Category Archives: South African Civil Society Information Service

SACSIS: The Antinomies of Democracy in Durban

http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1721

The Antinomies of Democracy in Durban

by Richard Pithouse

In the last days of June, Nkululeko Gwala was assassinated in Cato Crest – a shack settlement in Durban that is in the process of being upgraded with formal housing. Just over three months ago Thembinkosi Qumbelo was gunned down in the same streets. Both men had been prominent figures in the increasingly bitter struggles around housing that have convulsed Cato Crest in recent months. There have been road blockades, a land occupation – named, as they often are these days, ‘Marikana' – and the offices of two councillors have been burnt down.

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SACSIS: From Lusaka to Marikana

http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1608

From Lusaka to Marikana

by Richard Pithouse

On Friday night Thembinkosi Qumbelo was gunned down in a local bar where he was watching a football game on television. It was a well organised hit on a man who had, for years, been at the centre of a local struggle around land and housing – the keenest point of conflict between citizens and the local state – in Cato Crest in Durban.

Qumbelo made a remarkably bold entrance onto the local political stage on Freedom Day in 2005. Thabo Mbeki was set to speak in the King's Park stadium and Qumbelo led hundreds of people out of the shacks in Cato Crest with the aim of blockading the freeway leading into town and preventing Mbeki's cavalcade from reaching the stadium. The police stopped them in Mayville, near the Tollgate Bridge. There were ten arrests and Qumbelo spent the best part of a year in Westville Prison where he said he was subject to serious assault.

After his release he claimed to be subject to death threats by the local ANC. His concerns for his safety were not exaggerated. In April 2006 two former SACP activists were assassinated in Umlazi after supporting an independent candidate against the ANC in the local government elections. But Qumbelo went straight back to organising and by 2007 his organisation, the South African Shack & Rural Dwellers' Organisation, was openly linked to the IFP. He later joined NADECO and then re-joined the IFP before joining the ANC in late 2011. At the time he told a local newspaper that “Anyone who is serious about being a politician should be with the ANC”.

Reports on Qumbelo's work in the ANC are mixed. Some people argue that he was brought into the party's networks of corruption and used to discipline people's aspirations and forms of engagement. Others argue that he became a voice for popular aspirations within the party. But it seems that Qumbelo's fate was sealed with the arrival of 'delivery' in Cato Crest.

Speedier and more efficient 'delivery' is often presented as both the only demand emerging from popular protest and the main challenge confronting government. In some respects concerns about the efficiency with which the state rolls out its programmes make perfect sense. Millions of people live in degrading and life threatening conditions and one study has found that the most common demands emerging from the on-going wave of popular protest are for urban land and housing. Yet parliament was recently informed that R886 million has remained unspent by the Department of Human Settlements.

In Durban, the City estimates that it is home to 410 000 people who are living in 150 000 shacks in 484 settlements while 11 000 families are what it calls the 'beneficiaries' of 'housing opportunities' in the form of transit camps – government built and managed shacks. Some officials in the City still talk of 'eradicating shacks' but one report puts the number of houses built by the City in the last financial year at 1 268.

While the City's housing programme is failing to meet even the most basic of its residents needs it is succeeding in making politically connected people into millionaires. It is also enabling the ruling party to extend the anti-democratic reach of the politics of patronage and clientalism. There are a lot of people in and around the ruling party who have a direct personal interest in maintaining the status quo.

But even when 'delivery' does arrive as planned it is frequently a tool for assuming control and effecting exclusion rather than meeting people's urgent needs. This is most obvious when it takes the form of forced removal to peripheral sites, often referred to as 'dumping grounds', or to transit camps which are often worse than self-built shacks and governed through local despotisms sustained by patronage mediated through the party. Another way in which 'delivery' can mean disaster is that when shacks are demolished shack owners are sometimes given houses, or a place in a transit camp, but tenants are usually left homeless. This has no basis in either policy or law but is useful for City officials wanting to reduce the scale of 'the backlog' by excluding tenants, often the poorest people, from the count.

This is exactly what happened in Cato Crest: 'delivery' meant mass eviction for tenants as their shacks were destroyed and they were, illegally, left homeless. Around two weeks ago people rendered homeless occupied vacant land in Sherwood, an adjoining suburb. They called their occupation Marikana. On Tuesday last week 18 partially built flats were also occupied.

The Municipality sent in the police but they, perhaps chastened by Marikana and the series of more recent scandals at police brutality, requested the politicians to negotiate a solution. The politicians appear to have done little other than to tell the occupiers that their occupation is illegal and to appeal for them to wait patiently for housing to be 'delivered' rather than taking matters into their own hands. This has not been well received.

On Tuesday last week a crowd, 500 strong and armed with pangas and spades attacked the home of Mzimuni Ngiba, the local ward councillor. The next day Ngiba and his family fled their home. The state routinely renders people homeless in the exalted name of 'delivery' and it’s becoming increasing common for grassroots activists to have to sleep outside of their homes for fear of assassination at the hands of local party structures. But, unsurprisingly, political violence, which has been a top down phenomenon for years, is now starting to move in the other direction too.

It seems that after the attack on the councillor's home the ANC asked Qumbelo to speak to the occupiers, call them to order and represent them in negotiations. He agreed, some say reluctantly, and it was reported that on Thursday he was called a traitor, stoned and attacked with sticks after he agreed to meet with police and officials to discuss the evictions and consequent occupation without a mandate from the occupiers. But it seems that he was caught between two imperatives. Later on the same day he was quoted as being highly critical of the evictions that led to the occupation. Also on the same day a member of Qumbelo's committee was shot in the arm. The following day Qumbelo was assassinated. A good number of people think that he was assassinated from above rather than below but at this point all kinds of sometimes-contradictory accounts are circulating. The only thing that is clear is that struggles around land and housing are becoming increasingly violent in Durban. Both the representation of popular aspirations with a mandate from below and attempts to contain these aspirations with a mandate from above are increasingly dangerous tasks. This is unlikely to change for as long as the City continues to treat the gathering intensity of the popular aspiration for urban land and housing as an essentially criminal matter rather than a question of justice.

On Saturday Mayor James Nxumalo addressed a hostile crowd at the Marikana Occupation. They were carrying sticks and other weapons and singing 'sohlala siyinyomfa', a declaration to remain out of order. Nxumalo told the occupiers that they were breaking the law and should “Just allow the process to take its legitimate course.” He said nothing about the illegality of the evictions that left them homeless in the first place, the reality that most people living in shacks just can't afford formal accommodation or that, if current realities continue, plenty of people are likely to die waiting for the process of 'delivery' to 'take its course'.

One of the occupiers, who asked to be known as James, came to Durban from Bizana in 1995. He stayed with his brother in the Lusaka settlement in Reservoir Hills where he found bits and pieces of work. In 2006 the settlement was 'eradicated' and, after sleeping rough for a while, he found a shack to rent in Cato Crest. Now he has been evicted again. This time he is determined to hold the land that has been occupied. The power of the political symbolism of the journey from Lusaka to Marikana is undeniable.

SACSIS: War is Upon Us

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http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/1474

War is Upon Us

Richard Pithouse

to the fragrance of lemon blossoms
and then to the ultimatums of war
– Pablo Neruda, ‘Right Comrade, Its the Hour of the Garden’, Isla Negra, Chile, September 1973

When COSATU and the Communist Party have to rely on the police and their stun grenades, rubber bullets and, by some accounts, live ammunition to force their way into a stadium against the opposition of striking workers it is clear that their assumption of a permanent right to leadership is facing a serious challenge from below. It’s equally clear that the ruling party and its allies intend to force obedience rather than to seek to renegotiate support or enable democratic engagement, that the police aren’t even making a pretence of being loyal to the law rather than the ruling party and that this is the way that Blade Nzimande likes it.

The misuse of the police to defend the authority of the ruling party in Rustenburg is no exception to a broadly democratic consensus. In fact it has become a routine feature of political life. At the same time as the drama was unfolding in Rustenburg on Saturday a meeting with technical experts to discuss a plan to upgrade the Harry Gwala shack settlement on the East Rand was summarily banned by the police on the grounds that it was a ‘security threat’. The settlement is in urgent need of services as basic as water and refuse removal but millions have been spent on a pavilion in memory of Oliver Tambo adjacent to the settlement. As the ANC’s role in the struggles against apartheid is memorialised that memory is simultaneously desecrated as it is mobilised to legitimate the increasingly violent containment of popular dissent.

The collapse of the ruling party’s hegemony on the mines in Rustenburg is not the first time that the ANC has lost control of a territory where it once took its right to rule for granted. In early 2006 the ANC was, despite a large police presence and a large contingent of supporters bussed in from elsewhere, unable to go ahead with a rally to be addressed by S’bu Ndebele, the then Premier of KwaZulu-Natal, in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in Durban. Some years later the ANC eventually took that space back with the open use of violence organised through party structures with the support of the police. But despite the announcement, made by a senior SACP member, that the state had decided to ‘disband’ the movement that had won popular support in Kennedy Road, and despite tremendous intimidation and the gross misuse of the police and the criminal justice system to try and effect this ban, that movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo endures. The rupture in Rustenburg may also cohere into an enduring force. And there will be more ruptures to come.

There are important respects in which the politics developed in and around Marikana is very different from that developed in and around Kennedy Road seven years earlier. But one of the things that these two points of rupture do have in common is a firm insistence on the right of people in struggle, people who have decided to take their future into their own hands, to speak for themselves. This shared suspicion of authorised forms of local representation, and the consequent desire of people to represent themselves where they live and work, could, along with other points of connection, ranging from familial links to a shared experience of repression, provide common ground for linking struggles in urban shack settlements and on the mines. It has, in itself, no predetermined political character but, amongst other potentials, some of which could well be marked by a dangerous counter-brutality, the rejection of the ruling party’s local mechanisms for sustaining political control does carry the possibility for a renewal of democratic possibility.

The path that winds from Polokwane to Kennedy Road and on to Marikana and Nkandla and then up, past the reach of our gaze and over the horizon, is not taking us towards anything like the kinds of societies imagined in the Freedom Charter or the Constitution. The only visible transition on offer is one in which liberal democracy is increasingly replaced with a system in which the political class is treated as if it is above the law, the state is openly used as an instrument for the political class to accumulate rather than to redistribute wealth and power and people engaged in certain kinds of popular dissent are treated as if they are beneath the law. Police violence, including torture and murder, as well as state sanction for political violence by ANC supporters and political assassination have all become familiar features of our political life.

And powerful figures and forces in the ruling alliance from Jacob Zuma to Sidumo Dlamini, the Communist Party, MK veterans, SADTU and others are openly speaking the language of war. They may say that the war is on the enemy within, enemy agents, neoliberals, imperialists, criminals, enemies of the national-democratic revolution and counter-revolutionaries but what they really mean is that they do not intend to accept popular dissent as legitimate or to engage it through democratic institutions. Instead it is proposed that dissent be dealt with by the police and on occasion the army, as well as counter-mobilisation that aims to destroy rather than to engage and which is already often armed, and, in Sidumo Dlamini’s view, MK. War, generally not the war of open manoeuvre that we saw in Marikana and which we’ve seen, although with nothing like the same degree of murderous intent, in shack settlements across the country in recent years but rather the scattered, often secretive and frequently highly territorialised violence of low intensity war, of counter-insurgency, is upon us. The Kennedy Road, eTwatwa, Makause and Zakheleni shack settlements have all experienced this since Polokwane.

The figures in the ANC that talk of a return to principled leadership have no material base from which they could make a serious attempt to challenge the capture of the party and, thereby, the state by factions that are both predatory and authoritarian. For this reason their discourse functions, irrespective of their intentions, to legitimate the party rather than to organise or represent a last ditch attempt to save it. And, with the exception of the metal worker’s union, Marikana has marked the end of COSATU’s claim to democratic credibility and moral authority. If there is to be a renewal of democratic possibilities it will have to be undertaken against the ruling party and its allies.

Popular struggle against a post-colonial state is a very different thing to a national liberation struggle against an internationally discredited form of domination. But the time has come when we have to, like the generations that confronted the end of the illusions in postcolonial states elsewhere, face a future in which defeat of democratic and progressive aspirations is the most likely outcome of the ruthless intersection between elite nationalism and capitalism. And while there are some examples of popular struggles in the postcolony that have attained some critical mass in recent years they have also, as in Haiti and Bolivia, had to confront serious limitations. There is no easy route out of this crisis.

Nonetheless it is clear that the only viable resolution is one that includes the majority of us. This could take the form of an authoritarian and even quasi-fascist response to the crisis. But it could also take the form of a democratic project that seeks to move beyond the liberal consensus that reduced democracy to voting, court action and NGO campaigns and to build the political power of the dispossessed from the ground up. But if an insurgent project of this nature is to have any enduring success it will have to understand that the line dividing the political from the economic has been drawn to sustain both privilege and exclusion and that wealth, power and the structures that sustain them need to be subject to serious critique. This would put such a project at odds with most of the media and civil society as well as the ruling party making it, to say the least, a risky endeavour. But if political empowerment doesn’t translate into material empowerment – into land, housing, decent incomes and decent education – it will be little more than a detour on the road that has already taken us from Polokwane to Nkandla with our journey marked out in a steadily accumulating record of intimidation and blood.

The challenges that confront us are tremendous. But when war is announced there are only two real choices – to resist or to submit. The urgent questions that we have to confront are these: What will be the nature of our resistance and how will we carry it forward?