Category Archives: development

Padkos: Development without the poor

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Thursday 15 December 2011

Development without the poor

In an earlier edition of Padkos (No. 17) we argued that the real possibility and practice of democracy originates in the ‘dark corners’ of the state-we’re-in where ordinary poor people wage extraordinary struggle. One of the ways in which the spaces made and lived by the poor is rendered ‘dark’ is a developmental mythology that valorises the agency and dynamism of the middle class – and positions the poor as superfluous. In this edition we share a recent piece from Richard Ballard (Built Environment and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal) exploring the function and effects of this approach – an approach Ballard characterises as “development without the poor”.

It is the first in a forthcoming series of three review pieces where Richard says he will “review recent literature on three contradictory, although mutually constitutive, understandings of development. I refer to these as development without the poor, development for the poor and development by the poor”. In the Abstract for the article, he points out that: “Some contemporary narratives of development give privileged status to middle classes in the global South. …[But] celebratory narratives elide the complex circumstances that make and unmake middle classes. Furthermore, middle class gains do not automatically translate into development for others. Indeed, efforts to centre the middle class threaten to displace, and justify the displacement of, economically marginalised groups seen as surplus to development”.

As this year draws to a close, we have also to digest the experience of the climate change circus that was COP17. The failure of the official COP17 to make headway in resolving the crises is no surprise, and nor is the effective exclusion of the people/the poor. In many ways this was, after all, a meeting of the elites whose praxis and interests are the basis of the crises in the first place. But there were too many instances of contempt, conscription and coercion of ‘the poor’ by civil society elites (whether NGOs, academics, or activists) who dominated the “alternative spaces’ of COP17 to suggest that civil society modes offer the basis for humanising, liberatory resolution of the crises either. Far too much civil society praxis remains basically as elitist, as racist, as authoritarian, and as exclusionary as those they criticise in governments and capital. Real solutions to real crises will not be won by modes of working that are conducted in practice, either ‘without’ or ‘for’ the people/the poor.

Thanks: We are grateful to Richard and the editors of the journal, Progress and Human Geography, for permission to share this as-yet unpublished paper. Read and enjoy the attached: Richard Ballard, November 2011 “Geographies of Development: without the poor”, Forthcoming in Progress and Human Geography).

Heads up for some good holiday reading: lots of good stuff in the newest edition of the online journal, Interface (http://interfacejournal.net/current/). There’s an article by Michael Neocosmos (“Transition, human rights and violence: rethinking a liberal political relationship in the African neo-colony”) where he extends key arguments we summarised in Padkos No. 17; and there”s an important piece from Kenneth Good (“The capacities of the people versus a predominant, militarist, ethno-nationalist elite: democratisation in South Africa c. 1973 – 97”) detailing the battles fought – and largely lost – between the extraordinary radical democracy of ‘peoples power’ in the best of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and a violently authoritarian politics that came to characterise a dominant tendency of the African National Congress (ANC) in exile and through the transition to ‘democracy’ in South Africa.

Business Day: ‘Development by force’ is a recipe for rejection

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http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=124412

‘Development by force’ is a recipe for rejection

by Jacob Dlamini

IT IS said that in the early days of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), government bureaucrats descended on a village in the Eastern Cape, intent on bringing “development” to the village. The village was in a former homeland and was, like most villages in the area, without electricity and running water. Villagers fetched water from a stream some distance away, where they also did their laundry and tended their scraggy livestock.

The bureaucrats, imbued with a missionary zeal to bring about a “better life for all”, set about installing a communal tap for the village. Not long after the tap started running, a government official who was also high up in the African National Congress (ANC) showed up in the village to open the tap officially. The official, like the bureaucrats who had preceded her, expected gratitude from the villagers, especially the women whose job it was in the village to fetch water and do laundry.

Imagine her surprise, then, when the local women proved to be the least grateful of the villagers for the “development” delivered to them by the state. The women, so the story goes, pulled the official aside and berated her for placing the communal tap close to the centre of the village. The women told the stunned official that, had the bureaucrats bothered to ask the women, they would have discovered that the women preferred to have the tap placed away from the centre.

What the bureaucrats did not know was that the fetching of water was a gendered enterprise with both negative and positive sides to it. It was negative because it was governed by patriarchal social relations that determined what women could and could not do. But it was also positive because it gave village women the time and the space to be by themselves, away from the chief, the men and their children.

Fetching water and doing the laundry were, for the women, precious time they had to themselves. They valued that time.

Placing the communal tap close to the centre of the village took that away from them. They could not gather like they used to by the stream. They could not shoot the breeze or do anything they fancied without the surveillance of the men. The women wanted a communal tap all right. They just wished they had been consulted. They were not opposed to “development”. They just wished the bureaucrats had consulted them before giving them “development”.

I heard this story years ago and, for all I know, it may well be apocryphal. You may find similar stories in the former Soviet Union, Tanzania, India or many other societies subjected to top-down “development” by government bureaucrats who always knew better than villagers, peasants and poor people about what these “masses of our people” needed.

I have, since then, heard similar stories from politicians and regular folks.

When I interviewed the mayor of Standerton last year, shortly after she had been ousted by a “service delivery” protest and then “recalled” from office by the ANC, she spoke with pride about what she had done to bring “development” to Standerton. The mayor mentioned one case in which, she said proudly, she had brought “development by force” to an area. The case concerned a hill that, before the mayor’s intervention, had been dotted with shacks sited irregularly along a steep incline. The municipal council wanted to give the hill’s inhabitants electricity, running water and a sewerage network.

It could not introduce these things to the hill. It wanted the inhabitants to move to a housing development some distance away called Rooigrond. The inhabitants would not move. They liked the hill and its centrality. They would not budge. But, no, the council could not let these simple folk get in the way of “development”.

The council moved them by force, destroying their shacks in the process.

By the time colleagues and I arrived in Standerton last year to conduct research, the hill had lost all but two shacks.

All that remained of the former shacks were indentations, cleared plots, on one side of the hill to show where the shacks had been. Of the two shacks that remained, one belonged to an epileptic man and his mad wife. No one could explain how the couple had survived the removal. The other shack belonged to a mineworker-turned-farmer. He kept goats.

Asked why he did not move so he could get an RDP house with all the amenities, the man said he would have to give up his goats if he moved. There was not enough land for people and goats in Rooigrond, he said. The hill was better. His goats could roam up and down without hindrance.

I am sure the mayor meant well when she gave her constituents “development by force”. But I can’t help but wonder if she would still be in office if she had bothered to listen to her constituents, instead of presuming to know what was good for them.

Cape Argus: How the rich have hijacked development

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http://www.capeargus.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5039237

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.

M&G: David vs Goliath in Gugulethu

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http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-11-20-david-vs-goliath-in-gugulethu

David vs Goliath in Gugulethu
PEARLIE JOUBERT – Nov 21 2008 05:00

David is squaring up to Goliath in the form of a small, petite butcher staring down developers of a R350-million mall in Gugulethu.

Construction work on this massive luxury shopping mall, called Gugulethu Square, in Gugs township is under threat because owners of a 25-year-old family business are refusing to make way for the mall.

The owners of SKhoma Butchery, Thandi Kama and her sister Nolothando Koyana, inherited their business from their father. They are refusing to move out of the building from which they operate their highly successful butchery and eatery, saying the mall will only benefit the elite and not the residents of Gugs.

Sand and dust from the construction site blows into the butchery daily as bulldozers and cranes are moving closer and closer to SKhoma Butchery.

Kama is standing her ground, though, because she believes she has a claim on the land. Her father, Stanley Koyana, had been promised that he would have first option to buy the ground on which his shop stood.

“My dad couldn’t own land because he was a black man and wasn’t allowed to buy and own city land. Since 1994 we have had an agreement that we would have first option to buy if ever the land is sold. The city sold this 34 000 square metres piece of land to Khula for R11,70 and never gave us the option to buy part of it. Now we must make way for the mall and continue to pay rent for the rest of our lives. I will fight this,” Kama said this week.

The two sisters received a lawyers’ letter this week giving them until the end of the month to “vacate the premises”.

The letter, from attorneys Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr, told the sisters they are “holding up the construction of the new shopping mall and the damage our clients are already suffering and further future damage, which will be for your account, will be astronomical”.

Kama’s lawyer said she is lawfully occupying the premises because her lease agreement has not been cancelled. Kama and her sister said they “wouldn’t be bought or threatened”.

Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr had been briefed by the landowner, Khula, and the developer, West Side Trading. The latter, which belongs to Gugs businessman Mzoli Ngcawuzele, owns a 9% share in the development estimated to be worth R31,5 million. Ironically Koyana helped Ngcawuzele when he started up his own butchery and restaurant.

Ngcawuzele instructed his lawyers to offer Kama payment for relocating her business and “upon completion, to accommodate [her] in the new Gugulethu shopping mall”. With the support of a handful of other Gugs residents, they’ve vowed to fight “the fat cats” and not take up their offer.

“We are not against development. We are not against the building of the mall even. We are against the fact that promises were made to our father regarding buying the land on which our shop is and those promises were not honoured.

“We’re also against the fact that residents of Gugs will not benefit from the mall — only the already wealthy BEE-beneficiaries will benefit,” Kama said this week.

She said it is always the same — “already wealthy black and white business people benefiting from each and every development that happens”.

The initial investment of R350-million in the new mall was made by The Ideas Fund (Old Mutual), Mzoli Properties, Khula and Group 5. Group 5 is partly owned by ANC businessman Tokyo Sexwale. Requests for information from both Group 5 and its holding business, Mvelaphanda Properties, went unanswered.

The conflict around the mall has been brewing for almost two years when “Gugs Tycoon”, as Ngcawuzele is nicknamed, evicted the tenants of the now bulldozed Eyona shopping centre. Tenants were given six months’ notice and then moved to containers further along the road. Some were moved to the old age home across the road.

Mgcawuzele, the famous owner of the even more famous “Mzoli’s” restaurant and nightclub, said that there is nothing “fishy” about this mall. “To build a mall in Gugs has been my dream for the last eight years. We have consulted with every single community structure and everybody is happy with this development except for the anti-eviction campaign and the butchery across the road.”

He said a community trust is being set up which will “give 5% of the value of the mall to the community”, adding that the paperwork explaining how this will work is not ready yet. And 10% of the mall will be offered to local business people who want to buy into the scheme, he said – but no paperwork explaining this offer is available yet either.

“Everything about this mall is transparent and honest. The mall will change the lives of Gugs residents and no politicians will benefit from it. We’re building this mall for love and not money,” Mgcawuzele said.

The mall is set to open in September next year with 70% of the retail space already given to retailers like Spar, Shoprite, Truworths, Foschini’s, the major banks and numerous other large outlets.

Evicted carwash shop owner Maurice Tena dismissed philanthropy as the driving force behind Gugulethu Square. “The local small business people in Gugs will taste none of this massive cake,” he said. “This cake, like all other major developments in the country, will benefit those driving black 4×4s already [a reference to Ngcawuzele’s large black Jeep Commando]. I was evicted from my shop to make way for this development. We have no guarantees that we will benefit. Other people – white people and the black elite – will benefit from this mall.”

Mcediso Twala from the anti-eviction campaign has been leading demonstrations against the mall for the past month because no local workers are employed on the construction site. “Mgcawuzele is a bully who has employed MK veterans and taxi bosses to threaten [those of] us who are opposed to the way this mall development is proceeding. The poor need to benefit,” he says.

Mgcawuzele denied this, saying 40 workers of the 200 workers on the site were from the area.

Witness: Land rights for the poor

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Land rights for the poor
24 Sep 2008
Lisa del Grande

Working for 30 years on land rights issues does not make one an expert
in land reform. This has been our experience in South Africa anyway.
Every day brings new and interesting twisted lessons for us on how to
make land reform work — for anyone. Given the recent reports on the poor
success rate of our land reform programme to date any new ideas must be
good ones right? Wrong. But we can now put a price on how much it costs
to make a land claim go away —R515 575 000.

This latest lesson is a sad and strong reminder about how land has
become a playground for the wealthy few while the poor majority’s access
to land has been reduced to symmetrical rows of cement block houses so
they can be fed with infrastructure and services in the cheapest
possible manner. For some, land use is about feeding a lifestyle. For
many others, land use is about feeding a livelihood.

So isn’t it interesting that both the “lifestylers” and the
“livelihooders” are complaining about the restitution process in
KwaZulu-Natal. Now they have also found an ally in the staff employed to
implement this process. In a recent bizarre twist the restitution
commission staff have gone public over their internal complaints about
their manager — the KZN regional land claims commissioner. Is the
stumbling restitution process really the fault of one land claims
commissioner? While the Association for Rural Advancement (Afra) would
love to join a finger-pointing session, we were forced to consider the
situation more carefully when we witnessed another recent lesson in how
land reform really works. Those who value their lifestyles or their
livelihoods should pay close attention to this story.

The restitution process, ostensibly a rights-based programme to redress
dispossession, started with the passing of the Restitution Act in 1994.
All potential claimants were required to lodge their claims before a
prescribed cut-off date, which finally was December 2000. One such claim
was lodged by a group of people who had faced repeated removals from the
area in and around the Dukuduku forests. Prior to lodging a claim they
had in fact resettled on some of the land they were to claim, in a
desperate attempt to reclaim it. This led to a dramatic growth in new
homesteads in the natural forest area as others supported their claim to
the land, in return for a place to live. For the past eight years the
claimants have struggled to get the Regional Land Claims Commission
(RLCC) to process their claim. They have had many “lifestyle”
detractors, in the government, the development and tourism sector and
the environmental sector who attempted to criminalise their legitimate
claim to the land. In this time our government had a large part of the
area they had claimed proclaimed as a world heritage site. In this time
the government tried to entice them out the forest into a formal housing
settlement, ostensibly to save the forest. In this time the established
Greater St Lucia Wetland Park (now called the Smangiliso Wetlands Park)
gave out BEE concessions for development of tourism lodges in the park.

In this time the RLCC tried unsuccessfully to dismiss their claim as
invalid. The claimants contested this in the Land Claims Court and won.
Six years into the claim and after the court case the RLCC informed them
that their claim happened to overlap with another group. It then took
more than a year to convince the RLCC that this was a mistake. And
finally in this time of eight years, the claimants have witnessed the
position of the commissioner being changed three times. From
commissioner Cherryl Walker to commissioner Thabi Shange to the current
commissioner Duduzile Sosibo. However, the most recent coup d’état in
this eight-year period, in attempts to undermine their land rights, is
not one brought about by an allegedly by incompetent RLCC commissioner.
Rather it is one that has seen the provincial Minister of Local
Government, Housing and Trade Affairs, Mike Mabuyakhulu, with the
support of the provincial cabinet, announce that part of the land which
they have tried to reclaim will now become a housing project. On fairly
good word it seems that not even the RLCC official handling the claim
was consulted.

On August 27, 2008, in a local stakeholder meeting comprised mainly of
traditional leaders and councillors, Mabuyakhulu announced that the KZN
cabinet had decided to “legalise” the Dukuduku settlement through
on-site resettlement. Essentially the government will turn the settled
area of the forest into a housing project and move the heritage park’s
boundaries to secure “conservation bottom lines”. Two bottom lines are
the securing and fencing off of the remaining natural forest areas that
have not been settled, like Futululu forest, and secondly moving
subsistence and small-scale farming by families away from the flood
plains. It should be noted though that even the Futululu forest and the
flood plains fall under the Dukuduku-claimed area. And the estimated
cost of the solution to this battle for the land will cost R515 575 000.

While housing and services will always be a critical part of supporting
families to improve their livelihoods, the Umkhanyakude district is
renowned for its high unemployment and poverty rates. With much land
under forestry, conservation, game farming and commercial farming,
increasingly dense rural settlements face poor prospects for upliftment.
Currently the highest sector of employment remains the service sector.
Agriculture and access to land for small-scale family farming seems
critically important even with the proposed tourism potential of the
area. With battles between tourism developers over large tracts of land
and restitution claimants growing increasingly acrimonious what prospect
is there for self-sufficient or secure livelihoods?

The development stakes are clearly high. The year 2010 is looming and we
have partially banked our economy on a potential tourism industry. That
the Dukuduku land claim and a settlement agreement with the people in
the natural forest area of the claim is long overdue smacks of
government high-handedness. This will be the third attempt in 30 years
to settle the Dukuduku matter and this will be the third time that
political decision makers have not consulted those directly affected
despite the fact that they have legitimate land rights over the area.
While the restitution process is turning out to be protracted and messy,
it could be the developers who finally win, through back- door deals
like Dukuduku. An early score for 2010: development 1 — people 0.