Category Archives: The Huffington Post

‘Poor People’s World Cup’ Shows Exclusion Of Poor In South Africa

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/21/poor-peoples-world-cup-sh_n_619588.html

Leading up to the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, reports have come out alleging that South African authorities had made efforts to hide the homeless population to make areas seem more welcoming to tourists. Now, as the games go on, one organization is taking a stand to raise awareness about the negative impact of the World Cup on the poor and homeless.

The Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) has organized the Poor People’s World Cup, a three-week-long competition that mimics the FIFA World Cup, but allows poor South Africans to participate and spectate. Groups from 40 impoverished Cape Town communities have formed teams to compete in the Poor People’s World Cup.

AEC coordinator Ashraf Cassiem told CNN, “It’s an attempt by poor people in Cape Town to bring to attention their plight as a result of the World Cup and the effect it has on communities.

“It’s a platform created by poor people, for poor people, to expose the evictions and displacements affecting poor people in a negative way.”

According to the AEC, the World Cup excludes the poor because tickets are too expensive, and the event forces many poor people out of work because street vendors are not allowed to sell their merchandise. The AEC also claims that the poor have been moved to ‘Temporary Relocation Centers’ to be hidden from visiting soccer fans.

The Huffington Post: Off-Side at the World Cup

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raj-patel/off-side-at-the-world-cup_b_607951.html

Off-Side at the World Cup

Raj Patel
Author, “The Value of Nothing”

When the World Cup begins in South Africa on Friday, anyone who has ever kicked a ball will be able to follow along — soccer is elegant, straightforward and simple to understand. The Beautiful Game does, however, have a regulation that stops play, reverses the game and routinely baffles neophytes: the off-side rule. To understand it, spectators need only look outside the billion dollar stadiums to the streets of Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, for they are filled with off-side people, those whom the Rainbow Nation has yet to embrace.

The complexities of the off-side rule are almost indescribable on paper — it’s best explained with pepper-pots or, these days, YouTube. But the regulation is essentially this: It’s okay to loiter wherever you want on the football field, but if you find yourself behind your opponent’s lines in the wrong place when a ball is kicked your way, you can watch it fall, but cannot play it. Behind the lines of rivals, seeing events unfold, but unable to join in the game: That happens all the time in South Africa.

In particular, such is the plight of more than ten million South Africans without proper housing, many living in legal limbo throughout South Africa’s cities, under bridges, near trash dumps, on slopes and beyond the brows of hills. They’ll be enjoying the World Cup, welcoming their foreign visitors, and the glare of the international media might provide some cover for them to tell their story of 20 years off-side in South Africa.

Under apartheid, blacks were often violently removed from city centers, expelled to rural areas or forcibly relocated to the townships. When apartheid crumbled, so did the restrictions on movement that had hemmed in a large rural population. On taking power in 1994, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) government demobilized the popular movements that brought them to power and swapped apartheid economic dogma for neoliberal doctrine.

The government deregulated the economy, shrank the state, and opened local markets to the winds of international competition. The result: Jobs left the cities at precisely the time that new people arrived to take them, and social safety nets were cut to tatters. South Africa’s human development ranking fell from 95th in 1995 to 129th out of 158 countries in 2009

Through the 1990s and 2000s, temporary shacks became permanent homes for 1.8 million households. In cities, settlements blossomed in and around the middle class communities where a few residents found work as security guards, domestic workers, and day laborers. Work remains scarce, and formal unemployment rates in settlements routinely top 70%. When elections loom, shack communities are generally tolerated by local government officials because they offer a way to tuck wads of poor black ANC voters into wealthier and more conservative neighborhoods. Patronage pulses through the shacks during South Africa’s electoral seasons, but dries up during incumbent years.

The ANC insists that the worst of apartheid is over, that the ruling party has led a massive construction program to house the homeless, and that development is coming. Under apartheid, though, township houses stretched over approximately 580 square feet. Today’s shack dwellers are lucky to be relocated to homes with an interior space of 390 square feet, many miles from their work, schools and communities. Even then, tenure is insecure. As the World Cup opens, several Cape Town families face eviction because developers increased rents from $38 to $193 per month. Those who haven’t been given housing yet are encouraged to be patient.

Rather than wait another decade, shack dwellers have organized, protested and petitioned. The Abahlali baseMjondolo movement, a group of over 30,000 shack dwellers from across the country (and whose website I manage), recently took the government to South Africa’s highest court, and won. The Constitutional Court struck down a ‘Slums Act’ that would have effectively criminalized being so poor as to need a shack.

As Amnesty International has noted, though, the weight of these legal victories have been undercut by local violence against Abahlali’s leaders. Over the past year, shack settlement leaders in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town have been chased from their homes by gangs, arrested, detained without hearing and assaulted. The police have done little to help, and much to hinder, investigations into these human rights abuses.

As the World Cup begins, Abahlali are mounting an ‘Upside Down World Cup’ campaign to draw attention to apartheid’s unfinished business. In Cape Town, they will set up tin shacks outside the Green Point Stadium, positioning themselves off-side, to show how they live. Their greatest threat to the South African government is their visibility, and the activists fear violent arrest.

Yet their only demand is the chance to make the rules on the same terms as everyone else. In setting up their shacks in full view, shack dweller activists hope to turn the streams of passing fans not into spectators, but into team players who might, from their home countries, be able to hold the South African government to their rhetoric long after the Cup’s final whistle blows.

Raj Patel is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley, an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, and administers the website of the Abahlali baseMjondolo shackdwellers organization at www.abahlali.org. He is also the author of the international bestseller, The Value of Nothing: How To Reshape Market Society and Reclaim Democracy (Picador).

Here Comes the Neighborhood: The Housing Movement Goes Global in East Harlem

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-gouldwartofsky/here-comes-the-neighborho_b_514059.html

by Michael Gould-Wartofsky, The Huffington Post

Here, amid the glittering ruins of globalized gentrification’s gilded age, a kind of glocal tenants’ movement is taking shape, at once locally rooted and globally connective.

On April 6, 2008, a gathering of global dimensions was afoot on the steps of New York’s City Hall. You may have missed it at the time. You may have been hard-pressed to find it on the news.

That day saw the launch of the International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio, spearheaded by a bottom-up community organization of more than 600 immigrant and low-income families facing displacement from their homes in East Harlem: Movement for Justice in El Barrio (MJB), or The Other Campaign New York (after Mexico’s La Otra Campana.

Thousands of miles away, the executives of the London-based Dawnay, Day Group–the private equity firm that had just purchased 47 buildings (or 1,137 homes) in East Harlem as a beachhead in a bid to build a $5 billion real estate empire here–could hardly have foreseen the ignominious fate that awaited their overseas investments.

Two years, countless protests, a landmark lawsuit, and a global financial crisis later, the Movement was still standing, while Dawnay, Day had gone the way of Lehman Brothers and its East Harlem properties had fallen into foreclosure.

(Most recently, MJB mounted a successful legal challenge to the company retained to manage the buildings, and a campaign to block a nonprofit landlord with a record of gentrification from buying them out.)

Now, having outfought absentee landlords from Harlem to London, outmaneuvered unfriendly politicians (including City Councilor Melissa Mark-Viverito), and outlasted the predatory equity boom of the 2000s, MJB is taking community organizing to a new level of global sophistication.

The scope of the movement was on vivid display one Sunday evening in February, nestled in the basement of an East 116th Street community center, at what was billed as the Third Encuentro for Dignity and Against Displacement.

(See my report on the Second Encuentro here, and a friend’s longer report on the Third here).

Here were the hosts of the evening, the members of MJB leading bilingual chants and exchanges among the hundreds of activists and more than 40 groups that had crowded into the basement from a cross-section of local neighborhoods: (“New York City is not for sale!”)

Here were young representatives of the South African Shack Dwellers Movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo), video skyping in to the encuentro from townships in Cape Town and Durban, where residents are resisting forced displacement ahead of the 2010 World Cup.

“They say the Apartheid era is over,” explained Mazwi Nzimande, a high school student from the “Joe Slovo” slum, “but there is a new Apartheid system that is operating in South Africa, and the Apartheid is between the rich and the poor.”

Speaking to those assembled on 116th Street, Mazwi continued, “I want to let you know that you are not alone…and that it doesn’t matter that those on top are strong. We are stronger and we will keep fighting and we will win.”

In response, members of MJB broke into chants, in Spanish, of “Long live South Africa!” “You are not alone!” “Here, there, the struggle continues!”

Here, too, at the encuentro, was the People’s Front in Defense of the Land (FPDT), out of San Salvador Atenco, Mexico, crossing the border (so to speak) to join the videoconference.

Residents of Atenco have faced violent repression for defending the community from attempts to replace it with a commercial airport–a police riot in 2006 left two youth dead, 26 women raped, and 12 political prisoners who remain behind bars.

MJB responded last year by shutting down the Mexican consulate. Amid footage from the takeover, FPDT leader Trinidad Ramirez del Valle observed, “Distance, borders cannot keep us from fighting back against such injustice…We are filled with happiness to see how many are supporting us. We know our struggle is just and dignified.”

Messages of solidarity flitted back and forth, on and off the screen, from continent to continent but also from neighborhood to neighborhood:

Here was Nellie Bailey of the Harlem Tenants’ Council, speaking against the rezoning of 125th Street; here was Tom DeMott of the Coalition to Preserve Community, against the Columbia expansion; here was Javier Salamanca of the Sunset Park Alliance of Neighbors, against high-rise development.

Here, too, was Dahoud Andre, a Brooklyn-based Haitian activist with Lakou New York who had just returned from a grassroots mission to the scene of the man-made disaster that has left 300,000 dead and a million homeless since January 12:

“Haiti is not so much in the media as it was, but the tragedy continues. The problem is shelter.”

Dahoud had advice for those who wish to support Haiti’s displaced: “Support your local community organizations. Not the big ones, such as the Clinton-Bush Fund. These are the people responsible for destruction in Atenco, Haiti, and Harlem. We do not expect solidarity from them. The solidarity we expect is from the grassroots, from our true friends. We expect it from you guys.”

The encuentro concluded with the traditional smashing of the “neoliberal pinata,” which, this year as every year, drew an eager crowd of rebel children of El Barrio. One after another, they struck, and they struck, and they struck again, with all the might in their little arms, until the ghastly green monster burst apart at the seams and the sweet candy rained into their hands.