Category Archives: The New Internationalist

The Rising Power of Slum Democracy

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The Rising Power of Slum Democracy

by Raúl Zibechi

Across Latin America, people are exercising a different kind of democracy
– one that changes lives but rarely hits the headlines. Leading Uruguayan
writer Raúl Zibechi tracks this ‘democracy of the future’.

‘In the classroom we are all equals,’ says
Marisel, a woman of around 40 who is already
a grandmother.

We are in the shanty town of Las Tunas, built
by its occupants on an enormous rubbish tip 40
kilometres from the centre of Buenos Aires.
Marisel is participating in a bachillerato
populare – an informal educational system
for which the literal translation is ‘popular
baccalaureate’. Continue reading →

New Internationalist Blog: Souring the beautiful game

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http://blog.newint.org/majority/2010/03/25/beautiful-game/

Souring the beautiful game

Posted by Sokari Ekine on Thursday, March 25, 2010

Recently I listened to a radio programme on the growth of not just mega cities (those of over 10 million people) but meta cities with 20 million or more people – some crossing national borders – as a kind of corridor of mass humanity. The discussion centred around the need for public policy on how to manage these huge urban regions, and the implication for health, socio-economic and political structures and needs. One of the already recognizable impacts of mega and meta cities is the increasing poverty and economic divide within them, with large numbers living in informal settlements and on the streets.

One thing that the discussion failed to mention was the increase in forced removals of the poor from informal urban settlements to the outskirts of the mega/meta cities. The Shackdweller movement Abahlali baseMondolo, based in Durban, South Africa, has been under siege for the past four years and last September the Kennedy Road settlement came under attack from outsiders. Resistance to the attack was broken by the police, who proceeded to add to the destruction and to arrest of many of the residents. Abahlali are demanding the right of the poor to live in the city and for new housing to be built on its present premises and not in the outskirts of town, where their inhabitants become invisible people in a new form of apartheid based on class.

The attempts at dismantling informal residential and market traders in South Africa is directly related to the 2010 Soccer World Cup and the Government policy of hiding the poor to ‘protect the football tourists’ and present the country as a rainbow of prosperity. Apart from the millions of dollars already spent on building huge football stadiums – to which many of the poor will have no access anyway – $170 million is being spent on security to police the poor. Abahlali and the Shackdweller movement across South Africa are planning a series of demonstrations during the World Cup to protest against the lack of affordable and decent housing as well as the right for street traders to sell their products.

In July 2008 I visited Lagos, Nigeria. I remember the daily drive on a major highway, along which informal settlements and markets had grown over the years. Then one day all the shacks and markets had disappeared, broken and burned to the ground. Last year, thousands of Lagos beggars were rounded up and deported back to their home states – how do you deport people in their own country? A similar policy was adopted in Port Harcourt when thousands were driven from their homes in a massive act of violence.

These examples from South Africa and Nigeria are part of a global trend which increasingly denies poor and low-income people access to the city under the excuse of regeneration. In the US, in cities such as New York and Washington DC, low-income people are being forced out of their historic neighbourhoods as the process of gentrification takes over. Yet these cities vie for the privilege of spending massive sums of money on self-indulgent and ostentatious sporting entertainment.

In 2012 London will host the Olympics, at an estimated cost of $14 billion in a city which has a major housing crisis. Why is it that such monies can be found for a month’s entertainment but not for building new, sustainable homes? There is no doubt that some groups will benefit from the Olympics – investors, sporting businesses, sponsors and so on. But millions of ordinary Londoners will still be forced to live in sub-standard and inappropriate housing. The same applies for the majority of South Africa’s poor and low-income earners. The World Cup will not bring homes, access to better healthcare or even employment. Already those who were employed in building the stadiums are back on the unemployment line. I love football and there is no better way to spend a Saturday or Sunday afternoon than in the stands at Arsenal FC, an activity which due to the $60 price tag of a ticket is sadly no longer affordable. However, I find myself feeling increasingly reluctant to engage with the World Cup, given the cost to the lives of ordinary people.

New Internationalist: Shack dwellers’ struggle

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http://blog.newint.org/majority/2009/09/30/shackdwellers-strugg/

by Sokari Ekine

On 27 September the Kennedy Road settlement in Abahlali, South Africa, was attacked by a group of 40 heavily armed men. They destroyed 15 homes belonging to members of the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC), including that of S’bu Zikode. Some people were killed, including two of the attackers. The police were called, but only arrived on Sunday morning, when they arrested eight KRDC members but none of the armed gang. Residents are fleeing the Kennedy Road settlement and both the elected chair and deputy of Abahlali are in hiding following threats on their lives.

The story of the shack dwellers’ struggle dates back to the pre-apartheid period, when there was a policy to remove the urban informal settlements from city centres to allow for gentrification of the areas. The 1994 South African Constitution directly addressed the needs of shack dwellers by stating that new homes would be built to house them. However, rather than build homes on the existing land, the ANC Government has built poor-quality, inadequate homes on the outskirts of cities, where there is no transport or other infrastructure, mirroring the Apartheid era when non-whites were moved to locations far from the centre of cities.

The Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement began in Durban, South Africa, in early 2005 and is the largest group of militant poor in South Africa today. The Movement began with a blockade by Kennedy Road residents protesting against the proposed sale of a nearby piece of land which had been promised to them by the local council as a site for permanent housing. Since then, the Movement has survived fires, attempted evictions of their members, destruction of shacks, hundreds of arrests and continuous harassment by the local municipal council and the police. Under the banner of ‘No Land, No House, No Vote’, Abahlali boycotted both the 2006 local elections and the 2009 presidential elections and have more recently challenged the legality of the apartheid-type legislation of the KwaZulu-Natal Elimination & Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Bill, whose aim is to:

* Eliminate ‘slums’ in KwaZulu-Natal
* Prevent new ‘slums’ from developing
* Upgrade and control existing ‘slums’
* Monitor the performance of departments and municipalities in the elimination of ‘slums’ and the prevention of new ‘slums’ from developing.

It has detailed plans to make sure that all of this really happens. The Bill also says that it aims to ‘improve the living conditions of communities’, but it has no detailed plans to make sure that this really happens. It is therefore clear that its real purpose is to get rid of ‘slums’ rather than to improve the conditions in which people live.

The sustained attacks on Abahlali baseMjondolo and other shack dwellers in cities across South Africa raise a number of questions about the meaning of democracy and justice and who has the right to the city. Specifically these attacks speak to the rights of the poor not only to live in the city but to be a part of the development process. Looking at the Abahlali struggle in a global context we can see there is a policy of systematic harassment and removal of the poor from urban centres, along with the harassment and attempts to evict shack dwellers in a replication of apartheid-era policies based on race and class.

In New Orleans in 2005, Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding from the broken levees destroyed some 142,000 apartments of working-class families, plus thousands of public housing homes. In the aftermath of Katrina, thousands of residents were dispersed throughout the US in what many thought would be a temporary move until they could return to their homes in New Orleans. There was a housing crisis in New Orleans even before Katrina, and the city was one of the most deprived and underdeveloped in the country. Katrina was, for the developers, a godsend… Four years on and thousands of poor, mainly Black people, remain either homeless or are living in their ruined homes. The New Orleans state government, along with developers, has used Katrina as a way to deny the poor the right to live in the city – to be citizens.

Back in South Africa, the Durban government has been trying since 2002 to evict and relocate the people of Abahlali. They have been lied to, tricked by developers and the local government, harassed by racist police, had their leaders arrested on false charges of murders, and had protesters – including women – beaten by the police. All of this so the shack dwellers’ land can be used by developers to build houses for middle-income people, whilst they are sent to the wilderness of outer Durban.

Like Operation Murambatsvina in Harare, the Bill uses offensive language such as the word ‘slum’ to describe the communities and ‘eliminate’ to remove them. It gets worse. The plan is to place people in ‘transit areas’ between their eviction from their present homes and relocation to new homes. How long this will take is not clear. But forcibly removing people and placing them in transit camps before dumping them in wastelands of poorly built houses with no facilities sounds very much like the racist Group Areas Acts of the apartheid era. The Mail & Guardian even compared the Bill to Nazi Germany. In addition, the punishment for trying to prevent an eviction is 20,000 rand (about US$2,600) or five years in prison.

The city, regional and national governments have a choice. They can either invite representatives from the various shack dweller settlements, the street vendors, homeless and the street children to sit down and develop a proper, decent plan where people are treated as human beings with respect, or they can continue to be confrontational, anti-poor and inhumane. They have chosen the latter option, but it will not work – South Africa especially should know that it will not work. One final point: The policies discussed above are closely connected to the anti-immigration policies of the US and Western Europe and all those other countries in the world that are building walls to keep people out and imprison people inside.

The attacks against Abahlali are an attack against the poor and their right to exist and to live in the city. It is an attack against justice and against democracy. It is clear that both the local police and local ANC are complicit in the attacks against Kennedy Road. The informal settlements that make up Abahlali baseMjondolo house thousands of people, some of whom have been there for 20 years. I have no doubt the aim is to attempt to destroy the Movement. It didn’t work for the apartheid regime and it will not work now