Category Archives: Anna Majavu

IRIN: Détresse psychologique à Tin Can Town

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http://www.irinnews.org/fr/Report/96682/AFRIQUE-DU-SUD-D%C3%A9tresse-psychologique-%C3%A0-Tin-Can-Town

Détresse psychologique à Tin Can Town

LE CAP, 1 novembre 2012 (IRIN) – Une étude universitaire récente a identifié une série de troubles mentaux qui touchent les habitants des bidonvilles de la province du Cap-Occidental en Afrique du Sud. Ces troubles vont des insomnies chroniques à un manque d’amour-propre.

Intitulée ‘L’impact de la vie dans les camps de transit ; les témoignages des habitants de Blikkiesdorp et de Happy Valley’ (The Impact of Living in Transitional Communities; The Experiences of People in Blikkiesdorp and Happy Valley), l’étude a été menée par l’université du Cap-Occidental (UWC) et l’université de technologie de la péninsule du Cap (CPUT). L’étude a été restreinte à ces deux collectivités pour des raisons de budget.

« Comme les chercheurs n’avaient pas les moyens de mener des entretiens à grande échelle, nous avons pris quatre différents groupes témoins de 10 à 20 personnes résidant à Blikkiesdorp ou dans un autre camp de transit appelé Happy Valley. Et nous avons trouvé une grande concordance des résultats dans chaque cas », a déclaré à IRIN Shaheed Mahomet, maître de conférences en génie civil à la CPUT et activiste communautaire de Blikkiesdorp.

Parmi les troubles mentaux identifiés, il y a la dépression, les crises d’angoisse et de panique, les insomnies chroniques, les bouffées de colère et le manque d’amour-propre.

Sans espoir

Selon les auteurs de l’étude, il existe un manque d’information concernant la santé mentale des habitants de bidonvilles ; le rapport tente de combler cette lacune.

Blikkiesdorp – également appelé ‘Tin Can Town’ – est un camp de transit temporaire créé en 2008 et prévu pour accueillir 600 personnes. Il s’est développé depuis et compte aujourd’hui plus de 4 000 habitants parqués dans 1 500 cabanons d’une seule pièce fabriqués en tôle ondulée, à environ 34 km du Cap. Happy Valley est un camp de transit voisin où vivent 3 000 personnes. Les camps ont été construits en prévision de la Coupe du monde de 2010, qui s’est déroulée en Afrique du Sud, afin de reloger les personnes expulsées d’immeubles occupés illégalement.

« Le grand aspect négatif qui ressort des entretiens est le sentiment de désespoir et le fatalisme qui finit par toucher ces gens » Rasheed Ahmed, psychologue clinicien de l’UWC et responsable de l’équipe d’étudiants chercheurs en psychologie, a déclaré à IRIN : « Le grand aspect négatif qui ressort des entretiens est le sentiment de désespoir et le fatalisme qui finit par toucher ces gens. C’est très lié au fait qu’ils pensent ne pas avoir d’avenir. Les humains ont besoin d’espoir et d’un sens à leur vie pour s’épanouir ».

« Avoir un objectif futur est crucial pour mener une vie saine, aussi bien au niveau mental que physique. Beaucoup de personnes interrogées se sont plaintes de troubles psychosomatiques toujours présents tels que des maux de tête qui sont clairement liés au stress et à l’anxiété », a-t-il expliqué.

Difficultés colossales

Etienne Clarson, habitant de Blikkiesdorp et dirigeant local qui milite pour des logements à coût réduit, a déclaré à IRIN que le lieu était un « dépotoir pour êtres humains ».

« Nous sommes coincés ici, car nous n’avons nulle part où aller, et les difficultés à surmonter sont colossales », a affirmé M. Clarson. « Il y a de gros problèmes de criminalité – les gens ont peur de sortir de chez eux et de se faire voler. Nous sommes loin de pouvoir trouver du travail alors personne n’a d’argent. Les gens ont honte de leur situation et ils n’ont ni confiance en eux, ni amour-propre ».

L’étude a révélé que les conditions de vie avaient considérablement influencé les relations sociales et interpersonnelles, et que le manque d’intimité avait un impact négatif sur les relations humaines, ce qui entraînait souvent des problèmes conjugaux. Il n’y a pas d’aires de jeu pour les enfants qui sont témoins des trafics liés à la drogue et aux gangs dès l’âge de cinq ans.

Cependant, l’étude a montré que, pour une minorité de cas, l’adversité avait conduit à de hauts niveaux de résilience. « Une très faible proportion de personnes a montré une résilience exceptionnelle face à ces problèmes. Cela s’est manifesté à l’origine par une mobilisation communautaire. Mais cela ne doit pas être perçu comme un facteur positif important. Si quelqu’un se relève après avoir été assommé, nous devrions nous concentrer avant tout sur les raisons pour lesquelles il a été assommé », a expliqué M. Ahmed.

SACSIS: Failing to Protect the Poor against Crime

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1466

Failing to Protect the Poor against Crime

by Anna Majavu

South Africa continues to be a hazardous place for the Black poor. You don’t have to be a Marikana mineworker to die a death that is undignified, if not brutal and terrifying. The daily security concerns of the majority have never been further from the minds of politicians, who are either gripped with Mangaung mania, or – in the case of the DA – feverishly plotting the jingles and publicity stunts that they think will win them another metro city in the 2014 elections. COPE’s only recent claim to fame is its elderly MP who tried to open an aeroplane door in mid-flight, later escaping with a slap on the wrist after successfully arguing (with the support of the DA) that the combination of one alcoholic drink and one sleeping tablet made him lose his senses.

You know you are living in the most unequal country in the world when the mayor of a major metropolitan city can issue a self-congratulatory press statement – as the DA’s Patricia de Lille did recently – about the installation of less than 30 high-mast lights to be spread across numerous unlit informal settlements.

It is well known that in Cape Town’s townships and informal settlements, street lighting is almost non-existent, and as a result, that crime is rife. The complaint has been raised by residents at nearly every community meeting for years, no matter who organized the meeting or what else the meeting was supposed to be about. The DA likes to claim that communities vandalise every street light that ever gets installed but the truth is that street lighting has hardly been installed in the informal settlements and light bulbs are never replaced in the townships street lights. In Cape Town’s white suburbs, on the other hand, the DA city administration will send technicians out at 10pm to fix a streetlight bulb that died the same evening.

It emerged in a recent City of Cape Town press statement that poor, Black areas are not set to receive proper street lighting anytime soon. The DA city is instead going to rely on national government’s urban settlement development grant to install four lights here and there over the next two years. While the cost of keeping the streetlights on in white suburbs is part of the city’s normal budget, lighting the Black areas depends on donations.

The DA has already claimed that it is powerless to protect poor people on the Cape Flats from being caught in the crossfire between warring gangs, and that only the army would be able to do this. But with the re-emergence of necklacing in Khayelitsha as a community response to crime, the recent killings of four Cape Town metro police in the townships and the increase in the number of young people involved in violent gangs, it is clear that the DA is powerless on many more fronts and that things are unravelling fast in the “mother city”.

The concentration of public funds on white suburbs means the different races live totally different lives. White Capetonians can expect to wake up on the weekend and buy some beers for the night without incident. But for the past two Christmases, Khayelitsha residents have reported that police of all the different forces set up ad-hoc roadblocks on the pavements and ask residents returning from the bottle stores to show receipts for the beer they have purchased. If the residents have failed to keep their slips, or never got one, they are knocked around a bit and their alcohol confiscated. This is nothing to do with drinking in public but happens to ordinary people walking home after shopping.

More disturbingly, Black township residents are increasingly being subjected to the sight of public group killings, which increase the fear and insecurity in those areas. Several Khayelitsha residents vented their shock on Facebook just this past weekend at seeing groups of 14 year old youths killing each other in Makhaza Park.

“The park is full…it’s blood everywhere. These boys are carrying weapons I have never seen in (my) life. This is too painful to see. We have been calling the police over and over but they haven’t come,” wrote one person. She later posted an update that two police had arrived, watched for a while and then left. “These kids are continuing”, her desperate update read. Less than two hours later, another update read: “Sad to say, we have lost two young boys and others are injured…am numb”.

Such horrific practices would be unthinkable in one of Cape Town’s white suburban parks. But in the townships, the government has allowed these incidents to become part of “normal” life.

It was only last week that Cape Town’s largest shack area, the Enkanini informal settlement, was provided with 452 electricity points – for 11 000 homes. How 24 families are going to share one power point is a mystery. The DA says another 2000 electricity connections will be turned on before May 2013 but that the rest of the electricity will be installed in phases. It is still not clear whether every home will eventually have its own electricity point or not. This informal settlement is situated in a highly urbanised city, which recently won the title of “World Design Capital”, yet its high school only got electricity last week!

Townships in the rest of the country are equally under-developed and crime plagued. Rural areas are also experiencing a spike in crime. The situation will continue to worsen rapidly until the DA and ANC abandon their practice of maintaining the living areas set up by apartheid’s Group Areas Act.

Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen. The parties are two sides of the same coin. The ANC’s outdated neo-liberal economic policies were drawn up by the same international economists who wrote the policies of the DA. Successive ministers of Finance have focussed for 18 years now on pumping billions in public funds into tax breaks and incentives for overseas investors to set up factories that have never materialised.

Former president Thabo Mbeki said last week in a speech at Fort Hare university that South Africa was progressing “towards a costly disaster”, and was in a “dangerous and unacceptable situation of directionless and unguided national drift”.

This is rich coming from someone who, when he was in power, oversaw the arms deal; withheld anti-retroviral treatment from thousands of women living with HIV; set up the practice of wasting hundreds of millions of rands in public funds on hiring useless consultants for local and national government, and started the now defunct practice of paying retention bonuses to parastatal managers.

After 18 years, the DA and ANC have missed all opportunities to end apartheid in South Africa and improve the lives of the Black majority. The rapidly worsening situation, where more and more Black people are living without water, electricity, houses and schools as if in 17th century England, won’t be alleviated by either the DA or ANC. Their time has past.

SACSIS: The Psychological Cost of Living in an Informal Settlement: ‘Like a Mountain Fell on Me’

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1433

The Psychological Cost of Living in an Informal Settlement: ‘Like a Mountain Fell on Me’

by Anna Majavu

The “overwhelming adversity” they had to face daily as a result of living in an informal dwelling felt “like a mountain fell on me”, said one Cape Town resident.

Politicians from across the spectrum have lied to the public for years about their plans to “eradicate”, “upgrade” and “transform” informal settlements. They have forced communities out of informal settlements into equally horrible transit camps or temporary relocation areas, guaranteeing them a short stay before election promises kick in, only to abandon them for up to eight years in sub-human conditions. The DA, which rules over the Western Cape’s dumping grounds for the poor, and the ANC, which governs the rest of the country’s sub-human shack lands, have both failed to carry out any rudimentary housing programmes beyond their drop in an ocean, small-scale developments which do nothing to meet the mass demand for housing.

The recent killing by police of 34 miners in Marikana shone the international spotlight on the brutality of poverty in South Africa. But for the residents of Marikana’s informal settlement, the nightmare is not yet over. R24 million has been budgeted by government for an inquiry into what is already clear – that police killed the mineworkers. The Marikana informal settlement is by all accounts in desperate need of a R24 million upgrade but instead its residents are being treated to a new military occupation by the army. The sense of justice that the commission was supposed to bring has been neutralised by the continued actions of the police, who recently managed to kill ANC councillor Paulina Masuhlo “by accident”, after allegedly shooting randomly at the community for days.

Because of the sub-human living conditions they have been forced into, residents of informal settlements and transit camps are seen as less than human by police and criminals alike, who have become accustomed to treating these residents with the utmost cruelty.

This was highlighted in a recent study by Bryony Fell, Christel Mennette, Emily Elkington, Saabierah Towfie, Sue Drummond and Weslin Charles – a group of psychology masters students at the University of the Western Cape and Cape Peninsula University of Technology civil engineering lecturer Shaheed Mahomed. The study found that residents of informal dwellings suffer from severe psychological problems as a result of their living conditions. While the study focused on Cape Town’s transit camps – Blikkiesdorp (tin can town) and Happy Valley – its findings are likely to be relevant to all informal settlement residents.

The study found that residents showed “enormous resilience”, but were also plagued by problems such as a habitual inability to sleep because of the fear of crime at night – and the realisation that police were not there to help. They felt they were perceived as “dom en onnosel” (stupid and doltish) by the outside world because of their living conditions. After being abandoned for several years in what was supposed to be temporary housing, residents felt they had been made a joke of by government, and this shattered their confidence generally. They experienced feelings of extreme anger and desperation, isolation, distress and anxiety, which hampered attempts to create personal intimacy.

“The theme of overwhelming adversity was very strongly echoed. Participants sketched a picture of the numerous and seemingly insurmountable challenges that were part of their everyday experiences. These challenges affected all aspects of their being – physical, mental, psychological, social and spiritual,” the study reported.

The overwhelming adversity that comes with living in an informal dwelling felt “like a mountain fell on me”, said one participant.

Children were reported to be “blacking out” at times, seemingly from stress. With blankets and pillows soaking wet during the rainy season, parents had to cope with children being constantly ill or send their children to live elsewhere.

The participants also had harsh words for academics, complaining of unequal knowledge partnerships. Lots of overseas researchers come to Blikkiesdorp, but the results of their research are never shared, and these academic exercises did not benefit participants, the study reported.

The depression experienced by millions of informal settlement residents will not come to an end anytime soon without their fierce resistance to business as usual. The DA and ANC govern in an inappropriate fashion for the world’s most unequal country – spending public money on high-priced consultants, big salary bills for bloated administrations and on failed multimillion rand enticements for big corporations to set up mythical factories that will supposedly solve the jobs crisis. They have no political vision about eradicating inequality and are more likely to deploy the police and army to crush rebellions than to do anything to live up to their election promises.

The courts cannot be relied upon either to help do away with informal settlements, even though these dumping grounds contravene the right to dignity and safety. The Durban High Court last week ordered the eThekwini municipality to house – within three months – 37 families living in a transit camp near KwaMashu, Durban after the shack dwellers movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Socio-Economic Rights Institute brought a case to court. But the court only did this because these families had been evicted from the Siyanda informal settlement three years earlier on the proviso that they be given proper houses within a year. The court had a problem with the fact that the eThekwini municipality had ignored the legal proviso, not so much with the conditions in the transit camp.

In 2009 in Cape Town, judges visited ‘Blikkiesdorp’ to vet the living conditions there after the city applied to evict a large group of people who had set up shacks alongside the busy Symphony Way road. Although the Symphony Way dwellers had refused to be moved to Blikkiesdorp because they had forged a better community on the roadside (and subsequently produced a book about their community), the court decided anyway that they would be better off in the transit camp.

It is tragic when people are forced to battle it out in court to prove to well-off judges that one dumping ground for the poor (the transit camp) is worse than another (the informal settlement). Politicians from the DA, ANC, and other parties have long had blind eyes when it comes to the horrible living conditions in the various dumping grounds for the poor. Transit camps, temporary relocation areas and informal settlements are now a fact on the ground. Unfortunately, their existence is no longer seen as a political dilemma or embarrassment — much less a human rights abuse by either the DA, the ANC or the judiciary.

SACSIS: Poverty Wages and Inadequate Housing

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1399

Poverty Wages and Inadequate Housing

Last week at Lonmin mines, the ANC saw the consequences of allowing South Africa to remain one of the most unequal countries in the world. The steadfast refusal of the mineworkers to continue their dangerous work without a substantial pay increase, and the consequent massacre of the workers by police are just the start of what is yet to come.

The police killings appear to have sparked a level of outrage amongst the Black poor and working class that could prove to be a tipping point.

For the past few weeks, communities in Cape Town have been blockading major roads and highways in a protest against being made to live for almost two decades since the end of apartheid in shacks, leaky and crumbling homes and generally being treated like animals.

The DA, ANC, SACP and Cosatu’s heads are all still in the sand about the levels of anger on the ground – whether this anger be about housing, water or underpaid and dangerous work. The DA’s responses to any protests are written with the aims of portraying themselves as the victim or protecting white capital, and the tripartite alliance’s responses are now written with the sole purpose of voicing support for their preferred candidate at the ANC’s elective Mangaung conference later this year. It is therefore opportune for the DA to call for an investigation into the Marikana massacre, but not to criticize the mine owners, and opportune for the ANC, SACP and Cosatu to criticize the DA’s failure to deliver, but not to condemn the police massacre at Marikana.

The mainstream media supports this political game. Apart from their focus on former president Thabo Mbeki’s refusal to provide anti-retroviral medicines to pregnant poor, Black women, the media has refused, since 1994, to support the underdog in the story – the Black majority. Food price hikes by white-owned monopolies, the continued obscene profiteering by mine bosses, the failure of public-private partnerships in delivering housing and other services, have been stories largely ignored by the press.

The ANC has wasted the past 18 years in willingly paying back the debt incurred by the apartheid regime, spending billions more on a corrupt and pointless arms deal, dabbling in failed privatization and fiscal austerity experiments and building now-crumbling one room “kennels”.

One of the last reforms the ANC could make to save its bacon would be to roll out decent quality housing across the land on a massive scale, creating the thousands of jobs it has been promising.

Unfortunately, last week’s release of the National Development Plan 2030 by minister of planning in the presidency, Trevor Manuel does not give any hope that this will happen and can better be described as a damp squib.

In the area of housing, the plan is essentially a continuation of the failed GEAR economic policy. It proposes a mish-mash of incentives to get businesses to set up in townships, pie in the sky public-private partnerships and a vague “upgrade” of informal settlements.

While townships clearly need retailers and shopping malls to inject life into the area, and to assist residents without cars to shop close to their homes, these businesses have not led to a big increase of decent jobs in the townships. The staff employed by the retailers are all on casual or “permanent casual” contracts where they work irregular hours and end up with small pay cheques. The increase in the numbers of businesses in townships has not in itself made the townships more liveable – having a decent, permanent job that allows a worker to extend and improve his or her township home is key to that.

The plan also suggests that bank loans be combined with government subsidies and money made available by employers in their housing schemes to create a new kind of financing for working people who don’t earn enough to get a bond outright. This is a variation on the “gap housing” plan that has yet to prove effective. It is also a bit far-fetched given that hardly any employers have housing schemes any more, and that the ANC government has not even been able to get its own long-promised housing subsidy scheme for public servants off the ground yet. To qualify for a the smallest R100 000 “gap” house – which is little better than an RDP house – one needs to earn at least R4000 per month, which rules out most of the population.

And until now, when the DA and ANC governments have promised “upgrades” of informal settlements, they have not meant that they will build houses. An upgrade can mean anything from installing more pit or temporary chemical toilets, to putting in more taps or electricity.

People are desperate for houses above all. Yet Manuel’s plan also reflects the ANC’s unwillingness to move away from the privatized housing programme, where money is given to private contractors to build small housing schemes, instead of being given to municipalities to set up housing departments with properly trained workers. Since the end of apartheid, this privatized system has been used to buy political support and has seen private contractors milk the state of cash, using only the leftover money to build sub-standard low cost houses which are now going to cost R58 billion to rectify.

Human Settlements minister Tokyo Sexwale has shrewdly started to articulate the link between the poor quality post-apartheid homes and the role of the private contractors. Until now, Sexwale has insisted that private contractors who pocket most of the tender money and build faulty homes on the cheap are only corrupt individuals who need to be weeded out. But this month, Sowetan newspaper reported Sexwale tacitly admitting that privatised housing delivery was so flawed that government was “thinking about” setting up its own housing company.

Sexwale’s image was dented by last week’s exposé in the Mail and Guardian, which said he had invested $150 million with Israeli businessman Dan Gertler, who allegedly wooed Democratic Republic of Congo politicians to sell him mining rights in that country only to sell the rights on to global mining companies very quickly at huge profit.

The exposé, while grim, is not the only image problem that Sexwale faces. As he is now in the running for the deputy presidency at the ANC’s looming Mangaung congress, Sexwale will have to do something drastic to overcome the impression that he has failed in his housing portfolio. Sexwale is fond of blaming corruption for the failure to deliver houses on a large scale and the publicity stunt where he spent a few hours in a shack to experience slum life, did not make a great impression on the general public, who saw it as fake.

Sexwale also has the unfortunate tendency of saying things like “it is not an easy thing to build houses” at ceremonies where he hands over keys to a tiny 300 houses at a time. This does not inspire confidence. A new government housing company could be just the thing for Sexwale to improve his image ahead of the next elections.

SACSIS: Helen Zille’s Hopeless Handling of Cape Gang Violence

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1362

Helen Zille’s Hopeless Handling of Cape Gang Violence

by Anna Majavu

With the DA beginning their campaign to wrest control of another few provinces from the ANC in the 2014 elections, the impoverished residents of Cape Town’s Lavender Hill and Hanover Park have become the latest convenient political footballs.

Like other so-called “Coloured” communities – Delft, Grassy Park, Ocean View and Bishop Lavis – Lavender Hill and Hanover Park remain derelict ghettoes, which appear to be stuck in a long forgotten era. A part-privatised leaky housing development built on top of a wetland there in the 1990s has caused more harm than good, with poor residents having to fork out thousands on bond payments and repairs for damage they didn’t cause. As Eleanor Hoedemaker, a social movement activist from the area says, there hasn’t been any real housing delivery in the area for the past “fifty years”.

Just days after she was elected Cape Town’s mayor in March 2006, Helen Zille was forced to meet with a few hundred backyard residents who had been set upon by the city’s metro police after occupying some land near Lavender Hill. Fearing that her inauguration would be marred, Zille herself arranged a piece of state land in the area for the residents to settle on until they received new government houses in nearby Pelican Park. The residents named that patch of land Zille Raine Heights, partly in Zille’s honour. But their promised houses were never built and a few years later, the city took out an eviction order against them – winning the right to forcefully remove them from the very land they had been instructed to live on while waiting for their new houses.

This is Helen Zille and the DA’s involvement in the communities surrounding Lavender Hill and Hanover Park. Apart from poverty, these communities have been under siege from gangs for decades now. The DA has never done anything to end the drug trade on the Cape Flats and it risks losing thousands of votes in the 2014 elections because of this.

Last week Zille called for the army to be sent into Lavender Hill and Hanover Park, claiming that because of the “meltdown” in the top ranks of the ANC controlled national SAPS, local police had lost their ability to investigate gangs and drug crimes.

But in Cape Town, drug lords have been paying police bribes to protect their business for decades – including during apartheid. This is common practice not only in other parts of Cape Town – to which Zille turns a blind eye – but across the world.

When a political leader calls for the most draconian crackdown on communities – a military occupation – normally unthinkable in a parliamentary democracy, this is more an admission of their own failure to govern than anything else.

The DA has been in power in Cape Town for an uninterrupted six years now, and in control of the province for more than three years. Zille’s mantra is that the DA governs better than the ANC, but this is far from true. The economic policies of both parties are virtual carbon copies of each other, with the DA only differing slightly in its promotion of accelerated privatisation and its desire to do away with any slight protections for workers.

On the ground, both the DA and ANC are equally inept at “governing” since both have failed to provide basic services, decent education and healthcare, jobs or housing for the citizens unfortunate enough to live under their rule.

Their approach to policing is equally similar. The ANC’s refusal to do anything to stamp out the collusion between police and drug lords despite the anguish of the frightened residents shows their disrespect for the poor. There are also questions about why the army was deployed last year at peaceful protests over job allocations outside the new Khayelitsha District Hospital if it is not appropriate to deploy it to stop gunfights between gangs.

And Zille’s call for the army to rush into Hanover Park and Lavender Hill begs a critique of policing by the DA. The DA has never had a problem policing Cape Town when it wants to crush resistance by the poor. Its city administration has a safety and security directorate with a number of specialised units under its control, including the anti-land invasion unit and the anti-copper theft unit.

There doesn’t seem to be any reason why the city’s safety and security directorate does not set up an anti-gang unit. The anti-land invasion unit has been particularly “active” in Gugulethu, Macassar, Mitchells Plain, Delft and Mandela Park, in tearing down hundreds of shacks over the years set up by frustrated back-yard residents.

The Cape Town metro police force itself is seemingly willing and able to engage in brutal gunfights. When they wanted to tear down shacks in another so-called “Coloured” ghetto – Hangberg near Hout Bay in 2010, the Cape Town metro police opened fire with hundreds of rubber bullets, shooting four people’s eyes out. It seems odd that there is nothing these police can do to fight gangsters in Lavender Hill and Hanover Park.

Community activist Nkwame Cedile, of the Right 2 Know campaign in Cape Town says, “What we are going through in townships is violence of inequality. Zille and the ANC ruling elite are in denial about the violent impact of inequalities. They treat the continued violence as just a community safety issue and I say it is more than that,” said Cedile.

Cape Flats based political activist and academic Shaheed Mahomed says it is in the DA’s interests not to end the drug trade in the city.

“In the 1960’s and 70’s the US state systematically saturated the ghettoes with drugs to break the resistance that had been led by the Black Panther movement. A drugged youth would not lead any resistance.”

Mahomed points to last week’s execution of Lavender Hill Anti-Eviction Campaign activist Soraya Nordien, who was shot at point blank range just a week after being threatened with a gun by Junky Funky gang members. Nordien had been a leader in mobilising the community to set up neighbourhood watches in the area. “The police did nothing about this. The police openly collaborate with gang members,” said Mahomed.