Category Archives: Max du Preez

Cape Argus: ANC plays the fiddle as our country burns

Leave a reply

http://www.capeargus.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5095779

ANC plays the fiddle as our country burns

July 23, 2009 Edition 1

Max Du Preez

Remember the grainy television images of the 1980s of rocks and burning tyres in the streets, angry people throwing stones and petrol bombs and policemen firing into crowds?

Those scenes depicted United Democratic Front structures making the country ungovernable.

But we saw those same scenes again this past week.

In a dozen or so South African townships and squatter camps in several provinces, people took to the streets to protest, so we’re told, “against slow service delivery”.

“Service delivery” is becoming one of those meaningless euphemisms like “unrest” was two decades ago.

The Minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Sicelo Shiceka, blamed the SA National Civic Organisation for stoking the fires of protest.

Watch out, soon one of the government spokesmen is going to blame “agitators”, like the apartheid governments did from 1976 onwards.

We have to conclude that the overwhelming majority of those angry people we see on television stoning cars and damaging property are supporters of the ruling party.

Many of them are probably card-carrying members of the local ANC branch; almost all of them voted for the ANC in April.

How do we know that? Well, look at the protest areas one by one: Orange Farm, Du Noon, Khayelitsha, Zeerust, Diepkloof, Thokoza, Piet Retief and others and check the voting patterns of these areas in April.

It would be safe to say that in most of these areas most black people voted ANC just three months ago. If they felt uncomfortable voting for the DA, they could have voted for the black-led Cope or even the UDM. They didn’t. They voted for Jacob Zuma, for the post-Polokwane ANC that was going to be the friend of the people, the champion of the poor.

The elitist Thabo Mbeki faction had been defeated, now it was the time for the masses.

Ja, right. It now appears that the new regime is no closer to the people than the Mbeki lot. The gulf between ruling elite and ordinary township dweller is as great as ever – another feature of the protest that can compare with the township revolt of the 1980s, even though we have a democracy now.

During the weeks that the township protests were raging, it became known that former Umkhonto we Sizwe top brass and now Minister of Communications, Siphiwe Nyanda, had spent R2 million of taxpayers’ money on two cars for himself – not just reliable, safe cars, which he really should have at his disposal, but ultra luxurious rides with added bling that would make any multimillionaire proud.

During the same time we hear that senior ANC figures refuse to stay in the housing provided for them, and instead rent homes worth more than R30 000 a month – again, using taxpayers’ money. Sensitive, né?

And there are many other current examples of the post-Polokwane ANC’s new culture of crass materialism and entitlement.

A senior member of the Mbeki administration, now retired, remarked to me the other day that the only real differences between the Mbeki-ANC and the Zuma-ANC was that the level of debate was much lower now and the centre of power had moved from the presidency to Luthuli House.

The old apartheid government always appointed a commission of inquiry or a committee to investigate when something big went wrong.

Luthuli House’s reaction (nobody is even bothering any more to find out what the president is thinking about it) was to order an audit of the record of service delivery in the country’s municipalities.

Do the widespread and violent protests represent a major crisis? Yes, they do. Then one really would expect more than the appointment of a committee that will do an audit over the next few months.

How about sending senior ministers and directors-general and top ANC officials out to the troubled areas today?

The old cliche of playing the fiddle while Rome burns inevitably comes to mind.

The ANC’s mental energies are right now concentrated on a debate whether all South Africa’s mines should be nationalised and on how the judiciary could be manipulated so that they will end up with a Constitutional Court that would be friendly to the ruling party.

I don’t think the ANC has the political will to really solve the problem of service delivery on a local level, because the problem lies with the mayors, town managers and other municipal officials – and most of them are prominent ANC functionaries.

Political patronage is still more important than the plight of the citizens.

Shacks of Fear

Leave a reply

http://www.dailynews.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=502&fArticleId=2998655

Shacks of fear
November 17, 2005

By Max du Preez

The poor have been abandoned and ignored, writes Max du Preez

‘We are on our own. We are completely on our own.” I have read a lot of political documents, credos and statements in my life as a journalist.

I have never read anything as compelling, real and disturbing as the piece written in The Star last week by S’bu Zikode, chairman of the Abahlali base mjondolo (shack dwellers) movement.

He was speaking on behalf of the Durban settlements that elected him, but I am quite sure all people living in squalor in squatter camps in South Africa would say he formulated their anger and desperation accurately.

I wonder if those finely attired “champions of the poor” from the ruling alliance who gathered at a top Durban hotel last Friday to drink expensive whiskey and eat imported prawns and matured rare steaks in solidarity with their hero, Jacob Zuma, bothered to read Zikode’s statement.

Or if they realised that each one of their many fancy cars parked outside is worth a dozen or so houses that could be built for those who live in shacks.

Zikode paints a nightmarish picture of life in the squatter camps, of filth, disease and fear, of places where the hardest thing to do is to maintain some form of dignity.

“The night is supposed to be for relaxing and getting rest,” Zikode writes. “But not in the jondolos. People stay awake worrying about their lives. You must see how big the rats are that run over small babies.”

Zikode overturns President Thabo Mbeki’s often-repeated statement that we have two nations, one black and poor, one white and rich. There are three groups now, Zikode says: the poor, the middle class and the rich. “The poor have been isolated from the middle class.

We are becoming more poor and the rest are becoming more rich.”
He is quite desperate when he describes how they’re ignored: “Those in power are blind to our suffering, because they have not seen what we see, they have not felt what we feel every second, every day … President Thabo Mbeki speaks politics.

Our premiers and mayors speak politics. But who will speak about the issues that affect the people every day – water, electricity, education, land, housing?”

There is only one way the poor can speak and be heard, says Zikode. “When you want to achieve what is legitimate through peaceful negotiations, through humility, by respecting those in authority, your plea becomes criminal.

You will be deceived, you will be fooled and undermined. This is why we have resorted to the streets. When we stand there in our thousands, we are taken seriously.”

And his message to the politicians is clear: “The community has realised that voting for parties has not brought any change for us – especially at the level of local government.”

There is no ideology or rhetoric in Zikode’s message. It is a simple, desperate scream for the government, the business sector and the rest of us to wake up and stop this violation of human rights in our midst.

If we can’t get off our butts and do anything for moral or humanitarian reasons, then at least we should do it for the sake of stability in our society.

The poor are going to make sure that the middle classes and the rich sleep very uncomfortably if this state of affairs is to drag on.

Sociologists, psychologists and political scientists will one day write learned theses about how it happened that a movement that grew out of the oppressed masses became an uncaring, elitist and classist party in just a few years.

They seem to spend far more energy on black economic empowerment, which only benefits the top 1% of the formerly oppressed, than on looking after the bottom 50%.

They condone the payment of vulgar amounts of money to city managers and mayors who live extravagant lifestyles but are unavailable when approached by people pleading for just the basics to keep body and soul together.

They spend hundreds of millions on diplomacy and peacemaking all over the continent, but the plight of the poor leaves them cold.

They spend billions on building a new defence force (while we have no enemies), but cannot spend a quarter of that to eradicate squatter camps.

What will it take for South Africans and the government to wake up and actually do something drastic? We have had rioting and uprisings in dozens of townships over the last three years, some very violent.

It seems to have had no impact on the Union Buildings or on parliament.

What do these unfortunate people have to do to get heard? Burn thousands of cars in the suburbs like the rioters did in France? Start planting bombs?

The Communist Party and Cosatu can do a lot better with their energy than spending it on supporting Jacob Zuma.

He has been in provincial and national government – deputy-president for the last few years – and was as guilty of neglecting the poor as the rest. When did he suddenly become a champion for the poor? The day he got fired?