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Solidarity With The Cloverdean Community

A Solidarity Statement from Abahlali baseMjondolo for the Easter Monday Cloverdean Community Prayer Meeting

Monday, 5 April 2010

We wish to thank ESSET, the Cloverdean Community and all participating churches, organisations and individuals for making this call for solidarity with the Cloverdean Community in Benoni, Johannesburg. Abahlali baseMjondolo believe it is necessary and just that in any normal society people who have a duty to God and to their country will not be silent in the face of oppression.

We have been informed about what has been done to you. It is incredible that while the politicians are celebrating ‘Human Rights Day’ the rich continue to use the state to wage war on the poor. We have been told how 75 families were evicted from the Cloverdean Farm where they had been living for more than 20 years. We have heard that old people and small babies are among those who have been driven from their homes and their land. We know that one of the elderly women of your community had a stroke out in the open land where you are now living and that she was discharged from the hospital back onto that open land. We have been made aware that one of the women of your community has been raped in the bushes. The difficulties faced by your children have been shared with us. Some of us know very well how it is to wake up on a piece of open land after a night of rain and to then have to get children clean and tidy to go to school.

Thembela Njenga has told us that when the land that you were living on was sold a few years ago you were promised RDP houses but that this promise was broken. We understand that you responded to the breaking of this promise by occupying empty RDP houses in Chief Luthuli Extension 5. You were evicted from those houses by the court and had to return to the dirt and dangers of the empty lands. Three weeks ago good hearted well wishers who could not stand to see human beings living like cattle gave you tents. On Thursday last week the Municipality sent the notorious Red Ants to take the tens, and your money, sentencing you, for the third time, to life out on the open land without water, without toilets and without, they believe, hope.

Many of us have experienced similar attacks on our security and our dignity. Many of us have been attacked by municipal security, driven from our homes and left, like wild animals, in the bush. We suffered and we suffered and we hoped in vain and then we suffered again. Then we said “Sekwanele!” Our comrades in the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, in the Landless People’s Movement and in the Rural Network have also decided that enough is enough. Once we had decided that enough was enough we began to build our movements. Each community must decide for themselves when they have reached the point of saying “Enough!”.

We are in solidarity with every community that is under attack. Your suffering is our suffering. We are being brought together by this shared oppression. But we are also being brought together by the decision to resist. It seems that you also took that decision to resist when you occupied the RDP houses after your first eviction. Therefore we greet you as our comrades in the new struggle – the struggle to build the power of the poor against the rich and against the politicians. The road of struggle is very hard. It is very dangerous. But what other choice is there when the government that many of us struggled for and voted for turns on us?

We affirm that your right to the city is your right to all socio-economic opportunities. We affirm that your right to the city is your right to decide your own future. We affirm that none of us deserves to be treated with such contempt in any of our hard won cities. We know of the hidden price that the poor must pay in all of our cities to keep our place in our cities and we condemn this attack on the poor by the Ekurhuleni Municipality in the strongest terms.

What has been done to you it is not just immoral but it is also criminal. Our legal system has strong biases towards the rich but even our legal system recognises that it is a criminal act to render someone homeless without the provision of any alternative adequate accommodation. The Ekurhuleni Municipality and the Red Ants are criminals. This fact must be confronted directly. We call upon people that are near to you – churches, community organisations, trade unions, academics and NGOs, to take a side with you – not for you but with you.

We have noted that there have been so many instances in which the poor have had to pay the highest price for the right to the cities – the same cities that we build, we secure and we clean. It has become normal that the poor should have no place in our cities. Now it is the turn of the Cloverdean Community but it is clear that we will all have our turn to be evicted from our homes and our places of work and to be beaten when we demand what is ordinary and basic – the right to be taken as human beings, to be treated with dignity.

We reject, clearly, the idea that others should interpret our struggles for us and without us. So many academics, NGOs and journalists never speak to us but tell the world that we are struggling for service delivery. We have refused to be seen as poor people who only want service delivery, a service delivery without justice and equality, a service delivery without respect and dignity, a service delivery with Red Ants, transit camps and cracked RDP houses in the middle of nowhere.

If we do not resist and challenge our exclusion from the cities with all means necessary we will find ourselves out in the open lands or the transit camps. It is high time that we must take all our places in all our cities without fear. Taking our place in our cities means holding the ground that we already have and taking more too. This will obviously mean that we must prepare ourselves to pay the price which some of us have already paid – attacks in the night, police beatings, being jailed, always being watched, lies – even being driven from our homes with the support of the police.

While you were evicted from your homes in Cloverdean the eThekwini Municipality was trying to evict us from our main streets and important public building when thousands of us wanted to march for Human Dignity in Durban on Human Rights Day. But we were many, we were united and we were not intimidated and so despite the heavily armed police force we were able to successfully and peacefully take our place in our city on that day.

Abahlali have always been warning that the anger of the poor can go in many directions. We continue to make this warning as we witness that all around the country struggling communities are taking to the streets. People are resisting all over our cities and all over the rural areas. People are refusing to be evicted from their land. People are refusing to be excluded from our cities’ planning and are demanding to be able to exercise full citizenship. We need, in this time, to be very clear about what we are fighting for. We are not fighting over the crumbs that are thrown at us by the rich and the politicians.

We affirm that South Africa belongs to all who live in it and that we all have a responsibility to do whatever it takes to protect the future of our children and to reclaim our citizenship with all its entitlements. We must refuse those who want to take our humanity away from us with little offers of service delivery and bribery. We must refuse those who want us to fight each other over the crumbs. We must all fight for land and production to be shared equally and fairly without any heavy price being paid by the poor while taking the same rights that the rich take freely and safely.

Furthermore, just as the people from around our cities, our country and our world are uniting in support of our struggle we express our support for our comrades elsewhere who are being crucified by the upcoming FIFA World Cup. We have stood with, and we will continue to stand with our comrades from the Mitchell’s Plain Concerned Hawkers and Traders Association in Cape Town, all the street traders in Durban and the National Informal Traders Forum, the South African Street Traders Association, the Diepsloot Informal Traders Association, MTC Traders Berea Mall, the Mall to Mall and all the Task Teams formulated to resist any attempts by the City of Johannesburg to evict them from their trading spaces. We will continue to stand with the Taxi Associations whose routes are banned and whose taxis are being impounded because the Department of Transport cannot issue them with Operating Permits. All this is being done to exclude all poor South Africans from benefiting from the World Cup so that our politicians can impress international dignitaries with how well they can oppress the poor. The true meaning of ‘a world class city’ is a city that oppresses its poor with high effectiveness – removing us, hiding us and breaking our struggles.

We do not want world class cities. We want cities for all – real people’s cities. We have decided to resist these attacks on the poor and we invite you and all struggling communities and their allies, their real allies, those prepared to work with and not for the poor, to take this resistance forward.

We say that these attacks on the poor must come to an end. We affirm that your struggle to resist eviction, crime, hunger, starvation and eviction from your homes, trading plots and operating routes is just. We will stand with you against all forms of repression in your struggle for land and freedom.

Amandla!

The Star: Red Ants ‘cornered man, killed him’

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http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20081121054524763C766330

Red Ants ‘cornered man, killed him’

November 21 2008 at 06:49AM

By Poloko Tau and Beauregard Tromp

A resident was brutally killed at an RDP settlement in Ekurhuleni, allegedly by Red Ants guarding new houses against illegal occupation.

But this assertion has been denied by the Gauteng Department of Housing, which had contracted the Red Ants and who said the death was a result of a fight between members of the community over occupation of houses.

The incident has resulted in a furious standoff between the Red Ants and the enraged community of Eden Park Extension 5, who called for the guards in red overalls to be taken out of the area yesterday.

Meanwhile, a police statement said the Red Ants had attacked 34-year-old Alfred Ngubeni shortly after they had assaulted his 25-year-old wife, Ayanda Zulu.

According to the police, it all started after razor wire that had fenced in houses being guarded was stolen.

Police spokesperson Captain Mega Ndobe said part of the fence was missing when the guards woke up on Thursday morning.

He said the Red Ants had gone door to door investigating the theft, when a clash erupted between them and Zulu.

“They started assaulting her and that’s when her husband was called. He tried talking to them when he arrived, but the Red Ants attacked him with crowbars and he was certified dead on the scene,” said Ndobe.

Ngubeni’s friend, Lucky Williams, said the deceased never provoked the Red Ants.

“They were about 50 of them chasing him through the houses. He wanted to hide in a house, but they started smashing its windows. He then jumped out through the back window but others saw him,” he said.

According to Williams, Ngubeni, who was armed, fired a warning shot in the air in a bid to scare the Red Ants away.

When they did not retreat, he stopped and asked what was wrong, and that’s when they started assaulting him.

Housing spokesperson Aviva Manqa stated on Thursday night that a project manager at the site had said the Red Ants – infamous for conducting mass evictions – were not responsible for the killing. “What we’ve gathered is that people were fighting over houses, legal and illegal occupiers. However, should it be that they (Red Ants) are responsible, the department will take steps against them,” he said.

Two men were taken in for questioning but were later released.

o This article was originally published on page 1 of The Star on November 21, 2008

A piece of plastic called home

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http://www.mg.co.za/articledirect.aspx?articleid=309648&area=monitor

A piece of plastic called home

by Haydée Bangerezako

Activists in the Ekurhuleni municipality are claiming that informal settlements on the mining belt are being unlawfully demolished as a “clean-up” operation for the 2010 World Cup Soccer event and in order to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of eradicating urban slums by 2015.

Since February, the Ekurhuleni municipality has been moving slum dwellers from informal settlements to extension 10 of Tsakane, a large township approximately 40km away from their original home. Residents of informal settlements, such as the Chris Hani Angelo Station and a section of Makause, also known as Roseacres, have been evicted from their homes, while ihabitants of three other settlements, Delport, Kanana Driefontein and Road Reserve, are due to be evicted soon. The recent evictions violate the communities’ constitutional rights and contravene the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation Land Act of 1998 (The PIE Act), with both specifying that people cannot be evicted without a court order, says Lisa Blass from ProBono.org, an organisation offering legal services to the community.

But the municipality says the mining belt area, where many informal settlements, including Makause and Chris Hani, are located, are dangerous because of the threat of floods, sinkholes and open mineshafts. It has evoked emergency provisions to move squatters. “There was no eviction, it was voluntary relocation,” says Aubrey Mokgosi, acting head of the department of housing in Ekurhuleni. However, people like Blass dispute this: “They [the municipality] have not come forward to the community to say: we’ve done a geophysical study,” says Blass, adding that the new land is literally “at the end of the road”.

Marie Huchzermeyer, of the Wits School of Architecture and Planning, also disputes the municipality’s motives. “They are abusing emergency provisions and using it as a pretext to remove people from strategic areas to places where they haven’t built homes and on the furthest outskirts,” says Huchzermeyer, adding that, according to international standards, communities should be relocated within a 5km radius of their original location. Portions of sections one, two and three of Makause were bulldozed, destroying 2 366 shacks and brick homes, after residents were only given 10 days’ notice.

The Red Ants led the removals, as well as the resettlement, which were conducted in the presence of the SAPS and the Metro police. The community says the move was far from smooth and the Red Ants brutalised them, looted their belongings and destroyed shacks, even when people protested against being moved or were not present. “They [the municipality] are bringing back the idea that black people belong in the townships. We are like a rubbish in town,” says “General” Alfred Moyo, a Makause committee organiser, whose shack was burnt after a protest march against the relocation in March.

Blass says that Ekurhuleni sent out various representatives to register people to be relocated, which the municipality has said is the equivalent of having been given consent. Mokgosi refutes the claim that consents were unlawfully obtained and says they were given in the presence of the police. The community filed two urgent applications in February to stop the demolitions and removals.

In the first application the court ruled that a consent order was needed to evict 181 community members, which was not observed by the municipality, says Michael K Dzai, chairperson of the Makause Business Forum. The second application sought the cessation of all demolition activities, but it was rejected by the court.

Upon their arrival in Tsakane, a treeless and dry landscape on an open veld, the new occupants found their new homes were made of four poles and plastic bags. “You can’t call a plastic a better place; you have no windows, no doors,” says Moyo, who has chosen to remain in Makause. The new homes are a far cry from the type of temporary shelter the laws provide for, says Blass. The design of the shelter should be stable and durable for the anticipated lifespan of the shelter. Under the law the grant for the provision of a shelter is R14 000.

Henry Njabuleseni Dlamini, a Makause community leader in Tsakane, who consented to the move after being convinced by the municipality that Makause was dangerous, is not happy with his new home. “We were told that we would find RDP houses here,” says Dlamini. “They [the Red Ants] took everything outside and threw it out. They said we are not serious, because if we were, we would have built our house by then,” says Mary, who was kicked out of her new “plastic” home in Tsakane and whose belongings were left outside because she had no material to rebuild her shack.

Eric van der Berg, from Bell Dewar Hall, a law firm representing the disgruntled Makause community, is planning to bring a common law application to court to return people to Makause and rebuild their homes. “This is based on the fact that they were moved without a proper valid court order and without their consent,” says Van der Berg. Ekurhuleni, like every municipality in South Africa, has produced its Integrated Development Plan document for 2005 to 2010, which maps the city’s future. Ekurhuleni’s goal is to move towards the creation of sustainable human settlements, a plan that involves the progressive eradication of informal settlements. Similar moves have been made in other municipalities in Gauteng.