Abahlali murders show that your right to speaks still depends on where you live

Steven Friedman, Business Day

Will those of us who are free to speak ever hear those who are not?

Last weekend, the shack dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondolo buried S’fiso Ngcobo, who was chair of its branch at eKukhayeni outside Durban. Ngcobo was shot dead a week ago. Another Abahlali member, Ndumiso Mnguni, was shot and wounded. Five Abahlali activists have been murdered in the past eight months.

Abahlali is clearly the victim of a sustained attempt to use violence to suppress it. It is a target because it is not a friend of local power-holders in the Durban region. It has called for vote boycotts, makes it clear that it rejects the current government (it controversially endorsed the DA in the last election) and has successfully taken the authorities to court on behalf of people living in shacks.

The dominant ANC faction in the province has signalled clearly that it sees the organisation as a threat — Abahlali activists are, from time to time, hauled before the courts only for the cases to be dropped because the authorities have no case against them.

Evidence that a political vendetta is being waged against Abahlali is the 2016 conviction of two eThekwini (greater Durban) councillors for the murder of one of its activists.

The war against Abahlali coincides, of course, with repeated murders of councillors and party politicians in KwaZulu-Natal. But, while the party-political killings have, justifiably, received much attention in the national debate, the Abahlali killings have not. While they have received more media coverage than previous violence against Abahlali, there have been no debates in the media, regular and social, about how we stop the killing of activists who use their constitutional rights to challenge local power-holders.

Ignoring the Abahlali murders means turning a blind eye to a problem every bit as important as the killing of local councillors. While the shack-dweller movement has been singled out for extreme violence, it is not the only movement that has been targeted by local power-holders who dominate townships or shack settlements, and who don’t like to be challenged by groups who reject their right to control what happens in these areas.

One of the great ironies of this country’s post-1994 reality is that people in the suburbs, who are most likely to claim that their rights are not respected, enjoy all the freedoms that the Constitution promises. They vote in droves for the opposition, so much so that the suburbs are mini one-party states where the DA wins about 95% of the vote among homeowners and tenants (rather than domestic workers).

They criticise the government freely — so freely that when Jacob Zuma was president, it needed great courage in the suburbs to say anything even mildly good about the government.

In townships and shack settlements, where most people still support the ANC, the Constitution’s freedoms are often available only in theory: people can vote as they wish since their ballots are secret but they are in trouble if they urge people not to vote at all. And between elections, they must often tread carefully to avoid harassment by local politicians and police.

If this sounds familiar to those who were around before 1994, this is because it is: then, too, people in the suburbs were free and those outside them were not. The war against Abahlali is only one example of the reality that many people who were denied freedom before 1994 are still less than free because they cannot speak and organise in the ways the constitution intends.

The killing of politicians is intolerable. But so too is a reality in which whether you enjoy the rights which the constitution promises depends on where you live and how much you own.