Ndebele’s Humiliation
16 January 2006
(See attachment for version with pictures)

by Raj Patel

This weekend, KwaZulu-Natal Premier, S’bu Ndebele went on the campaign trail, assisted by incumbent ANC councillors panning for our votes this election season. It was a shambles, with rallies postponed and backfiring in a number of constituencies. This didn’t happen because the ANC is unpopular. Far from it – the ideals of justice, equality, democracy and dignity for which the majority fought against apartheid are held more strongly than ever. It’s not the people who are rejecting the ANC – it’s the leadership.

Take, for example, the events in the Kennedy Road informal settlement this weekend, where the Premier was scheduled to hold a rally. Seldom have the lines between marketing, political and military campaigns looked so thin. Residents were informed on Friday, via a stern call from Crime Intelligence, that Ndebele would be arriving on Saturday. The local councillor, Yacoob Baig, came to the settlement, and tried to seize the keys for the community’s meeting hall, a hall that he had refused to upgrade, despite repeated requests. When the keys could not be found, he told the residents that they were to sweep the hall, and prepare it for Ndebele’s arrival at 9am.

On Saturday morning, with the sun already roasting the ground, the rally was inaugurated with the arrival of nine police vans, a Caspir, and an armoured bus ready to take away detainees. Thus was the ground made safe for democracy. Well, one kind of democracy anyway. Abahlali baseMjondolo like to distinguish between people’s politics and party politics. Two different conceptions of democracy were up against each other. One works to engender democratic discussion where people live and work. The other argues that control of the state won be election legitimates domination from the top down. At this point, only a handful of ANC-supporters, none of them from settlement, had arrived, sporting new, black ANC t-shirts. As the sun rose higher, and the police retreated to the shade, several buses and Benzes brought in other ANC supporters to the shacks. The police stood guard over the proceedings, protecting the ANC from the people it purported to be serving. Kennedy Road residents have no faith in the political neutrality of the police or their fidelity to the rule of law. When the nearby Foreman Road settlement wanted to march on Mayor Obed Mlaba late last year their march was illegally an unconstitutionally banned by City Manager Michael Sutcliffe and an attempt at peaceful defiance of the ban was met with a savage, entirely unprovoked and, of course, illegal police attack. Since then people wearing red shirts or known to be Abahlali baseMjondolo supporters have been routinely harassed by police officers who have often extorted money on the threat of arrest.

The rally pushed through into the central area outside the community centre, a small dusty area, just wide enough for taxis to pick up people, and turn around. With eight cars there, it was full. It also happens to be the site of one of six water taps, in a settlement of six thousand. The ANC’s sound equipment was parked right in front of it. When the residents of the settlement started chanting above the sound of the rally, Superintendent Glen Nayager gave them an order to disburse or fact arrest, so that the ANC could continue. But where were the shackdwellers to go? They were already home.

“The lost key is a metaphor for the ANC”

Caption: The police encourage you to vote for the ANC.

Having only been told late on the day before that their homes would be descended upon like this, there were few residents of the informal settlements present. Those who were there, dressed in red “No Land, No Vote” T-shirts chanted and sang against a mounting ANC chorus. But there were also important conversations. It appeared that many of the ANC supporters knew that there was a rally over two weeks before, but didn’t know where it would be until they got off the bus – a sort of electoral magical mystery tour, with a free t-shirt and some food thrown in. On seeing the conditions in the shacks, though, one ANC traveller, a man in his 50s, turned on Baig. “Why can’t you give them the land?” Pointing to the houses on the opposite side of the road, he continued “they have houses. These people don’t even have that.”

Demagogues like the Minority Front’s Amichand Rajbansi have drawn deserved criticism for their racist scaremongering in Chatsworth, conjuring up spectres of racism with statements like “Our Indians are ignored… while residents of informal settlements have been moved in.” But Rajbansi isn’t the only one to pit working class Indians against working class Africans. Jayraj Bachu has also promised to rid his ward of informal settlements so that property prices might rise. Baig has made a range of contradictory promises and threats, depending on his audience. Of course ANC policy, which aims at removing settlers from suburbs and dumping them in rural ghettos, is not different in practice to what Rajbansi demands. The difference is that the policy of forced removal is justified in the name of the poor and not the middle class and racist prejudices that drive it.

This is what the ANC has become, and this is why there has been such spirited resistance to it, why S’bu Zikode, chair of the Kennedy Road Development Committee has said “They can campaign – that is their right – but we know this is a war on the poor.” And as for the ANC? Mnikelo Ndabankulu of the Abahlali BaseMjondolo put it well – “The thing I want to clarify is that we are the ANC. We reject the current ANC nominee for our ward and we therefore have a policy of no vote for this election. We will vote in 2009 when we are happy with the nominee.”

After the international media attention directed at the Foreman Road [repressions], the world is watching the ANC closely. How they respond to the dissent being shown not only by settlements in Durban, but by constituencies of the poor across the country will be a litmus test of their claims to democracy.