STEVEN FRIEDMAN
Published: 2009/10/07 06:37:16 AM
WHILE those who shape the national debate avert their eyes, the government’s commitment to democracy is being tested in a Durban shack settlement. And it is failing.
Ten days ago, armed men descended on the Kennedy Road shack settlement. They reportedly killed several people and drove hundreds out. The raid was aimed at activists of the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) shack- dwellers’ movement, whose leaders fled the settlement after being warned they would be killed. AbM has repeatedly challenged the local African National Congress (ANC) leadership; it has urged members not to vote and has launched a Constitutional Court action against the government.
Activists say the armed men are associated with the local ANC, which researchers say vowed to turn the AbM office in the area into an ANC office. Police reportedly did nothing to stop the attacks, but later arrested people associated with AbM. On the Monday after the violence, police arrived in numbers with the local ANC councillor and provincial safety and security MEC Willies Mchunu, who held a public meeting at which they reportedly endorsed AbM’s forced expulsion from the settlement.
A statement by Mchunu and the office of provincial police commissioner Hamilton Ngidi claimed that the provincial government “moved swiftly to liberate … (Kennedy Road) that had been placed on an illegal curfew, wherein residents had been forced to stop watching television, walking or cooking after seven at night”.
Local activists insist that the only curfew imposed on the area closed shebeens at 10pm, and was negotiated with police.
Claims that police were protecting residents would be more plausible had there not been a history of tension between AbM and the local ANC in which police have been accused of acting against AbM. It would also be more credible if a press report had not quoted an ANC source saying that there was “a battle for the hearts and minds of the people of Kennedy Road …. There is a political twist to this thing.” Nor does the province’s statement say why, if a crime was committed, the initial action against AbM activists was taken not by police acting within the law, but by a mob shouting slogans hostile to Mpondo residents of the settlement.
The context and the evidence suggest that what was really happening was an attempt to cripple an organisation that the local ANC dislikes. AbM’s president, Sbu Zikode, insists that “the ANC has invaded Kennedy Road. We have been arrested, beaten, killed, jailed and made homeless by their armed wing.” So far, neither the province nor the ANC has produced plausible evidence to contradict this claim.
This is not the first time police and ANC branches have worked together against social movements that are independent and sometimes highly critical of the ANC. Local ANC leaders in other areas, used to a monopoly, are threatened by independent activists, and seek to drive them away. In some cases, police have been accused of helping them.
While political freedom has been respected at the national level, at the grassroots level the constitution’s promise of the right to act within the law to influence decisions has often been rendered meaningless by local power- brokers protecting their turf.
This latest incident suggests, in two ways, an escalation of the attacks on independent activists, which greatly increases the threat to democracy.
First, until now there was no evidence that provincial or national politicians supported these attempts to muzzle ANC critics — it seemed likely that senior ANC figures were unaware of what local party bosses were doing. Now, an apparent attempt to close down ANC critics is endorsed by an MEC. This suggests that the provincial ANC in President Jacob Zuma ’s home province is supporting a campaign to eliminate an organisation that the local ANC sees as a threat.
Second, the claim that the mob that descended on Kennedy Road was mobilising ethnic prejudices is particularly disturbing. Activists claim that Zuma’s rise to the presidency has sparked a resurgence of ethnic prejudice in KwaZulu-Natal. The attack on AbM does nothing to contradict them.
It is no exaggeration to insist that democracy’s immediate future is at stake in Kennedy Road and wherever the rights of grassroots citizens to organise is denied. If we ignore events there, and the apparent complicity of senior politicians in attacks on citizens’ organisations that displease the ANC, we open the door to the erosion of the freedoms of everyone, including the commentators and middle-class citizens groups who seem to show no interest in the rights and freedoms of shack dwellers.
Democracy means that all citizens are allowed to express themselves. If people at the grassroots do not enjoy that right, democracy is not operating for most of our people. And it may then be only a matter of time before power-holders decide that the rest of us need to be curbed.
The shack dwellers of AbM and other grassroots activists threatened by local power are the front line in the fight to keep us democratic.
We need to make their right to a voice a priority — and to force provincial and national politicians to account for their role in suppressing, or failing to protect, that right.
Friedman is director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, an initiative of Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg.