Category Archives: The Sunday Times

Sunday Times: Is the SACP still relevant?

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http://www.timeslive.co.za/opinion/commentary/2011/07/31/is-the-sacp-still-relevant

Is the SACP still relevant?

Mazibuko K Jara:

The South African Communist Party can be faulted on many fronts, but its sterling contribution to defeating apartheid and challenging capitalist exploitation was personified in the principled socialist morality and selflessness of Chris Hani, Joe Slovo and others.

In Hani’s words: “To be the general secretary of the SACP was belonging to a party that must link up with day-to-day struggles of the people.”

Yet today’s SACP is largely invisible in these popular struggles for social justice. At worst, the SACP proclaims these struggles as social liberalism and counter-revolutionary.

For all its 90 years of history, current radical rhetoric and the continued presence of many genuine rank and file socialists in it, the SACP is a shell that stands for a demobilising politics of intrigue, power battles, self-justifications for indulgence in trappings of state power, and promotion of personality cults.

The SACP has failed to move beyond a state-obsessed centralism. The SACP is now reduced to the role of mollifying increasingly desperate and restless poor and working people who bear the brunt of post-apartheid capitalism.

The crisis of the SACP cannot spell the end of left renewal. The challenge for forces of the left, poor and working people, and others committed to social justice is how to engender a new counter-hegemonic politics that is relevant and concrete. The formation in January 2011 of the Democratic Left Front is only one step in the much larger long-term processes of political, social and economic struggles ahead.

One of the most important struggles in this regard is to build alternatives to limited conceptions of political agency where, to count as a political force, a political actor has to form a party and contest elections in a one-party dominant model in a capitalist society.

This conception displaces the politics of the people with the self-serving politics of politicians. Politics can and must be about the people. Ordinary people cannot just be regarded as merely disgruntled and powerless protesters. They can go beyond apathetic one-off voting every five years or limited wage-based challenges to the wealthy business elite, or powerless grumbles against the failures of the ANC government.

Like Abahlali baseMijondolo, the Social Justice Coalition and many other localised struggles, the Grahamstown-based Unemployed People’s Movement shows the possibilities of a people-based politics. Formed in August 2009, it has become the most powerful force in the Makana municipality. Its formation represented a collective recognition of the appetite for self-emancipation, and without self-organisation, the unemployed in Grahamstown might as well have remained on the margins of that divided small town.

In its short two years of existence, the movement has marched, written deputations, submitted memorandums of demands, held sit-ins, held meetings with the state, used the law and more.

It has challenged unemployment, poor-quality housing, lack of housing, lack of water and sanitation, lack of electricity and street lighting, violence against women and problems with the social security system. The movement has humanised politics by concerning themselves with how to rebuild the social fabric of a poor community.

In all this, the movement has no illusion that the gradual recognition of constitutional socioeconomic rights and holding government accountable will be the ultimate answer to the systematic and structural marginalisation of the unemployed. The Unemployed People’s Movement is grappling with how to connect immediate struggles with their systemic roots and how to challenge the state as the main transmitter of inequalities.

The movement’s experience is only the start of what will definitely be a long-term process to renew politics in South Africa.

It is this kind of renewal that Hani yearned for when he said: “In the struggle … we have always identified the central role of the oppressed.” Hani’s yearning lives in the Unemployed People’s Movement and challenges the many genuine socialists in the SACP’s rank and file to ask and answer hard questions, lest they get left behind by history.

Jara is a former SACP member and a co-founder of the Democratic Left Front

The Sunday Times: Slum clearance, South Africa-style

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article7107170.ece#none

From The Sunday Times (UK)
April 25, 2010
Slum clearance, South Africa-style

WAVING iron bars and pickaxes, the Red Ants, a rented mob of thugs in bright red overalls and crimson helmets, used the half-light of dawn for cover as they marched into the slum. Stamping out the first cooking fires of the day with heavy boots, they spread out in a long line. Then they attacked.

Bleary immigrant women dropped plastic water containers and ran in panic towards their corrugated iron homes. “Grab the children,” they screamed.

By sunrise their shacks on the outskirts of Johannesburg had been razed. They were forced to watch as their few possessions were burnt.

The Red Ants, described as state-sponsored mercenaries by their critics, have become a growing force in the past few months as South African cities have begun a campaign of “beautification” before the World Cup begins in June. This means clearing away unsightly immigrant squatter camps.

This month, more than 100 Zimbabweans were beaten and evicted by Red Ants from a derelict building on the main road to Ellis Park stadium in Johannesburg, one of the football tournament’s main venues.

It followed a series of Red Ant evictions ordered by the provincial department of public transport along main roads within a mile of the stadium, which will host five matches. Hundreds more Zimbabweans were forcibly evicted from properties in central Johannesburg.

Red Ants also flattened more than 100 shacks within a two-mile radius of the Mbombela stadium, near the Kruger national park. Most of those evicted were Zimbabwean.

Human rights groups are warning of a return to xenophobic violence that led to the deaths of scores of immigrants during township riots in 2008.

According to Braam Hanekom, chairman of Passop, a refugee rights charity based in Cape Town, the Red Ants are doing the government’s dirty work. “They are essentially a militia that ruthlessly and forcefully displaces people from their shelters under government instructions,” he said. “They are notorious for their brutal and violent approach towards the poor.”

The ruling African National Congress regards beautification as a policy that extends beyond the building of new stadiums, roads and airports. It sees the World Cup as an opportunity to showcase its achievements since it came to power 16 years ago.

Attacks have increased on immigrants drawn to South Africa by the hope of work on projects for the tournament. And the onslaught may intensify after the World Cup. Unemployment, already at 27%, is expected to rise as thousands of construction jobs disappear. In the run-up to local elections next year, many politicians are expected to exploit fears that immigrants are “stealing” jobs.

The South African commission for human rights said it had been bombarded by claims from immigrants that they had been warned they would be “dealt with” after the tournament.

Lawrence Mushwana, the commission’s chairman, said: “African foreigners living in South Africa must brace themselves for a new wave of xenophobic attacks after the World Cup is over.”

Walter Da Costa, chairman of a migrant support group in Johannesburg, believes local authorities bear responsibility for much of the violence. Council agents pay the Red Ants and give them their distinctive uniform on a casual basis, he said.

“As they are recruited from the bottom rung of the ladder, is it surprising that their actions usually amount to little more than intimidation and terrible violence?”

Many Red Ants are drawn from vigilante groups in townships in Durban and Johannesburg which are already intent on ridding the country of immigrants. They routinely refer to migrant families as “parasites” and “cockroaches”.

“We will not stop beating them until our work is done, until they leave this land forever,” a Red Ant member in Soweto told The Sunday Times.

“It’s our land and we have the right to help the authorities move them on. If the municipality asks us to destroy these cockroaches then we’ll do that and flatten their homes to dust.”

Attacks by the Red Ants and a growing number of vigilante groups are nationwide. In the Breede Valley, in the Western Cape, more than 1,200 Zimbabwean refugees struggle to survive in a camp built on a rugby field. Many are victims of Red Ant raids in the north; others have been burnt out of their homes by hate mobs.

“I was among a few hundred Zimbabwean refugees taking shelter in the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg when the Red Ants came and sprayed us with brown sewage water,” said Chenzera Ndbele, 14. “When we moved to a local slum with my mother they came back with pickaxes. When they forced us out they made us watch as they burnt our belongings.”

Dorcas Chinomera, 17, a refugee from Zimbabwe, recalled the day when a mob arrived outside her shanty home in De Doorns, two hours’ drive from Cape Town. “They were screaming ‘kweri kweri’ [parasites] at us. They spat in our faces and stole our furniture and burnt our home to the ground as the police looked on.”