Wednesday, 21 September 2011

Dear Mayor de Lille

Thank you for the reply from your chief of staff to our letter dated 12 September. We have now had time to circulate it amongst our members and to discuss it carefully.

We do appreciate your invitation for the leadership of Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape to meet with the mayor. There has, after so many years of struggle in Durban, been no such invitation from any mayor in Durban and we note and appreciate your willingness to meet with us.

As we have previously stated we have no intereste in attending stage managed events that are designed for the media rather than to enable genuinely open discussion. We are committed to participatory democracy and to participatory budgeting and urban planning methods and would like to find forms of engagement that are genuinely participatory. As we have both noted in the past the current policies are failing to address the urban crisis in Cape Town. We cannot accept that so many of our people will live their whole lives in shacks. We need to find a new path and to advance down that path. This requires the development of a serious critique of the current policies and not just PR exercise in support of them. We want to build a people’s Cape Town in which all people count the same and everyone can live a life of safety and dignity. To us it seems logical that this will only be possible when people are put before profit and the social value of land is put before its commercial value.

8 September 2011

Dear Mayor de Lille

I wish, at the outset, to make it clear that we, as Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape, and the many organisations in solidarity with us across Cape Town, appreciate some aspects of your speech yesterday.

We appreciate the fact that you acknowledge that shack dwellers, including backyarders, are living as we are as a result of a history of oppression and not because there is something wrong with us. Once this fact is acknowledged then it becomes obvious that we need justice and not charity to help us to survive poverty for another day or education to train us to accept our poverty. What is required is an end to poverty.

http://www.khayelitshastruggles.com/2010/11/freedom-and-dignity-comes-before.html

Mzonke Poni, the Chairperson of ABM WC writes
Date: 16 November 2010

While housing demand in South Africa is very huge like any other developing countries in the world it is import to point it out that the freedom and dignity should be priories over the crisis of housing in order to address the issue appropriately.

Housing crisis and providing houses for the poor in South Africa has been politicised and used as tool to divide the poor and to gain political power in the expense of the poorest of the poor.

The Poor Must Claim the Right to be Housed Within Well Located Land

Mzonke Poni

What does this notion (The Right to the City) means to the poor? This simply means:

1. It means improving the quality of life (as the preamble to the Constitution says the government has a duty to ‘improve the quality of life of all citizen and free the potential of each person.

2. It will promote social and economic development (as section 152 of the Constitution says local government must provide services to communities in a sustainable way, it must promote social and economic development, and furthers says it must encourage communities and community organizations to be involved in the matters of local government.

http://www.capetimes.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5201423

The Kennedy Road killings are akin to Stalinism and a threat to democracy

October 14, 2009 Edition 1

Martin Legassick and Mzonke Poni

ON September 26 at 11.30pm, a group of 30 to 40 men wielding pangas, sticks and guns surrounded the community hall in Kennedy Road informal settlement in Durban.

Kennedy Road is the original home of Abahlali baseMjondolo (ABM), a social movement of shackdwellers which has active branches in 34 Durban settlements and 54 nationally, with about 20 000 members. ABM is respected internationally and throughout South Africa by civil society organisations for its participatory democratic and non-violent procedures.

In Solidarity of Abahlali Leaders at Durban Kennedy Road

These kinds of attacks to our comrades are completely unacceptable, we know this is not the first time for our comrades to be attacked, as much as previously they were attacked by group of unknown people but the current attacks at Kennedy road clarifies that the ANC had been behind these attacks with a view to push our strong comrades out of mobilized communities so that they can reclaim the leadership of those communities.

This is clear that people who attacked me last year September 2008 and took my valuable belongings including my laptop which I was using to store the movements confidential information were also sent by the ANC to attack me.

Some good news in dark times - Mzonke represented himself at his trial and won, decisively. The police officers were exposed as liars under cross examination by Mzonke and all charges were dropped.

Mzonke Poni, Chairperson of Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape, is scheduled to stand trial on the charge of public violence on Tuesday 29 September 2009. The charge relates to a protest organised in opposition to state criminality against the Macassar Village Land Occupation. He has written this essay on 'public violence' in response to the charges levelled against him.

Macassar Village, after another illegal demolition

Update: The City has overruled the decision by the Ward Councillor to give a nearby piece of land to the occupiers and the Anti-land Invasions Unit is, again, illegally demolishing shacks and illegally taking people's building material. Click here for more information on blatant state criminality by the City of Cape Town and here for the press release sent out via SMS late on Thursday night.

Siyanda, 19 May 2009

Update: Click here to read the front page story in the Cape Times on the illegal evictions, police violence and arrests in Macassar Village and here for a video interview from the Siyanda transit camp.

Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement
Tuesday, 19 May 2009

The Elections Are Over – The War on the Poor Continues