Nationwide Marches Against the PIE Amendment Bill

11 June 2026
Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement

Nationwide Marches Against the PIE Amendment Bill

For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.
– Frantz Fanon

On Friday 12 June we will march against the Bill in Durban, Johannesburg and the Pixley ISaka Ka Seme municipality in Mpumalanga. We will be joined by our comrades in progressive trade unions and other organisations of the authentic left.

We will march against the hard turn to the right by the Government of National Unity and against the attempt to criminalise our lives and struggles. We will march for land, freedom and dignity.

If passed into law the PIE Amendment Bill would criminalise poverty and the struggles of impoverished people. It would make it easier to evict people into homelessness while criminalising the collective efforts of poor communities to secure land, organise themselves and defend their rights. Activists, community leaders and social movements would face imprisonment and massive fines of up to a million rand for supporting land reform from below.

Since the intention to amend the PIE Act was first announced we have held meetings in shack settlements and villages across the provinces where we organise, as well as a General Assembly in Durban, to discuss this attack on the poor. We have organised local pickets and protests, and confronted the government when they have allowed public hearings to go ahead.

African people were impoverished and made pariahs in their own country by colonial land dispossession. The ANC has failed to heal this wound, and has left most of us impoverished and, when we come to the cities in search of education and work, treated like pariahs. The PIE Bill did not give us land but it did place some limits on how the state and private landowners could treat us, and did give us some space to organise ourselves as we struggle for land reform from below. The attempt to amend the Bill is an attempt to remove the limited protections that were won by the mass struggles against apartheid and is part of a wider turn to the right by the ANC and the GNU.

The PIE Amendment Bill tells every shack dweller, every rural person planning to make their way to a city in search of a better life, every worker who sleeps four to a room, every young person who does not have a job but needs to form their own household and every woman without much money who needs to escape an abusive relationship that their life is worth nothing in the eyes of this government.

The PIE Amendment Bill is a new chapter in the history of repression that runs through the Native Land Act of 1913, the Slums Act of 1934, the Group Areas Act of 1954, and the Slums Act of 2009. Each of these Acts aimed to exclude the majority from access to land and the cities and to criminalise access to land outside of the state and the market. Each of these Acts was an act of war against the African people, an Act designed to make us poor, keep us poor and rob of us our dignity. Each of these Acts was an attempt to make sure that we were permanent pariahs.

Just as we defeated the Slums Act of 2009 we will defeat the PIE Amendment Bill. And just as we continued the struggle for land after we defeated the Slums Act of 2009 we will continue the struggle for land after we have defeated the PIE Amendment Bill. Our humanity is not negotiable and we will struggle to defend it, and create the material conditions for our lives to flourish, whatever the risks and costs.

Over the last twenty years our movement has won more gains and victories than we can count. Many thousands of people have won land and we have won gains that benefit all poor people. Our movement has also become a home for the oppressed, a space where our dignity is recognised and solidarity is built. If passed into law the PIE Amendment Bill would criminalise our movement overnight. It is a direct attack on our movement and on democracy and we will resist it with all out strength, and with the support of all genuine democrats.

It is important that the people of South Africa are very clear that the ANC, which is now in a coalition with the DA and FF+, is launching an outright attack on poor people in general and the organised poor in particular that is attempting to roll back the limited but important gains in rights won after 1994.

This Bill is unconstitutional, and if necessary we will confront it in the Constitutional Court. It is an attack on the Constitution from the right that aims to give property owners even more power than they currently have. When she announced the Bill, Thembi Simelane, the minister of human settlements was very clear about its purpose. She said that it will ‘create a more stable and predictable environment for investment and growth’.

In Durban we will march from Curries Fountain to the City Hall. In Johannesburg we will march from Jeppe Park to the Gauteng Legislature, where we will make a submission on the Bill. In the Pixley ISaka Ka Seme we will hold a picket.

We are living through a terrible social crisis. Unemployment is at catastrophic levels, especially among young people, where it is over 60%. Hunger is widespread, with more than a quarter of families going hungry. Last year, more than 10,000 children died of starvation.

Public institutions have been hollowed out by organised corruption, often tied to criminal networks, as well as decades of austerity. Many municipalities are collapsing under debt, mismanagement and infrastructural decay. The rates of murder and rape are among the highest in the world, and more and more people have to live in shacks every year.

For many people, daily life has become increasingly precarious. Entire communities experience state abandonment while a small political and economic elite continue to accumulate wealth. The promise that democracy would bring dignity and meaningful social transformation was first broken and has now been abandoned.

Things cannot go on as they are. While our movement and the wider left struggle for a society in which land and wealth are fairly shared, a society in which the humanity and dignity of all people is respected, the forces of the right are moving fast to contain the crisis with repression. The PIE Amendment Bill is part of that turn to the right, that turn to repression. Those who tell us that the poor migrant is the cause of our problems and is our enemy are another part of that turn to the right. We will not be fooled into calling a poor migrant our enemy.

The migrant who comes to the city looking for work is not the one who stole our land, who sends out men with guns to evict us, who steals from the people via corruption and cuts budgets for social spending.

We know who our real enemies are, and they include the people who are trying to push this amendment to roll back the limited gains of 1994 and criminalise poverty and the self-organisation of the poor. The real enemies are the ones who wants to amend our Constitution so that apartheid can walk through the front door again.

We will not be cowards hiding under the bed while the amabutho of capital and corrupt nationalism march past. We will fight. We will occupy. We will shut down streets. If the
Minister of Human Settlements does not have ears to hear us and eyes to see us we will meet her in the Constitutional Court.

They want to make sure that we are permanent pariahs in our own country. We refuse to have our aspirations for land and dignity criminalised and we will not allow our movement to be criminalised. We refuse to be pariahs. We are the people of this land and we will continue the struggle of our ancestors, the struggle to make this a free and rich land, a welcoming land, a land where we can all flourish and live in peace.

We call on all progressive trade unions and organisations, and all shack dwellers and rural landless people, to stand with us in Durban, Johannesburg, and Pixley ISaka Ka Seme Municipality, in Durban, and in every corner where the poor are told to be quiet and to accept that our lives should not count the same as all other lives.

Thapelo Mohapi 084 576 5117
Mqapheli Bonono 073 067 3274
Sinenhlanhla Mcanyana 073 832 3331