durban: a new enemy moves into sight – a bitter struggle looms

Thursday – September 8, 2005 1:14 PM

So, after years of neglect the government, in various forms, is suddenly very interested in Kennedy Road. Militant struggle produces the interest that passive suffering does not. On Monday 29 August a cavalcade of yellow cars from various departments rolled in (up to two hours late) for a meeting to discuss the work being done, by the community, for people with AIDS. The community organisation currently provides various forms of support to orphans (including food, clothes, liaison with schools etc), food for the sick, assistance with grants, linkages with hospitals and clinics and so on. The meeting was opened by an official from the Department of Agriculture, Health and Welfare. She said the following in her opening statement:

“We are very pleased to be here in the field with you. We target the same clients and have the same core business. We want to work closely with all our stakeholders so that we can improve services delivery in an integrated manner. We are committed to mainsteaming AIDS and want to help you to develop a business plan.”

The actual structure of the meeting took the form of using a ‘tool’ prepared by a consultant. The ‘tool’ was a very detailed 21 page questionnaire asking detailed (often statistical) questions about what the community does in the area of AIDS. Government people took turns to ask the questions on the form. The community organisation was not given the form in advance and so, even though they keep detailed records in notebooks, they couldn’t answer all the questions. There is no way that the Centre for Civil Society could have answered similar questions about its own operation without preparation. The structure of the exercise meant that as it went alone the tone of the government officials becomes somewhat inquisitorial and judgmental and the community organisation people became somewhat depressed. What else can happen when questions can’t be answered or, when they can, the consultant’s research has deemed the answers ‘wrong’? (Food parcels must cost R280. Research has shown this. Spending R150 per food parcel per family is wrong and must be explained). Nevertheless not every impulse towards solidarity could be crushed by the ‘tool’. People, on both sides, could find ways around the consultants’ madness. When it came to the question of ‘sustainability’ the community organisation duly produced beaded AIDS ribbons which they said they would sell. The government duly said they would train them to develop a business plan. Everyone knows its nonsense but once the sustainability box is ticked it is possible to move on. And support for some of the extant initiatives was duly and sincerely pledged. And new projects were proposed – e.g. R8 per old person for a monthly get together of the old people and so on.

But last night the big boys came in under the confident leadership of Deputy City Manager Derek Naidoo. He began, as these people always do (do they read Fanon? they act out the script with precise accuracy….) with a glowing account of his role in the struggle. He then moved on to speak at length about how progressive the City Council was and how it was put there by the people and by the struggle. He then, magnanimously, spoke about how the people there had suffered and how the municipality felt their pain. He quoted the Durban mayor Obed Mlaba quoting the Freedom Charter on housing to make his point concrete. He spoke at length about an article that would be appearing in The Mercury the following day and how it shows how well the Municipality is doing. The article is on the front page of The Mercury today. Titled “Feeling Good about Durban” it begins by noting that “New Developments, like uShaka Marine World, and the Suncoast and Sibiya Casinos, have made residents more positive about the city”. It goes on to note that, of those working, 92% of whites are happy with their jobs, 80.2% of Asians, 50.5% of coloured and 41.5% of Africans. It concludes with Bonke Dumisa, CEO of the Durban Chamber of Commerce saying that “poverty was a concern” but it wouldn’t affect investor confidence” because “Investors accept that South Africa has two economies, a first world economy with people with a high disposable income, and a third world economy.”

Naidoo then moved to his key purpose. We are here, he announced, to avert the march. Then, after a long (and of course technicist) ramble about budgets and policies – punctuated by an interlude where people were berated for allowing the settlement, which he spoke of as if it were a disease, to grow from 716 shacks in 2002 to 2 666 (“this growth is unacceptable!”) – he made his offer.

Council wanted a ‘partnership’ with the ‘leadership’ of the community. The council can build two toilet blocks in the settlement and the leadership must run these toilet blocks by charging “10 cents and 20 cents a time” (10 cents for a piss and 20 cents for a shit? no one is sure) and using this money to employ a cleaner and to cover the maintenance costs.

This was greeted with fury.

People asked about the nearby land that had been promised to the community for housing for ten years and as recently as two weeks before it was suddenly dug up (in May this year) to build a brick factory. They asked about the housing they had been promised. Naidoo said that the land was not safe for housing – it could move – and that the air (due to the adjacent dump) was not safe for breathing. The pollution, he kept stressing, affects people of all races. People in Kennedy Road are well aware that council tells the people in the big houses across the road that the air is safe. They asked how could this be and how could it be that the land was safe for a factory but not for housing, how could it be that the land was safe on one side of Kennedy Road (where there is a suburb) but not on the other (where there are shacks)? How could it be that the land and air were safe for a school and college nearby. Naidoo had no real answers but he did say that the city was looking at closing the dump because of the pollution that affects “formal housing” and setting up a gas to electricity project with the UN. (This is the World Bank project on which people in Kennedy Road have been promised a few jobs – exactly the same promises have been repeated to people in other nearby areas and so people are now well aware that the World Bank is lying. This sharing of information and experiences across race and degrees of poverty and neighbourhoods has been one of the benefits of the struggle).

But Naidoo told the truth about the city’s plan for the poor. The squatters will, he said again and again, be moved to the rural periphery of the metro. In his exact words “The city’s plan is to move you to the periphery”. He came under sustained attack. Where will we work? Where will our children school? What clinics are there? How will we live? His answer basically came down to the claim that the city would try to enable entrepreneurship in its rural periphery. People will be dumped in the bush and given training to start businesses. People said that there was no infrastructure in rural areas. Naidoo agreed and said that people must understand that it is too expensive to build it there and that the development focus was the 25km circumference radiating out from the nodal point of the city centre. No one took any comfort from that.

Nonhlanhla Mzobe stormed out shaking with rage.

It was put to Naidoo that this was the same as apartheid – black people were being pushed out of the city. Naidoo said that if people didn’t like it they should go to the constitutional court. This is, he observed, a democracy. He was told that people would rather block the roads than go to the court. Everyone knows that the courts are for the government and the rich.

Bhengu pointed out to Naidoo that there was in fact plenty of land around. Examples were cited. He said that the land belongs to Moreland (Tongart Hulletts). Fazel suggested to him that it be expropriated. He said that the government was looking into it.

Naidoo was told that the march would be averted if he promised 2 500 houses in the city in writing. He said “No, this place has been identified and prioritised for relocation. It is ringfenced for slum clearance.” He was asked if he would put his offer of a partnership around the toilets in writing. He said “No. The city is extending their hand. This is particpatory democracy.” Naidoo was told that people wouldn’t be voting in the local elections. He berated them for not respecting democracy and said they had no right to tell people not to vote. Naidoo was told that the march was going ahead and that if it didn’t get results it would be the last attempt at a legal intervention. Road blockades were promised.

S’bu Zikode declared the meeting closed. His closing statement ended as follows: “You have lied, you are lying and it seems you will continue to lie. We’ll put 14 000 on the streets.”

Naidoo and his entourage left.

The intense discussions about strategy continued into the night.

So what are we to make of all this? None of Naidoo’s claims about the land being unsafe sound plausible. The way he spoke of the growth of the settlement as though it was a disease made his subjective position very clear. Last year city manager Mike Sutcliffe gave a lecture at UKZN. He showed photographs of shacks in the nearby elite suburb of Reservoir Hills and said (paraphrasing from memory) “This shows how much work we still have to do to transform the city. There are no squatter settlement in white areas but they are still there in Indian areas. This is not fair.” Clearly Sutcliffe is moving from a concern with elites. Our position here is obvious – develop settlements in white areas too. But the council is doing more than just extending white privilege to the Indian elite. It is clear that the entire development strategy is based around nurturing the rich and using public money to making the rich richer on the understanding that this will trickle down to the poor who h!
ave no value and so must be pushed out of the city.

This is the same logic that was recently used to try and expel the poor in flats in Chatsworth and other areas from the city. That struggle is, for the moment, won. But winning that struggle is relatively easy. It affects a minority and a minority that can with lots of hard work mobilise sympathetic middle class support in the media and so on. What happens when you are talking about a large group of people routinely stigmatised (very often by the so called ‘left’ too) as stupid, criminal, dirty and dangerous? A group of people for whom middle class support is very, very difficult to win?

Based on Naidoo’s comments last night it seems that two things are in order:

1. An all out attack, using every available mode of struggle, on the council’s attempts to move the poor out of the city. Therefore a direct attack on the state.
2. A demand that the land owned by Morelands be expropriated by the state and/or movements. Morelands is a company that got its land after it was stolen by colonial conquest. They then ran their sugar farms with indentured labour. Now they are building gated communities and business parks where corporate HQs, hospitals and schools all look exactly the same on that land. What company has more blood on its hands? Therefore an attack on capital.

Fazel Khan & Richard Pithouse