Category Archives: Mandy de Waal

Daily Maverick: Shack flames highlight Makause’s deadly combo of lies and local politics

Leave a reply

http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-10-18-shack-flames-highlight-makauses-deadly-combo-of-lies-and-local-politics

Shack flames highlight Makause’s deadly combo of lies and local politics

If you thought the road to Mangaung was paved with obfuscation and complexity, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Dig into a local municipality and you’ll find the politics there just as confounding. If not more so. By MANDY DE WAAL.

This is a story of three protagonists – all with divergent versions of what happened. First up is General Alfred Moyo, who is unemployed and lives in Makause, an informal settlement in Primrose, a suburb of Germiston on Gauteng’s East Rand. He’s an activist and, from what this journalist can see (admittedly after just two visits to Makause), he’s fairly highly regarded in the community because he helps people stand up to power and he fixes problems. Makause is a socialist and well-versed in issues of constitutional and land rights, which doesn’t make him popular with the authorities in the area.

Tania Lynette Campbell is the councillor for ward 21 (Primrose) which belongs (politically) to the DA. Campbell took the ward in both the 2006 and 2011 elections and, judging by the election results, it was a good race in an ANC-owned metro.

The other character in this drama is Aubrey Mokgosi, who’s the director of Human Settlements Property & Institutional Support in the Department: Human Settlements in the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Council.

The story goes like this. On Saturday 13 October 2012, a woman allegedly commited suicide by taking petrol from a generator, pouring it over herself and setting herself alight after her man walked out on her. Makause is an incredibly dense informal settlement; the shacks are wedged well up against each other, and for the most part made of highly flammable materials. Within a short space of time, 18 shacks were consumed.

On Monday 15 October, after many of the 18 families slept out in the rain, Daily Maverick heard about the story from Moyo, the activist. One of the first calls was, of course, to Campbell, the ward councillor, to find out what was going on. Campbell was unaware of the fire in the informal settlement.

“I am surprised I haven’t been notified, because the community development worker has not contacted me. She normally phones me. I haven’t been notified whatsoever,” Campbell said.

“I will have to follow up, I don’t even have knowledge of that whatsoever,” she added.

The community development worker referred to by Campbell, Moyo alleges, doesn’t even live in Makause, but stays some 30km away near Vosloosrus. Community development workers, or CDWs, are an invention of the Mbeki era and, during his tenure as president, The Aloof One said these “multi-skilled community development workers’’ would be government’s direct link to communities. The idea was to “bring government nearer to people and to enable it to respond to community needs”, as expressed at the time.

Ekurhuleni’s Human Settlement man, Aubrey Mokgosi, heard of the incident late on Sunday night, and on Monday morning got the wheels of bureaucracy churning. He effected a survey of the site, and got a quote for disaster relief management from the local government’s official supplier, the Red Ants. When the official supplier was still not on site on Tuesday 16 October, after families had spent four nights out in the rain, he put in the official phone calls to give bureaucracy a little shove.

The Makause shack dwellers affected by the fire did, however, received one common or garden Pep Stores-type blanket per familial unit, and a fair-sized bag of mealie meal. Mokgosi got a quote for R93,879,00 from the Red Ants to supply building materials, reconstruct the shacks and to provide food parcels and blankets.

By Wednesday morning the hammers were hammering, but the materials being used to rebuild the shacks weren’t exactly new. The Red Ants, by Mokgosi’s own admission, are Ekurhuleni’s “official service provider appointed through council supply chain management policy. They both assist council to demolish, relocated (sic), construct shacks as well as to monitor land invasion as and when requested,” Mokgosi wrote in response to the Daily Maverick’s questions.

The next question Daily Maverick asked was whether it was true that “[i]n this instance the Red Ants demolished shacks in a nearby area, and used that material to rebuild the shacks in Makause.” Mokgosi’s response was a challenge to the Daily Maverick to prove the allegation, which was made by the local community.

He added: “Red Ants are allowed to reconstruct shacks with used material.”

Nonetheless, it is not difficult to raise ethical queries around a supplier that’s ruthlessly evicting people, knocking down shacks and carting off the building materials. Who then restores shacks or builds shacks, and can use “recycled” material. But then, Google the word Ekurhuleni and you’ll hit a number of links claiming ethics aren’t enshrined on the metro’s mantle.

Furthermore, members of the Red Ants where arrested for theft late last year during evictions in Germiston for-theft and were alleged to have attacked residents with crow bars.

But let’s get back to why Campbell, the ward councillor for Makause, was the last to know about the fire. Moyo’s story is that this is because she (together with the ANC-led metro) wants to evict people off Makause so that a mall can be built on the site.

“The last time Tania was in Makause was when she came to assert her working relationship with a mob group who endorse and support the relocation of the community. But this land can’t be developed because there’s a legal case,” says Moyo. “She is not even aware of the litigation, nor is she in possession of all the documents in this regard. She knows nothing. The ANC wants her to push for the evictions to go through, so people will see they are evicted by the DA, that it was her ward, the DA that evicted them.”

In her response, Campbell says: “Every month I hold a ward committee meeting, on which there are two representatives from Makauwse (sic). They regularly update me on this area of the ward and highlight any problems that residents in the informal settlement experience.”

Campbell says she visited the informal settlement in June, July and August. “There are also regular meetings with the Customer Care Centre Officials, myself and leaders of the community. Obviously I am kept abreast of any volatile situations that may arise by the EMPD (Ekurhuleni Metro police department) and Primrose SAPS.”

“On 17 April, before the State of the City address by the Mayor, the DA Caucus leader, Shelley Loe, and I visited residents in Makause so that Loe could tell the Mayor exactly what residents in the worst affected informal settlements wanted to see happen in their community this year. These concerns were related in detail in Loe’s speech to the Mayor later that month,” Campbell says.

The DA ward councillor says Moyo is “a leader who was banished” from Makause. Moyo says that Campbell’s view has been tainted by the ANC and the police, both of whom don’t look very kindly on him because he’s non-partisan and won’t support either party.

“We are a non-political structure, but the DA has turned against us. The ANC has turned against us. It is because we refused to partner or be inspired by them. We refused to work with either,” explains Moyo, who is part of the Makause Community Development Forum (MDF) which is the organisation opposing the eviction of people at the informal settlement.

“The ANC says [the] MDF is working with the DA. But the DA says the MDF is working for the ANC. But both the ANC and DA are supporting the evictions of our community. These allegations are being used to divide and confuse the community,” he says, adding: “We are resisting so we are being labelled, and they want us to be overthrown and not to be supported by the community.”

Campbell and Mokgosi respond individually to these allegations of in-fighting between the DA and ANC, but the answer’s remarkably similar. They both claim that there’s no such thing as political in-fighting in Germiston.

Moyo has been threatened by the police, meanwhile, who have locked his community offices. The threat is that if he doesn’t desist from “running to the media” or making allegations of police brutality against the SAPS, Makause will be another Marikana. (Read DM’s story: Police to people of Makause: ‘March and there’ll be another Marikana’.)

Moyo and members of the community will be marching to the Germiston police station on Thursday 18 October at 12h00 after weeks of trying to get approval for this march. Meanwhile, Campbell is requisitioning reports from all and sundry to get to the bottom of why she wasn’t informed of the fire and why the emergency response from the municipality was so inadequate. Mokgosi’s waiting for Daily Maverick to prove community allegations against the Red Ants, and requisitioning a further quote from them because there was another fire.

And Moyo? Well, he’s sorting out the march, trying to get the media there so no one gets hurt. Mostly he’s phoning aid organisations to bring blankets, clothes and food to supplement the appalling municipal response, so that another lot of families won’t be left out in the rain and cold.

So, dear reader, you tell us who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys. Who’s telling the gospel and who’s telling lies. Whatever your answer, the reality is that in Makause politics, like greater South African affairs of state, the truth is exceedingly hard to find.

Daily Maverick: In the wake of the Makause shack fire, the destitute and forgotten

Leave a reply

http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-10-16-in-the-wake-of-the-makause-shack-fire-the-destitute-and-forgotten

In the wake of the Makause shack fire, the destitute and forgotten

A compact informal settlement in Primrose, Germiston, Makause houses the poorest of the poor and unemployed, who have nowhere else to go. Their living conditions are desperate, but became more so when a woman poured petrol over herself and set her body aflame. The blaze raged through 18 dwellings, taking what little the people there had. Insult was added to injury by the way Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality responded to the disaster. By MANDY DE WAAL.

The two voices were raised so loudly on the morning of Saturday 13 October that everyone nearby in the informal settlement could hear the screaming. But overhearing the argument wasn’t difficult; in Makause settlement in Primrose, Germiston the shacks are wedged right up against each other. Space is at such premium there that you can’t even slide a hand between most dwellings.

The man had had enough. He packed his bag and walked out the shack, leaving the woman behind. She was hysterical and dragged a generator into her home. She had a lighter, and – it appeared to onlookers – she wanted to use it.

“When the man left, the lady started to show signs of trying to commit suicide. She took a generator and a cigarette lighter to set the shack alight,” eyewitness Eric Ndlovu told Daily Maverick at the scene. The subsequent shack fire razed 18 dwellings, leaving about as many families homeless.

“Some men came and tried to stop the lady from doing that, but the lady found a way of sending them away.” She asked the men to buy her airtime from the tuck shop in the settlement so that she could talk to her family. “That is when she got the chance to use the petrol in the generator and start the fire,” Ndlovu said.

The men came back to hear agonised screams coming from inside the shack. “The fire had already started and nobody could risk going inside to extinguish the fire. Even I tried but it was a no go. It was too dangerous,” he said.

Ndlovu described a blaze that was consuming shacks in minutes. “They caught fire so quickly, and just spread. You know petrol… when you extinguish it with water then you spread it around. People didn’t have enough water, or enough assistance in terms of extinguishing the fire.”

Watch: General Alfred Moyo speaks at the scene of Saturday’s shack fire about the government’s failure to supply adequate aid.

The community told Daily Maverick that the fire engine – situated across the road from the settlement – took twenty minutes to reach the scene of the unfolding disaster. When it did, they say it arrived with only a few litres of water. “After ten minutes they had run out of water and the fire still continued. It was really difficult, really terrible,” Ndlovu added.

When Daily Maverick phoned the local municipality to find out why there’d been such an inadequate response, Ekurhuleni Disaster and Emergency Management spokesperson William Ntladi said the claim that the fire engine didn’t have enough water was nonsense.

“It is not that we didn’t have enough water. The informal settlement… well, we know how clustered it is. The heavy vehicle couldn’t go deep inside, so we had to send a small vehicle and relay the water into the smaller vehicle to reach the fire. The streets in between the shacks are very narrow and don’t accommodate the bigger vehicle,” Ntladi explained.

This journalist explained to Ntladi that she stood at the scene of the fire and that the area was alongside the tar road, and nowhere near the inner locale of the settlement. “I was off duty, I just heard about it,” Ntladi confessed and referred the query to Rogers Mamaila, also with Ekurhuleni emergency services.

Mamaila said the fire engines carry 4,000 litres on board, which get discharged at 400 litres per minute. “It is not an endless supply. The supply is only for one delivery, and it depends on the crew to see how many deliveries are required.

“That informal settlement may not have fire hydrants to replenish the trucks,” he said, adding that when the emergency services arrived the eighteen shacks had already been burnt, but that the crew managed to save the others.

“Ekhuruleni have trained CERT (Community Emergency Response) members, who are trained to deal with own fires prior to our arrival. We went into that same informal settlement house-to-house and educated people on how to prevent fires. A month ago a man died in that same informal settlement and they blamed us for not responding quickly enough. We have said they must walk or run to us, and in the meantime make use of the CERT members who are trained on advanced fire fighting. There are four CERTs in attendance there,” said Mamaila.

Makause is a compact settlement that the local government says is home to close on 30,000 people. “From the municipality’s side we have done everything we could have done. The method in which those people have built that informal settlement is wrong. When they build shacks they must leave a space of between five to six metres but they say there is no space,” Mamaila said, and explained that it was the compact nature of the informal settlement that made the outbreak of fires such a disaster.

For twelve-year-old Mahlatse Tomolo, the explanations were academic. All she cared about was the fact that she had no uniform to wear to school and had lost all her books to the fire. “I came back at four or five in the afternoon and I saw the ambulance and the people who work with the fire. Everything was burnt. My clothing… my school uniform… everything was gone. All I have left with is the clothes I have on. Even my school books are burnt. I feel bad because we have nowhere to go to. This is my home. We need help to rebuild our shack,” the young girl said.

Sipho Mashala was out of his home in the late afternoon when the fire broke out, but was heading back home to cook food when he overheard people speaking about the fire. “I never believed what they said, but when I got here I saw it, and seeing is believing. My shack was on fire. My matric certificate, my ID – everything was gone. All I have is these clothes. Actually I am devastated. I don’t know what to do.”

Formerly from Bushbuckridge in Limpopo, Mashala came to Gauteng to find work. “I am going to have to go home and go back to the drawing board. I am not a criminal and I won’t resort to crime, so I will have to go back as soon as I have money. But now that my certificate is burnt, I am going to have to start from scratch. I am a married man and have a child to support. I am devastated.”

Rector Shabangu was sleeping when the blaze threatened his shack in the late afternoon. “My wife, she woke me up saying: ‘Man, come on. Wake up. There is a fire coming.’ I said: ‘Man. Hayi. Fokkof.’ I thought she was just playing, but she forced me to wake up.”

“When I woke up I found… well… it was terrible. I took some buckets of water and poured on the other side of my room so that it doesn’t go further. I climbed on top of the roof and those people who used to assist us they came. They gave me the pipe with the water and I used it to stop the fire,” the unemployed shack dweller said.

“When I was busy doing that I saw something like meat. I said what kind of meat is this? When I tried to go this side I saw a hand. Then I jumped away from that roof. I was afraid. I was shocked. It was so terrible. In my shack I had clothes, my bed, a fridge, and a cupboard. I have no means to replace this.”

Shabangu said the local government promised to help but little assistance was rendered by the time Daily Maverick was on the scene, two days after the fire. “Since they promised (local government) – they are still promising but nothing happened. I am sleeping around here on the ground,” he said, pointing to blackened ground adjacent a rubbish dump where people forage for plastic bottles, glass and scrap tin to sell.

“We have to make fire and sleep near the fire. It has been cold and I just hold my child in my arms. We have no place to sleep so this is what I must do,” Shabangu said, shaking his head while his wife scoured through the debris with her two-year-old child tied to her back. Shabangu has two children.

These people, who are in a desperate predicament, told Daily Maverick that all they’d received from local government was one blanket per family as a means of disaster relief. Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality’s Aubrey Mokgosi points fingers at “outsourced suppliers” for the delay.

“I heard about this fire only last night (Sunday) about midnight and only this morning we asked our service provider to go and do a survey and give us a quotation. We have now asked our service provider to help with rebuilding the shacks. I am not too sure if they have been on site or are preparing to do so,” Mokgosi said.

When asked who the service provider was, Mokgosi said they were the ‘Red Ants’ – which is an awful irony. Private security guards who got their name because of the bright red overalls they wear, the ‘Red Ants’ are notorious in Gauteng because of the brutal way they evict tenants and demolish shacks. They are often used by local government who don’t want to lose votes, and are especially feared in Johannesburg’s inner city where they evict the poor with impunity.

“The government seems to be promising but it doesn’t provide us. You must vote for the government but then the government doesn’t assist us. I told myself: ‘Why should I have to vote?’ I do vote but get nothing,” said a dejected Shabangu, who faces another night of sleeping in the dirt with his baby girl in his arms, his wife and other child huddled around a fire in a sprawling settlement that is not without criminal elements.

“The government is just working for its own benefit, so it is better that I just leave voting. I don’t see what the ANC is doing. Those people are just working for their own pockets.”

Shabangu’s voice is not alone, either – it is the voice of the everyman and -woman, of people in poverty who expected democracy to bring a better life, but now eat only bitter disappointment.

Daily Maverick: Police to people of Makause: ‘March and there’ll be another Marikana’

Leave a reply

http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-10-05-police-to-people-of-makause-march-and-therell-be-another-marikana

Police to people of Makause: ‘March and there’ll be another Marikana’

by Mandy de Waal

The road to Mangaung looks like a movie production these days, and every visible move is being played out in the national media. But far away from headline news, in places like Makause on the East Rand, the daily skirmishes for power unravel unseen. Here, community leaders say they’re being threatened by an ANC-aligned police force that’s trashing their right to gather, and make their voices heard. By MANDY DE WAAL.

“The SAPS in Primrose are not responding positively to the cases that have been forwarded to them for their attention,” says ‘General’ Alfred Moyo from the Makause informal settlement, located in Primrose in Germiston on the East Rand, where people want a better life. There’s no access to formal sanitation, no electricity, and access to water is fraught. To make matters worse, says Moyo, the police don’t react to residents’ complaints, and reported cases of crime (like theft, violence and mob justice) are just ignored by the police. Moyo is a leader of the Makause Community Development Forum, which wants to march to the SAPS station in Primrose to protest against police brutality and the police’s alleged refusal to investigate residents’ cases.

“The problem in Makause is that there is an unruly mob that is well-supported by the ANC and the police, but which doesn’t have the support of the community in Makause,” says Moyo, speaking to Daily Maverick on the phone from Primrose. Moyo says that this mob’s agenda is political and that it is trying to “delegitimise” the Makause Community Development Forum, which is working with people in the informal settlement to agitate for better services, and to ensure they are aware of their Constitutional rights.

“We have applied with the police and the Metro police for permission to march to the Primrose police station, but the police there just threaten us,” says Moyo, who adds that the leaders of the community forum have been negotiating with police management at the Primrose station and the municipal Metro police to gain the go-ahead for a legal march.

“We approached the SAPS and obtained a form from the Metro police. We filled in the form, filed it with the police and notified the office we intend marching to, which is the Primrose police station. This was done on Friday 19 September, and we were told to come back and see the station manager. We went back on Wednesday 26 September where we met with the station manager, head of visible policing and two other police officers,” Moyo says.

The Makause community leader says that during the meeting he was verbally attacked and threatened by the police, who asked him why he wanted to bring the force into ill repute. “The head of visible policing, Colonel Ratsing Shuburi, asked us why we were applying to march against the police. ‘What is wrong with you that you want to challenge the code of conduct of the SAPS?’ she asked us. We told her our memorandum would list all our grievances.”

“Shuburi warned me that if we went ahead with the march there would be ‘another Marikana’. She was referring directly to the events at Marikana where the police shot and killed all those protesting miners. She said that the police were ready for us and that if we marched, Makause would be turned into another Marikana. She said that if we went ahead we would be challenging the police to make another situation like they did in Marikana,” Moyo relays.

The community leader says the police were at the ‘container’ office of the Makause Community Development Forum on Thursday 04 October to interrogate organisers about the march. “The police were here to find out what we intend doing, and they said if the march goes ahead they will arrest me and they will personally come after me. I think they were here to show us that the police are ready to shoot us.”

Makause has been an informal settlement since 1992, and the population there has spread to some 12 or 13 thousand people. There was no ‘legal’ water supply until August 2008, when the local municipality installed two taps on the outskirts of the settlement. “We won’t wait for government to help us. We got water through our own initiative. We connected to the very same pipes that are running through our settlement. There are water pipes encroaching and we knew we had a Constitutional right to water. We can fundraise and organise for ourselves to get the basic services we need.”

Moyo says few houses have electricity, and these connections are mostly illegal. For the most part, people in Makause struggle with pricey generators, primus stoves and candles. “It is a massive challenge to struggle with paraffin and candles. There are challenges when the petrol price goes up and we have to pay more because we use generators. To get a proper connection of electricity and water – we don’t demand this from the government because we as the community want to develop ourselves.”

The Makause Community Development Forum is an informal, non-politically aligned structure set up around 2007 to deal with evictions and threats of forced removals against the community. “We were attacked by the ‘Red Ants’ and the police, but we created this informal structure to represent the community. We were challenging and fighting the evictions, but our direction has now extended to champion the improvement of services in terms of the development of the entire community. Now we stand for the provisions of essential and Constitutional rights for our community,” Moyo explains.

The community leader alleges that the ANC wants to gain control of the community because the land they are living on has been earmarked for development and there are lucrative contracts up for grabs.

“This ANC mob tried to break into my shack and destroy my shack in the middle of August, but I was away in Magaliesburg. My family phoned the police and they took the entire mob, to address them, but when we tried to make a case the police just gave us challenges. For days we tried and then eventually we got a case number, but there has been no response from the police. The secretary of our organisation was also apprehended and threatened by this mob, but the police have ignored us. That same mob went to our community office and destroyed it, and the police have done nothing,” says Moyo.

“It is a political matter,” he adds. “The ANC wants to de-legitimise us and replace our leadership in the community. That is why we are under threat. In May last year during the municipal elections the same thing happened, they were trying to overthrow us.” The ward that is represented by Makause is now under DA control, although Moyo is emphatic that neither he nor his organisation supports the DA.

“We represent development in Makause and don’t align ourselves with any political structure. We want to have one community structure and we want one community campaign. That is why we want this march. We want to show that we are one, we are united. And that when we are united we can build a better community.”

Daily Maverick phoned the Primrose police station for comment but the station manager wasn’t available, Shiburu was on leave and the communications officer was away on communications training.

As the broader battle for Mangaung continues, Makause is the perfect metaphor for the skirmishes for control at a grassroots level.

Daily Maverick: SA’s banned gatherings: Goodbye Constitution, we hardly knew you

Leave a reply

http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-09-28-sas-banned-gatherings-goodbye-constitution-we-hardly-knew-you

SA’s banned gatherings: Goodbye Constitution, we hardly knew you

Using red tape, bureaucracy and good old fashioned municipal bungling, local governments from Rustenburg to Germiston, Pretoria to Durban and beyond are banning protest marches in the wake of civil action in Marikana. By MANDY DE WAAL.

Women from Marikana, near Rustenburg in the North West, have been trying to stage a legal protest march for close on two weeks now, following the 16 September death of Paulina Masuhlo. Masuhlo, an ANC PR councillor, was shot by police using rubber bullets during a raid on Nkaneng informal settlement in which residents dodged tear gas and police fire. Masuhlo died in hospital a few days later.

But it looks as if local authorities are doing everything in their power to ensure that people’s rights to “assemble, to demonstrate, to picket and to present petitions” as stipulated in Section 17 of the SA Constitution, as well as the Regulation of Gatherings Act, is quashed.

The Marikana march in protest of Masuhlo’s death and the occupation of the area by security forces is being organised by the Wonderkop Community Women’s Association (which includes woman from Nkaneng and the broader Marikana community) and the Women’s Support Initiative. This march was due to happen Saturday, 22 September, but police and local authorities put a stop to it saying the march was illegal. Organisers cancelled the march and immediately started applying for the necessary authority to stage the protest action on the following Saturday, but without success.

Marikana and Nkaneng are part of the Madibeng Municipality. After the first march was denied, organisers were told that the local government didn’t have the jurisdiction to rule on the demonstration and that they needed to approach the Rustenburg Municipality. However this information was only offered after many days of toing, froing and battling red tape. But it’s been a no-go from Rustenburg, which wrote to organisers saying the protest action “does not meet the requirement of the Gathering Act” together with a number of other objections the organisers say are not valid.

“It is completely absurd. The police and officials have acted outside the law and we find the reasons for their disallowing this march absurd and spurious,” said Sipho Mthathi, an activist and Marikana organiser. “They are saying that the purpose of the march doesn’t meet the requirements of the gatherings act, but there is no requirement of the gatherings act we haven’t met.”

Mthathi said the group was now seeking legal counsel, and chronicled a litany bureaucratic hurdles that organisers had to deal with to try get government permission for a march. “We launched papers with officials from the Madibeng municipality well ahead of our proposed march on the 22nd of September, but trying to find the person responsible for giving permission was impossible. After hours and hours of phone calls, our lawyers made the determination that we would launch the paper with everyone within the municipality.”

Earlier this week organisers were promised a meeting with police, traffic officials and local government by the Madibeng mayor’s office, but when organisers arrived for the meeting they were made to wait three hours for the relevant people to be assembled and the meeting to begin. “It was at this meeting that we were told that Madibeng was handing the matter over to the Rustenburg municipal authorities,” Mthathi said.

They fared little better at Rustenburg, and after a barrage of emails and calls another meeting was set up and the activists had to wait another handful of hours while the necessary authorities where gathered for the meeting. “There was a panel of seven people from the Rustenburg authorities and they included the police, intelligence and security officials. I literally had to beg the police to gather the relevant people so that the meeting could begin. During the meeting they raised the issue that businesses in Marikana had complained about disruptions. They said this is why they didn’t want the march to go ahead,” said Mthathi.

“However, the written documentation they have us doesn’t event reflect the verbal arguments offered. In the meeting they asked if the meeting was politically motivated, which has absolutely nothing to do with the Constitution or the regulating act that governs demonstrations and pickets,” she said.

The women have instructed their attorneys at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies to launch an urgent application in the High Court to overturn what they call the Rustenburg Municipality’s “unlawful decision”.

But the Marikana march isn’t the only protest action that’s been given the jack boot. The Right2Know Campaign will be marching to the Union Buildings in Pretoria on Friday, despite not getting the go ahead from police.

“Although we have made repeated attempts to engage meaningfully with the Tshwane Metro Police Department and the South African Police Service regarding the planning of this event, they have subjected our activists to delays, frustrations and hostile behaviour that threatened to derail the event,” a statement from Right2Know read.

The information freedom campaigners are marking “International Right to Know Day”. Voicing concerns they have with the government’s Secrecy Bill will be Dale McKinley a journalist, lecturer and one time Johannesburg chair of the South African Communist Party; Mashao Chauke of the Anti-Privatisation Forum; climate change campaigner Ferrial Adam, and Bishop Paul Verryn.

In Germiston, on Gauteng’s East Rand, a planned march by the Makause Community Development Forum in Ekuruleni against the management of the Primrose Police was denied. The march, set for 5 October, was to protest against police brutality, inefficiency, corruption and involvement in politics.

Activists aligned to the Makause Community said the Primrose Police yesterday “refused to sign the application for the March” and made “threats against the Makause Community Development Forum indicating that they (the SAPS) will not be embarrassed by the Makause Community” and that “Marikana tactics would be utilized if the community went ahead with the march”. The activists added that Makause community leaders where threatened with physical violence by police.

In Durban, the Kennedy Road Displacees notified the Sydenham police of its intention to picket outside the station following alleged sustained attacks by police that activists say have resulted in injuries, two deaths, people being displaced and homes being destroyed. Picketing was due to start on Friday, but activists were advised to seek permission from the Durban Metro Police despite this not being required in terms of the Gatherings Act for a picket of fewer than 15 people.

Finally, in Bhisho, a march by Ayanda Kota and the Unemployed Peoples Movement went ahead on 20 September, despite being banned by police. Kota was called by traffic police in Bhisho who informed him that “due to pressure from the legislature” the march was denied. A permit had been obtained for the protest action, but Bhisho police told Kota the march wouldn’t go ahead because he was “very arrogant” and because the demonstration was political. Kota said that the police threatened him before the protest began.

“Official attempts to put red tape in the way of organisations right to assemble, gather and picket is commonplace,” said Jane Duncan, Highway Africa Chair of Media and Information Society at Rhodes’ journalism school. “What makes the recent squashing or rights to assemble noteworthy is that it is happening in a context where these prohibitions are intensifying.

“There seems to be an intensification of attempts to prohibit gatherings on spurious grounds. Fears expressed by number of people close to the Marikana struggle that there is an undeclared state of emergency there. What is happening is bearing those fears out. The security cluster has made it clear they will clamp down on illegal protests, but are making it impossible for protest to happen. So protest will happen anyway and could lead to spiral of violence. This is a very dangerous moment for protestors in South Africa,” Duncan added.

Duncan said the government was creating the basis for a massive social explosion, and that scholars of social movement activism have shown time and again that when authorities act unjustly and attempt to suppress legitimate expressions of protest or anger, the suppression just made the struggle more intense.

“People recognise that the state is unjust, as the veneer of the state as a neutral player in balance of forces is being stripped away to expose the brute force of the state as a law enforcer of private capital. SA’s democracy has been exposed for the sham that it has become in a place like Marikana,” Duncan said.

And as Mangaung gets closer and closer, South Africa is increasingly in danger of becoming a de facto state of emergency as democracy gives way to military might.

Daily Maverick: Baragwanath’s shame: A good man dies

Leave a reply

http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-07-03-baragwanaths-shame-a-good-man-dies

Baragwanath’s shame: A good man dies

by Mandy de Waal

Godfrey Tenehi was a good man, an entrepreneur who counselled criminals to leave their theiving ways behind in favour of legitimate business. But when a blaze broke out in Tenehi’s shack, critically wounding him and his girlfriend, the doctors at Baragwanath refused to admit him. Fourteen agonising hours later, Tenehi succumbed to his burns in an open ward where people were eating and walking around, instead of being taken care of in ICU or Baragwanath’s famed burn treatment centre. By MANDY DE WAAL.

It is the darkest time of night – the hour just before dawn breaks – and an ambulance is racing from Jabavu to Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Diepkloof, Soweto. Inside the ambulance: two paramedics who have battled to try and stabilise a young man and woman who have been burned severely. The patients are fighting for their lives. With them is a distraught mother.

“It was critical, very critical,” says paramedic Kate Hlungwane. “They were in pain, in such excruciating pain. Burn wounds are the worst because they are so painful. At the scene they couldn’t even get a vein in the young man. The other paramedic, who is an ALS (advanced life support) nurse, was trying to put up lines. The young man was so severely burned it took quite some time to get the vein. But [by] the time we got him to hospital, the patient was conscious and responsive. He was trying to tell us where the pain was.”

At least the trip to the hospital was short, and Baragwanath had earned a reputation of having one of the best burn treatment units in Africa. There was that hope to cling to. But when the ambulance arrived at the emergency entrance, the paramedics weren’t even allowed to bring the patients in.

“The hospital was on divert, which means there are no beds, there are too many patients for the resources and they divert the patients to other hospitals,” says Papi Marajane, a paramedic who attended to the patients on the scene. “They refused to even see the patients. But they may not refuse a patient regardless of whether the hospital is on ‘divert’ or not,” says Marajane, who is a stubborn man. He wasn’t about to take no for an answer – not with two critical burn patients in his ambulance, and certainly not when he was standing outside a hospital supposedly renowned for their burn treatment centre.

“The consulting doctor on duty and I had this big confrontation because the doctors didn’t even want to look at the patient[s]. They just told us that we must go away. That was a bit hard for me to swallow,” he says.

The tragedy that led to Dimaketso (Maggie) Molefe and Godfrey Tenehi being burned so badly unfolded in the early hours of Sunday 01 July, 2012, when Tenehi’s grandmother heard screaming coming from the young man’s room.

“On the 1st at about 02h00, my grandmother heard screaming from Godfrey’s shack, which is in front of her bedroom,” says Ted Tenehi, Godfrey’s older brother. It was the early hours of Sunday morning, and the weekend is a time when fun is had with friends, so at first there wasn’t any concern. But when the screaming continued, the Tenehi brothers’ grandmother jumped out of her bed and ran to see what was the matter was.

“Immediately she sees flames coming out from under the door, but the door is closed. It was clear that there was a fire in the room,” says Tenehi, whose younger brother David came to break down the door with the help of a tenant staying next door.

“It appeared that the fire had taken control and my brother and his girlfriend had no way out, no exit,” he explains. By the time the door was forced and the fire was killed with a fire extinguisher, Tenehi’s brother Godfrey was badly wounded. “My brother was brutally burned and couldn’t move. He was lying down in the fire when they kicked open the door.”

Mrs Dimaketso Tenehi, Godfrey’s mother, pulled the pair out of the shack and raced off to phone an ambulance. But there was no response. She then ran to the nearest clinic at Mofolo in Soweto and got the security guard to summon paramedics, who came to assist. By the time they arrived, it was almost four in the morning – two hours after the first screams were heard coming from the shack.

“The paramedics took about 30 minutes preparing my brother Godfrey and then took him, his girlfriend and my mother to hospital. But when they arrived at Baragwanath hospital and rushed in to get a doctor, the doctor on duty said no, he wouldn’t accept them,” says Tenehi.

“The paramedic was fighting with the doctor, begging him. Telling the doctor on duty: please attend to the patients because they are brutally burned and their chances of survival would be slim if they were turned away. But the doctor just chased them away. He said no, Baragwanath had too many people already,” Tenehi adds.

Paramedic and advanced life support nurse Marajane picks up the story: “We arrived at the hospital just after five in the morning and left at 06h30. So much time was wasted.”

Despite the consulting doctor refusing the burn patients entry, Marajane tracked down the number for the Managing Medical Officer responsible for putting hospitals on divert. “I phone the MMO, and after I had explained what was happening, he asked to speak to the consultant who was the head of the doctors at Baragwanath and who was trying to chase us away,” he says.

“The consultant spoke to the MMO, and after that, this doctor had a change of heart; he was a good person all of a sudden and took the patient in. All the doctors there wanted to cut my head off because I was so stubborn because I knew that they can’t turn away a patient without seeing the patient, even if they are on divert,” explains Marajane.

If the paramedic hadn’t been aware of that fact, he’d have had to take the patients to Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital, which is about 30 minutes away from Baragwanath. “These two patients were critical and needed immediate attention, but you know they took their time,” says Marajane.

Maggie Molefe was taken to ICU just after 06h30, but Godfrey Tenehi wasn’t as lucky. He stayed in emergency until 08h30, when he was taken to the wards – only after the fumbling awkwardness of getting forms filled out and questions answered.

“He hadn’t even seen a doctor, he only had seen matrons, and the matrons told me that he only came into the wards at 10h00,” says Ted Tenehi. “They put him in a bed with just a pipe in his mouth, in a normal ward. That ward is just like a hostel set-up, it has beds all over and there are people there who are sitting eating. There are people who were walking around. It was a ward that could take close to about 20 people and looked just like a normal ward, but they tried to tell me it was a trauma ward. I could see with my own eyes that the other people there could be discharged at any time.”

“My brother was put in the bed and they said that his chances of living were very slim. They said he would not make it. When I walked in and saw my brother, it was very devastating. He was still breathing and there was this sound… like… ‘Aaaah aaah’. [At this point in the conversation Ted Tenehi makes an agonisingly low groaning sound.] You could see how he was still suffering.”

Photographs of Godfrey Tenehi show him in an open ward with heavy blankets placed over his body – a body that was so badly burnt the paramedics couldn’t find his veins. A desperate Ted Tenehi tried to get his brother medical intervention.

“I went to the person in charge and told her that I would climb the tallest mountain to get my brother the chance to live. I asked, what can I do, is there any chronic medication that requires extra money, or does he need a donation of skin, what is it that I can do?” Tenehi relays.

“I wanted to pick up the phone and try and call a charity or somehow get some money because I myself can’t take seeing him in the terrible state he was in. The lady in charge said: ‘There is nothing you can do. Just pray because he will be dead in 24 hours.’ I was devastated.”

Tenehi then went through the hospital to try and find a doctor in charge, but without any success. He then wrote a short missive and emailed it out, hoping it would be passed on to someone who could help.

“I wanted to get the information out as far and wide as I could so that I could try to get help so my brother could live. I then went to go and see a nurse in the wards to see if I couldn’t arrange for my brother to be moved to a private hospital. I know of the number of people of Netcare, the number for sponsorships. I wanted to see if they could help me. But the nurse responded by saying: ‘There is nothing you could do. Baragwanath is the best hospital in this matter. But your brother has a very slim chance of survival.’ Then I was confused. If this is the best hospital but you don’t offer solutions to a critical situation, how can you say you are the best?”

Tenehi asked for a schedule of doctors on duty. But he never got the list. Later he went down to emergency again to try and get help or advice. “I walked into the emergency room and two people died there. There was this elderly lady in a wheelchair. I remember I helped her to come in. Nobody attended to her. The next minute the man who had brought her in started to cry. She was dead. No one had even paid attention to her. It really hurt me because that was also the situation my brother was in. Nobody cared,” says Tenehi.

The question Tenehi wants answered is why his brother’s girlfriend was taken to ICU, and why his brother was taken to an open ward in terrible agony, only to be given a bed amongst people eating and walking around. Only to be abandoned.

Tenehi says he got no answers to this question. “The only response I got was: ‘This one is already dead. Just forget about it’.” After scrambling for hours to try and get medical intervention for his brother, Tenehi got a call at 21h15 to say his brother had died.

“Now I am the only breadwinner in the family. There are certain funds I am still waiting for, there are people who were to have paid me and they haven’t paid me for my work, so I am trying to go a legal route. Now I am trying to get some money from somewhere so that I can at least bury my brother. It is the most terrible situation.”

Tenehi says his brother was a good man. “He was only 33 years of age. I groomed my brother, and he looked up to me as his role model. Anything that I would do, he would do it. He started his career after he saw I was into music and became a choreographer. He got into dance. He was one of the dancers in Miss SA and helped them with choreography in the late nineties.”

An entrepreneur, Godfrey Tenehi had a business that employed a group of youths who cleaned community dustbins; he worked as an instructor in a gym; and was on the verge of setting up a cosmetic and hair-care sales distribution business when he died. “He had his own DJ set-up and he would go and work at parties on the weekend, and used that to make income for himself. Even if he worked in the week, he would still go out on the weekend and do events, tell people how to bring dancers or indigenous drama into their parties and functions.”

But what’s remarkable is that despite being a busy entrepreneur, Godfrey Tenehi was something of a social activist who wanted to deter people from getting involved in crime. “He was working with a group of people in Meadowlands who were facing a life of poverty. For them the solution was to turn to crime, but he actually talked them out of it. He would visit criminals in prison to try and help them be an entrepreneur like him.”

Says his grief-stricken brother: “He was a good man. But the way he died. He cried until he died from the pain. It is unbelievable. Bara just neglected him and wrote him off. Why do we have doctors?”

Daily Maverick managed to get hold of Baragwanath’s PR department late in the afternoon, where the spokesperson who answered the phone said: “Well, it is four now, so I need to go home, but I will give this to the relevant matron who I know will take care of this matter. Besides me going home, I still need to investigate the matter to determine how true your facts are. You caught me when I was about to leave.” The spokesperson said she would get someone to call before Daily Maverick deadline, but no one called.

Simon Zwane, the spokesperson for Gauteng’s MEC for Health and Social Development Ntombi Mekgwe, responded promptly to Daily Maverick’s request for comment by saying: “Our comment is that we will investigate this matter and stern action will be taken if negligence is found to have contributed to the demise of this man.”

“What about the family and the way the family were treated?” asked Daily Maverick.

“We apologise to the family for the way they were treated. They should have been treated with much more sensitivity and compassion.”

The DA’s Gauteng Caucus spokesperson on Health and Corruption, Jack Bloom, says Baragwanath is appallingly run and he fears many cases like this one happen, but go unreported. “Baragwanath’s CEO Johanna More is a nurse. Would you put a nurse in charge of a R2-billion corporation? They have a budget of more than R2 billion, and yet they don’t even have a chartered accountant,” says Bloom, adding that nonetheless, the most shocking aspect of this tragic incident was the lack of compassion.

“He could have been admitted earlier. It doesn’t appear that pain medication was properly administered, or that anybody cared. To me, what is most shocking is that nobody seemed to care. That there is this anxious family begging for help, but they are not even looking at what the options are. Surely there were better options than making this man wait so long, and just putting him in a general ward? He should have been in ICU.”

Baragwanath will do its investigation. It may issue a statement. Ted Tenehi will bury his brother Godfrey, and do what he can as the sole breadwinner for his family. The news cycle will churn. And, very cruelly, life will just go on.