Category Archives: Op-Ed

The Times: ‘Tide of change’ merely a dull merger

Leave a reply

http://www.thetimes.co.za/PrintEdition/Insight/Article.aspx?id=953875

‘Tide of change’ merely a dull merger,

Published:Mar 08, 2009

In Njabulo Ndebele’s imaginary interview, “A new breed of voters wants imaginative politics” (March 1), he manipulatively electioneers for the Congress of the People, depicting it as a “tide of change” for “real political choices”.

Ndebele should know that multiparty democracy is not, in itself, “imaginative politics”, and that COPE’s policies are a dull merging of the worst of the ANC and the Democratic Alliance.

Of what use is it to “let a thousand parties bloom and give renewed life to our constitution” when it protects illegitimate white wealth and fails to protect people’s rights against poverty, social misery, unemployment and landlessness?

Ndebele’s suggestion that an electoral system in which “local communities elect their representatives and president directly” will improve transparency and political accountability and empower the electorate, is unfounded.

The electoral system is neither the cause nor the solution to people’s problems.

That lies in the socioeconomic system, in which gender, race and class inequality are permitted by all political parties.

If the electoral system was magical, the US would not have ghettoes, brutal police, racial profiling and a perpetual underclass.

Even if inadvertent, Ndebele was condescending in his eulogy for places such as Soweto as well as in his directive that people must demystify parties and trade unions.

To Ndebele’s feigned elitist ignorance, communities have demystified politics and trade unionism for initiatives such as the Landless People’s Movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo (shack dwellers’ movement), the Anti-Privatisation Forum and the Anti-Eviction Campaign.

He groundlessly claimed the debutant youth vote has “open-mindedness, new ideas and fresh perspectives” and loathes the simplistic discourse of exploitation and confrontations decreed by the “laws of history”.

The Skierlik shooting, the Waterkloof Four, the University of the Free State video and the incarceration of black youths is sufficient proof that our youth is not born free from the “laws of history”.

Where is the open-mindedness in Jika maJika and fresh perspectives in iPodism?

What is a “sense of social purpose” when thousands of youths are unemployed and dying of HIV/Aids?

Ndebele also bizarrely stated that ending the unfinished work of apartheid required that South Africans honestly confront themselves about how they are socialised.

What socialisation?

Apartheid was systemic, and systematic structures of anti-black oppression and socialisation followed.

Politics dealing with socialisation is unimaginative.

The imaginative politics, urgently needed in South Africa, is the politics of socioracial justice. Sadly, just like Ndebele, no political party provides imaginative politics. — Nkosinathi Mzelemu, Bhobhoyi, KwaZulu-Natal

Mercury: Meeting people’s housing rights

Leave a reply

As usual a politician confronted in the media with specific and concrete details of state behaviour replies with general statements about laws and policies as if the latter are somehow more real than the former…But, of course, a key part of what is wrong is that laws and policies are routinely ignored by the state when it comes to the poor….

http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4833009
Opinion
Meeting people’s housing rights

February 09, 2009 Edition 1

Mike Mabuyakhulu

AS A person who respects our country’s judicial system, I was initially reluctant to respond to the article titled “Forced removals” by Kerry Chance, Marie Huchzermeyer and Mark Hunter in The Mercury on January 29. However, because inaccuracies tend to gain the status of conventional wisdom if left unchecked, I am forced to set the record straight.

The authors protest about the “worrying new trend of forcing shack dwellers into transit camps – with no clear indication of when or to where they will be moved”.

This, allegedly, is the government’s approach to dealing with slums and slum settlements in pursuing its “technocratic ‘formal at all cost’ approach to housing”. The writers use the case of the shack dwellers of Siyanda informal settlement, near KwaMashu, to highlight this “technocratic” approach to informal settlements.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Essentially, the article makes very broad general assumptions without any factual basis.

The department of housing, which has the stewardship over all housing matters, functions in line with our country’s constitution, which contains the Bill of Rights. The Bill guarantees certain and specific rights and freedoms for all of our people, be they informal settlement dwellers or well-off residents.

One of the guiding principles that the department adheres to is that, in line with the Prevention of Illegal Eviction Act, we cannot remove people from informal settlements and not provide them with alternative accommodation, even if we are building them better and adequate housing.

The temporary shelter – or transit camps, as the three writers refer to this arrangement – is precisely that, a time-bound accommodation arrangement for those people who, for one reason or another, must be moved from where they reside for development to take place.

The very reason that people have to move to alternative accommodation testifies to the government’s commitment to improving our people’s lives for the better.

The harsh reality is that, because informal settlements are by their very nature unplanned, it is very difficult, if not in some cases impossible, to develop an informal settlement while there are people still residing there.

If, for example, we were to build our people houses while they resided in their shacks, we would be accused of being a government that does not care for its people.

A construction environment is a hazardous one and we cannot open our people to that danger.

Indeed, chapter 13 of the national housing code provides for the relocation of people where de-densification is needed and where communities are living in hazardous circumstances.

This is in accordance with sections 26 and 26 (2) of the constitution, which provides that the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures to achieve the progressive realisation of this right, the access to housing.

The authors, unfortunately, miss this point. The government states categorically that it does not house people in temporary shelter indefinitely.

When we house people in temporary shelter, as we have done in Lamontville, Cato Manor and other areas, we convene meetings where we inform people exactly how long their stay will be in the temporary shelter.

It would seem, unfortunately, that the writers are not well-versed with the interactions that take place between the people and the government.

The writers also accuse us of fantasising about ridding our province of slums. They go further and suggest that it is the advent of the 2010 soccer World Cup that forces us to chase this objective.

Again, we educate them that it was in 2000 that we formalised our slums clearance programme in the province, a programme that was later adopted by the national government.

At the time we did not know that in 2010 we would be hosting the soccer World Cup.

As for the allegation that the apartheid four-roomed houses were bigger and better than the houses being built by the democratic state since 1996, the authors have only managed to expose their own ignorance about the history of our housing development and the present context of the democratic state’s housing programme.

Whereas the four-roomed houses were meant as temporary housing for migrant workers who did not have rights to own them, the houses being built by the democratic state for the majority of our people are meant to accord our people rights to housing that they never enjoyed before democracy.

The more than half a million people in our province who have accessed these houses agree with us that, indeed, this government intervention has changed their lives.

As we speak, the emphasis of our housing programme is on creating sustainable human settlements.

Recently we signed a multibillion-rand agreement with First National Bank, the major focal point of which is building inclusionary housing.

All this is evidence that ours is not about chasing numbers but about using housing as a leverage for social transformation.

Unfortunately the writers have chosen to ignore all this public information about housing and have decided to spread inaccuracies about our efforts.

We hope that in future they will take a little bit of time to research their subject before they put pen to paper.

Mike Mabuyakhulu is KwaZulu-Natal MEC for local government, housing and traditional affairs.

Daily News: Careless council moves have led to shack fires

Leave a reply

http://www.dailynews.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4627067

Opinion
Careless council moves have led to shack fires
The adoption of the Slums Clearance Programme in 2001 has denied provision of basic services to our shackland dwellers

September 24, 2008 Edition 1

Imraan Buccus

Little more than a week ago, almost the entire Foreman Road shack settlement in Clare Estate burnt down, leaving thousands destitute. The next morning residents found a body in the ashes. There had also been a devastating fire in the same settlement last year. The photographs of the morning after are apocalyptic.

The nearby Kennedy Road settlement has had seven major fires this year. Just a few weeks ago eight people, including five children, were burnt to death in a shack fire in Cato Crest. My family, as well as most Daily News readers, I am sure, were deeply shocked to read about these fires from the comfort of our sturdy homes.

A recent Abahlali baseMjondolo report written by Robert Neuwirth, an American journalist who lived in shack settlements in Rio, Bombay, Nairobi and Istanbul while researching his celebrated book Shadow Cities, shows that on an average day there are 10 shacks fires in South Africa. In Durban there is an average of one shack fire a day.

Shack fires put young children and old and disabled people at particular risk, results in the loss of ID books and school uniforms, and render the already poor destitute. They create acute stress for children, many of whom are tortured by recurring nightmares about the fires. Some lose their HIV medication and getting more can be almost impossible.

Here in Durban from 1990 until the city adopted its controversial Slums Clearance programme in 2001, serious attempts were made to provide life saving basic services to shack settlements. But after the adoption of the Slums Clearance programme all shack settlements were instantly deemed “temporary” and the provision of basic services was largely stopped.

But a bureaucratic decision to declare shacks temporary does not make them go away. People now just have to live in them without enough toilets, taps, paths, drains and so on. The decision to stop the provision of basic services is a key cause of the fires and a key cause of the difficulty that residents have in fighting the fires.

One of the services that was withdrawn for shack settlements after 2001 was electricity, and there is a direct link between the fires and the city’s decision in 2001 to cease the provision of electricity to shack dwellers.

Cramped

When people are cramped into one-roomed shacks with walls of plastic and cardboard, the smallest accident with a candle or paraffin stove can result in thousands losing everything in a matter of minutes. Everyone seems to agree that the fire brigade does a good job once the firefighters reach the scene.

But shack fires spread quickly and it is impossible for people to fight a fire effectively if, as in Foreman Road, there is only one tap in the whole settlement. Despite the very high risk of fire in shack settlements, the city does not provide residents with fire extinguishers. This is unacceptable.

There is a direct connection between the failure to provide basic services to shack settlements and the regular and often catastrophic fires.

If we are to have any claim to be a caring city the decision to cease the provision of life-saving basic services to shack settlements must be reconsidered with maximum urgency. In fact, given the stress that the constitution puts on the right to life and the rights of the child, it is probably unlawful.

The whole policy of slum clearance is fundamentally misguided. This was the policy of apartheid and of other authoritarian regimes like the dictatorship that ran Brazil in the 1970s. These policies have never worked and are now entirely discredited internationally. The reason why they fail is that they see shacks, rather than the housing crisis, as the problem. They fail to understand that shacks are poor people’s solution to the housing crisis. Neither knocking down shacks nor forcibly removing people to out-of-town housing developments is a viable solution to the housing crisis. In fact, both approaches just make the housing crisis worse.

These days the progressive policies that have been developed in countries like Brazil and the Philippines are not about eradicating or clearing slums but instead seek to support shack settlements so that they can develop into viable communities with decent conditions. The first step is to secure tenure for residents so that there is no threat of eviction, the next is to provide basic services and the third is to formalise the housing.

But in South Africa we are making two fundamental mistakes. The first is that our only focus is on building houses and this means that we leave people in the most appalling and insecure conditions while they wait for housing. The second is that much of the housing being provided is, as under apartheid, being built on the periphery of the cities where people simply cannot survive.

We have failed to understand that where people live is sometimes more important to them than the structure in which they live. We have also failed to understand that housing rights are not just about access to a physical structure – they are about things like tenure security and access to basic services.

We cannot continue with a situation where to be poor in Durban means that your home will be burnt down again and again and again. We need decisive action to stop the relentless fires devastating the poorest communities in our city.

# Imraan Buccus is a university-based researcher and contributing author to African Politics – Beyond the Third Wave of Democratisation – Juta Press (2008)

Mercury: Human rights are just words to poor people

Leave a reply

http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4532321

Opinion
Human rights are just words to poor people

July 30, 2008 Edition 1

Imraan Buccus

The new South Africa was founded on a commitment to human rights.

Neither of the contesting nationalisms of the National Party and the African National Congress had built their politics around human rights before 1994, but a human rights centred deal was one that everyone could live with.

In a human rights culture and in a human rights legal system everyone matters. Children, prisoners, foreigners, the poor, sex workers – everyone.

Capitalism, authoritarian versions of socialism and most forms of nationalism all take the view that some people are expendable. Some can be sacrificed for the greater good.

The one great benefit of a human rights-based system is that, at least in principle, everyone has certain basic rights that cannot be expendable. No one is either above or below the law.

Our constitution is justly recognised as one of the most progressive in the world.

However, this fact sometimes leads to a certain focus on the law at the expense of the realities of social life.

And one reality of social life in South Africa is that because people have to approach the courts to secure their rights, the well off are well able to secure those rights while the poor, who cannot afford to access the courts, are simply not able to defend their rights. This is why Durban is able to engage in systematically unlawful acts towards marginal groups such as street traders, shack dwellers and foreigners.

There are two solutions to this problem.

One is for the legal aid system to be sorted out so that everyone can access competent and committed legal support. We simply cannot allow the current system, whereby access to the law is commodified, to continue. The second solution is for marginal groups to, as some groups have done so successfully, organise themselves so that they can build their strength through their numbers.

These days it is clear that what divided progressive from regressive states is not so much the language that they speak but the degree to which they accept autonomous mobilisation from below.

In Kerala in India, Port Allegro in Brazil and now also in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and perhaps most of all in Bolivia under Evo Morales, ordinary people are actively encouraged in organising independently of the state. The same was true in Haiti during Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s period.

Mass-based public participation in the life of societies is the most effective route out of systemic marginalisation.

Because the law is commodified and autonomous grassroots organisations are often treated as more or less criminal in South Africa, vulnerable groups are not benefiting from our human rights culture. Now that that culture is under threat from people that wish to be above the law we may well find that the poor do not rally in support of it for the simple reason that they have never benefited from it. These are dangerous times.

The sight of Congolese refugees being beaten on the steps of the city hall has taken Durban to a new low.

We should recall that these are people who have fled a war in their country that has claimed more than four million lives, a war that the South African government is indirectly complicit in via its tacit support for Robert Mugabe.

We should recall also that they were made homeless in Durban by xenophobic attacks against which they received very poor protection from the authorities.

When they appealed to the city for mercy they were assaulted and then dumped in Albert Park. If a group of residents from middle-class suburbia were treated in this fashion they would have had the city authorities in court within minutes.

And they would have won the protection of the court. Our human rights system would have worked for them.

But for the marginal in our city, this was just not an option. For them human rights are mere words.

However, it is encouraging that, with the support of religious groups, refugees have recently met with street traders and shack dwellers to make common cause.

Perhaps some good may come out of this latest shock to the international image of Durban. If all the people who are not considered fully human in this city can link up their struggles there may be some hope for a future where basic human decency is at the centre of our public life. A city where it would be utterly unthinkable for the most marginal residents to be assaulted on the steps of the city hall while pleading for mercy.