Pretoria - Gauteng Premier Nomvula Mokonyane has described the findings of a survey on the Quality of Life in the Gauteng City-Region as an important reality check.
"This reality check will help us make a holistic assessment about where we are as a province and where necessary take further steps to improve the state of the province," the premier said on Thursday.
The Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO), which conducted the survey, commissioned a sample of 6 643 respondents from different parts of Gauteng for the survey in 2009.
The survey found that majority of Gauteng residents - 46 percent - were satisfied or very satisfied with their lives, one fifth was neither satisfied nor dissatisfied while the rest were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied.
Commenting on the findings that people came to Gauteng to work and not necessarily to live in the province, the premier said the provincial government had been pursuing an integrated human settlement strategy that included rentals.
Mokonyane added that while she was pleased that most people in Gauteng were satisfied with their lives in the province, she was concerned about the feelings of the remaining respondents.
"We will continue to implement measures that will create more work and ensure an equal distribution of our province's wealth so that we address their challenges," she said.
According to the survey, the majority of Gauteng residents were happy with the national government's performance, however they were not satisfied with local government.
Six out of 10 people who participated in the survey were "satisfied or very satisfied" with national government and 50 percent were "satisfied or very satisfied" with provincial government but that satisfaction level dropped to four in 10 for local government, Professor David Everatt, executive director of the GCRO said.
The survey also found that crime and unemployment were the biggest problems. One in five respondents had been affected by crime, while 46 percent of respondents named crime as the biggest problem their communities faced.
Getting jobs and decent jobs was also a top concern. "The rate of unemployment [excluding scholars, housewives and pensioners] in this survey was 45.5 percent which is quite high," said Everatt.
More women than men, and more blacks (51.1 percent) than coloureds (35.4 percent), Indians (20.9 percent) and whites (8.7 percent), were unemployed. Of those employed, only half had decent jobs, which included getting sick leave, overtime and having an employment contract.
A total of 39 percent of respondents grouped themselves among "the poor" as opposed to the working class or the middle class.
The survey also found that trust between racial groups was under strain.
One of the questions respondents were asked during the survey was whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement: "Blacks and whites will never really trust each other."
Six out of 10 respondents agreed either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement.
"When similar questions were asked in social surveys in the 1990s, whites were mistrustful of blacks and black respondents were more likely to say that race groups would learn to trust each other. This survey shows a reversal in those results," GCRO Senior Researcher Annsilla Nyar said.
According to the survey four out of 10 whites seemed to believe that trust between blacks and whites will develop over time, with 42 percent disagreeing or strongly disagreed with the statement.
Only 20 percent of blacks disagreed with the idea that blacks and whites would never really trust each other.
The survey was conducted by the GCRO in partnership with the University of Johannesburg, the University of Witwatersrand and the Gauteng Provincial Government.
