On 9 April 2020, President Cyril Ramaphosa addressed the nation announcing an extension of the National Lockdown by an extra two weeks. The lockdown requires all South Africans to stay at home. A few hours before this announcement was made twenty-nine women were arrested in the Azania occupation in Cato Manor for defending their right to have a home for themselves, and their families.

The twenty-nine women were told that they had been arrested for ‘contravening the lockdown’. Their ‘crime’ was sleeping on open ground after their homes were destroyed by a notoriously violent state hired private company, Calvin and Family Security. This land was first occupied in February 2019, and the occupiers have been subject to more than thirty armed evictions since then. On each occasion they have rebuilt their homes. However, after the most recent eviction they were prevented, at gunpoint, from rebuilding by Calvin and Family Security. As a result, they decided to continue their resistance by remaining on the land and sleeping out in the open.  

Some of the women who were arrested had their children with them, some were with babies as young as two years old. Their children were taken into arrest with them. However, through negotiations with the Abahlali baseMjondolo legal team the women were released without any charge being laid against them. These women still have no home to return to and have returned to the land which they have occupied for more than a year. They are resolved to remain there. We salute their courage.

These arrests come on the back of sustained, violent and illegal evictions carried out almost daily by the eThekwini Municipality despite, the national government’s call to stop all evictions during the period of national lockdown and long-established legislation that prevents evictions without an order of the court.

Over the last fifteen years Abahlali baseMjondolo has endured numerous waves of severe repression in Durban, including the destruction of the homes of the movement’s leading members by armed mobs aligned to the ruling party, open death threats, organised campaigns of slander and repeated assassinations.

It is clear to the SRWP that the eThekwini municipality is cynically misusing this period of lockdown to repress Abahlali baseMjondolo, a powerful social movement which has successfully organised numerous land occupations in Durban over many years. There can be no other explanation for the Municipality’s senseless and inhumane attacks on some of the most vulnerable people in the city during this time of national and global crisis.

The SRWP urgently calls on the national government to immediately intervene and insist that all evictions be stopped. We also support the call for Calvin and Family Security to be immediately shutdown and subject to a credible criminal investigation for its repeated violence during unlawful evictions. We also call on all our members to give their full support to the comrades in Abahlali baseMjondolo who are leading the fight for land, housing and dignity!

We once again reiterate, that we condemn all those who uphold private property above human lives! We fully support Abahlali baseMjondolo’s insistence that the social value of urban land must be placed before its commercial value.

The domination of the private interest of wealth and property over social interests can only be destroyed through a communist revolution led by the working class and we are committed to building the organised power of the working class from below to achieve this.

The need for a lockdown to deal with a very serious pandemic cannot be used as cover to further repress and attack the largest and best organised formation of the poor to have emerged since the end of apartheid in the interest of the violent and predatory forces that dominate the ruling party in Durban.

In this time of global crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic it has become clear capital’s maniacal drive to dispossess, exploit and oppress is placing all of humanity, and the viability of the earth itself, at risk. It within these times of crisis that the condition of the majority of society is laid bare for all to witness and it is in times like this, and on a day like today, when we remember our fearless leader, comrade Chris Hani that we must also remember his words:

“For the wretched of the earth, the 90% of humanity living in a capitalist society, socialism is the only answer. History has not ended… We will mould a new, just society!”

The power will be ours by force!

Issued by Motebang Oupa Ralake
General Secretary of Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party

For more info contact,
Vuyolwethu Toli
National Spokesperson
Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party
0735880677
media@srwp.org.za