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Pambazuka: Police brutality and service delivery protests

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http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/72780

Police brutality and service delivery protests
Mphutlane wa Bofelo
2011-04-21, Issue 526

The six policemen arrested for the murder of protestor, Andries Tatane in Meqheleng Township in Ficksburg in South Africa’s Free State are ‘political scapegoats’. To put it bluntly, the six are ‘sacrificial goats’ on the altar of populist, grandstanding and electioneering politics. Their arrest is a quick ploy to take attention away from the systemic factors that inform police brutality. It is aimed at absolving the collective responsibility of South African Police Services (SAPS) and its political principal, the ANC-led government. It is the timing of the incident rather than government’s intolerance to police brutality that informs the arrest of the six cops. The number of incidents of intimidation, harassment, torture, arrest and shooting of protestors by police during peaceful protest action in the post 1994, neo-apartheid dispensation is alarming. Families, individuals and organisations that lay complaints to the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) and various state institutions about incidents of illegal arrests and illegal shootings, harassment and torture and ‘disappeared dockets’ often wait forever for any kind of response.

Usually there is hardly a public announcement, let alone a report of investigation of incidents of police brutality. Instead, incidents of harsh repression of protests by the police are often followed by stern pronouncements by the state and government officials amounting to criminalisation of protest action and radical acts of civil disobedience. These statements are often accompanied by warnings to the public that the police will deal harshly with those involved in these acts. As a matter of fact, statements labelling civil disobedience as criminal acts and amounting to threats of harsh police action have featured in the state of the nation addresses of both former president, Thabo Mbeki and the current state president, Jacob Zuma. When you add ‘the shoot-to-kill’ injunction of the police chief Bheki Cele to state indifference to public complaints and public pronouncements that criminalise protest action and justify repressive measures to suppress it, you have a policy and systematic framework that sanctions and fuels police brutality.

As for the protests against lack of service delivery, one does not need to be a rocket scientist to know that public discontent is mainly the result of failure of government policies and programmes to provide sustainable and quality jobs, free and quality public education, health and transport, decent and habitable housing and free water and electricity to all citizens. There is also common agreement that the protests are fuelled by an absence of genuine and direct participation of communities in the design, implementation and evaluation of planning, governance and development; the complete disregard of public opinion; and the capture of ward committees and other public platforms and state institutions and resources by narrow and selfish party and elite interests. This is exacerbated by the allocation of state tenders, jobs and promotions in public administration only to comrades, friends and family members and various forms of cronyism and nepotism, maladministration and corruption including jobs for sex.

There is no doubt that unequal social and power relations and inequitable allocation of resources as well as unequal access to amenities and services has an impact on public participation and on the organisational capacity of communities to engage in effective lobbying and advocacy. This also affects the extent to which different communities and sectors of society can effectively make use of tools and platforms such as research, print and electronic media, public hearings, petitions and submissions on policies. The reality is that success of various forms of lobbying, advocacy and influencing public policy still rely heavily on the quality and quantity of financial, technological, material and human recourses and social capital at the disposal of communities.

A critical factor to also consider is that citizen action and public participation is either aided or disenabled and sabotaged by state agency and state capacity. The receptivity or non-receptivity of government institutions to the voice of communities largely determines the form that public discontent will take. In South Africa the incapacity or reluctance of state and public institutions to respond proactively to public concerns and needs or to take decisive action has diminished their faith in government and state institutions.

Public scepticism has been worsened by the bad state of internal democracy in political parties and by the general impression that politicians and parties only use popular support as a leverage and device to attain power and wealth for themselves. Among other things, this has led to the reduction in the numbers of people who attend public gathering and public hearings, greater mistrust of politicians and political institutions, and a decline in voter turn out. For an example, the voter turnout in the national general election in SA decreased from 19.5 million people in 1994 to just over 16 million in 1999, and fewer than 16 million in 2004.

It is this lack of trust of formal structures and processes for placing demands on the state that drives both peaceful and aggressive expressions of protest action and civil disobedience. Therefore, instead of criminalising protest action and civil disobedience, the government should design and implement a coherent and practical programme of transforming the organisational culture and value system of state bureaucracies and public administrations. Currently the Batho Pele initiative is just words on a piece of paper, without a concrete sanctions and incentive framework that enforces adherence and performance. It is therefore not capable of yielding a service culture, transparency or transformed attitudes of public administration staff and government officials. Clearly the solution to these problems is processes and platforms that locate people and communities at the centre of designing, planning, implementing and evaluating policy, governance and development. This would include effectively making people to be at the centre of designing protocols, systems and structures of security and policing in their communities and transforming SAPS into a police force that protects communities rather than one attacks them.

No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from Symphony Way

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http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/72304

No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from Symphony Way

Raj Patel

Before the Soccer World Cup last year, I was asked to write a foreword to an anthology of life stories told by South African pavement dwellers, living on Symphony Way, near Cape Town. The stories blew me away. It was very easy to write the short introduction below, just as it’s easy to encourage you to take a look at it now. The book is called No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from Symphony Way, and it’s available here.

ON SYMPHONY WAY

For those outside South Africa, particularly for the generation of activists who fought apartheid, it’s tempting to imagine that after Mandela was freed from Robben Island, and lines snaked outside polling booths in the first free elections, and after the ANC won, and the national anthem became Nkosi Sikelele Afrika, and after Nelson Mandela held high the Rugby World Cup trophy, that even while the Soviet Union collapsed and capitalism crowed triumphantly from the United States, all was well in the Rainbow Nation.

But despite the close-harmony singing and the holding aloft of leaders, South Africa isn’t ‘The Lion King’. It’s more like ‘Animal Farm’. Orwell ends ‘Animal Farm’ with a scene in which we see the pigs and the humans whom they displaced, sharing a meal together, and it being hard to tell pig from human. Over the past two decades, a few black South Africans have become very wealthy, as Steve Biko predicted in 1972:

‘This is one country where it would be possible to create a capitalist black society, if whites were intelligent, if the nationalists were intelligent. And that capitalist black society, black middle class, would be very effective … South Africa could succeed in putting across to the world a pretty convincing, integrated picture, with still 70 percent of the population being underdogs.’

For many, the struggle against apartheid never ended, because apartheid continues to live. The introduction of neoliberal economic policies have led to falling levels of social welfare for the poorest. In South Africa, human development levels are now lower than in Palestine.[1] The ascent of a new black capitalist class isn’t, however, the end of the narrative. The state itself, in trying to stamp out the uncomfortable appearance of poverty, and in behaving in ways similar to the Apartheid regime, has done much to fan the flames of dissent, and to continue the story of the fight against apartheid.

Think, for instance, of over one hundred families living in backyards across Delft, who thought that Christmas had come early in 2007. They received letters from their local councillor inviting them to move into the houses they had been waiting for since the end of Apartheid. They left their backyard shacks, to occupy their new homes along the N2 highway. For a brief moment, all was as well as can be expected. The quality of housing on the N2 project is an ongoing scandal, but at least the homes were theirs.

Then the families received another notice. They were to be evicted. The original letters authorising them to move into their new homes had been sent illegally. The local councillor who sent them suffers the modest indignity of being suspended for a month. The N2 residents are treated altogether more harshly. They are kicked out of their homes with nowhere to go – their former backyard shacks having been rented to new families the moment the old ones left. The city tried to move them to the temporary relocation areas, many kilometres away from the communities they have grown up with. The units that pass for housing here are tin shacks, ‘blikkies’, ramshackle blocks of metal in the sand, wind and baking sun, sealed in by armed police yet beset with crime. The evicted families refused to move to ‘Blikkiesdorp’. They organized, setting up a temporary camp on the pavement of Symphony Way. The government threw its might into the legal system, extracting an eviction order that, by October 2009, soon after the letters in this book were written, moved all 136 families to the sandy wastes of Blikkiesdorp, in time for the tin shacks to bake in the summer heat.

Apartheid ends and apartheid remains.[2]

The squires of the new order bicker among themselves for the spoils.

The poor, who fought and died for justice, wait for it long after its arrival has been announced. Movements arise to hasten the day when apartheid’s remains can be swept away. The movements are crushed. At the beginning of 2010, when this preface is being written, the South African government has gone on the offensive against organizations of poor people across the country, from refugee camps to mob attacks against the leadership of the Kennedy Road Development Committee in Durban, to the residents of Symphony Way in Cape Town.

So why should you care about the pavements of Symphony Way when there’s no one there anymore, just in time for the 2010 World Cup tourists? The readiest answer is that while the government can take the people out of Symphony Way but they can’t take Symphony Way out of the people. As the residents themselves announced, “Symphony Way is not dead. We are still Symphony Way. We will always be Symphony Way. We may not be living on the road, but our fight for houses has only just begun. We warn government that we have not forgotten that they have promised us houses and we, the Symphony Way Anti-Eviction Campaign, will make sure we get what is rightfully ours.”

This book is testament to what it is to be Symphony Way. Written toward the end of the struggle on the pavements, this anthology of letters is both testimony and poetry. The power of the words comes not simply from confession, but through the art with which these stories are told. Every struggle has its narrators, but some on Symphony Way are wordsmiths of the highest order. When Conway Payn invites you to ‘put your shoes into my shoes and wear me like a human being would wear another human being,’ he opens the door to a world of compassion, of fellow-suffering, that holds you firm.

The letters do not make for easy reading. Lola Wentzel’s story of the Bush of Evil, of the permanent geography of sexual violence, will haunt you long after you close the pages of this book. In here you will find testimony of justice miscarried, of violence domestic and public, of bigotry and tolerance, of xenophobia and xenophilia. There’s too much at stake to shy from truth, and the writers here have the courage to face it directly, even if the results are brutal. Amid this horror, there is beauty, and the bundle of relationships between aunties, husbands, wives and children, of daughters named Hope and Symphony. All human life is here.

A few visitors have seen this already. Indeed, Kashiefa, Sedick, Zakeer and Sedeeqa Jacobs remark on the cottage industry of visitors, students and fellow travellers who visit – ‘Everyday there is people that come from everywhere and ask many questions, then we tell them its not lekker to stay on the road and in the blikkies.’ But this book isn’t an exercise in prurience. It’s a means to dignity, a way for the poors to reflect, be reflected and share with you. This book is testimony to the fact that there’s thinking in the shacks, that there are complex human lives, and complex humans who reflect, theorise and fight to bring change. This book is a sign of that fight, and in reading it, you have been conscripted. Mon semblable, mon frère[3] – you are addressed, reader, not as a voyeur, but as a brother or sister, as someone whose eyes dignify the struggle.

If your tears fall from your eyes as did from mine, you have will have been touched by the idea, the incredible realisation, that the poor can think for themselves, write for themselves, and will continue to fight for their humanity to be recognised. Whether or not you went to the 2010 World Cup, come to this book with open eyes, and you’ll leave with an open heart.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Raj Patel is an award-winning writer, activist and academic.
* ‘No Land! No House! No Vote! Voices from Symphony Way’ by Symphony Way pavement dwellers is published by Pambazuka Press.
* This article first appeared on Raj Patel’s blog.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[1] http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/
[2] This ambiguity is one soon to be explored by Sharad Chari in his ‘Apartheid Remains’ project.
[3] T his is a line from the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, whose finger-pointing to the reader was a little more accusatory. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/039250.html

The revolt of South Africa’s untouchables

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http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/71559

The revolt of South Africa’s untouchables
Pedro Alexis Tabensky
2011-03-09, Issue 520

The levels of anger are steadily rising among the poor in direct proportion to the number of empty promises made to them. Their lives are defined by violence; unemployment; poor housing; poor schooling; corruption at municipal level in addition to incompetence; and hunger. Those who have not been co-opted by the mainstream, or are not fanatically wedded to a party that offers them little; or, alternatively, who are not drifting aimlessly, lost to reason or quashing their misery with Umtshovalale, are preparing for something. And the anger fuelling the urge to prepare is of the best sort: Slow-burning and steady; optimistic yet realistic; informed ever more thoughtfully by the idea that there is no blueprint for a better tomorrow. And since things could not be much worse than they are today, the only existing alternative left to the poor, in the eyes of those who in increasing numbers are developing a fighting spirit, is to take matters into their own hands. Over and over again it has been shown to them that officialdom cannot be counted on, that the democracy that we have today is not for them, and hence is a democracy in name only.

Of course there are those among the poor who are resigned to their fate, but resignation can be found in large number in any group (even among the prisoner ranks in Auschwitz). What cannot be ignored, despite these qualifications, is that, increasingly, powerful bonds of solidarity are being forged among the marginalized—often despite fundamental ideological differences and allegiances—against the status quo and its architects.

In increasing numbers, and with increasing levels of sophistication, the poor are coming together, ganging up against the common foe responsible for their shameful predicament. These movements include: Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), the Poor Peoples’ Alliance, the Landless Peoples’ Movement, the Anti-Eviction Campaign, Mandela Park Backyarders, Sikhula Sonke, and the Unemployed Peoples’ Movement (UPM).

And these independent movements are communicating with one another on a regular basis, having conferences such as the recent Conference of the Democratic left in Johannesburg, and using the law and its institutions to achieve their aims. As other movements in Northern Africa and the Middle East, particularly in Tunisia and Egypt, which have very recently forced their despots to flee, they are becoming increasingly more sophisticated. They are learning how to use the structures of power to their own advantage. They are finding moneys here and there without strings attached, thinking about possible futures without economic injustice, rereading Biko and Fanon, and using their feet and voices. And, crucially, for much of the future of revolt will be shaped by this, they are using communication technologies to great effect. The cell phone and the internet are becoming instruments for genuine democracy outside of the stifling structures of power.

Sadly, more often than not, the voices of the dispossessed are met with police or grassroots thuggery (such as the widely reported violence met out against AbM in Durban in 2009 and the ANC Youth League sabotage of a meeting convened by the UPM to discuss the Makana Municipality water crisis in 2010). But this violence only stops them temporarily. In the medium term, it works as a catalyst. The more they are shot at and beaten in police stations and on the streets around the country, the more they become convinced that their fight is to assert their humanity; the more they are convinced that they are largely alone and that what they hope for can only be brought about by their own efforts. They are no longer waiting for a kind of secular second coming.

And their voices are starting decisively to be heard and taken seriously by the mainstream, despite countless acts of official and semi-official violence met out against them, and despite mainstream condescending portrayals of them as angry children unproductively venting out frustration or as blind automata of some mysterious third force.

This condescension is not new in our country. Biko warned the architects of apartheid that one of the worst things they can do for their nefarious cause is to assume that black people—almost all extremely poor—cannot think. This false assumption, Biko thought, helped bring the township about, an ideal place for people to share ideas, to plan and above all to mobilize. History speaks of the results.

As mentioned above, these movements are flourishing outside of official party-political structures. And the choice to remain outside of such structures speaks of a lack of trust in officialdom, of a sense that the democracy that this country requires must start on the ground and, especially, in the shacks. One key reason why this sense has become particularly relevant to our current context is that there is an increasing realization that there are no viable mainstream political parties.

The realization that democratic action can no longer be deferred is motivating grassroots movements to promote the idea that the best vote is not to vote at all. There is the standard view that one of the primary democratic tasks of all responsible citizens happens in the voting booth. But arguably voting for this party or that is only genuinely a democratic task when the available alternatives are acceptable. However, in a context where this is not the case, then the most democratic thing to do could be to make a statement of non-confidence by not voting.

And it is also not surprising that grassroots political movements are encouraging their members not to vote, for they tend to have a conception of democracy which is radically participative. They do not believe that the best citizens can do is to delegate political responsibility in the voting booth. Rather, for them, true democracy occurs when citizens take it upon themselves to be the makers and caretakers of democracy.

South Africa’s untouchables are growing restless and they are no longer waiting inside their shacks for democracy to pay them a visit.

No Land! No house! No vote! Voices from Symphony Way

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http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/Announce/71611

No Land! No house! No vote! Voices from Symphony Way

In 2007 hundreds of families living in shacks across the new ‘integrated’ township of Delft in Cape Town were moved into houses they had been waiting for since the end of apartheid. But soon they were told that the move had been illegal and they were kicked out of their new homes. They built shacks next to the road opposite the housing project and organised themselves into the Symphony Way Anti-Eviction Campaign. Written toward the end of the struggle on the pavements, this anthology is testimony, poetry and an expression of the fight to bring about change. Hear an interview with Symphony Way residents on the Pambazuka Press website.

“The Symphony Way pavement dwellers are the voices of struggle from below – of the landless, homeless and shelterless. The book is a compelling testimony to the ingenuity of the people to organise themselves and invent ever-newer forms of struggle.”
Issa Shivji, Mwalimu Nyerere Professor of Pan-African Studies, University of Dar es Salaam

“The Symphony Way occupation was a real attempt at an insurgent and tenacious solidarity against an increasingly exclusionary and brutal society. It was an experiment at the outer limits of the innovative and courageous grassroots militancies that have emerged in South Africa in recent years. This book is also an experiment at the outer limits of radical publishing. All the tenacity, beauty, pain, desperation and contradictions that breathe their life into any popular struggle haunt the pages of this searing book.”
Richard Pithouse, Department of Politics and International Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa

“A magnificent and moving account of a long and hard fought struggle … [This book] is a clarion call for basic human rights and for human dignity. A powerful insider’s view into the landscape of poverty in neoliberal South Africa.”
Michael Watts, professor of development studies, University of California, Berkeley

“An extraordinary collection of writings from the spirit of resilience and strength of the collective which lay bare the betrayal of the people in post-apartheid South Africa.”
Sokari Ekine, author and award-winning blogger

“This book carries not only the suffering of the Symphony Way communities but of the millions of poor people of the world … It is through this courage that we can all hope for the real struggle that intends to put human beings at the centre of our society.”
S’bu Zikode, president of the Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement, South Africa

“As middle-class African journalists and activists, we thought we were telling the tale of the poorest, but here we are surpassed. Their truths, spoken in their sharp vernacular tongue, fly straight to the heart of the matter.”
Michael Schmidt, journalist and author

“These powerful and poignant testimonies that have emerged from the blockade of Symphony Way are voices ensepulchered by the South African state yet they refuse to be silenced … This is a story of horror conjugated with hope, compellingly told with a brutal directness and eloquence.”
Professor Peter McLaren, University of California, Los Angeles

Apartheid has ended but we’re still landless (audio)

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http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/Dakar2011/70905

The following audio piece [mp3] is an interview with Africa Mthombeni from South Africa’s Landless People’s Movement which is a member of la Via Campesina, an international movement that brings together millions of peasants, indigenous people, women farmers, migrants and agricultural workers. The group was formed in 1999 by landless people in South Africa frustrated by the slow pace of land reform. Mthombeni highlights South Africa’s specific land situation starting with the land act of 1913, which enclosed the majority of black people on 13 per cent of the land within Bantu reserves. 87 per cent was left to mostly white commercial farmers. Despite the end of apartheid over 20 years ago, the pace of land reform has remained very slow.

Interviews conducted by Zahra Moloo, an independent journalist from Kenya, currently based in London, UK.