|
Resistance
/ SOUTH AFRICA
As
the sharks of global capitalism circle South Africa, Ferial Haffajee
tracks a growing grassroots resistance.
On a crisp morning at the beginning of June, the tape of South Africa’s history
appears to have been rewound to the time when the community protests that began to topple
the apartheid regime were at their height.
The Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) is on the march, led by veteran activist
Trevor Ngwane who, lifting his feet in the ritual dance of protest, toyi-toyis with them
through dusty streets.
The poor in the townships that have outstanding bills owing to the electricity utility
Eskom are being cut off. Before partial privatization Eskom must become more profitable
and lower the numbers in its debtors book. According to Ngwane: ‘Our belief is that
electricity is a right. We cannot afford to pay rates much higher than big business does.
The system’s in a mess.’
Ngwane has gone door to door, collecting information about conditions in Soweto, to
help bolster the call to end electricity cut-offs. What he has seen is shocking. Most
households in this metropolitan township earn less than R 800 ($100) a month; almost half
the households surveyed survive on an old-age pensioner’s payment of R 540 a month.
Ngwane recounts how he is often stopped in the streets by acquaintances ‘asking me
for five rands to buy bread. I see starvation, actual starvation.’
For Trevor Ngwane, electricity cut-offs in Soweto are easily located in the global
economic diktat that services are better run on profit lines. As one-time speculator
George Soros admits: ‘South Africa is in the hands of global capital. That’s why
it can’t meet the legitimate demands of its people.’
For this reason, Ngwane has also brought his toyi toyi to Washington protests against
the World Bank, the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and the World Economic
Forum meeting on South African soil in June 2001. Though at heart he is a community
activist, he takes hope from a new wave of international protest against economic
globalization.
Ngwane’s message to this movement is: ‘Through international solidarity we
were able to get rid of the apartheid regime. But now our freedom is coming to nought
because of neoliberal policies of these institutions which undermine our freedom. We need
solidarity to oppose these policies.’
And about the growing resistance on the home front, he explains: ‘The point has
been reached in South Africa where people have been pushed to struggle in defence of their
standard of living. It happened under apartheid. When people are under pressure, they have
no choice but to fight back.’
He adds: ‘Organizations like the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee are small
beginnings, of this we are under no illusions. But I am also aware that history can move
in leaps and bounds.’
Soweto, the township that is a symbol of the struggle against apartheid, is the heart
of the country – the real South Africa. The taxi dodges potholes and then a horse and
cart, piled high with coal. You speed past tiny brick houses, set cheek by jowl. It’s
dusty and mostly treeless, except for forlorn attempts at ‘greening’ – a
ragged tree, a patch of grass dotted here and there.
In the suburb of Dlamini electric cables run from tall, wooden poles into the mkukus
– chicken coops – as the ubiquitous shacks are called. Children run wire cars
along the dirt road.
This is the stomping ground of Trevor Ngwane. He wears street-smart dreadlocks and a
lumber jacket favoured by urban black men. His turquoise cell-phone rings constantly.
A veteran anti-apartheid activist born and bred in Soweto, Ngwane was expelled as a
local councillor of the ANC for Pimville in 1999. He was disciplined after he objected to
the Government’s World Bank-influenced development model for Johannesburg which
involved privatization (known here as ‘corporatization’) of public services like
electricity, water, parks and even the Zoo.
For the ANC has changed course and character from the liberation movement which took
power on a wave of euphoria in 1994. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) it
began with was a radical social-democratic policy document based on the Freedom Charter,
centred around human, infrastructural and economic development. Its goals were one million
houses, universal and affordable electricity, a national health scheme and social
security.
But in 1996 the ANC was forced by powerful investors and the IMF to adapt itself to the
‘realities’ of the global economy with its new Growth Employment and
Redistribution strategy (GEAR). International economic élites helped shape this
programme, and its heart is neoliberal, placing macro-economic targets like low inflation
and a low budget deficit (three per cent) at the apex of policy, and relegating
development goals to second place.
Since then, health, welfare, education, electrification and housing budgets have been
slashed. Income disparity has actually increased since the end of apartheid, and around
one in four South Africans are unemployed.
‘There’s been a shift in policy from a redistributive policy to a
trickle-down policy,’ says Ngwane. In a nutshell – if you can’t pay, you
can’t have it. So he has moved from the inside of power, back to the outside, back to
challenge, back to protest.
The struggle against apartheid is so recent that a proud culture of resistance is still
latent in the townships, and it is this that is feeding the rumbling at the grassroots.
Ngwane says: ‘It’s just like the old days. We are pamphleteering, we have
meetings. There’s a defiance campaign called Operation Khanyisa, where people
themselves reconnect electricity that’s been cut off. It balances the power between
Eskom and us, we contest their power to switch on and off.’
‘I’ve addressed about 20 to 25 meetings recently and things are changing,
people are listening. What strikes me now about all these protests is that we’re so
fresh out of political independence and it’s amazing that people have shaken off the
nationalist honeymoon so quickly,’ he continues.
Trevor Ngwane is seeing that in every community the issues sparking people to march and
to organize are different but the same. Different in detail, but they reflect the same
needs. Many are allied to the Anti-Privatization Forum, of which Ngwane is secretary, a
national forum that links a range of organizations which oppose various forms of
privatization and which assist with community struggles.
In Katorus, former guerillas of the ANC are bitter at being forgotten by their comrades
– now the war is over, they have not been rehoused, retrained or retained. They too
are organizing and last year challenged the ANC during the local election.
For them, Ngwane is an icon, a leader who hasn’t left the township for the suburb;
the barricades for the boardrooms. Without a touch of arrogance, Ngwane states: ‘I
represent a feeling, a trend, a thinking among people. People come to me and say we are
willing to fight. We need someone who is willing to speak out for us.’
Assisted by local and international academics, radical groups, trade unionists and
others, the new movement is nascent but has potential. Many from this new movement were
heavily involved in the protests against the global pharmaceutical giants and for
affordable AIDS drugs, for example. In the port city of Durban, ANC veteran Fatima Meer
helps to organize poor communities faced with evictions. She and other former ANC
supporters have organized ‘defenders of communities’ – mobile groups who
forcibly stop evictions. In April last year, for example, older women in the Chatsworth
community surrounded and defended their homes against eviction – this became known as
the Auntie’s Revolt.
Ngwane says: ‘The ANC is a shell of its former self. It has no mass politics; it
only prepares for power struggles. You still get loyalists, but most people are
demobilized, cynical; they are leaving the stage. They are our happy hunting ground.
It’s easier to win those on the outside. Our problem now is to provide a political
home for these people, but there isn’t a consensus of how we relate to the state. We
are a young democracy, remember. But we have to provide people with choices. The ANC in
power is very unresponsive. This is their big mistake. When people elect you, you’ve
got to be there for them.’
‘When the next election comes in 2004, there will be pressure from the left for a
more coherent approach.’ While some of his comrades favour the new politics of social
movements, which place little faith in electoral politics, Ngwane is still an old-school
activist. He believes that the time will soon be ripe to consider a workers’ party.
Ferial Haffajee is a journalist based in South Africa.
|
‘Who are the protesters?’ asked South African president Thabo Mbeki at the
Davos World Economic Forum. ‘No-one could tell me.’
Suggest, however, that the new South African élite are losing their connection to the
masses and African National Congress leaders – responsible in 1994 for bringing a
heroic 72-year liberation struggle to fruition – turn defensive.
‘Why protest us?’ enquires Mamphela Ramphele – once radical
black-consciousness leader Steven Biko’s closest comrade and lover, now managing
director of the World Bank responsible for human development. ‘We are now the
Establishment, and that is how it should be!’
But
the tragic reality is that, while Mbeki occasionally speaks of ‘global
apartheid’ as if he means to end it in his lifetime, again
and again South Africa’s rulers seem not so much interested
in breaking the chains of global apartheid, but in polishing
them.
Take the case of AIDS drugs. In March 2000 Mbeki’s spokesperson, Parks Mankahlana,
gave this blunt justification to Science magazine as to why the South African Department
of Health will not provide a relatively inexpensive shot of Nevirapine to 100,000
pregnant, hiv-positive women to prevent mother-to-child transmission: ‘That mother is
going to die and that hiv-negative child will be an orphan. That child must be brought up.
Who is going to bring the child up? It’s the state, the state. That’s resources,
you see.’
A case alleging that Mbeki is violating the constitutional right to healthcare can be
expected in coming months.
Or take the cut-offs, in August 2000 and as a prelude to privatization, of what had
been a 17-year-long free supply of water to residents in rural KwaZulu-Natal province,
forcing them to fetch water from contaminated sources. Within a month a cholera outbreak
occurred which affected more than 100,000 people in one year – the worst epidemic
ever recorded in Africa.
Paying twice for apartheid
Within three years of the official launch of apartheid in 1948, a World Bank mission
visited Pretoria and began lending to the white regime. Only when South Africa became an
‘upper-middle-income country’ in 1967 did the Bank stop funding apartheid (the
IMF continued until told to stop by the US Congress in 1982).
Half the Bank’s $200 million in loans went to expand white consumers’ access
to electricity, which was denied to virtually all black South Africans until the 1980s.
The apartheid debt inherited by the ANC in 1994 was around $25 billion. Because of
power relations prevailing at the time, and fear of offending foreign lenders, Nelson
Mandela and his advisors agreed to service the loans. Diabolically, apartheid would be
paid for twice: first when foreign bank loans funded bullets which killed black democracy
activists, and then when society repaid those banks for the bullets with resources that
should have gone to social development.
In response a group of activists formed Jubilee South Africa, demanding total
cancellation by creditors in the US, Switzerland, Britain and Germany. Led by the
Archbishop of Cape Town, Njongonkulu Ndungane and Mandela’s official biographer,
Professor Fatima Meer, the Jubilee movement also demands reparations from financiers who
supported apartheid and colonialism throughout the region. At regular anti-bank protests
in Switzerland Ndungane tells officials: ‘It took you 50 years to do right by the
victims of the Holocaust. Don’t take so long when it comes to victims of your
apartheid loans.’
The World Bank and Citibank are other key targets, and Jubilee helped catalyse the
World Bank Bonds Boycott, reviving the international solidarity tactics once used to
encourage disinvestment from companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa.
Citibank is also building a new skyscraper next to Johannesburg’s Sandton
Convention Centre, which in September 2002 will host the World Conference on Sustainable
Development (Rio-plus 10) and is fast becoming a focus for resistance.
Taking inspiration from hundreds of citizen mobilizations around the world, from
Seattle to Cochabamba to Prague to Harare, local activists in the healthcare, water,
environment, economic justice, community, women’s, youth, church and labour movements
will all be there. They won’t hesitate to remind visitors that racial liberation has
come at a huge socio-economic cost.
For South African activists like Trevor Ngwane, the metaphor of the anti-apartheid
struggle – such as has inspired the World Bank Bonds Boycott campaign — also
applies to ‘decommodification’ struggles over land, air, water and everything in
between, uniting grassroots progressives against common enemies and around
‘rights-based’ demands that put people before profits.
And perhaps Rio-plus 10 will be where we break – rather than polish – the
chains of global apartheid, not least the neoliberal policies foisted on the new South
Africa as part of its Faustian compromise with globalization.
Patrick Bond is a Johannesburg-based academic and activist; his new book, Against
Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance, is
available from UCT Press and Pluto Press.
|
 |
 |
2000
January: The World Economic Forum goes under siege in Davos, Switzerland. The first
international treaty explicitly addressing both environment and trade negotiated since the
establishment of the WTO, the Biosafety Protocol regulating international trade in
Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) is signed in Montreal by governments reeling in the
aftermath of Seattle. |
|
|
| February: The culmination of the Ecuadorian indigenous uprising against IMF
dollarization of the economy; President overthrown. Thai activists protest against
globalization at United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting,
Bangkok. |
|
|
|
2000
April: Protests against pricing of water in Cochabamba, Bolivia under World Bank-imposed
privatization. Thirty thousand converge on Washington DC on 16 April to protest against
the World Bank/IMF annual meeting. |
|
|
| May: The Asian Development Bank meeting is blockaded by farmers, students, and NGOs opposed to its anti-poor policies in Chiang Mai, Thailand. |
|
|
| September: Protests in Melbourne, Australia against the World Economic Forum meeting
and in Prague, Czech Republic against the World Bank and IMF draw thousands onto the
streets. |
|
|
|
2000
September: Nearly six million Brazilians vote to end IMF-imposed reforms of their economy
in a self-organized referendum. ‘Cry of the Excluded’ marches take place
simultaneously in Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, Mexico, Honduras,
Paraguay. |
|
|
| 20 October: 20,000 militant workers and students erupt onto the streets of Seoul, South
Korea chanting ‘we oppose neoliberalism and globalization’ during the
Asia-Europe (ASEM) summit. |
|
|
|
New
Internationalist 338
