Cape Argus: How the rich have hijacked development

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How the rich have hijacked development

June 17, 2009 Edition 1

Richard Pithouse

From the SACP across to the corporate spin-doctors and down to the development committees in shack settlements, more or less everybody in South Africa speaks the language of development. In some ways this is a good thing. It indicates a hard-won agreement that the realities of inequality are so cruel and perverse that any social project can be credible only if it ameliorates these divisions and the suffering they cause.

But one of the key problems with this consensus is that it carries a degree of authoritarianism while lacking a clear content. The result is that it is simultaneously difficult to be against development without seeming anti-social and to know exactly what counts as development.

So the meaning of development is continually contested. When a shack dwellers’ organisation decides to blockade a road to demand “development”, it means something very different from a property owners’ association lobbying, also in the name of “development”, to change the law in order to make the eviction of shack dwellers easier.

But with the right spin, almost any attempt by the rich to further enrich themselves at the direct expense of the poor can be justified in the name of “development”.

Vast amounts of cash and political energies that could have been directed towards meeting the basic needs of people living in intolerable conditions have been wasted on stadiums for 2010. There’s been similarly reckless spending on other vanity projects for years.

The failed uShaka theme park in Durban is a case in point.

When it opened with the grand promise of development, there were near riotous conditions at the gates as thousands of people who would never afford the entrance price arrived in search of the handful of menial and precarious jobs on offer.

But year after year it has sucked money out of the public purse and into private hands like some kind of crazed giant vacuum cleaner in a fourth-rate horror movie.

But development is not only an ongoing and massive set of state subsidies for the rich. It is often a direct attack on the poor. Around the country the livelihood of street traders is under attack as they are forced out of long-established markets in city centres. In Durban this is being done in the interests of developing a corporate mall. And everywhere shack dwellers are being forcibly removed from their own shacks on well-located and therefore valuable urban land to government shacks outside the cities. Farm workers are also being forced off the land in the interests of elite projects like game farms.

As the ANC increasingly became a vehicle for elite accumulation, often justified in the language of the left and in the name of the poor, many took heart from our constitutional commitments. And over the years the Constitutional Court has made some compelling interventions in support of the dignity of the poor.

Five years ago the court famously declared that when it comes to adjudicating competing claims for urban land, it is necessary to “infuse elements of grace and compassion into the formal structures of the law”.

In the same judgment, it insisted that with the transition to the post-apartheid legal order, “people once regarded as anonymous squatters now became entitled to dignified and individualised treatment with special consideration for the most vulnerable”.

But the reality is that state and private power continue to act unlawfully with regard to the poor.

The reality is also that the “housing rollout” has often been an authoritarian and corrupt process that, in many instances, has physically excluded poor people from cities by dumping them in peripheral ghettos.

The commitment to providing “houses” in these ghettos has recently changed to a commitment to providing “housing opportunities”. People are now often being dumped in one-roomed government shacks in “transit camps” or “temporary relocation areas”. With their razor wire fences and single entrances policed by armed guards they have a clear familial link to the concentration camp.

No one could look at these places and seriously conclude that they are intended as spaces in which people will flourish. It is entirely obvious that they are places for surplus people – people who do not count.

The N2 Gateway Project in Cape Town has deservedly become the most notorious of the state’s housing projects. It was certainly not undertaken in a consultative manner and although it has always been justified in the name of the poor, both the state and its bankrupt private partner, Thubelisha Homes, have sought to use it to free well-located land for private profit by instituting a mass forced removal to government shacks in transit camps on the urban periphery.

Last week the Constitutional Court endorsed the forced removal of 20 000 people from the Joe Slovo shack settlement in the interests of this development. The judgment has shocked many progressive lawyers who see it as, at best, profoundly and culpably naive.

It is clear that the court has subordinated its own elegantly stated ethical commitments to the tyranny of the language of development.

We are in urgent need of a national conversation about the nature of development. That discussion needs to include serious consideration of whether or not it is right to so often expect the worst off, the poor, to pay the highest price for our development model.

But in order for this sort of genuinely national discussion to be possible, we’ll need to face up to the fact that the monopoly elites have long wielded over the interpretation of our common commitment to development will have to be broken.

Breaking that monopoly will require a radical political empowerment of the poor against elites in the state, business and civil society. And given the paranoia and authoritarianism with which elites tend to respond to a demand for equality issued from below, we must accept that this will not happen without a fight.

The road ahead is long and almost certainly bitter.