Category Archives: Khadija Patel

Daily Maverick: In Durban’s Cato Manor: Death by protest, death by dissent

http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2013-10-01-in-durbans-cato-manor-death-by-protest-death-by-dissent/

A 17-year-old girl was shot and killed during a protest in the Cato Manor informal settlement on Monday morning. Police insist they acted in self-defence, but protesters believe the shooting was politically motivated, designed to stifle dissent. Whoever's right or wrong, Nqobile Nzuza has died. By KHADIJA PATEL.

Once more the South African Police Services's incapacity to effectively facilitate the right of South Africans to protest has come into sharp focus. In the early hours of Monday morning a 17-year-old girl, Nqobile Nzuza, from the Cato Manor informal settlement in Durban was gunned down during a protest. Activists from the shack dweller’s movement, Abahlali Base Majondolo, lay Nqobile's death squarely at the feet of the police.

Mnikelo Ndabankulu, a spokesperson for Abahlali, says the movement had decided to barricade roads in protest against government’s failure to heed to its core demand: to provide housing to the homeless.

“If you can remember very well, we had a march protest on 16 September and then we gave the municipality and other stakeholders seven days to respond to our grievances failing, which we [would] show our political power, and that is what happened in our branches – blocking roads and burning tyres,” Ndabankulu says.

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Daily Maverick: A Durban shack dweller’s movement tells of ANC’s woes

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http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-10-04-a-durban-shack-dwellers-movement-tells-of-ancs-woes

A Durban shack dweller’s movement tells of ANC’s woes

The Durban High Court ruled the municipality was responsible for finding permanent accommodation for shack dwellers after transferring them to a transit camp in 2009. But even as the court ruling was welcomed, activists and residents now fear the ANC or sympathisers of local government will avenge the ruling with violence. It’s happened before. By KHADIJA PATEL.

Up, down and around the darkened hills of Clare Estate in Durban we drove. We weren’t exactly sure where we were, but with our trust fully invested into a loaned GPS navigator, we were confident that we were travelling from the University of KwaZulu-Natal Westville Campus back to the city centre. But even as we drove for 10 minutes, navigating hill after hill, the roads growing narrower and shack settlements spilling out in front of us, we trusted in GPS. My friend Ayesha was certainly not new to physical reminders of South African inequality. After all, she’d worked as a doctor at Chris Hani Baragwanath in Soweto and the Tygerberg Hospital in Mitchells Plain, commuting daily between privilege and struggle.

But as she steered the car gingerly, she remarked at how much more “in your face” the shack settlements in Durban seemed to be. It was a few minutes more, with no main roads or highways in sight, that we realised that we were not in fact headed into Durban but were instead being directed to the home of the owner of the GPS system in Clare Estate.

But even as we chuckled at our own blind dependency on technology and braced ourselves for more winding roads and missed turns that sternly tested my friend’s clutch control, we looked with a tourist’s fascination at this side of Durban, so vastly different to the sandy beaches and luxury hotels we grew up knowing the city for.

It’s not as though the juxtaposition of elites and indigent was new to us. We knew too well that 10% of the South African population live in informal settlements, shanty towns, squatter camps. They are communities forced into the margins of formal society, whatever you prefer to call them.

To Durbanites there is something special about this area of the city, where you can look down from the hilltops. It was too dark for us to judge for ourselves, but views of the city aside, it was also here in one of the eight shack settlements in Clare Estate that Abahlali baseMjondolo (isiZulu for “people of the shacks”), the shack dwellers’ movement, was established in 2005.

In the Kennedy Road settlement, between Africa’s biggest garbage dump and Clare Estate, a fiercely democratic movement took root to contest the evictions of shack dwellers to make way for property developers.

And just days ahead of our excursion to the lush green hills teeming with people and shacks, Abahlali had won an important battle against the local government. The Durban High Court ordered the eThekwini Municipality to provide houses to 37 families of Richmond Farm Transit Camp in KwaMashu. The families had been evicted from the Siyanda informal settlement in March 2009 to make way for the construction of a road, and one of the conditions of the eviction order was that eThekwini Municipality would provide the families with permanent housing within a year. These 37 families were left out.

The court slapped a three-month deadline to the judgment, warning that municipal office-bearers must ensure that the municipality provides the housing due the families for the last two-and-a-half-years or be held in contempt of court. The threat of a fine or jail time now looms for eThekwini mayor and his aides.

But even as Abahlali joined the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI), which represented the shack dwellers in court, in celebrating the judgment, Abahlali was immediately wary. It fears the court victory may come at the cost of further antagonising the local government and branches of the ANC.

In a statement Bandile Mdlalose, general secretary of Abahlali said, ”While we celebrate this victory, Abahlali are worried that we may be attacked and receive death threats, as happened after the Constitutional Court victory against the KZN Slums Act when Kennedy Road was attacked leaving two people dead in September 2009.”

In September 2009, residents of the Kennedy Road settlement and their families were attacked by an armed gang. They believe were targeted because of their association with Abahlali and with the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC), a local community-based organisation. Over a period of several hours on two nights, they were sought out and intimidated into leaving the informal settlement. Their homes were destroyed and their possessions were stolen. They were rendered homeless and destitute. Abahlali is confident it was the ANC who was behind these attacks.

Abahlali was proving to be too much trouble, its opposition to government too strong and its court victory a potential subversion of the thrust of power in the country. Or so it believed.

Three years on, the memory of those attacks continues to haunt the organisation.

Last Friday, members of Abahlali picketed outside a local police station, wary of having their request for a “public gathering” denied. They negated the need for formal permission for a protest, by assembling just 15 people to picket and then deliver a memorandum to the Sydenham police.

In the meantime, SERI has launched legal action against the police, alleging they refused to come to the aid of shack dwellers in 2009 and when they did arrive, failed to protect them.

In Durban’s shack settlements residents embraced the new dispensation with an understanding that the rate of change would be slow. But in 2012, when instead of housing, water, electricity, refuse removal or sanitation, people are left to the mercy of the city’s bulldozers, we understand then that Marikana did not happen in a vacuum. Marikana, the anger of the miners, the role of the state and the police have a historical context in Kennedy Road. It’s all happened there: the feeling of being undermined by official representatives, an erosion of trust in the police and the long arm of ANC politics.

Nigel Gibson, in his book Fanonian Practices in South Africa, points out that when the Kennedy Road shack dwellers first barricaded roads in Durban with burning tyres and mattresses to protest evictions, “their demands were far from revolutionary”. He says, “They were the demands of loyal citizens making reasonable requests, borne of their citizenship, for inclusion in the ‘new South Africa’: for housing, safety, health care and political representation.”

Gibson notes as well that the success of Abahlali’s establishment from its beginnings in Kennedy Road to settlements across Durban, and then across the country, proves that their experience and frustrations are not unique. “It was the universality of the Kennedy Road shack dwellers’ experience and demands that was immediately understood and taken up by neighbouring settlements,” he says.

People, whether in Marikana, Clare Estate or the KwaMashu transit camp feel like their interests are not being considered. It was the gripe of striking miners against the National Union of Mineworkers in Marikana, it was also the gripe of striking miners against the National Union of Mineworkers at Goldfields’ KDC East mine, it is also the gripe of shack dwellers in Durban who have lost faith in the instruments of local government to adequately represent their interests. The service delivery protests that see roads barricaded and angry people braying for houses, water and electricity, often come because the relationship between residents and their local government officials has broken down.

Abahlali have been called “neurotically democratic” – leaving even decisions on whether to allow filmmakers into settlements up to the collective. But much of their success is credited to giving voice to views on the ground, making people feel like they too matter.

Back at the hotel on the Golden Mile, the road gyrated to a concert on the beach celebrating South African heritage, or something appropriately nationalistic for a Heritage Day weekend. Inside the hotel, the foyer teemed with members of the South African Democratic Teachers Union. They seemed to be dressed for a party, a very noisy one and a world apart from the darkened roads that split shack settlement from the other settlements, better endowed with bricks, mortar and running water. DM

“Landmark evictions ruling poses a threat to municipal officials,” on Mail & Guardian
“South Africa’s shack-dwellers fight back,” on The Guardian
“The Psychological Cost of Living in an Informal Settlement: ‘Like a Mountain Fell on Me’,” on SACSIS

Daily Maverick: In embracing Marikana, the SACC revitalises itself

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http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-09-17-in-embracing-marikana-the-sacc-revitalises-itself

In embracing Marikana, the SACC revitalises itself

Khadija Patel

SA’s beleaguered government continues its security crackdown in Marikana, with the South African National Defence Force announcing that it deployed 1,000 soldiers to the restive mining town in the North West. But even as President Zuma attempted – not very successfully – to allay fears about government’s respect for civil liberties, it was the South African Council of Churches on the ground at Marikana, helping workers apply for permission to march. By KHADIJA PATEL.

“It seems as if both government and Lonmin misread the situation on the platinum belt, and now what seemed resolvable might become an untenable situation,” Bishop Jo Seoka, president of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) said in a statement released by the Bench Marks Foundation on Saturday. Against the backdrop of teargas, rubber bullets and a noxious cocktail of fear and hatred among striking workers and residents in Marikana, Sekoa’s warning of an “untenable situation” was further strengthened by confirmation from the South African National Defence Force that troops had indeed been deployed to Marikana.

“The soldiers were deployed at the request of the police to support them in their operation,” SANDF spokesman Brigadier General Xolani Mabanga is reported by Sapa to have said. According to Mabanga, the soldiers in Marikana hail from the air force, the army and the military health services. And as South Africans react with alarm to the scale of the security presence in Marikana, Sekoa believes the government’s most recent attempts to assert control over the striking workers threatens the gains made in negotiations.

“I am concerned that all the hard work around the peace accord, the negotiations with Lonmin and the rock drillers, where we were making a lot of progress, might now come to an abrupt end,” he said. According to him, the reaction of both government and Lonmin has been hampered by a lack of understanding of the underlying problem.

“Workers, whether in Lonmin or Amplats, have legitimate grievances – grievances that go back years – that have now come to the surface. I know that it is not instigators that are driving the work stoppages, but genuine issues of absolute poverty, lack of respect for workers in the economy and how they contribute to the overall development of the country,” Sekoa said.

Sekoa is also chairperson of the Bench Marks Foundation, but it is in his role as president of the SACC that he has come to the fore in Marikana. And yet just a few months ago, detractors from within the SACC had predicted the untimely demise of the organisation. It is exactly this sort of critical take on Marikana, which the SACC has taken in recent weeks through Sekoa, that many predicted the organisation was no longer capable of. In March this year, dissidents within the organisation told the Mail & Guardian that the organisation’s “strategic capability to be critical has been depleted”. According to these disgruntled insiders, the SACC no longer enjoyed political leverage and had little influence over the president.

And as calls for urgent funding fell on deaf ears and the organisation’s financial woes continued to worsen, provincial and national staff members of the SACC rejected a mass retrenchment proposal by its national executive committee. Speaking to Daily Maverick on Sunday evening, Rev. Mautji Pataki, General Secretary of the SACC, refused to comment on the health of the organisation’s finances or the current standing of the impasse between SACC staff and the organisation’s leadership over the retrenchment packages. Indeed, complaints regarding the SACC leadership raised by its staff are remarkably similar to grievances of striking miners in Marikana against the National Union of Mineworkers.

In a statement released by SACC staff in July, it is claimed the “failure of the [SACC’s national executive committee] to consult the staff of the SACC [about retrenchment packages] is a symptom of individual interests, agendas and power struggles which contradicts the ethos of the SACC operating in a post-Apartheid, constitutionally democratic South Africa.”

Even though such criticism of the organisation is pervasive, the SACC is an organisation with a proud history. When it was formed in 1968, the organisation was meant to foster black leadership in Christian churches to promote the liberation struggle on religious and moral grounds. As the SACC grew, it was key to the revival of mass action against Apartheid in the 1980s. And from 1985, it was a vocal proponent of the campaign for sanctions against South Africa. Previous leaders of the SACC include luminaries like Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, Rev. Frank Chikane and the late Beyers Naude. The organisation is still housed in Khotso House, which of course also housed Cosatu, among others.

Despite its links to the ANC, the organisation has however not been a praise singer for the ruling party. At various times the SACC has taken opposing stances to government. Notably, earlier this year the organisation met with Deputy President Kgalema Mothlanthe to voice their reservations on the controversial e-tolling proposal. “While the SACC accepted the rationale of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project as part of the strategy to decongest the roads, they expressed concerns at the state of public transport and urged government to take urgent steps to provide a reliable, efficient and quality public transport system,” the organisation said in a statement following the meeting.

But it is perhaps in Durban, in the aftermath of the Kennedy Road violence in 2009, that the SACC’s stance was most similar to the one they have adopted on the Marikana crisis of today. In September 2009, a group of 40 people is reported to have attacked a youth meeting of the shack dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. The attackers allegedly demolished residents’ homes and two people were killed in the ensuing violence. Suspicion was rife that the tragedy was perpetrated by ANC members and local police. And the SACC was scathing in its criticism.

“The Sydenham Police failed to provide the security that the people of Kennedy Road deserve,” Eddie Makue, former General Secretary of the SACC, said in a statement.

Fast-forward to Marikana, then, and an organisation under great strain from within has been resurgent, earning the trust of workers and mine management alike. It was the SACC who succeeded in brokering talks between Lonmin management and striking workers. The church organisation said its president, Bishop Jo Seoka, had persuaded Lonmin executives to finally meet striking miners in Marikana. “We received a mandate from workers that they were eager to meet management and we were able to speak to both management and workers,” Pataki explained.
“We started on the same day of the shootings,” Pataki said, denying strongly that it was the shootings that had taken the SACC to Marikana. He insisted it was co-incidental that the shootings occurred on the same day the SACC began working there. Pataki, however, rejects assertions that it is the SACC now representing workers’ demands in Marikana better than the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). “They have just asked us to open the road for them,” he said.

Yet it is telling that mineworkers in Marikana have shown more trust in religious leaders in the guise of the SACC than they have in NUM. Pataki nonetheless believes it is the authority of the church that strengthens the legitimacy of SACC in Marikana. “We represent the church. We simply walked into Marikana, knowing nobody there, and people welcomed us,” Pataki said.

“Anybody who does not trust people of the church, well, I don’t know what you can say about them.”