Category Archives: Democratic Left Front

Mahala: “Africa is Under-Polluted”

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http://www.mahala.co.za/reality/africa-is-under-polluted/

“Africa is Under-Polluted”

Benjamin Fogel

The International Conference Center (ICC) in Durban where the COP 17 talks are taking place is located between a Nedbank office block and a mall. A location that effectively symbolizes what ultimately stands in the way of genuine environmental action: state-protected big business and the gratifying wonders of consumerism.

People marched on the ICC this past Friday to protest reports that developed nations have basically written the event off and are refusing to commit to any serious cuts in emissions until at least 2020. Former Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solon, declared: “If this deal goes through, one third of the planet will be laid [to] waste.” He meant the Global South and Africa in particular. As Larry Summers, a former Obama-Clinton advisor, Harvard President and Wall Street stooge, once put it, “Africa is under-polluted!”

Some 1000 activists decided to storm the gates walling off the conference from the rest of Durban, taking the police entirely by surprise. The shock led to a potentially incendiary moment. There were enough protestors to initially overwhelm the skeleton police presence and they called in reinforcements from behind the walled-off COP 17 compound. Soon police vans and 30 cops in riot gear rocked up looking confused. They failed to stop people from the Rural Women’s Assembly from occupying the designated space for protest at Speaker’s Corner, but rallied fast and set up a perimeter between the entrance to COP 17 and the street. They tried to push the crowds back towards the street where they wouldn’t disturb the delegates. General Cele might be gone, but the legacy of his Michael Bay inspired policing tactics remains firmly embedded within the culture of South Africa’s finest.

On Saturday, it was soon apparent that the police had a late night planning session with the Durban municipality. They wouldn’t be caught off guard again. The designated protest route was changed repeatedly by the Municipality. It felt like a deliberate attempt to isolate “radical elements” and show them who is boss. Durban city authorities eventually attempted to block the march from taking place at all. The city had to be taken to court for the march to happen. They backed down at the last minute but insisted on an alternate route far removed from the ICC. The case is sure to have national significance – hopefully exposing the tendency to officially excuse mega-events, UN conferences and the World Cup, from the peoples’ constitutional right of freedom of assembly.

Thousands of protestors finally marched across Durban. A march besieged by a group of pro-Zuma ANC supporters dressed in green ‘COP17 volunteer’ shirts. I personally witnessed them throwing bottles and stones. They ripped up placards while openly acknowledged they were ANCYL members. Part of a local pro-Zuma, anti-Malema faction. They sung ‘Mshini wami’ and chanted slogans in support of COP 17. One of them shouted at the Rural Women Assembly, “How much Lobola for you bitch?”

But, what were pro-Zuma supporters doing harassing protestors on the International Day of Climate Action?

They even admitted to being sent to disrupt the march by local ANC branches. Over 400 marshals failed to intervene. The police actively isolated the Democratic Left Front (DLF) from joining the rest of the protest. ANCYL cadres then physically attacked several of the DLF contingent. Ayanda Kota, part of the DLF group, told me later: “What we experienced yesterday was another example of the fascism for sale of the ANCYL and the treachery of the COSATU leadership.” He suggested COSATU was behind suppressing non-alligned, poor, militant and radical voices all over the country. At a subsequent press conference, the DLF and Desmond Desai from the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, both noted that these ANCYL “Green Bombers” were on the Durban City payroll, representing both the UN and the Zuma regime’s desire for a seamless global media event.

We thought, while marching, that the ANC “agent provocateurs” were part of the broader protest action, at first. Then we noticed they were singing songs calling for Juju’s head! Allegedly some 200 of these Green Bombers were paid R180 to disrupt the protest. They also seem to have been prompted to target DLF supporters and grassroots organizations supporting the “1 million climate jobs campaign”. This section of the march was deliberately separated with the help of marshals supplied by COSATU. The march itself was comprised largely of NGOs and COSATU members. Harassment of protestors while police stood back went on for over 4 hours suggesting co-ordination and complicity between the police and the ANC crowd. A complicity recorded repeatedly in political violence around Durban.

Universally loathed, Durban City Manager, Mike Sutcliffe, is a man not known for his tolerance of dissenting voices. Rehad Desai reports that Sutcliffe wanted to restrict the march to a manageable 100 people. Failing that, he tried to keep the march out of the CBD. Only after being confronted by protest lawyers representing civil society, was the march allowed.

The DLF has initiated a criminal case against the individuals responsible for the violence towards the protestors as well as a civil case against the city of Durban, the mayor and city manager in particular. Sutcliffe and the Municipality have developed a reputation over the years for criminalizing politics outside of the official ruling channels. The result is a disturbing conflation between the local ANC and the state.

Abahlali baseMjondolo, an independent grassroots organisation, has been on the receiving end of state violence in Durban for years. Its members are often attacked. Infamously, in 2009, the Kennedy Road pogrom took place. Hundreds of Abahlali members were illegally expelled from the informal settlement leading to several violent deaths. The Durban municipality tried to control awareness of the assault by charging the victims. The case was thrown out of court earlier this year.

On the face of it, it seems that a UN Conference that amounts to a superficial stage-managed show of grappling with imminent environmental collapse without really committing anyone to anything, is happening in a city run by a municipality that pays thugs to attack legitimate protest.

How apt.

Release Comrade Simphiwe Zwane

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Democratic Left Front (www.democraticleft.za.net)

23 October 2011

PRESSS STATEMENT: RELEASE COMRADE SIMPHIWE ZWANE, OKM COUNCILLOR FROM THEMBELIHLE (JOHANNESBURG)

The Democratic Left Front (DLF) calls for the immediate release of Comrade Simphiwe Zwane, the Operation Khanyisa Movement (OKM) councillor in the Johannesburg City Council. On Friday 21 October 2011 at about 11 p.m., Comrade Zwane, was arrested at her home in Thembelihle – the shack settlement in Lenasia, south of Johannesburg, where there have been sustained community protests for services, housing and unemployment. She is being held at the Lenasia Police Station cells.

Her arrest follows the release on appeal of Comrade Bhayzer Miya who was arrested on September 13 and spent more than a month in jail after being refused bail by the Protea Magistrate’s Court. Miya is a key leader of the Thembelihle community who was also the OKM candidate for ward councillor in the 2006 and 2011 local government elections. Another 13 comrades had also been arrested in the course of the ongoing struggles in Thembelihle. The state is using arrests and the courts to frustrate the struggle of the Thembelihle community by victimising its leaders. We demand the unconditional release of Councillor Zwane, and the dropping of charges against her and Miya, and the 13 other comrades from Thembelihle who will appear in court on the 27th October.

Following the callous and illegal slaying of Andries Tatane by the police in Ficksburg, Zwane’s arrest confirms that the repressive organs of the state are directed at people and workers engaged in protest action. Councillor Zwane’s arrest is linked to the march she led on the 22nd August where she read and handed over a memorandum to the ANC ward councillor. She had reported on this march when she addressed the DLF National Workshop on Local Government that was held at the beginning of July. Through this march, the community of Thembelihle demanded that the City of Johannesburg must speedily deliver housing, electricity and water.

The memorandum also demanded an end to the exploitation of workers by Lenasia employers. The government’s failure to address these demands angered the community leading to the recent weeklong uprising in Thembelihle. Instead of responding to these demands, the City of Johannesburg has collaborated with the police to victimise Comrade Zwane. As the OKM press statement released on Friday showed, Councillor Pravin Naidoo, the ANC Chief Whip in the Johannesburg City Council, publicly attacked and slandered Councillor Zwane for leading the march. This was shortly followed by Advocate J. Browde, the Commissioner for Integrity in the Office of the Speaker of Council, summoning Councillor Zwane and interrogating her about the march, suggesting that disciplinary measures would be taken against her for leading the march.

The ANC government must deliver on its election promises of houses, electricity, water, education, healthcare, public transport, jobs and a better life for all. Comrade Zwane is an exemplary councilor who speaks and acts on behalf of the people who elected her. She is the only councilor in the City of Joburg who actually takes mandates from the community and reports everything discussed in council meetings. She is subject to the right of recall by those who elected her. More than half of her salary is used by the OKM to fund campaigns that defend and promote the interests of the working class and the poor. She is bound to do these things because during her election campaign she signed a pledge and a legally binding contract to this effect. She is being victimised in order to kill the vision of the necessity for a government that is run and controlled by ordinary people.

The DLF endorses the call for solidarity with Comrades Zwane, Maziya and 13 other Thembelihle comrades issued jointly by OKM, the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, the Landless Peoples Movement (Protea South), the Commercial Services, Agricultural and Allied Workers’ Union, GOLCOM, the Solidarity Economy Education and Communication Cooperative, the Mine Line Workers’ Committee, the Democratic Socialist Movement and and the Socialist Group. The DLF also endorses the press conference that will be held later today: 23 October 2011, at 11h00 at the offices of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee at the Careers Centre, corner Chris Hani Road and Immink Drive, Baragwanath, to provide the media with more details of this shameful development and the campaign that OKM will wage to secure her release.

Finally, the DLF reiterates its call for a People’s Tribunal into State Violence and Repression Against Social Protest. In June this year, the DLF together with 27 social movements called upon COSATU, as the foremost representative of the working class, to convene a such a Tribunal. Such a tribunal must aim to assess the extent and legality of such violence, determine who has been responsible for the brutality, and formulate proposals for reform of public order policing. The tribunal should include representatives of trade unions and civil society organisations and also individuals whose involvement would add credibility to its deliberations.

FOR COMMENTS, CONTACT:

Vishwas Satgar (DLF) – 082 775 3420

Mazibuko K. Jara (DLF) – 083 651 0271

Sphiwe Segodi (OKM) – 072 655 4177

Arrest and release of Simphiwe Zwane in Thembelihle – 24 October 2011

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Arrest and release of Simphiwe Zwane in Thembelihle – 24 October 2011

Councillor Simphiwe Zwane, a ward councillor for the Operation Khanyisa Movement (OKM) – an affiliate of the Democratic Left Front (DLF) – representing the Thembelihle informal settlement and its surrounds, was arrested late on Friday 21 October 2011 on charges of intimidation. The charges stemmed from her participation in and organisation of recent protests at the settlement. Zwane was charged with intimidation of the local ANC councillor.

The arrest took place the day after Bhayiza Miya, another organiser of the protests was released on bail by the High Court, after it decided that there was insufficient evidence against him to support an almost identical charge of intimidating the local ANC councillor – and no evidence at all against him on a number of other charges (including public violence and malicious damage to property) relating to the recent protests.

Update – 24 October 2011

Councillor Zwane was released today after the Control Prosecutor at the Protea Magistrates’ Court declined to prosecute because there was not enough evidence to support the charge against her. Had Zwane not been represented by a SERI attorney, Teboho Mosikili, Zwane would likely have been remanded in custody for at least another day. Mosikili forced the police to produce the evidence on which she had been charged, leading the Prosecutor to conclude that there was insufficient evidence to sustain the charge. The charge was then withdrawn.

Zwane’s arrest is the latest in a series of arrests of people who participated in or organised the recent protests in Thembelihle. Some people arrested claimed that they were just walking by the protests when the police apprehended them and had absolutely nothing to do with them. The organisers of the protest, including Miya and Zwane, have apparently been arrested at the behest of members of the local ANC, including the local ANC councillor, Janice Zondi. Little to no evidence has been produced against them and they have been released with the help of competent legal representation – after spending periods of a few days to over a month in detention.

Such evidence as has been produced is in the form of statements from local ANC members, upon which the police justify the arrest and detention of the organisers of the protests. Zwane, Miya and the other protestors are invariably identified as the ANC’s political opponents.

It remains to be seen whether the charges proffered against Miya and the others can be substantiated, but, at present there is insufficient evidence to justify the refusal of bail, let along to bring them to trial. SERI is concerned that the police, the department of correctional services, and the criminal courts are being enlisted (more or less knowingly and willingly) in a politically motivated campaign to criminalise protest and to stifle opposition to the state and the ANC in the Thembelihle informal settlement. Zwane’s arrest, in particular, appears to have taken place on the mere say-so of the ANC councillor, or an ANC member close to her – and in the absence of any evidence against her.

Please contact the following DLF representatives for more information:

Vishwas Satgar (DLF) – 082 775 3420

Mazibuko K. Jara (DLF) – 083 651 0271

Sphiwe Segodi (OKM) – 072 655 4177

Sunday Times: Is the SACP still relevant?

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http://www.timeslive.co.za/opinion/commentary/2011/07/31/is-the-sacp-still-relevant

Is the SACP still relevant?

Mazibuko K Jara:

The South African Communist Party can be faulted on many fronts, but its sterling contribution to defeating apartheid and challenging capitalist exploitation was personified in the principled socialist morality and selflessness of Chris Hani, Joe Slovo and others.

In Hani’s words: “To be the general secretary of the SACP was belonging to a party that must link up with day-to-day struggles of the people.”

Yet today’s SACP is largely invisible in these popular struggles for social justice. At worst, the SACP proclaims these struggles as social liberalism and counter-revolutionary.

For all its 90 years of history, current radical rhetoric and the continued presence of many genuine rank and file socialists in it, the SACP is a shell that stands for a demobilising politics of intrigue, power battles, self-justifications for indulgence in trappings of state power, and promotion of personality cults.

The SACP has failed to move beyond a state-obsessed centralism. The SACP is now reduced to the role of mollifying increasingly desperate and restless poor and working people who bear the brunt of post-apartheid capitalism.

The crisis of the SACP cannot spell the end of left renewal. The challenge for forces of the left, poor and working people, and others committed to social justice is how to engender a new counter-hegemonic politics that is relevant and concrete. The formation in January 2011 of the Democratic Left Front is only one step in the much larger long-term processes of political, social and economic struggles ahead.

One of the most important struggles in this regard is to build alternatives to limited conceptions of political agency where, to count as a political force, a political actor has to form a party and contest elections in a one-party dominant model in a capitalist society.

This conception displaces the politics of the people with the self-serving politics of politicians. Politics can and must be about the people. Ordinary people cannot just be regarded as merely disgruntled and powerless protesters. They can go beyond apathetic one-off voting every five years or limited wage-based challenges to the wealthy business elite, or powerless grumbles against the failures of the ANC government.

Like Abahlali baseMijondolo, the Social Justice Coalition and many other localised struggles, the Grahamstown-based Unemployed People’s Movement shows the possibilities of a people-based politics. Formed in August 2009, it has become the most powerful force in the Makana municipality. Its formation represented a collective recognition of the appetite for self-emancipation, and without self-organisation, the unemployed in Grahamstown might as well have remained on the margins of that divided small town.

In its short two years of existence, the movement has marched, written deputations, submitted memorandums of demands, held sit-ins, held meetings with the state, used the law and more.

It has challenged unemployment, poor-quality housing, lack of housing, lack of water and sanitation, lack of electricity and street lighting, violence against women and problems with the social security system. The movement has humanised politics by concerning themselves with how to rebuild the social fabric of a poor community.

In all this, the movement has no illusion that the gradual recognition of constitutional socioeconomic rights and holding government accountable will be the ultimate answer to the systematic and structural marginalisation of the unemployed. The Unemployed People’s Movement is grappling with how to connect immediate struggles with their systemic roots and how to challenge the state as the main transmitter of inequalities.

The movement’s experience is only the start of what will definitely be a long-term process to renew politics in South Africa.

It is this kind of renewal that Hani yearned for when he said: “In the struggle … we have always identified the central role of the oppressed.” Hani’s yearning lives in the Unemployed People’s Movement and challenges the many genuine socialists in the SACP’s rank and file to ask and answer hard questions, lest they get left behind by history.

Jara is a former SACP member and a co-founder of the Democratic Left Front

DLF Statement on the Kennedy 12

19 July 2011
Democratic Left Front

Press statement: Celebrate the acquittal of the Kennedy Road 12! Investigate the role of the SAPS and the ANC in the September 2009 attack on Kennedy Road

 



Mnikelo Ndabankulu speaks outside the court

 

The Democratic Left Front (DLF) salutes the 12 members of Abahlali BaseMijondolo (AbM) from Kennedy Road in eThekwini who were acquitted of all charges of murder. Their arrest and trial followed a September 2009 attack on AbM in the Kennedy Road informal settlement eThekwini. All evidence pointed fingers at ANC-mobilised and police-supported attackers who were heavily armed and used ethnicity part of their strategy. ANC involvement in the attack was confirmed by ANC provincial statements that heralded this attack as the ‘liberation’ of the area. For months after the attack the homes of AbM leaders were openly and publicly attacked with impunity by the local ANC. Many had to leave the area.

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