Leave Cutting Edge Alone
On the 28th April 2011 the SABC television programme Cutting Edge screened a programme on life in Grahamstown. The title of the story was ‘bucket of shame’. In Grahamstown there are vast areas that continue to use the bucket system to shit seventeen years after democracy.
People are shitting in buckets and plastic bags in Ndancama, a township that was erected in 1972. The few RDP houses that have been built are crumbling down. The sewerage is not working.
People are also shitting in buckets and plastic bags in eLuxolweni. RDP houses were supposed to be built here in 2010 but the project was never completed and the contractors have abandoned the site even thought thirty houses remain unbuilt. The quality of the work on the houses that were built is shocking and the sewerage is not working.
In the Sun City shack settlement, founded in 1982, and the Transit Camp, RDP houses are supposed to be being built but the emerging contractors are struggling to complete the project due to government delaying the payments.
My brother Sizakele Maxhegwana (his number is 046 – 637 0587) used to work as a casual worker, collecting the buckets full of shit. When we witnessed the unpleasant working conditions we advised him to stop working. No medical support was given. We felt that the work was hazardous to his health.
The Cutting Edge show on Grahamstown was carefully researched and it told the truth. Workers were interviewed and they narrated their unpleasant working conditions. Residents were interviewed as well and they told their stories about the indignities and dangers that come from not having access to proper toilets.
All these devastating ills are emerging from a Municipality that is rotten at the base. The Mayor is personally indebted to the Municipality for an amount of not less than R60 000.
In the 2010/2011 Financial year the Makana Municipality could not account for an amount of R19 million.
In the 2009/2010 Financial year the very same Makana Municipality could not account for R24 million.
Old ladies are shitting in plastic bags while millions of rand cannot be accounted for! This is disgraceful.
Since the Cutting Edge show on Grahamstown was screened we have witnessed a lot of anxiety from both the municipality and the ruling party. Some senior members of the ruling party accused us of paying SABC, Cutting Edge in particular, for screening what they called “a right wing agenda that seeks to destabilise ANC ahead of the local government elections”. An employee of the municipality publicly accused us of being drunk with wine that we get from reactionary white academics. The local ANC said the Luthuli house is looking at the video and that both UPM and SABC “shall shit bricks”. Zandie Mahlahla, a senior member of the ANC, publicly threatened me on the campus of Rhodes University. She said that I am “going to be killed and be buried in the township”. She closed the way of our Publicity Secretary Xola Mali. She just stood like a zombie.
We have now learnt that the Makana Municipality has taken South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa (BCCSA). This is another signal of the death of democracy in South Africa. It is another signal that corruption is entrenched in our society and that who ever seeks to expose it we be met by all kinds of hostilities and intimidations. It is another signal that the party that once aimed to be a national liberation movement is now a means to private accumulation and top down social control.
After what happened to Abahlali baseMjondolo in Kennedy Road and Pemary Ridge in Durban in 2009 and the Landless People’s Movement in eTwatwa on the East Rand in 2010 no autonomous poor people’s organisation can afford to ignore public death threats from the ANC.
Now that the ANC has openly declared its tensions to be able to censor the media we should not see this attempt to intimidate journalists as an isolated instance.
It is clear that the Municipality can not prove
· Distortion: Nothing is being exaggerated in this programme. It is a fact that our people use the bucket system to shit. It is a fact that our municipality is corrupt. The workers told the truth when they narrated their unpleasant working conditions
· Material Omission: I wonder what sort of defence of such appalling conditions that our people continue to endure after 17 years of “democracy” could be claimed to be a ‘material omission’?
· Summarisation: The summary presented in the show presented the reality of the lives of our people in a very fair manner.
The real problem here for the ANC is the screening of a programme on the bucket system on the eve of local government elections. The real problem here is that local authorities do not want to be exposed as corrupt. The real problem here is a political party that is so obsessed with power that anything that threatens their government must just be suppressed and vanquished.
The ANC is silent when we suffer day in and day out. The ANC can ignore our people for seventeen years while we shit in plastic bags and buckets. But when we speak up they jump into action and threaten to kill and to make us shit bricks. They are very efficient and effective when they want to be. They do not leave us to suffer because they have a capacity problem. They leave us to suffer because they want to leave us to suffer.
On the day of the hearing against Cutting Edge the people of different areas still using buckets’ will protest outside Makana Municipality Hall. We will dump all the shit in front of the Town Hall because that is where it belongs.
We are sick and tired of being dehumanized by the ruling power elite. We are fed up of giving and giving and not getting anything, but bullshit. We are told that it is our sacred, national and revolutionary duty to put our crosses next to their name in the IEC’s boxes. But they have no interest in allowing us to put our shit in toilets.
If our lives and voices matter, of which they should, the Municipality must drop the case against Cutting Edge immediately and focus on eradicating the bucket system, fighting corruption and servicing the people with basic social rights.
Leave Cutting Edge Alone!
Yours truly;
Ayanda Kota
UPM – Chairperson
078 6256 462