Category Archives: The South African Civil Society Information Service

SACSIS: Abuses of Force During Public Order Policing Operations

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1455

The Road to Marikana: Abuses of Force During Public Order Policing Operations

by David Bruce

During apartheid some of the most notorious instances of police brutality were the killings of demonstrators involved in peaceful protests. It therefore made sense that one of the issues that received concerted attention during the police reform process of the 1990s was public order policing.

An important initial step in this regard was the introduction of new legislation. The Regulation of Gatherings Act, in fact, came into force in January 1994 prior to the formal transition to democracy. A special Standing Order ‘on crowd management during gatherings and demonstrations’ was eventually also adopted by the South African Police Service (SAPS) in 2002. These documents were intended to entrench a policy framework in terms of which the primary role of public order police was to support the right of members of the public to assemble and demonstrate.

In post 1994 South Africa, the right to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression is entrenched in the Constitution. But though the Constitution protects the rights of members of the public to protest ‘peacefully and unarmed’ it must be acknowledged that between them the Constitutional, legislative and policy provisions are somewhat blurry in some respects. This applies in particular to demonstrations where there is violence, including violence against property, by demonstrators.

Section 9(2)(d) of the Regulation of Gatherings Act, for instance, appears to authorise the use of firearms or other weapons ‘to protect against’ not only death or serious injury, but also ‘destruction or serious damage to property’. Section 11(4)(c) of the public order policy, on the other hand, provides that rubber bullets ‘may only be used to disperse a crowd in extreme circumstances. But though one might argue about what constitutes ‘extreme circumstances’, and when, if ever, these include the destruction of property, there is far less ambiguity about the fact that they may only be used when ‘less forceful methods have proved to be ineffective’.

Along with legislation and policy a major investment was also initially made, with substantial foreign assistance, in transforming the apartheid “riot police” into public order policing (POP) units. A new training curriculum was developed and implemented and formal management and command structures were introduced.

Ironically, simultaneously with the development of this specialized capacity, there was an apparent decline in the need for it. By the early years of the new millennium it seemed that the specialised public order policing capacity that had been created was something of an over-investment. Though there were a large number of demonstrations the vast majority of them were entirely peaceful. In order to support their right to freedom of assembly all the police needed to do was provide a couple of police vehicles and a handful of ordinary police officers as a formal escort. As a result public order units started to be used, in support of station-based police, in crime combating operations. The intensive work that had been done on equipping them to deal with complex, and potentially violent, public order situations, would, from this point on, no longer be sustained.

From roughly July 2004 onwards South Africa experienced a series of community and labour demonstrations that involved significant levels of violence. These included sporadic protests against the provision of housing, service delivery and local council corruption, a municipal workers’ strike in July – August 2005, various protests over the demarcation of provincial boundaries, and a major strike of security guards over April–June 2006. This pattern of violent protest has continued up to the present.

Though some strikes included a number of killings, in community protests violence on the part of protestors was largely confined to attacks on property. The major exceptions to this rule were acts of collective violence that were motivated by xenophobia, or took on a xenophobic dimension. Most notably in May 2008, 62 people were killed in a series of riots by mobs that targeted people who were believed to be foreigners from other African countries.

Notwithstanding this dramatic increase in violent demonstrations there was no significant increase in killings by police during demonstrations. Over roughly five years, between the beginning of 2000 and the end of 2004, four people were killed by police during demonstrations. Three of these deaths did take place in 2004 but two of these occurred during an operation by the Ekurhuleni metro police and one of the local sheriff’s offices. Two more people were killed in 2006 and one in 2008. Notwithstanding the horrific violence that was involved no people were killed by the SAPS during the xenophobic attacks of May 2008 with police in fact being accused of being deliberately tardy in their response. Two people were also killed during a demonstration in Thandakukhanya township near Piet Retief in Mpumalanga in 2009. One was allegedly shot by a traffic police officer and the other by a private security guard.

There was something of an escalation in 2010, with three people killed by police in that year. These included a 46 year-old grandmother, Priscilla Sukhai, in Daveyton in May and a schoolgirl, Anna Nokele in Welkom, in September 2010. But then something very dramatic happened.

During a period of less than five months, from the middle of February 2011 to the beginning of June eleven people were killed in demonstrations. These included two young children who were allegedly drowned as they tried to escape from police who were firing at a township demonstration in Boipelo, 300 kilometres southwest of Johannesburg. The other nine deaths appear to have been a direct consequence of the adoption by the SAPS of brutal new methods for dealing with public protests.

These methods involved the use of live ammunition in some instances. They also involved direct firing of rubber bullets at demonstrators. There is some indication that the new strategy involved the targeting of leaders or other people playing a prominent role in the demonstrations. Whilst at the time it was widely believed that it was a freak incident, the killing of Andries Tatane on April 13 2011 was part of this pattern of killing.

Where rubber bullets are fired directly at close range they are highly likely to be lethal. Rather than being fired directly they are intended to be used as ‘skip fire ammunition’. It is for instance rubber bullets that the International Association of Chiefs of Police is referring to when it says in its policy on ‘civil disturbances’ that “Skip-fired projectiles and munitions or similar devices designed for non-directional non-target-specific use may be used in civil disturbances where life is in jeopardy.”

The new SAPS approach first came to public attention during a police operation in Wesselton, near Ermelo, in mid-February 2011. Violent protests that included the blockading of access routes to the township by the burning of tyres, the smashing of traffic lights and road signs, and stoning of a police vehicle had started on Monday the 14th of February. Two people were killed, apparently as a result of police action, during the demonstration.

Though the exact circumstances of the deaths are not entirely clear, according to an Agence France-Presse report, police acknowledged that they fired rubber bullets at protesters and that they ‘shot live ammunition into walls as a warning’ allegedly after demonstrators opened fire at the security forces. It was presumably the live ammunition that accounted for the death of Bongani Mathebula. According to his mother, “he was walking back home from a traditional healer’s surgery when he was caught in the crossfire of police shooting at rioters.”

Accounts from residents painted a deeply disturbing picture of police action on Wednesday the 16th when the community protest had already died down. According to residents the police imposed a curfew in the township punishing people who were on the streets by shooting them with rubber bullets or sjambokking them. A cell phone video clip showed a young man rolling on the ground while being followed by armed police, one of whom is perched on the police vehicle’s bonnet. According to the man who captured the footage on his cell phone “the youngster in the clip was coming from the nearby shops with a female friend when he was summoned to the officers’ vehicle, questioned and allegedly shot at several times with rubber bullets. He was then forced to roll on the dusty street for a considerable distance.” According to a Mail & Guardian report, the man who captured the footage also said, “They didn’t want anybody on the streets that day. That guy wasn’t the only one [who was assaulted]. A lot of people were being ejected from shops and forced to roll on the ground. The police were also conducting door-to-door raids.”

Live ammunition also appears to have accounted for the death of a young woman, Dimakatso Kgaswane, who was one of two people killed by police during a protest on May 31, 2011 in Tlokweng in North West province. According to a press report, police used live ammunition to disperse protesters who set alight a tavern and a police minibus. The protest was against ritual killing and perceived police inability to solve cases in the area.

Whilst live ammunition may have accounted for the death of Bongani Mathebula and Dimakatso Kgaswane, it is more likely that Petros Msiza, who died on the 3rd of March 2011, was killed by rubber bullets. According to a press report, Msiza was killed during violence that erupted “when city law enforcers refused to allow South African Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) members, who had gathered at the Tshwane Metro bus depot, to march through the city.

The precursor to the increase in killings in 2011 appears to have been the re-establishment of Operational Response Services (ORS) as a full division within the SAPS. Though it had previously been a full division, by 2010 ORS was a sub-component of the SAPS Crime Prevention division. In January 2011 the then ORS head was transferred to assume the position of provincial commission of the Western Cape. ORS was then re-established as a full SAPS division and a new divisional commissioner, Lieutenant General Malewa, appointed as its head. In addition to the public order units, ORS included a number of paramilitary units including the Special Task Force, National Intervention Unit and Tactical Response Teams.

In some respects the new SAPS methods preceded the re-establishment of ORS as a full division. In July 2009 SAPS members fired rubber bullets at people at close range during an operation in response to protests in Balfour in Mpumalanga. The report of a ‘quick response’ study published in September that year describes, and includes photographs of, “a 15 year-old boy who had been shot 10 times by rubber bullets at close range. The boy had also suffered a severe head injury allegedly from being struck on the back of his head with the butt of a gun.”

According to the report, “The research team also met a woman who had recently given birth and who had been shot in the stomach at close range by a rubber bullet while, according to her, hiding under her bed when a police officer demanded to know who had blocked the road with stones.” An accompanying photograph indicates that, in this case, ‘close range’ meant a distance of less than one metre.

Violent policing methods appear to have had the backing of senior politicians. Addressing 280 mayors and municipal managers at a meeting in October 2009, for instance, President Jacob Zuma said, “I wish to take this opportunity to state without any ambiguity: this government will not tolerate the destruction of property, the violence and the intimidation that often accompanies protests.”

Zuma’s remarks were made notwithstanding consistent evidence that violent protests generally followed successive unsuccessful attempts by people in communities to have their grievances heard and attended to.

Though heavy-handed police actions were a characteristic of some protests prior to 2011, the re-establishment of ORS as a full division in January 2011 appears to have marked a radical departure. The division’s creation was, it seems, accompanied by the idea, that once police had a pretext for using force, they could dispense with principals of minimum force, and use as much force as they wanted to.

But in the aftermath of the political furore that followed the Andries Tatane killing, at a summit against police killings, on 8 July 2012, Minister of Police, Nathi Mthethwa announced a reversal of this policy. He told the summit that while there was a ‘need to use maximum force against violent criminals’ police should use ‘minimum force in dealing with fellow citizens.’

This speech appears to have heralded a reversal of the ORS approach to the policing of demonstrations. Between July 2012 and the Marikana massacre 13 months later, there has apparently been only one killing. In July 2012 a 14-year-old boy died of a gunshot wound during a protest in Folweni Township near Durban.

But, in addition to the massive use of live ammunition, direct firing of rubber bullets was also brought back into use during the police operation at Marikana on 16 August. This brutal use of ammunition that is supposed to be used non-lethally has now apparently taken another life following a police crackdown in Marikana’s Nkaneng township on the weekend of the 15th and 16th of September. ANC councillor Pauline Masuhlo died in hospital on Wednesday 19th of September. She was allegedly shot by police. Her family believe that she died as a result of a rubber bullet lodged for three days in her leg, close to the knee.

Notwithstanding the consistent evidence that police continuously use excessive force, our political leaders continue to lay the blame for violence on demonstrators.

SACSIS: The Case for Opening SADC Borders: ‘We live here, we work here, we’re staying here!’

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/712.1

The Case for Opening SADC Borders: ‘We live here, we work here, we’re staying here!’

At the end of July 2011, the South African government plans to lift the moratorium on deportations to Zimbabwe and will probably start the deportation of all undocumented Zimbabweans living in South Africa.

Given the Minister of Home Affair’s stated intent to begin ridding the country of undocumented people from other African countries after she is finished with Zimbabweans, it is more than likely that the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) is going to intensify its crackdown on all undocumented people after July 2011.

The irony is that in certain cases, the DHA is to blame for undocumented people in the country. A recent research study undertaken by the People Against Suffering Oppression and Poverty (Passop) shows that scores of people are turned away on a daily basis from the Refugee Reception Office (RRO) in Cape Town, “rendering them undocumented through no fault of their own.”

Passop monitored the RRO for two weeks between March 28, and April 8, 2011. During this period, 1,659 people were tuned away for various reasons. About 365 people were turned away because there were no forms for them and 363 people were turned away due to border pass issues. Some people were turned away because 1) there were too many people to serve that day, 2) they had no money to bribe officials, 3) they were at the wrong office, or 4) for visiting the RRO on a wrong ‘nationality day’.

It is partly due to the factors highlighted above that the Passop report argues that the RRO in Cape Town is operating “under capacity” in comparison to the numbers of people applying for papers. Instead of penalizing immigrants for something that is beyond their control, the South African government ought to consider extending the concept of the Zimbabwe Dispensation Project (ZDP) to other foreign nationals from the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

The SADC region is moving towards a free trade area. Research shows that the opening up of national economies has largely been accompanied by the increased mobility of labour across borders.

Interestingly, the proposed Protocol on the Free Movement of People in the SADC of 1995 had initially also put forward an “open borders” concept, i.e. SADC citizens having free movement within SADC.

Apart from the fact that the SADC region is moving towards a free trade area, it is worth keeping in mind that immigrants from the SADC countries helped build the South African economy. Research also shows that South African mines (and the South African agricultural industry) depended on cheap foreign labour in order to make profits. In fact, “mining has consistently been one of South Africa’s most important industries, one of its biggest employers and the driving force of its industrial economy,” contends Jonathan Crush, the director of the Southern African Migration Programme (SAMP).

SAMP research further shows that throughout the 20th century, at least 40 percent of the mine workforce was non-South African. A research paper published by the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) in 2005 points out that by 1970, there were over 260,000 male labour migrants on South African mines. Put differently, this means that hundreds of thousands of male migrants from the SADC countries have spent the greater parts of their working lives in South Africa, argues Crush. These workers came from Malawi, Lesotho, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Angola and Tanzania.

It was in recognition of this fact in 1995 that the post-apartheid South African government offered permanent residence to mineworkers from outside of the country who had been working on the mines since 1986.

Crush reports that 26,440 miners applied for permanent residence, but points out that the reason a small number of miners applied was twofold.

Firstly, miners were poorly informed about the first amnesty and had insufficient time to make their applications.

Secondly, the fact that the miners had to have served 10 years to apply is unjust given the 5-year limitation on SADC country citizens applying for permanent residence. If all miners were to apply for a reopened amnesty, the results would be startling. Some 150,000 non-South African miners would be eligible.

Additionally, the GCIM’s research paper reveals that many adults in SADC countries have either parents or grandparents who have worked in South Africa in the past. “In every case, nearly a quarter or more people have grandparents who had worked in South Africa…About a quarter of the people in Namibia and Zimbabwe have parents who had worked in South Africa. So did 41% of Batswana, 54% of Mozambicans and 83% of Basotho.”

It is this history that compels me to argue that the South African government ought to consider extending the concept of the ZDP to other foreign nationals from the SADC region.

Based on the foregoing, people from the SADC countries have political grounds to apply for South African papers that allow them to work and live in this country. Their fathers and grandfathers, after all, were exploited, like all blacks in this country, by a white supremacist regime in order to build the South African economy. In some cases, their fathers and grandfathers paid the ultimate price, dying from pneumonia and other lung diseases on the South African mines.

Perhaps it is worth noting that many people in the SADC region live in poverty and view South Africa as a place with many economic opportunities. Although South Africa has its own problems and challenges, the truth of the matter is that South Africa is the economic powerhouse in the region (some might argue on the whole continent). In a policy brief written for the Economic Justice Network, Dale McKinley argues that SADC member states have a population of about 250 million people and a combined GDP of some US$432bn – 65 percent of which comes from South Africa alone.

Needless to point out, South Africa became the regional economic powerhouse that it is today partly on the backs of immigrant labourers from the SADC who helped build the country’s economy. Is it unreasonable for people to want to share in the fruits of what they helped create?

On the Casual Bulldozing of a Shembe Temple in Durban

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/606.1

On the Casual Bulldozing of a Shembe Temple in Durban

By Richard Pithouse

Whenever they find a reality that doesn’t suit them / they alter it with a bulldozer
– Mahmoud Darwish, A State of Siege, Ramallah, 2002.

Mahmoud Darwish, a poet who wrote, especially towards the end of his life, with a real confidence in what he called the butterfly’s burden, the social weight carried by delicate beauty, began his life in al-Birwa, a village in Galilee. He was seven years old when his family fled the Israeli military in 1948 and his life was spun between Moscow, Cairo, Beirut, Paris and Ramallah before he died in Houston in 2008.

In his wandering exile he was able to visit Casa de Isla Negra, the cherished home of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. In a poem about his visit to Neruda’s home he recounts his recollection, at Isla Negra, of a conversation with the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos in his home in Athens. He had asked Ritsos what poetry is and Ritsos had replied that it is the “inexplicable longing” that “makes a thing into a specter, and makes a specter into a thing. Yet it might explain our need to share public beauty.”

Here in South Africa the Constitution may declare that we are all, or least all of us with the appropriate papers, equally the public and equally entitled to find and share beauty as we see fit. But much of our shared life is dominated by business interests that appeal to markets rather than publics and not everyone is in the market for everything. This is not always a case of market logic rendering, as it often does, some people superfluous and therefore invisible. When the poor are out of the places to which they are supposed to keep, when a shack stands next to a suburban home or a poor child sits next to a richer child in a school, the mere presence of people without money can render them hyper-visible. People, with all their individual depth and complexity, are sometimes turned into objects onto which all kinds of contempt, fear and hate are projected.

One of the many places in our society where the fracturing in who counts as a full member of our national public and who does not is immediately visible is Motala Heights near Durban. Motala Heights is nestled into a valley between the factories on the outskirts of Pinetown and a steep hill that leads up to the expensive suburb of Kloof. Some of the people in the valley are poor and live in tin houses that they have built on rented land and some are middle class or wealthy and live in large suburban homes. There is also a shack settlement at the foot of the hill that leads up to Kloof.

In 2006 the eThekwini Municipality tried to send in their men with guns to eradicate the shack settlement. When Bheki Ngcobo told them that their actions were illegal in terms of the Constitution he was tear-gassed and beaten to the ground. But, in the end, the squatters stopped the City’s illegal eviction. The law is not everything but it is also not nothing. At the time the squatters were convinced that the eviction had been directed by a local landlord and businessman, Ricky Govender, and claimed that the municipal demolition team had been drinking in his pub before they set off up the hill to eradicate a community. There is no doubt that some municipal officials and police officers speak as if Govender, who boasts of connections to Jacob Zuma, has some sort of extra-legal authority over the whole community. Govender’s plans to force out the poor in order to develop Motala Heights for private profit clearly carry a lot more weight than the demand of its poor residents that the state support them in building a community for all the residents of the area.

Govender has been trying, for some years now, to evict some of the people in the tin houses. They are often old and poor. Some have lived in their homes for as long as forty-five years. Like the municipality, he has failed because his attempted evictions have been illegal. This is public knowledge. Allegations that he has dumped dangerous industrial waste right outside activists’ homes, threatened to have activist Shamita Naidoo killed for R50 and to bulldoze people’s homes have been reported in the local press. Newspapers have also reported that Govender has been interdicted in the Durban High Court from evicting people without a court order, from assaulting and harassing his tenants and from bulldozing their homes. In 2007 The Mercury reported that Govender had threatened to kill one of their photographers. Yet the state has made no visible move to ensure that Govender and the residents of the shacks and the tin houses should all live under the obligations and protections of the Constitution. Money and political connections appear to have bought Govender a degree of immunity.

Last month the squatters’ claimed that, after years of struggle, the Municipality finally sent a team to fix up the dirt road leading into the settlement. They say that Govender instructed the team to stop work and redirected them to his pub where the gravel was used for his own private maintenance work. On Friday last week a bulldozer shuddered up the hill adjacent to the shack settlement, went straight to the Shembe temple and obliterated it. There was no warning of what was about to happen. The driver of the bulldozer referred residents to his boss who referred them to Ricky Govender. The temple had been there since 1997 and has been used for worship every Saturday since then.

In A State of Siege, a poem written amidst the Second Intifada, Mahmoud Darwish wrote that “Whenever they find a reality that doesn’t suit them / they alter it with a bulldozer.” Palestine has endured a unique horror since 1948 but the arrogance of unrestrained power bulldozes all kinds of inconvenient realities across space and time. A few days after the American backed military coup against the elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973, Isla Negra, Pablo Neruda’s home, was ransacked by soldiers who burnt his books in the garden. “Look around,” he famously said to them, “there’s only one thing of danger for you here—poetry.”

After the 1913 Land Act, Sol Plaatjie wrote of the “roving pariahs” torn from their rural homes and unwelcome in the cities and we have, of course, our own body of poetry against the bulldozing of inconvenient realities. In 1948, Modikwe Dikobe, trade unionist, novelist and secretary of the Alexandra squatters’ resistance movement in Johannesburg, wrote in Shantytown Removal of being left “unfeathered,” “wingless” and “dumbfounded” in a “ruin” that once housed “a thousand souls / With its own administration.”

The bulldozing of inconvenient realities is not just a strand in the story of our past. Almost a hundred years after the Land Act millions of roving pariahs remain in the shack settlements on the edges of our towns and cities. They are often shunted around at the point of guns wielded by the state and private power. There are plenty of sixteen year olds who have never lived a day under apartheid but who have seen their homes, communities and, in Motala Heights, their temple, treated as nothing but an aberration to be bulldozed from the landscape.

When people put on their white robes and walk up a hill to pray in a temple under a tree they are reaching towards the sacred, bringing body and spirit together. This is one way of making poetry, of honouring the butterfly’s burden.

In Motala Heights we could say to the police, to Ricky Govender, to the eThekwini Municipality, to the headmaster of the local school “Look around—there’s only one thing of danger for you here—people.” But saying that will count for nothing if enough forces cannot be marshalled to defend the public good and push the logic of private profit into its place.

SACSIS: The KwaZulu-Natal Slums Act: Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated

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South African Civil Society Information Service
13 May 2009

http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/283.1

The KwaZulu-Natal Slums Act: Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated

On 14 May 2009 the Constitutional Court will hear the attempt by the shack dweller’s movement Abahlali baseMjondolo to have the KwaZulu-Natal Slums Act declared unlawful. Other provinces have been mandated to develop similar legislation and the decision of the court may have a significant impact on the future of our cities.

Thabo Mbeki’s government built a lot of houses. But this does not mean that we have been building democratic and inclusive cities. On the contrary it is a major mistake to assume that the resolution of the crisis in our cities is a simple question of building houses. We should recall that the apartheid state built a lot of houses and that around the world authoritarian regimes, like the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, have often built a lot of houses.

In fact Lindiwe Sisulu, Mbeki’s Housing Minister, left the state’s housing programme in a catastrophic mess. The Breaking New Ground Policy, officially adopted in 2004, recommends democratic engagement with communities with a view to upgrading settlements where they are. It has never been implemented. The constitution protects unlawful occupiers of land against summary eviction but the state is the primary perpetrator of systematically unlawful evictions. The state’s actions are, in strict legal terms, routinely criminal.

Both policy and law have been ignored in favour of an increasingly authoritarian discourse around eliminating or eradicating slums. This has led to a deliberate reduction in the provision of basic services to shack settlements, often unlawful and violent evictions, and forced removals to out of town housing developments and prison like ‘transit camps’. Evictions leave people destitute and bereft of community, expulsion from the cities takes people away from work and schools and the reduction of basic services like electricity, toilets and water actively subjects people to relentless fires and the loss of children to something as easily avoidable as diarrhoea.

One of the many pernicious consequences of the slum clearance discourse is that the government ends up measuring its progress on the resolution of the urban crisis via two metrics the first being the reduction in the number of shacks. So if, as often happens, only half the residents of a settlement are accommodated in a new housing development and the rest are left homeless as their settlement is razed the state will measure that as progress. The other way that progress is measured is by the number of people moved into state controlled spaces. This is problematic enough given the well known fact that a well located shack is often much better for people than a poorly located government house. But in a perverse Orwellian move some municipalities are compounding the damage done and turning the urban question into a numbers game by calling the new and deservedly notorious transit camps, or even tents, ‘housing opportunities.’ So even when people are forced out of shacks and into transit camps against their will and at gunpoint the statistics will simply show that they have ‘accessed a housing opportunity’.

It is unsurprising that this technocratic approach to development, an approach that is incapable of measuring the human consequences of state action, has been subject to sustained resistance. Shack dwellers across the country, some organised into movements and others acting independently, have been blocking roads, marching on councillors and, on the rare occasions when they can access the judicial system, taking the government to court. Entirely legal forms of protest have often been responded to with unlawful state repression.

The Slums Act, passed into law in 2007, is an attempt to give legal sanction to the turn to an outrightly authoritarian and anti-poor response to the crisis of our cities. It has direct connections to similar colonial and apartheid legislation, like the 1951 Prevention of Squatting Act. It compels municipalities and private land owners to evict, gives legal sanction to the notorious transit camps and criminalises shack dwellers’ movements. It assumes that shack settlements, rather than the material and political realities that give rise to shack settlements, are the problem and so rather than seeking to reduce injustice it attacks ordinary people’s attempts to survive in an unjust society. Shack dweller’s organisations across the country and across the political spectrum have emphatically rejected the Slums Act. People have been beaten, shot at with rubber bullets and arrested while marching against it.

In his study of the rise of capitalism in England Karl Marx called the legislation aimed at controlling peasants who had moved into the cities after being forced off the land ‘bloody legislation against the expropriated’. The Slums Act is certainly not as blood thirsty as the laws of the English Kings that rained down beatings, whippings, brandings, enslavement, imprisonment and execution on people forced into vagabondage after the enclosure of their land. But it does demand that state violence be directed against the dispossessed. It is legislation against the expropriated. Its function is, quite clearly, to marshal state and private force against the poor in order to reassert the absolute control of the state and capital over urban planning and urban land use.

There are currently no grounds for optimism that Zuma’s government will seek a more just and democratic resolution of the urban crisis than that imagined by Mbeki. On the contrary the ANC’s Polokwane Resolutions actively endorse the extension of the Slums Act to other provinces.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The state could, along with meaningful and pro-poor rural land reform, actively support the efforts of poor people to hold their ground in our cities. It could, for instance, attempt to actually implement the Breaking New Ground policy. Or it could take a larger step forward and, following examples in Brazil and the Philippines, implement measures to put the social value of urban land before its commercial value.

Grassroots activists will be making their way to the Constitutional Court for the hearing on 14 May from shacks settlements around Johannesburg as well as Durban and Cape Town. We will have to wait and see how the court decides to measure their humanity. We will also have to wait and see how it decides to weigh that humanity against the demand for legislation that can only, when it comes down to the practicalities of sending out the men with guns to banish the poor from our cities, be a bloody business.

SACSIS: The Solution to Shack Fires is Electrification, Not More Training

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http://sacsis.org.za/site/news/detail.asp?iData=149&iCat=253&iChannel=1&nChannel=News

The Solution to Shack Fires is Electrification, Not More Training

Despite all the confident government talk about ‘eradicating slums by 2014’ the fact is that the number of people living in shacks is growing. Recent statistics show that the percentage of the population living in shacks has now increased to 15.4 percent from 12.7 percent in 2002.

South Africa is not the first country where the government has simply announced a date by which shacks will be ‘eradicated’. In 1968 the military dictatorship in Brazil declared that shacks would be ‘eradicated’ by 1976. When attempts to achieve this goal by forcibly relocating people to peripheral housing developments were resisted the dictatorship resorted to trying to burn people out of their shacks. Things have not degenerated to this level in South Africa. But many municipalities, with eThekwini and Erkhuleni being amongst the worst, are trying to reduce the number of people living in shacks by way of unlawful and in fact criminal mass evictions that are often accompanied by state violence.

The talk of ‘eradication’ is clearly a form of denialism. It is a denial of the realities of urbanisation, it is a denial of the realities of poverty and it is a denial of the realities of the politics of space. We need to accept that people will continue to migrate to the cities in search of opportunity, that shack settlements will continue to be an important safety net for city people who cannot afford formal housing and that being able to live close to opportunity will continue to be more important for many people than living in a formal house. In some instances politicians are trying to cap the demand for urban housing by effectively criminalising urbanisation by the very poor. The KwaZulu-Natal Slums Act is the most egregious example of this. Measures like the Slums Act come down to a return to the use of state violence to keep the poor out of the cities.

The fantasy that shacks will be eradicated by 2014 also leads to a failure to provide basic services to shack settlements. Now that they have all been rendered ‘temporary’ at the stroke of a bureaucratic pen the provision of services appears to be wasteful in the eyes of elite planners. But the reality is that many shack settlement are up to 30 years old and could easily continue to exist for another 30 years. In many of these settlements the provision of water, toilets, refuse removal and electricity is either non-existent or wildly inadequate. The failure to provide these services leads to all kinds of health problems and lays particular burdens on women’s time and, in the case of the absence of toilets, safety.

One of the most acute consequences of the failure to provide services to shack settlements is the relentless fires. They can happen any time but across the country winter is particularly feared as the burning season. The huge Kennedy Road settlement in Durban has had 6 fires already this year. In Cato Crest, also in Durban, 8 people including 5 children recently burnt to death. Old people, disabled people and children are most at risk of death in the fires but everyone stands to loose their homes and possessions including the ID books and school uniforms essential for access to some state services.

The ultimate solution is clearly the provision of decent housing. But the housing crisis in South Africa is not reducible to the provision of houses. There are all kinds of smaller interventions that could immediately reduce the threat of fire. For instance, if there were taps spread throughout the larger settlements people would be able to fight the fires more effectively. And community fire fighting efforts would clearly be much more effective if fire extinguishers were provided. Fires would be less likely to start and to spread if people were given fire resistant building materials. Fire engines would be better able to access the large settlements if roads were provided into the settlements. But the biggest issue is that of electricity. In settlements or parts of settlements that have been electrified, whether by the state or by residents, the incidence of fires is greatly reduced. There is a direct link between the fires and failure of most municipalities to electrify settlements, and in Durban the 2001 decision to cease all attempts to electrify settlements. This is compounded by the regular and often violent police raids to remove life saving self organised electricity connections.

If the state is unwilling or unable to electrify settlements it must accept that, as happens across the word, people will do the job themselves. Electricity is about many things. It means that children don’t have to do homework under street lights, that meals can be cooked, clothes ironed and families kept warm with much more safety and much less time and effort, often by women. It also means that people have much better access to the national public sphere via television discussion programmes. But most of all it means that people are not at constant risk of fire.

Almost invariably government spokespeople respond to shack fires by blaming the victims. We are told that the fires are the fault of a parent who wasn’t watching a child carefully enough or someone who was drunk and so on. These stories are often simply fabricated. But even when they are true the point is that when people have electricity an exuberant child, a drunk adult or someone who has grown tired at a funeral vigil might knock over a lamp but the result will be trivial – perhaps a broken globe. In a shack that is lit by a candle and where people are warmed by a brazier and their food cooked on a paraffin stove a tiny slip in concentration can quite easily result in catastrophe. For this reason the solution to shack fires is not, as government spokespeople say, to train people in fire awareness. The solution is to electrify the settlements.

People cannot be expected to live in constant fear of fire until they get government houses. Many people now living in shacks will, like Irene Grootboom, end their days in a shack. Shack fires are an emergency and electricity is a life saving essential service.

By Richard Pithouse, an independent writer and researcher in Durban.