Thursday, 20 March 2014
Press Statement for Immediate Release from the Masifunde Education and Development Project Trust Together with the Rural People’s Movement & the Unemployed People’s Movement
Remembering Sharpeville Day in Grahamstown
Date: 21 March 2014
Time: 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Venue: City Hall, Grahamstown
Tuesday, 18 March 2014
Unemployed Peoples’ Movement Press Statement
Makana Municipality Bans another March
Municipalities around the country are banning marches and supressing the right to protest. The Makana Municipality in Grahamstown is one of the worst offenders.
The year before last they illegally banned one of our marches on the grounds that one of our comrades was on a list provided by intelligence of people who are not allowed to address public gatherings unless the riot police are present. We had to go to court to march and when we did march riot police came from all over the Eastern Cape to monitor our comrade.
Last year they illegally banned one of our marches on the spurious grounds that ‘they were dealing with the issues we were raising’. It is obvious that a Municipality can’t decide whether or not they are dealing with the issues that people want to raise in a protest. It is the people that should decide this.
http://groundup.org.za/content/south-africas-water-wars
by Mandy de Waal
Ma Gladys Mphepho hovers over a pot on a two plate cooker in her shack in Papamani, an informal settlement outside of Grahamstown. “We do not have dignity,” she says, stirring the rice, flavoured with beef stock, that is her family’s Sunday lunch. “We do not know what it means to have dignity. Forget about any question of dignity,” says Mphepho.
It is a sweltering day in the heat of summer and Mphepho is talking about her daily struggle to live, which is exacerbated by the crisis that the people of Papamani, and greater Grahamstown, have with water. There are two taps in the whole of Papamani which serve close on 30 homes. Each home houses some five or six people. Do the maths, and that’s over 150 people who get water from two taps. That’s to drink, make food with, to wash with and to do anything else that requires water.
03 December 2013
Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement
Mokoape, Vavi, Naidoo & Kasrils to Speak at the Assembly of the Unemployed
From the 7th to the 9th of December our movement, other organisations of the unemployed and the poor, and our allies in unions, civil society and other progressive formations will converge on Grahamstown for the first Assembly of the Unemployed.
South Africa's economic crisis, intensified by Zuma’s toxic mixture of neoliberalism, corruption and repression and the global crisis since 2008, has rendered millions of our people as surplus to the needs to the economy, in a manner which traps us in poverty and hopelessness. While the public purse is plundered to build Zuma a palace millions are without work, without houses, without access to decent education and without hope.