system of white minority rule in 1994. But poverty, failing government services in many places and a national unemployment rate of over 32% that all mainly affect the country's Black majority are seen as central to the ruling party's loss of support.
