Pambazuka
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Fri, 2009-12-18 05:57.
Pambazuka | Raj Patel | The Attack on AbM in Kennedy Road Durban’s bedtime stories: Abahlali baseMjondolo's struggle continues
Raj Patel
2009-12-16, Issue 462
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/61058
In a house in a leafy Durban suburb, lightly festooned with Christmas decorations, a TV is playing the Adam Sandler movie 'Bedtime Stories'. Across scenes of gumballs falling from the sky and Roman gladiator races, our hero tries to get ahead through wish fulfilment. Predictably, his dreams don’t come true in quite the way he hoped.
Under other circumstances, the house in which this TV sits might have been someone’s dream come true, too. It has all the mod-cons – running water, flushing toilets, electricity – and the only neighbourly menace is the sirens of hair-triggered home-security systems. But this is only a temporary home, a safe-house hidden in white suburbia, sheltering activists from the Abahlali baseMjondolo shackdwellers movement. The comforts of this house are a reminder of the comforts of a home they’ve lost, and the nightmare they’ve been through over the past few months.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Fri, 2009-12-11 07:36.
Michael Neocosmos | Pambazuka | Pemary Ridge | The Attack on AbM in Kennedy Road Attacks on shackdwellers - a failure of citizenship?
by Michael Neocosmos in Pambazuka News
If the South African state is a democracy, Michael Neocosmos asks in Pambazuka News, how has it condoned the deployment of violence and murder on the shackdwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, an organisation of the poor that has ‘engaged in peaceful protests’ and ‘advocated peaceful alternatives to the dominant politics’? At the root of the problem of the state reaction to Abahlali, Neocosmos argues, is ‘not simply a failure of democracy, but a systematic failure of citizenship and of the nation.’
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Fri, 2009-10-09 10:12.
Nigel Gibson | Pambazuka | Raj Patel | The Attack on AbM in Kennedy Road http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59322
Democracy’s everyday death: South Africa's quiet coup
Nigel Gibson and Raj Patel
2009-10-08, Issue 451
You don’t need presidential palaces, or generals riding in tanks, or even the CIA to make a coup happen. Democracy can be overthrown with far less pomp, fewer props and smaller bursts of state violence. But these quieter coups are no less deadly for democracy.
At the end of September, just such a coup took place in South Africa. It wasn’t the kind involving parliament or the inept and corrupt head of the ANC (African National Congress), Jacob Zuma. Quite the opposite. It involved a genuinely democratic and respected social movement, the freely elected governing committee of the shack settlement at Kennedy Road in Durban. And this peaceful democracy was overthrown by the South African government.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Sat, 2009-09-12 15:20.
audio | David Ntseng | Mnikelo Ndabankulu | Pambazuka | Sokari Ekine | Steffen Fischer | Zodwa Nsibande http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/58602
Accountability and keeping promises
An interview with Abahlali baseMjondolo
Abahlali baseMjondolo with Sokari Ekine
2009-09-10, Issue 447
Sokari Ekine recently met in London with two members of the South African shackdwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, Mnikelo Ndabankulu, a founding member and spokesperson, and Zodwa Nsibande, the general secretary of the Abahlali Youth League. In their interview they were joined by David Ntseng of the Church Land Programme, an NGO based in KwaZulu-Natal province which works on land rights issues. They discuss a range of issues from movement building and successes and the 2008 'Slums Act', to the decision not to vote in national elections and combating xenophobia in South Africa.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Thu, 2008-10-16 13:47.
Makause Community Leaders Forum | Pambazuka Community leaders from across Gauteng will meet with newly elected Ekurhuleni Mayor Ntombi Mekgwe to show her the devastating impact of government policy in the informal settlement of Makause on the east of Johannesburg. The visit will take place on the 16th October, the eve of the United Nations' International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.
MEDIA ALERT: Stop the "Eradication and Prevention" of our homes.
Issued on 3 October 2008 by a coalition of Gauteng community organizations
Community leaders from across Gauteng will meet with newly elected Ekurhuleni Mayor Ntombi Mekgwe to show her the devastating impact of government policy in the informal settlement of Makause on the east of Johannesburg. The visit will take place on the 16th October, the eve of the United Nations' International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Sat, 2008-07-19 07:31.
camp | leadership | Neha Nimmagudda | Pambazuka Resistance from the other South Africa
Neha Nimmagudda (2008-07-17)
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/49497
“Leaders are meant to lead and to be led [by those who elected them]” - Lindela Figlan, Abahlali baseMjondolo movement
Fourteen years since the transition to democracy, leadership in South Africa is in a state of flux—and South Africans know a thing or two about leaders. For every Mandela, after all, there is an Mbeki. In his seven years of presidency, Mbeki has mistaken denialism for leadership and appeasement for diplomacy. The liberation victors in the ANC have tied up the ruling party in its own historical mythologizing, determined to hold its grasp on the state. Now, for every Mbeki, there is the possibility of a Zuma.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Sun, 2010-03-14 17:34.
2010 Fifa World Cup | Azad Essa | Pambazuka http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/62906
South Africa World Cup 2010: 100 days to what?
Azad Essa
2010-03-10, Issue 473
I don’t like press conferences.
Organised to propagate nothing more than a particular message, they are spaces where real questions are rarely asked because there is no place for real answers.
Everything is pre-empted, rehearsed and answers are a performed act, designed by media experts, advisers and prom queen mothers. Everyone knows that real answers to probing questions are found in the most unlikely of places: In the bar, on the golf course, in someone else’s bed.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Sat, 2009-11-07 16:26.
Pambazuka | Sowetan | William Gumede http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/60020
South Africa's success is about ‘we’, not ‘me’
William Gumede
Almost every developing country that has become rich since the Second World War has done so by lifting the majority of people out of poverty collectively and not the elite only. In fact, the developing countries that have been successful since the Second World War, particularly those from the East Asian developmental states, have done so by empowering the widest number of people – at the same time, not just an elite. Those developing countries where only a small elite became prosperous, have as countries stagnated.
Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Fri, 2009-10-23 09:18.
Pambazuka | police | Sowetan | William Gumede Bring SA’s security apparatus under civilian control
William Gumede
2009-10-22, Issue 454
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59686
As is now becoming increasingly clear from the many court trials, towards the end of the presidential term of Thabo Mbeki, elements of the security apparatus increasingly started to behave like their apartheid predecessors in their muzzling of rivals and legitimate criticisms of the state, and in the abuse of power for personal and factional interests.
The leadership succession battle of the ANC, ahead of the party’s December 2007 Polokwane national conference, saw rival factions inside the ANC often using state security agencies, the police and intelligence services, to try to eliminate each other. At the height of the tussle, a state of paranoia reigned, where smear campaigns, deliberately planting stories and entrapment – such as the attempt by rogue intelligence agents to plant drugs on a Mail & Guardian journalist – were used as a devastating weapon to discredit opponents.
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