Category Archives: South African Civil Society Information Service

SACSIS: Failing to Protect the Poor against Crime

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1466

Failing to Protect the Poor against Crime

by Anna Majavu

South Africa continues to be a hazardous place for the Black poor. You don’t have to be a Marikana mineworker to die a death that is undignified, if not brutal and terrifying. The daily security concerns of the majority have never been further from the minds of politicians, who are either gripped with Mangaung mania, or – in the case of the DA – feverishly plotting the jingles and publicity stunts that they think will win them another metro city in the 2014 elections. COPE’s only recent claim to fame is its elderly MP who tried to open an aeroplane door in mid-flight, later escaping with a slap on the wrist after successfully arguing (with the support of the DA) that the combination of one alcoholic drink and one sleeping tablet made him lose his senses.

You know you are living in the most unequal country in the world when the mayor of a major metropolitan city can issue a self-congratulatory press statement – as the DA’s Patricia de Lille did recently – about the installation of less than 30 high-mast lights to be spread across numerous unlit informal settlements.

It is well known that in Cape Town’s townships and informal settlements, street lighting is almost non-existent, and as a result, that crime is rife. The complaint has been raised by residents at nearly every community meeting for years, no matter who organized the meeting or what else the meeting was supposed to be about. The DA likes to claim that communities vandalise every street light that ever gets installed but the truth is that street lighting has hardly been installed in the informal settlements and light bulbs are never replaced in the townships street lights. In Cape Town’s white suburbs, on the other hand, the DA city administration will send technicians out at 10pm to fix a streetlight bulb that died the same evening.

It emerged in a recent City of Cape Town press statement that poor, Black areas are not set to receive proper street lighting anytime soon. The DA city is instead going to rely on national government’s urban settlement development grant to install four lights here and there over the next two years. While the cost of keeping the streetlights on in white suburbs is part of the city’s normal budget, lighting the Black areas depends on donations.

The DA has already claimed that it is powerless to protect poor people on the Cape Flats from being caught in the crossfire between warring gangs, and that only the army would be able to do this. But with the re-emergence of necklacing in Khayelitsha as a community response to crime, the recent killings of four Cape Town metro police in the townships and the increase in the number of young people involved in violent gangs, it is clear that the DA is powerless on many more fronts and that things are unravelling fast in the “mother city”.

The concentration of public funds on white suburbs means the different races live totally different lives. White Capetonians can expect to wake up on the weekend and buy some beers for the night without incident. But for the past two Christmases, Khayelitsha residents have reported that police of all the different forces set up ad-hoc roadblocks on the pavements and ask residents returning from the bottle stores to show receipts for the beer they have purchased. If the residents have failed to keep their slips, or never got one, they are knocked around a bit and their alcohol confiscated. This is nothing to do with drinking in public but happens to ordinary people walking home after shopping.

More disturbingly, Black township residents are increasingly being subjected to the sight of public group killings, which increase the fear and insecurity in those areas. Several Khayelitsha residents vented their shock on Facebook just this past weekend at seeing groups of 14 year old youths killing each other in Makhaza Park.

“The park is full…it’s blood everywhere. These boys are carrying weapons I have never seen in (my) life. This is too painful to see. We have been calling the police over and over but they haven’t come,” wrote one person. She later posted an update that two police had arrived, watched for a while and then left. “These kids are continuing”, her desperate update read. Less than two hours later, another update read: “Sad to say, we have lost two young boys and others are injured…am numb”.

Such horrific practices would be unthinkable in one of Cape Town’s white suburban parks. But in the townships, the government has allowed these incidents to become part of “normal” life.

It was only last week that Cape Town’s largest shack area, the Enkanini informal settlement, was provided with 452 electricity points – for 11 000 homes. How 24 families are going to share one power point is a mystery. The DA says another 2000 electricity connections will be turned on before May 2013 but that the rest of the electricity will be installed in phases. It is still not clear whether every home will eventually have its own electricity point or not. This informal settlement is situated in a highly urbanised city, which recently won the title of “World Design Capital”, yet its high school only got electricity last week!

Townships in the rest of the country are equally under-developed and crime plagued. Rural areas are also experiencing a spike in crime. The situation will continue to worsen rapidly until the DA and ANC abandon their practice of maintaining the living areas set up by apartheid’s Group Areas Act.

Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen. The parties are two sides of the same coin. The ANC’s outdated neo-liberal economic policies were drawn up by the same international economists who wrote the policies of the DA. Successive ministers of Finance have focussed for 18 years now on pumping billions in public funds into tax breaks and incentives for overseas investors to set up factories that have never materialised.

Former president Thabo Mbeki said last week in a speech at Fort Hare university that South Africa was progressing “towards a costly disaster”, and was in a “dangerous and unacceptable situation of directionless and unguided national drift”.

This is rich coming from someone who, when he was in power, oversaw the arms deal; withheld anti-retroviral treatment from thousands of women living with HIV; set up the practice of wasting hundreds of millions of rands in public funds on hiring useless consultants for local and national government, and started the now defunct practice of paying retention bonuses to parastatal managers.

After 18 years, the DA and ANC have missed all opportunities to end apartheid in South Africa and improve the lives of the Black majority. The rapidly worsening situation, where more and more Black people are living without water, electricity, houses and schools as if in 17th century England, won’t be alleviated by either the DA or ANC. Their time has past.

SACSIS: On the Third Force

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1456

On the Third Force

Richard Pithouse

The National Union of Mineworkers has informed us that workers organising their own strikes are being covertly ‘manipulated’ and their strikes and protests ‘orchestrated’ by ‘dark forces’ and other ‘elements’ that amount, of course, to another manifestation of the infamous ‘third force’. ‘Backward’ and even ‘sinister’ beliefs in magic consequent to the rural origin of many of the workers are, we’ve been told by an array of elite actors, including the Communist Party, central to this manipulation. Frans Baleni, horrified at the insurgent power of self-organisation, has not just informed us that his union is trying to “narrow the demands” and persuade workers to “return to work”. He has also called for “the real force behind the upheavals” to be “unearthed” by the state on the grounds that “It is completely untrue [that] the workers are responsible” for the ongoing revolt.

Neither Baleni nor anyone else demanding a witch-hunt to penetrate the depths of an elaborate conspiracy and dig up the real source of the miners’ rebellion seems able to realise that they’re on a hunt for nothing other than their own paranoid fantasies. And we’ve yet to see a statement pointing out that there is no part of society in which people don’t look towards some sort of magic to strengthen themselves against the vicissitudes of life. Middle class people are, for instance, often fanatically wedded to all kinds of belief in magic ranging from prosperity cults organised, oddly enough, in the name of a Palestinian carpenter who scorned wealth to various kinds of quackery, the fantasy that the possession of commodities can miraculously transform us at the level of our essential being and actual belief in concepts as entirely divorced from reality as the fiction that we inhabit an ongoing ‘national democratic revolution’, that there could be a ‘Zuma moment’ to match the ‘Lula moment’ or that ‘the free market’ could liberate us all.

Many aspects of the ANC’s vertiginous decline are, indeed, ‘alien tendencies’ to the ANC as it has existed at certain points in the past. But paranoia about ‘sinister forces’ covertly manipulating popular action has a long history in the party. During the struggle Steve Biko was, notoriously, presented as a CIA agent and dissent in the ANC’s camps was automatically ascribed to traitors working for the apartheid state. Of course the Cold War was full of intrigue and conspiracy and the apartheid state was a third force supporting Inkatha in its war on the ANC. But the ANC’s history of having to operate amidst genuine intrigue does not mean that every time ordinary people challenge the party they are the unthinking dupes of some conspiracy.

Since its assent to power the ANC has, in striking continuity with apartheid and colonial discourses, frequently named the white agitator as the sinister Svengali manipulating ordinarily deferent people into rebellion. The white agitator is frequently assumed to have all sorts of fantastical powers. He (and it appears to always be a he) has sometimes been presented as hoping to bring back apartheid and at other times has been presented as an agent of foreign governments ‘hell-bent on destabilizing the ANC’. Baseless allegations about the covert manipulation of other political parties, and, on occasion, imagined ethnic plots, have also been used to explain away popular dissent as a conspiracy on the part of a rival elite. But now it seems that responsibility for the rebellion across the platinum belt is being ascribed to Julius Malema and the factional battles in the ANC.

The ANC has no monopoly on a paranoid worldview founded on a systemic inability to grasp that workers and other poor people have precisely the same capacity for political thought and agency as all other people. The tendency to respond to popular organisation via the paranoid lens of a moral panic in search of a folk-devil is a general feature of our elite public sphere. The DA, for instance, has blamed drug dealers and the ANC Youth League for protests in Cape Town that are clearly both self-organised and genuinely popular. Some NGOs have invented their own folk-devils to explain their lack of influence over popular politics and to delegitimate popular organisation. And various factions of the left outside of the ANC have shown themselves entirely unable to think about popular politics organised both independently of the ANC and outside of their control without recourse to their own, and equally fantastical, version of the white agitator thesis.

These realities mean that while the particular form of the paranoia that follows the ANC’s inability to comprehend popular political agency is certainly inflected by its experience of the struggle, the Cold War and, of course, the enduring Stalinism of the SACP, it is in no way a unique phenomenon. On the contrary it is typical of elite politics across the political spectrum and across a wide variety of organisational forms from political parties to NGOs, the media and the academy. This is consequent to the fact that we live in a class society where elites undertake bruising battles against each other, sometimes in the name of poor, but share an investment in the ongoing manufacture of a fundamentally irrational ‘common sense’ in which the full and equal humanity of oppressed people is denied. It is this shared paranoia at the prospect of people effectively considered as barbarians entering, and thereby desecrating, the hallowed ground of the terrain on which elites conduct their battles and negotiations that explains why some of what Blade Nzimande says about self-organised political action is no different to what the business press says about it.

This is hardly unique to our time and place. Any cursory study of the historical record reveals a tremendous wealth of examples of people whose humanity and equal capacity for political thought and action was denied by all the experts of the day but who, nonetheless, succeeded in providing the most practical refutations of the irrationality of that consensus. From the slave rebellion against ancient Rome led by Spartacus, to the rebellion of the Zanj slaves in ninth century Iraq, the Peasant’s Revolt in fourteenth century England, the rebellion of Haitian slaves just over two hundred years ago and the anti-colonial revolts people considered as sub-human, as incapable of effective independent thought and action, have constantly demonstrated that it is the various hypotheses of a graduated humanity, rather than the people whose full humanity is denied, that are truly irrational. But even in defeat elites have frequently been unwilling to accept the very concrete evidence before them and have instead ascribed the material refutation of their assumptions of superiority to conspiracy. And it has frequently been assumed that conspiracy is animated by diabolical or irrational forces. There was, it was said, Devil worship behind the peasants’ revolt in England, evil African rituals at the heart of the Haitian Revolution, religious outrage at gunpowder cartridges greased with pig and cow fat that inspired the Indian Rebellion and sinister rituals and manipulation rather than, say, the demand for land and freedom, behind the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.

The ANC’s own history during the struggle is not, as it likes to pretend, one of an enlightened political elite leading a nation to freedom from above. On the contrary the party was frequently alienated from popular initiative when it first emerged and, in fact, often hostile to it. In many cases the party was only able to draw new sequences of popular dissent into the fold, and to enable them to function as a source of renewal, after they had already proved their power in action. This is broadly true of the women’s riot in Cato Manor in Durban in 1956, the Pondo Revolt in 1960, the Durban strikes of 1973 and the Soweto uprising of 1976. But since it captured the state it has lost the capacity to be renewed by absorbing popular political initiative, which it has consistently seen as illegitimate irrespective of the degree to which it is lawful.

It is inevitable that all kinds of people are going to show up in the wake of a successful mobilisation. They may range from demagogues to activists, academics, journalists, NGOs and churches. Many will be opportunists of various sorts looking for a constituency to conscript, materially or discursively, into their own projects. Others will just want to make a quick splash for themselves before moving on. But some will be genuinely interested in understanding and perhaps communicating what is happening and some will be genuinely interested in negotiating solidarity. What ever their intentions people higher up the class hierarchy are likely to get more media attention then the people whose political initiative they are responding to.

But the fact that people have shown up after a moment of insurgent popular action hardly means that they orchestrated it. And if people do decide to form alliances across the social divisions that usually mark our society they have, irrespective of whether or not someone like Frans Baleni approves, every right to do so in a democracy. The idea that it is automatically dubious and even ‘sinister’ for workers and other poor people to make their own decisions about who to form alliances with is, to say the least, paternalistic, paranoid, anti-democratic and, in many cases, rooted in a barely masked desire to keep oppressed people in their place. Of course popular action, on its own or in alliance with other forces, may or may not take a democratic or progressive form but that is a different question.

SACSIS: The Psychological Cost of Living in an Informal Settlement: ‘Like a Mountain Fell on Me’

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1433

The Psychological Cost of Living in an Informal Settlement: ‘Like a Mountain Fell on Me’

by Anna Majavu

The “overwhelming adversity” they had to face daily as a result of living in an informal dwelling felt “like a mountain fell on me”, said one Cape Town resident.

Politicians from across the spectrum have lied to the public for years about their plans to “eradicate”, “upgrade” and “transform” informal settlements. They have forced communities out of informal settlements into equally horrible transit camps or temporary relocation areas, guaranteeing them a short stay before election promises kick in, only to abandon them for up to eight years in sub-human conditions. The DA, which rules over the Western Cape’s dumping grounds for the poor, and the ANC, which governs the rest of the country’s sub-human shack lands, have both failed to carry out any rudimentary housing programmes beyond their drop in an ocean, small-scale developments which do nothing to meet the mass demand for housing.

The recent killing by police of 34 miners in Marikana shone the international spotlight on the brutality of poverty in South Africa. But for the residents of Marikana’s informal settlement, the nightmare is not yet over. R24 million has been budgeted by government for an inquiry into what is already clear – that police killed the mineworkers. The Marikana informal settlement is by all accounts in desperate need of a R24 million upgrade but instead its residents are being treated to a new military occupation by the army. The sense of justice that the commission was supposed to bring has been neutralised by the continued actions of the police, who recently managed to kill ANC councillor Paulina Masuhlo “by accident”, after allegedly shooting randomly at the community for days.

Because of the sub-human living conditions they have been forced into, residents of informal settlements and transit camps are seen as less than human by police and criminals alike, who have become accustomed to treating these residents with the utmost cruelty.

This was highlighted in a recent study by Bryony Fell, Christel Mennette, Emily Elkington, Saabierah Towfie, Sue Drummond and Weslin Charles – a group of psychology masters students at the University of the Western Cape and Cape Peninsula University of Technology civil engineering lecturer Shaheed Mahomed. The study found that residents of informal dwellings suffer from severe psychological problems as a result of their living conditions. While the study focused on Cape Town’s transit camps – Blikkiesdorp (tin can town) and Happy Valley – its findings are likely to be relevant to all informal settlement residents.

The study found that residents showed “enormous resilience”, but were also plagued by problems such as a habitual inability to sleep because of the fear of crime at night – and the realisation that police were not there to help. They felt they were perceived as “dom en onnosel” (stupid and doltish) by the outside world because of their living conditions. After being abandoned for several years in what was supposed to be temporary housing, residents felt they had been made a joke of by government, and this shattered their confidence generally. They experienced feelings of extreme anger and desperation, isolation, distress and anxiety, which hampered attempts to create personal intimacy.

“The theme of overwhelming adversity was very strongly echoed. Participants sketched a picture of the numerous and seemingly insurmountable challenges that were part of their everyday experiences. These challenges affected all aspects of their being – physical, mental, psychological, social and spiritual,” the study reported.

The overwhelming adversity that comes with living in an informal dwelling felt “like a mountain fell on me”, said one participant.

Children were reported to be “blacking out” at times, seemingly from stress. With blankets and pillows soaking wet during the rainy season, parents had to cope with children being constantly ill or send their children to live elsewhere.

The participants also had harsh words for academics, complaining of unequal knowledge partnerships. Lots of overseas researchers come to Blikkiesdorp, but the results of their research are never shared, and these academic exercises did not benefit participants, the study reported.

The depression experienced by millions of informal settlement residents will not come to an end anytime soon without their fierce resistance to business as usual. The DA and ANC govern in an inappropriate fashion for the world’s most unequal country – spending public money on high-priced consultants, big salary bills for bloated administrations and on failed multimillion rand enticements for big corporations to set up mythical factories that will supposedly solve the jobs crisis. They have no political vision about eradicating inequality and are more likely to deploy the police and army to crush rebellions than to do anything to live up to their election promises.

The courts cannot be relied upon either to help do away with informal settlements, even though these dumping grounds contravene the right to dignity and safety. The Durban High Court last week ordered the eThekwini municipality to house – within three months – 37 families living in a transit camp near KwaMashu, Durban after the shack dwellers movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Socio-Economic Rights Institute brought a case to court. But the court only did this because these families had been evicted from the Siyanda informal settlement three years earlier on the proviso that they be given proper houses within a year. The court had a problem with the fact that the eThekwini municipality had ignored the legal proviso, not so much with the conditions in the transit camp.

In 2009 in Cape Town, judges visited ‘Blikkiesdorp’ to vet the living conditions there after the city applied to evict a large group of people who had set up shacks alongside the busy Symphony Way road. Although the Symphony Way dwellers had refused to be moved to Blikkiesdorp because they had forged a better community on the roadside (and subsequently produced a book about their community), the court decided anyway that they would be better off in the transit camp.

It is tragic when people are forced to battle it out in court to prove to well-off judges that one dumping ground for the poor (the transit camp) is worse than another (the informal settlement). Politicians from the DA, ANC, and other parties have long had blind eyes when it comes to the horrible living conditions in the various dumping grounds for the poor. Transit camps, temporary relocation areas and informal settlements are now a fact on the ground. Unfortunately, their existence is no longer seen as a political dilemma or embarrassment — much less a human rights abuse by either the DA, the ANC or the judiciary.

SACSIS: Poverty Wages and Inadequate Housing

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1399

Poverty Wages and Inadequate Housing

Last week at Lonmin mines, the ANC saw the consequences of allowing South Africa to remain one of the most unequal countries in the world. The steadfast refusal of the mineworkers to continue their dangerous work without a substantial pay increase, and the consequent massacre of the workers by police are just the start of what is yet to come.

The police killings appear to have sparked a level of outrage amongst the Black poor and working class that could prove to be a tipping point.

For the past few weeks, communities in Cape Town have been blockading major roads and highways in a protest against being made to live for almost two decades since the end of apartheid in shacks, leaky and crumbling homes and generally being treated like animals.

The DA, ANC, SACP and Cosatu’s heads are all still in the sand about the levels of anger on the ground – whether this anger be about housing, water or underpaid and dangerous work. The DA’s responses to any protests are written with the aims of portraying themselves as the victim or protecting white capital, and the tripartite alliance’s responses are now written with the sole purpose of voicing support for their preferred candidate at the ANC’s elective Mangaung conference later this year. It is therefore opportune for the DA to call for an investigation into the Marikana massacre, but not to criticize the mine owners, and opportune for the ANC, SACP and Cosatu to criticize the DA’s failure to deliver, but not to condemn the police massacre at Marikana.

The mainstream media supports this political game. Apart from their focus on former president Thabo Mbeki’s refusal to provide anti-retroviral medicines to pregnant poor, Black women, the media has refused, since 1994, to support the underdog in the story – the Black majority. Food price hikes by white-owned monopolies, the continued obscene profiteering by mine bosses, the failure of public-private partnerships in delivering housing and other services, have been stories largely ignored by the press.

The ANC has wasted the past 18 years in willingly paying back the debt incurred by the apartheid regime, spending billions more on a corrupt and pointless arms deal, dabbling in failed privatization and fiscal austerity experiments and building now-crumbling one room “kennels”.

One of the last reforms the ANC could make to save its bacon would be to roll out decent quality housing across the land on a massive scale, creating the thousands of jobs it has been promising.

Unfortunately, last week’s release of the National Development Plan 2030 by minister of planning in the presidency, Trevor Manuel does not give any hope that this will happen and can better be described as a damp squib.

In the area of housing, the plan is essentially a continuation of the failed GEAR economic policy. It proposes a mish-mash of incentives to get businesses to set up in townships, pie in the sky public-private partnerships and a vague “upgrade” of informal settlements.

While townships clearly need retailers and shopping malls to inject life into the area, and to assist residents without cars to shop close to their homes, these businesses have not led to a big increase of decent jobs in the townships. The staff employed by the retailers are all on casual or “permanent casual” contracts where they work irregular hours and end up with small pay cheques. The increase in the numbers of businesses in townships has not in itself made the townships more liveable – having a decent, permanent job that allows a worker to extend and improve his or her township home is key to that.

The plan also suggests that bank loans be combined with government subsidies and money made available by employers in their housing schemes to create a new kind of financing for working people who don’t earn enough to get a bond outright. This is a variation on the “gap housing” plan that has yet to prove effective. It is also a bit far-fetched given that hardly any employers have housing schemes any more, and that the ANC government has not even been able to get its own long-promised housing subsidy scheme for public servants off the ground yet. To qualify for a the smallest R100 000 “gap” house – which is little better than an RDP house – one needs to earn at least R4000 per month, which rules out most of the population.

And until now, when the DA and ANC governments have promised “upgrades” of informal settlements, they have not meant that they will build houses. An upgrade can mean anything from installing more pit or temporary chemical toilets, to putting in more taps or electricity.

People are desperate for houses above all. Yet Manuel’s plan also reflects the ANC’s unwillingness to move away from the privatized housing programme, where money is given to private contractors to build small housing schemes, instead of being given to municipalities to set up housing departments with properly trained workers. Since the end of apartheid, this privatized system has been used to buy political support and has seen private contractors milk the state of cash, using only the leftover money to build sub-standard low cost houses which are now going to cost R58 billion to rectify.

Human Settlements minister Tokyo Sexwale has shrewdly started to articulate the link between the poor quality post-apartheid homes and the role of the private contractors. Until now, Sexwale has insisted that private contractors who pocket most of the tender money and build faulty homes on the cheap are only corrupt individuals who need to be weeded out. But this month, Sowetan newspaper reported Sexwale tacitly admitting that privatised housing delivery was so flawed that government was “thinking about” setting up its own housing company.

Sexwale’s image was dented by last week’s exposé in the Mail and Guardian, which said he had invested $150 million with Israeli businessman Dan Gertler, who allegedly wooed Democratic Republic of Congo politicians to sell him mining rights in that country only to sell the rights on to global mining companies very quickly at huge profit.

The exposé, while grim, is not the only image problem that Sexwale faces. As he is now in the running for the deputy presidency at the ANC’s looming Mangaung congress, Sexwale will have to do something drastic to overcome the impression that he has failed in his housing portfolio. Sexwale is fond of blaming corruption for the failure to deliver houses on a large scale and the publicity stunt where he spent a few hours in a shack to experience slum life, did not make a great impression on the general public, who saw it as fake.

Sexwale also has the unfortunate tendency of saying things like “it is not an easy thing to build houses” at ceremonies where he hands over keys to a tiny 300 houses at a time. This does not inspire confidence. A new government housing company could be just the thing for Sexwale to improve his image ahead of the next elections.

SACSIS: Keeping It Real

http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1391

Keeping it Real

Richard Pithouse

The distance between the stated aspirations of a protagonist on the political stage and the realities of its actual practices can sometimes mark a genuine attempt at internal contestation. It would, for instance, be a good thing if a group of people in the ANC insisted that the party was seriously committed to the principle that every child has a full, equal and immediate right to an education that could nurture their talents and then backed this affirmation up with real action, including effective action against the people and interests within the party that are responsible for, and even profiting from, the education crisis. But when there is no real acknowledgement that stated aspirations mark out values and goals that are clearly different to those guiding the actions that are actually taken we are dealing with ideologies – ideas that legitimate rather than guide or question the exercise of power.  Continue reading →