Wednesday, 30 September 2020
ESCR Session on the challenges facing residents of shack settlements

Opening remarks by S’bu Zikode delivered this afternoon to the opening of the 68th Session of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Thank you, Mr. Chairperson, members of the ESCR-Net and the Committee for the ESCR for affording us with such an important platform to express our concerns.

Across the world residents of the shack settlements, many of which are in fact land occupations, are not recognized as human beings who can think for themselves. We are not treated with respect and dignity, or taken seriously. We are treated as if we are beneath the law. The state often engages us with violence rather than discussion. Some NGOs and some media have presented us to the world as criminals. For too long we have been living in substandard housing conditions, with no access to water and sanitation. For too long we have been denied access to roads. We have been denied refuse collection and electricity provision. The failure to provide electricity has caused regular shack fires in shack settlements resulting in the loss of many lives. We live, year after year, like pigs in the mud in the summer when it rains, and with fire after fire in the winter.

When state assisted housing and job opportunities are provided they are allocated along party lines. In the case of South Africa, if you are not connected to people in power you do not get a job or house in our shanty towns. If you stand up to this you will be at a very high risk of violence.

For too long local politicians have become dangerous figures in our communities in the name of leadership, law and order. Our movement has lost 18 activists who have been murdered. Some have been murdered by local politicians of the ruling African National Congress, some have been murdered by the state and its police. Some have been murdered by municipality’s land invasion units and by private security companies. Recently we have been subject to sustained violence from Calvin and Family Security Company. Across the world, activists are targeted and attacked for demanding social justice and decent living conditions.

For too long our efforts to organize the oppressed and build the democratic power of the oppressed has been met with state violence. Organizing outside the state and the ruling party has been criminalized. If we take democracy seriously we are met with violence.

We have been denied access to well-located urban land where we can be closer to areas of active economic opportunities, we can have access to health care facilities and our children can have access to better education. Globally, states are prioritizing economic and political interests over basic human needs.

We are implementing a programme of land reform from below with organized land occupations. But this is a difficult and dangerous politic. Grassroots urban planning is not recognized by the state and they use all forms of violence to try and crush it.

What we need is for the allocation of land to be removed from state and capitalist control and to be organized on a democratic basis. There should be a total decommodification of land. Land was not bought and sold before colonialism and it should not be bought and sold now.

For too long brutal and illegal evictions have been terrorizing communities, even during a pandemic that requires us to stay at home for public health reasons. We therefore demand an end to all evictions in our cities. We demand an end to all land dispossession, utilities cut offs and related attacks on the poor.

The politicians continue to try and divide the oppressed by turning neighbour against neighbour with xenophobia and other forms of prejudice and discrimination. All progressive movements must do all that they can to oppose this. The strength of the oppressed lies in our unity.

State corruption is a great threat to future stability in our countries. We demand an end to all state corruption that has robbed our communities of the right to access all economic, social and cultural rights as enshrined in the international laws and standards.

Land, wealth and power must be shared equally. The right to housing and a life lived in dignity must be guaranteed for all. We call this a living communism, a politic in which every person counts as a person, the dignity of every human is respected, there are no more human borders and the brutal centuries during which colonialism and capitalism have drenched the world in blood are finally brought to an end.