South Africa's White Poor

A fraction of South Africa's white population lives in poverty similar to that of many of the country's black township residents. They are grappling with the same problems.

Barefoot children play with whatever they can find in front of the shanties in which they live. Idle adults sit on stools in front of their shacks; it just gets too hot inside. This was a common scenario for black families during South Africa's decades of apartheid. For many, living conditions haven't improved since the country declared statutory equality in 1994. Leigh Du Preez, the founder of the South African Family Relief Project (SAFRP), says that policies designed to redress decades of enforced inequality have not had the intended effect. But she is not talking about black families: Du Preez says more and more white people have been left unemployed and hungry, having to fend for themselves amid growing racial tensions. "People think that this can't be true, but this is how my people live," Du Preez says.

It is hardly surprising there is little awareness about the issue of growing white poverty. Less than 10 percent of South Africa's population is white, according to the 2014 census, and less than 10 percent of whites live in this kind of poverty. Du Preez explains there are almost 500 informal settlements of white people across South Africa, asserting that "no one will help them."

Munsieville is an hour northwest of Johannesburg, a former landfill, with more than 300 families living in close quarters. "There was nothing at all here before. There was no sanitation, no water, no electricity. Now there's one portable toilet for every three families. It stinks everywhere," she says, adding that the unsanitary conditions have led to outbreaks of bronchitis, pneumonia, and chicken pox.

It's not that the lives of the white camp residents in Munsieville are worse than those of the black community. On the contrary, the vast majority of black township residents are also struggling to survive.

"They are all trying to make this place as livable as possible, with whatever little they have," says Marius Du Preez, Leigh's husband.

A foreign reporter once suggested poor white people might deserve to be in dire straits after benefitting from decades of apartheid rule. Du Preez has heard that argument before: "I can understand when foreign people say those things about us. But they don't understand that apartheid wasn't about [creating] poverty. It was about power and control, and yes, it was bad.

"But we have more black squatter camps under the current government than we ever did under apartheid," Du Preez says. "Plus, we have all these white squatter camps as well. How is that better?"

http://www.dw.com/en/south-africa-whites-feel-the-pain-of-poverty-too/a-19375561

Use the Power

On 30 March 1960, Philip Kgosana led a march of 30 000 people on Parliament in protest against the pass laws. He was arrested and jailed and later went into exile. For Kgosana, the protest against the pass laws was the "entry" point to a bigger struggle, a struggle "to change the lives of African people" He was to be in exile for 36 years, 22 of them spent working for the United Nations, in Africa and Asia. When he retired at 60, he returned home to the Winterveld, north of Pretoria only to find that "in 36 years, nothing had changed. The problems of our people were still the same."

He is critical of those in authority who "blame apartheid" for South Africa's problems after 22 years. "Why blame apartheid? You have been in charge. There is a misuse of power for the accumulation of wealth," he said. "If you get to power and you use it to make yourself rich, you are not doing your job. You are fooling us."

"Political power is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end, a tool to achieve social and economic freedom. Our people want food, and schools, and houses. What are all these squatter camps? There is not one city in South Africa which doesn't have this other city, this shack city, full of water and dead dogs. And these are growing. If there are children sleeping on the floor and studying under a tree, and you have power, you aren't using that power."

South African White Poverty

The number of whites living below the poverty line is growing in South Africa. An estimated 400,000 white South Africans live in white squatter camps in South Africa. The Daily Mail UK reported that there are about 80 squatter camps where white squatter families live. They have little food, little or no running water, and no electricity. Shanty houses are surrounded by clapped out cars as children play along the dusty wasteland in the scorching sun. What water is available is infested with mosquitos, breeding illness and disease.

Although the estimate on whites living in poverty in South Africa is thought to be 400,000, this is out of a white population of about 4 million while the country’s population is about 50 million. Those who live in white squatter camps may receive a monthly stipend of about $40.95 while they are often denied access to basic healthcare services.

Leigh Du Preez, who works for the South African Family Relief Project (SAFRP) charity, said those at the camp have little chance of finding a job. Leigh said: ‘As soon as they read your application and see you are from a white squatter camp, they turn you down. ‘It’s very difficult to get a job if employers know you live in one.’

Corrupt SA Politicians

African National Congress activist Denis Goldberg, the only white man to be convicted among 10 people on trial for their lives alongside Nelson Mandela and served 22 years in prison,  has called for leaders of the party to be replaced.

"Corruption is a problem. I personally believe, and I will say it publicly as I do in South Africa, the members of the ANC need to renew the leadership from top to bottom. I'm not going to name names, because it's a problem throughout, from national, provincial and local government level."

The ANC veteran said that "a definite attempt" was now required by ANC members to say "enough is enough" and instigate a leadership clear-out.

 "Let us focus on the needs of our people, not on your needs as new political leaders with access to power, and therefore wealth and personal enrichment, which robs us, in a way, of our freedom."

After apartheid, what? (1990)

Editorial from the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

So. after the nomenklatura in Eastern Europe, it is now the white minority in South Africa that has been forced to agree to negotiate on giving up its "leading role" and "guaranteed monopoly" of political power. For this is what the release of Mandela means. 

It means that those in charge of the South African state have at last publicly admitted what they have long realised in private: that they cannot maintain the law and order necessary for the proper functioning of the capitalist system they preside over without including the majority of the population in the system of political representation. Their hope is that Nelson Mandela will be able to command sufficient support among the black population to be the person with whom they can negotiate an orderly transition from apartheid to the new "non-racial democracy" that capitalism demands, indeed has been demanding for decades. 

The failure of apartheid, as an attempt to impose on a capitalist economy a caste system based on skin colour, is underlined by the fact that the party in charge of the South African state—the Afrikaner nationalist National Partei—is the same party that, under such hateful figures as Malan, Verwoerd and Vorster, introduced apartheid after 1948 as a rigid codification, and intensification, of the existing discriminatory practices against "non-whites". 

Already in 1948 apartheid was an anachronism, even from a capitalist point of view but. with the franchise restricted to "whites" most of whom were Boers in all senses of the word, the succession of parties directly representing the capitalist interest—the United Party, the Progressive Federal Party and, today, the Democratic Party—were unable to win a majority in the white parliament. Political power was exercised—and has been without a break since 1948—by the representatives of Afrikaner nationalism whose original policy was to try to reconstruct the master and servant relationship between whites and" blacks their forefathers—the people who organised the Great Trek from the Cape Province in 1836 to avoid the abolition of slavery in the British Empire—had known in the pioneer days of white colonisation. 

What the Afrikaner nationalist government sought to keep "apart" capitalism brought together. More and more Africans were drawn into capitalist industry, and not just as labourers in the mines but as workers of all kinds—clerks, accountants, bank employees as well as foremen and skilled and semi-skilled production workers—until today they form the majority of the urban working class of South Africa. 

From the 1970s onwards the development of capitalism forced the government to abandon apartheid bit by bit. First to go was the industrial colour bar under which certain skilled manual jobs were reserved for whites. Then Africans were allowed to form trade unions. Then the Pass Laws were abolished and Africans allowed to own property in the townships. Then the so-called "petty apartheid" of separate park benches, beaches and the like was relaxed. Then "coloureds" and Asians were granted some political rights. Then the Mixed Marriage Act—which criminalised sexual relations between the different "races"—was abolished. Then mixed residential areas emerged in some cities. 

All that remains—and of course it's a big all—are the laws which classify every South African into one or other "racial" group and which reserve areas for the exclusive habitation of these groups, but the De Klerk government has declared, as it had no choice but to, that these too are negotiable. 

Like all decent-minded people, Socialists are pleased at the coming demise of the obscene system of institutionalised race discrimination of apartheid. Although the coming of a non-racial regime in South Africa will allow the "non-whites" there a dignity and respect as equal human beings which they have been denied up to now, the ending of apartheid will not amount to "liberation" for the working class in South Africa. Capitalism without apartheid—which is all even the ANC wants, despite its talk of "socialism" (in reality, nationalisation, or state capitalism)—will remain capitalism and so exploitation for profit, bad housing, inadequate health care, cheap schooling, unemployment, poor transport, police brutality, pollution and all the other problems workers have to endure under capitalism will continue as well. 

The end of apartheid will not mean the end of working class problems. At most it will result in the creation of the best conditions under which the working class can struggle to protect its interests within capitalism and, more importantly, can struggle alongside the workers of the rest of the world for the non-class as well as non-racial society that socialism will be.

South Africa's Born Frees

South Africa’s post-apartheid generation, the “born-frees”, discontent grows. Thakeng Moreki lives in Orange Farm, a sprawling, impoverished shantytown 40 miles south of Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa—his community a place bypassed by the economic gains that the end of apartheid was supposed to bring to the nation’s poor. Unemployment exceeds 40 percent in Orange Farm, South Africa’s most populous shantytown, with 350,000 residents. And the lack of opportunity evident across the country falls heavily on the “born frees”—those who grew up after apartheid ended in the early 1990s. The “born frees” have begun to question their country’s leadership amid rampant unemployment, limited opportunity and entrenched political corruption.

“We have democracy in South Africa but leaders are like: They eat first and then they leave what is left for the people,” Moreki said “The people fought for democracy, but these leaders forget what they fought for.”

“Young whites still enjoy the inheritance of apartheid, and we are still at a disadvantage because the wealth is not properly shared,” said Thula Gumede, 21, a politics and public management major at the University of Johannesburg. “Those who took land and resources still have it.”

Owethu Mbambo, another University of Johannesburg student, said she shares Gumede’s view. “Affirmative action for blacks in South Africa is attacked as unfair,” Mbambo, 22, said. “Blacks are given the moral burden to ‘get over it.’ We are told to be happy to be free. But it is only a one-way street. White people are not changing like we are being told to change.”

Richard “Bricks” Mokolo, a paralegal and community activist who runs the Orange Farm Human Rights Advice Center, said neoliberal economic policies adopted by the ANC, under pressure from entities including the United States, have structurally excluded millions. “Shortly after the election of Mandela, I realized that the policies the government was adopting would make poor people suffer more than under apartheid,” Mokolo said. He once led a successful fight to stop ANC government privatization of water service in Orange Farm. “The government and the private sector are not creating jobs. Even college graduates are unemployed.”

Land Of Dust - Post-Apartheid South Africa

JOHANNESBURG, 15 May 2014 (IRIN)

"We're not celebrating anything" two decades after the end of apartheid, said Shawn Yanta. "Only the rich are celebrating. The  working class are still struggling to get on with living."

Yanta lives in Stofland in the Hex River Valley of South Africa's Western Cape. The dawn of democracy in 1994 delivered a boost to this region's table grape industry, as it brought an end to international boycotts of South African produce.

The Western Cape produces more than 80 percent of the country's table grapes and the Berg and Hex River Valleys are the country's primary production areas. Table grapes are among the world's most traded fruits and the prevailing climatic conditions in these valleys provide an unusually long eight-month window for production.

But that revenue does not translate into the betterment of the lives of the fruit pickers, who are trapped in poverty and neglected by the government and social services.

IRIN's latest film, Land of Dust, looks at the conditions of the workers in the Hex River Valley, where long hours, low wages, poor health and education opportunities, are the rewards of farm employment. Conditions which have changed little since the end of apartheid.

from here

South Africa's Elections

In South Africa’s  May 2014 election most of the ‘Born Frees’ (persons born after the end of apartheid in the early 1990s) are eligible to vote in a general election yet a recent “Status of Youth Report” released by South Africa’s National Youth Development Agency found that young voters, with few exceptions, “are regularly less likely actually to turn out on Election Day than other age groups.”

Shenid Bhayroo was one of the thousand-plus journalists that traveled to South Africa in December 2013 to cover the death of Nelson Mandela.

Bhayroo saw a strong public dissatisfaction with the deep poverty rampant across South Africa, poverty many South Africans increasingly blame on failures of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), the organization Mandela once led. Many studies list income inequality in South Africa as highest in the world, citing such figures as the poorest ten percent averaging $427 in annual income compared to $80,800 for the richest ten percent.

“What I saw was a greater sense of criticism of the short-comings of the ruling party, even from staunch ANC supporters,” Bhayroo said referencing rising objections including criticisms of corruption and nepotism among ANC officials, particularly South African President Jacob Zuma. “There’s been little improvement in the lives of the working poor.”

Mosi was a member of the ANC’s military wing, living years outside of his homeland in exile. He suffered a gunshot wound in Angola during a 1980s battle against American CIA-funded rebels that were fighting in alliance with South Africa’s apartheid government. Mosi is among the ANC supporters dissatisfied with the policies and practices of that party.

“Too many ANC leaders now drive Mercedes Benz cars. They don’t do things for the poor,” trade union member Mosi said, critical of top ANC officials for engaging in self-enrichment, a repugnant practice of elites worldwide. “The ANC has political office, but the economy of the country is still in the hands of white people,” Mosi said during a July 2013 interview in the impoverished township of Alexandria located adjacent to the most wealthy enclaves in Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa. “People in South Africa are still poor. Some still sleep on the streets.”

“While political apartheid ended economic apartheid in a different guise took shape,” American scholar Dr. Anthony Monteiro, of Temple University in Pennsylvania, wrote in a December 2013 essay entitled “Nelson Mandela: The Contradictions of His Life and Legacies.” For Monteiro, instead of a “radical redistribution of wealth and income…a program of neo-liberal capitalism and protection of western corporate wealth and white South African interests [was] implemented. In return blacks got the right to vote and modest improvements in the lives of the poor…the suffering of the working masses and poor got worse…”

Nkosi Patrick Molala, a legendary soccer star, anti-apartheid figure and community activist in South Africa who holds the dubious distinction of being the first soccer star in his nation imprisoned for anti-apartheid activities. Molala served eight years on infamous Robben Island , is among many concerned about the grave economic inequities in his nation like 50 percent unemployment about black youth. “Much in the ‘Rainbow Nation’ that we claim is the same as before: Those who were poor then are poor now,” Molala said. Post-apartheid South Africa is a “democracy of those who can make it,” Molala said during an interview last summer.

From here 

No crock of gold at the end of the rainbow nation

April 27 marked the 20th anniversary of South Africa's first democratic elections. Many things have improved in South Africa since 1994, to be sure. State racism has ended. People have rights. Yet, everyday life for most South Africans remains a struggle and with it the sense of disappointment that accompanies it, given the gap between the expectations of liberation and the state of abjection that the majority continues to inhabit.

South Africa's unemployment rate in 1994 was 13 percent - so bad that most were convinced it could only get better. Yet today it is double that, at about 25 percent. And that's according to official statistics; a more reasonable figure, according to most analysts, is probably closer to 37 percent. The situation is particularly bad for young people. The Economist recently reported that "half of South Africans under 24 looking for work have none. Of those who have jobs, a third earn less than $2 a day."

 South Africa also boasts a reputation for being one of the most unequal countries in the world. Not only has aggregate income inequality worsened since the end of apartheid, income inequality between racial groups has worsened as well. According to the 2011 census, black households earn only 16 percent of that which white households earn. About 62 percent of all black people live below the poverty line, while in the rural areas of the former homelands this figure rises to a shocking 79 percent.

In 2006, still 70 percent of South Africa's land was under the control of whites, who constitute a mere 10 percent of the population. The ANC's Black Economic Empowerment programme has succeeded in minting new black millionaires (South Africa has 7,800 of them now), but can't seem to manage the much more basic goal of eliminating poverty.

 South Africa's mineral wealth, including some of the richest seams of gold, platinum, and coal in the world, remain in the hands of corporations such as British-owned Anglo American. The finance sector, which has ballooned to a dangerously large 21 percent of the country’s GDP, remains mostly monopolised by four white-owned conglomerates.

The World Bank and the IMF have long praised South Africa for its accomplishments since 1994, and friendliness toward foreign direct investment. The apartheid National Party was determined that the transition would not undermine key corporate interests in South Africa, specifically finance and mining. They were willing to bargain away political power so long as they could retain control over the economy. And so they did. The ANC retreated from its position on nationalisation and an IMF deal signed just before the transition deregulated the financial sector and clamped down on wage increases. The central bank, left in the hands of the old apartheid bosses, was insulated from democratic politics and its mandate limited to targeting inflation instead of employment or growth.

The National Party only managed to extract these concessions because they had successfully divided the resistance movement between moderate elites, such as Thabo Mbeki, who had spent many years in exile, and the more radical activists who were at the forefront of the struggle within South Africa itself. The latter were largely unrepresented in the economic negotiations, while the former enjoyed a sort of royal treatment, including a now infamous series of secret meetings in the United Kingdom with major figures in mining and finance. Mbeki, a self-proclaimed Thatcherite, was easy to convince. He already believed in the basic neoliberal principles that the National Party were hoping to institute.  For him, the route to prosperity for the new nation depended not on nationalisation and redistribution, but on global market integration and foreign investment, which would supposedly grow the economy and trickle down to the poor.

Still, when the ANC assumed power in 1994 it implemented a progressive policy initiative known as the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). The RDP was designed to promote equitable development and poverty reduction, mostly through public investment and the mass rollout of social services to connect millions of people to housing, electricity, water, and clinics. This was abandoned a mere two years later.  Mbeki and then Finance Minister Trevor Manuel held clandestine discussions with World Bank advisors toward drafting a new economic policy known as GEAR (Growth, Employment, and Redistribution, even though it accomplished precious little of the latter). It was implemented in 1996 despite significant resistance from within the unions. GEAR amounted to neoliberalism: more privatisation, lower trade barriers, and looser financial controls.

When the ANC came to power with a landslide vote in 1994, they did so on the promises of the Freedom Charter. Penned in 1955, the Freedom Charter expressed South Africans' demands for the right to work, housing, freedom of movement, and - most radically - economic justice. "The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people," the Charter reads. "The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole, [and] all other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the wellbeing of the people." Most South Africans agree that these promises have been betrayed.

South Africa is ablaze with discontent, earning it the title of "protest capital of the world". Early this year some 3,000 protests occurred over a 90-day period, involving more than a million people. South Africans are taking to the streets, as they give up on electoral politics. This is particularly true for the young: Nearly 75 percent of voters aged 20-29 did not participate in the 2011 local elections. So far the protests have been focused on issues like access to housing, water, electricity, and other basic services, but it won't be long before they coalesce into something much more powerful, as they did during the last decade of apartheid. There are already signs that this is beginning to happen. The Economic Freedom Fighters, founded by Julius Malema, the corrupt former leader of the ANC Youth League, is successfully mobilising discontented youth and making a strong push to nationalise the mines and the banks. NUMSA, the metal workers union, recently broke ranks with the ANC in a historic turn that could open the way for a labour-based opposition to the ruling party for the first time since 1994.

The government's response has been a mix of police repression - including the recent massacre of 44 striking miners at Marikana - and the continued rollout of welfare grants, which now provide a vital lifeline to some 15 million people. The grants are a stop-gap solution to the failure of trickle-down economics, a way of papering over the contradictions of South African capitalism; everyone is aware that without them poverty and inequality would be so unbearable that the country's already tenuous sense of social stability would come crashing to an end. The ANC's legitimacy is beginning to unravel and consent among the governed has begun to thin as the ANC scrambles to shore up its symbolic connection to the liberation struggle.

 The revolution that brought us the end of apartheid has accomplished a great deal, to be sure, but it has not yet reached its goal. Liberation is not yet at hand. What is democracy if it doesn't allow people to determine their own economic destiny or benefit from the vast wealth of the commons? What is freedom if it serves only the capital interests of the country's elite?

Adapted from AlJazeera article by Jason Hickel, lecturer at the London School of Economics

Mandela's Promises Broken

While Obama, Cameron, Hollande and Merkel cry crocodile tears for Mandela’s passing they will conveniently turn a deaf ear to many of his observations.

“Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times -- times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry and wealth accumulation -- that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils.
Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life. While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.” -- Mandela during a 2005 speech on global poverty at London's Trafalgar Square

It is a pity that Mandela and the ANC failed to address the poverty problem and inequality remains South Africa’s greatest issue.

White South Africans, who account for 8.7 percent of the population of 53 million, on average earn six times more than their black counterparts and still have access to better education, medical care and housing. Just 8.3 per cent of blacks over the age of 20 had some post-secondary education in 2011, compared with 37 percent of whites.  The Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, has risen to 0.63 in 2009 from 0.59 in 1993, making South Africa one of the world’s most unequal societies. Unemployment is around 26%. according to official figures  but is much higher.  Youth unemployment exceeds 50%. About 80% of unemployed young people never worked or had jobs longer than a year.

During the first decade of ANC rule, around two million South Africans lost homes. Another one million lost farms. Shack dwelling increased 50%.  One-fourth or more of South Africans have no running water or electricity. Around 40% of schools have no electricity.  About 50% of South Africans have inadequate sanitation. Around 40% have no telephones.

HIV/AIDS remains a major problem. South Africa has the world's largest number of affected people. Officially it's over five million. It's more than in North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Central Asia combined.

Post-apartheid, life expectancy declined by 13 years. In 2011, it was 58, according to the World Health Organization.

Mandela could have made a difference. He could have fought honestly for a genuine socialist society. He chose instead the policies of the IMF and neo-liberalism. He relegated millions of black South Africans to permanent destitution, unemployment, hunger, malnutrition, homelessness, lost futures and early deaths. Accommodation with capitalism trumped the 1955 ANC's Freedom Charterthat declared "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people." and that  "The people shall share in the country's wealth!"  and "The land shall be shared among those who work it!"

The farm workers fight

Unions and charities supporting the Western Cape's 500,000 farmworkers say pay and conditions are so bad that South African wines, grapes and Granny Smith apples have called for a boycott of them. Of the Western Cape's fruit production, 58% is exported and, in Britain, one of the main importers is Tesco. For world socialists those calls to boycott South African produce is deja vu of the earlier anti-apartheid campaigns. This may help in this particular case but will not lessen the class struggle in South Africa.

The farmers' "vindictive" response to the latest two-week strike in the £850m-a-year fruit and wine sector is sacking workers by the truck-load.

South African farmworkers  called off the latest round of a strike for a daily wage of 150 rands (£10.65), their union said but warned of a new flare-up in the Western Cape.  Portia Adams, a spokeswoman for the employers' organisation Agri SA, said many farms had continued to operate using non-unionised labour from outside the farming areas.

 "The government should be forcing the farmers to the table but it is not," said Nosey Pieterse, secretary general of the Black Workers' Agricultural Sector Union, (Bawusa). "Our only weapon left is for the foreign retailers to pledge that unless the conditions are addressed, they will no longer import South African products." The government has been silent on the issue, tacitly pointing to ongoing annual minimum wage talks. Pieterse, a lifelong activist for farmworkers' rights, said: "The farmers are intransigent, vengeful and arrogant. Yet they are the beneficiaries of post-apartheid South Africa. In the first 10 years of democracy, the wine industry grew tenfold, from 20m litres output before 1994 to 220m litres. The farmworkers' conditions went the other way. Tenure rights laws were not accepted by the farmers. More than 1  million farmworkers were evicted. They remain slaves on the land of their birth."

 Most farmworkers are not unionised, many are illiterate and face the risk of eviction because they live on their employers' properties.Poorly enforced labour rights and tenancy laws as well as the pitifully low statutory minimum daily wage in the sector – 69.39 rands (£4.92) – perpetuate a culture of paternalism. To go on strike, workers have to stand up to employer.  A 2011 report by Human Rights Watch found widespread exposure to pesticides, lack of access to drinking water or sanitation, and failure to pay sick leave. While the system of dop – payment in alcohol – has largely been abolished, the Western Cape still has the highest rates in the world of foetal alcohol syndrome.

South Africa - the inequality didn't go away

South Africa’s first census in a decade shows wealth disparities between race groups that persist 18 years after the end of apartheid. While incomes for black households increased an average 169 percent over 10 years, their annual earnings are 60,613 rand ($6,987), or a sixth of that for whites.

Population growth and life expectancy have been curbed by one of the world’s worst AIDS epidemics. About one in nine people in South Africa are infected with HIV, the virus that causes the disease, according to the government. The census found 3.37 million children under the age of 17, or 19 percent of the total, had lost one or both parents, with AIDS cited as a major contributor.

“These figures tell us that at the bottom of the rung is the black majority who continue to be confronted by deep poverty, unemployment and inequality,” President Jacob Zuma said.

Born-again robber baron

A hero of South Africa's struggle who is now a business tycoon has been accused of having the blood of Marikana mineworkers on his hands after the release of emails he sent to mine management and government ministries. Cyril Ramaphosa, who 25 years ago led the National Union of Mineworkers in a key strike against the white minority regime, was criticised for betraying the very people he used to represent.

 His business interests include a seat on the board of Lonmin, the company that owns the platinum mine where, two months ago, a wildcat strike led to a police massacre of 34 workers. Ramaphosa sought to intervene with senior government figures on Lonmin's behalf. On the eve of the killings, he called for action against miners engaged in "dastardly criminal" conduct.  Ramaphosa had called for action to deal with the "criminals", whose crime was to seek a wage increase. Ramaphosa warned the police minister, Nathi Mthethwa, to come down hard on the strikers, and was lobbied by Lonmin management to "influence" Shabangu and advised her that "silence and inaction" on the events was "bad for her and government". E-mails showed a direct collusion between Ramaphosa, Lonmin, mineral resources minister Susan Shabangu's department, the police ministry and state security agencies.

Co-author of the post-apartheid constitution, a patrician figure in the governing African National Congress Ramaphosa has been touted as a possible deputy to President Jacob Zuma in an ANC leadership election in December.

poverty apartheid contines

South Africa's children still face apartheid-like inequality according to a new report. Sixty percent of children survive on less than 575 rand ($67, 51 euro), or around two thirds of black children 18 years and only two percent of white children.

Most of the poorest children live in rural areas, still locked into apartheid's geography of living in the poor former quasi-independent homelands that were set up for blacks by the racist white minority government.

"It looks just like a map of the old South Africa," said Katharine Hall, senior researcher at the University of Cape Town-based Children's Institute describing a map showing the geographical dispersal of the most deprived areas.

"Children who are born to poor parents and grow up in poor households are likely to remain poor, and in this way the inequalities of apartheid are reproduced," states the report.

post-apartheid capitalism

In the shadow of Lonmin's Marikana mine in South Africa ramshackle settlements cluster around this mine operated by the world no. 3 platinum producer and around others in the North West Province, the world's prime platinum mining region. The mine and its squalid settlement was the scene of labour violence last week which killed 40 miners, two police and two security guards, the deadliest security incident in South Africa since the end of white minority rule 18 years ago.

"This is no way to live or grow children. Fifty people share one toilet. We don't have water," said a woman who identified herself as Pinky, the wife of a striking rock drill operator at Marikana who shares a one-room tin box with her husband and two children.

"You work so hard, for so little. You might as well be dead," said a 23-year-old Lonmin worker

A report this week by the Bench Marks Foundation, a church-linked organisation that monitors corporate responsibility, found that living conditions for South Africa's black miners on the platinum belt were the worst in the country. "The conditions in the township constructed by Lonmin are appalling. There are broken down drainage systems spilling directly into the river at three different points," Bench Marks Foundation executive director John Capel said, adding this situation had been left unattended for the last five years.

Nelson Mandela's ANC promised a better life for all when it took power with the end of apartheid in 1994. But despite being Africa's largest economy income disparity and unemployment have mushroomed while chronic joblessness has helped entrench a massive underclass. These circumstances, combined with ballooning living costs and a demand for better pay, led to the violent strike by Marikana workers which culminated in the police shooting of 34 miners on Thursday. They died in a hail of gunfire.

Poor unlikely to escape poverty

Children born into poor families unlikely ever to escape poverty or reap the rewards of living in Africa’s largest economy even 18 years after the end of apartheid. A child’s gender and ethnicity at birth, combined with a lack of education, largely determines that person’s chances of success in life. Equally significant is the World Bank's observation that the richest 10 percent of South Africa account for 58 percent of the nation’s income, while the bottom 10 percent accounts for 0.5 percent.  The bottom half earns less than eight percent of the nation's income.

Sandeep Mahajan, who headed the World Bank report said "Our results show that a South African child not only has to work harder to overcome the disadvantages at birth due to circumstances, but having done so, finds that these re-emerge when seeking employment as an adult,"

Labour analyst Andrew Levy said "History has shown that societies that have emerged from any kind of unjust system of governance struggle with inequality," said Levy. But he added that the new government "could have done better".

Where are the books?

Most South Africans still face to quality education, 18 years after apartheid. A court last week found two government schools that went for five months without books in the northern Limpopo province in breach of the country's constitutional right to basic education.

"The issue of shortage of textbooks ... is not isolated in Limpopo," said Lukhanyo Mangona, spokesman for an NGO Equal Education. "We cannot quantify the number of (affected) schools, but everywhere you go you hear about these things."

Education was one of the main areas where blacks fought the racist apartheid regime, which sacrificed entire generations of blacks to the desks of a second-class "Bantu" education.

"Education was the foundation upon which inequality was fashioned during the years of apartheid, but unequal educational opportunities still remain amongst the greatest obstacles to equality, dignity and freedom in today's South Africa," said Equal Education.

http://www.thesundaily.my/news/383844
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/court-case-highlights-south-africas-lack-of-books/story-e6frf7lf-1226361429844

traditional oppression in South Africa

The Traditional Courts Bill is meant to replace the Black Administration Act of 1927 with a law that is constitutional. As is stands, the bill creates a separate legal system for rural folk, geographically recreating the old Bantustans with no irony. If passed, it will in effect strip between 17 million and 21 million people living in rural South Africa of many of the rights we enjoy in the rest of the country.

The bill partly recognises what is already operational in many of these spaces. This includes royal patriarchs who explicitly endorse the kidnapping of girls into marriage – ukuthwala – as Chief Mandla Mandela does, to those who silently endorse it, such as Chief Mwelo Nonkonyana. Many rural communities organise against repressive patriarchal practices, resisting forced unpaid labour, refusing to pay tribal levies, and in countless ways refusing to be docile subjects of chiefs who are given absolute power by this bill. The bill will bestow the final say on the chief presiding over a dispute.

Legal researcher Dr Simiso Mnisi reminds us that ordinary rural Africans shape and reshape custom, culture and practice all the time. She calls this living custom. Living custom enables culture and custom to continue to work in the interest of those who own it.

Mamphela Ramphele challenged this false opposition often held up in conservative culturalist arguments between “foreign” legal systems at work in the rest of the country and “indigenous” legal systems that will be protected in the proposed bill. She points out that our specific legal framework is home-grown. We created our Constitution and legal framework. We did not import it from anywhere else. This is why it is the most progressive Constitution in the world and is globally recognised as such.

The Bill lists criminal offences that can be heard by a traditional court. The Bill allows for the minister to appoint a traditional leader as the presiding officer of the court—without community input. The Bill does not allow a defendant to have an attorney, nor does it give a defendant the option of being tried in a mainstream court.

Dr Sindiso Mnisi Weeks, senior researcher at the law, race and gender research unit of the University of Cape Town, said "It centralises power to a single individual who may have conflicts of interest.”
Mazibuko K Jara, of the Democratic Left Front, said that for the past month he had “listened to harrowing stories from many women and other rural dwellers about the conditions they face living under unaccountable and undemocratic chiefs. The struggle for democracy has only just begun again in rural areas.”
Nomonde Mbelekane, president of the Rural People’s Movement, testified in 2010 about injustices at the hands of traditional leaders. “Some of the chiefs in Peddie have said that women are impure, dirty and involved in witchcraft. In Prudhoe village, an eight-month pregnant woman was called to the Dabi tribal court. She had tried to claim damages from the man who made her pregnant. The court decided that she was just accusing the man and dirtying his name. The court said the man’s father is rich and important; he cannot just have his family name pulled through the mud. She was then sentenced to corporal punishment.”

Other activist groups such as the Association for Rural Advancement, The Rural Women’s Movement  and the Landless People’s Movement also expressed concern about the proposed law.

The situation gets even worse for women. In many traditional courts, women are not allowed to represent themselves or even speak during proceedings. This bill reinforces this by allowing for women to be represented by their husbands or family members (the bill prohibits legal representation in traditional courts) – entrenching existing discriminatory practices. Women’s groups and particularly rural women’s groups are justifiably outraged. 18 years into democracy, women in rural areas are about to be declared second-class citizens by their own government. In practice, many rural women already struggle with decisions by traditional authorities that regularly attempt to strip them of things like land access and inheritance rights. This will only get worse when women find themselves stuck in a system that refuses to recognise their right to speak for themselves or provide legal protections from the very people now making legal decisions. Other gaps include the fact that there is no explicit recognition of crimes such as physical and sexual abuse which are currently considered private or ‘domestic’ matters not fit to be brought before a public court.

There also appears to be no opt-out clause. Anyone whose civil or criminal matter arises in the jurisdiction of the traditional court (i.e. Chief) can be summoned to the court and failure to show up carries whatever penalties the chief sees fit, up to and including those he (and it will almost inevitably be ‘he’) could hand down in sentence. People living in areas control by chiefs won’t have the option of choosing to have their cases heard in a magistrate’s court, like other citizens, without first going through the traditional court process, and even then can only appeal on limited grounds. While everyone else in South Africa has one legal system, these people have another.

Those who support the bill vehemently argue that this is a necessary part of respecting traditional culture and that it is important because constitutional authority has undermined the power and authority of the chiefs. Those opposing it point out that the bill takes us right back to the era of a separate legal system for black people – an era that was problematic precisely because those living in the homelands, those who were deemed (through no will of their own) to fall under the authority of traditional leaders, were not equal before the law. South Africa is a complicated country and the careful balancing of the rights of different groups is inevitably necessary. For this democracy to work, however, the rights of an individual to have a say in his or her future, to be treated equally before the law and to be recognised as part of the same system as everyone else, rather than being regarded as a subject with no say in the matter, have to be secure.

10 problems with the Bill

1. It creates a second-class justice system for over 17 million South Africans.
2. It gives even more power to those chiefs recognized by the state law and nothing to all other legitimate traditional leaders.
3. It allows these chiefs to decide what custom means.
4. All other members of the community, including women and young men, are not included in decision making.
5. It removes checks and balances on power, creating room for corruption, including the power to demand illegal levies.
6. It confirms apartheid “Bantustan” boundaries.
7. It negatively affects women, especially by supporting rules that prevent women from representing themselves.
8. It allows for forced labour and removal of customary benefits as punishments.
9. It applies to everyone; you cannot opt out even if you have valid reason.
10.Regardless of what charge you are facing, you can never ask for legal representation

Last year the Malawi government was widely condemned over local courts bill that gave legal authority to ‘lay courts’. Part of the reason for the criticism was the bizarre crimes that were recognised, such as “writing or uttering words with intent to wound religious feelings” and “fouling the air”, but the more important problem was that it created a parallel, largely unregulated local legal system.

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82004
http://mg.co.za/article/2012-02-17-traditional-courts-bill-out-of-step/
http://www.africanscene.co.za/2012/03/traditional-courts-bill-a-travesty/

THE TRAGEDY AND THE FARCE

"Tradition has it that whenever a group of people has tasted the lovely fruits of wealth, security and prestige it begins to find it more comfortable to believe in the obvious lie and accept that it alone is entitled to privilege." - Steve Biko

Despite celebrations of freedom on 27 April every year, severe and widespread poverty persists in South Africa. Our education system is in tatters, the future of many black kids has been declared futureless. Unemployment is sky rocketing, wasting the talents of many young people who are condemned to a life of permanent poverty. Many black people continue to lack access to electricity, clean water and proper sanitation. Many are under nourished.

All these things are happening when the elite and the government officials are living affluent lives. The president has just built a mansion in Enkandla to the tune of more than R400m. Malema has also built a house to the tune of R16m. Every weekend the elite host parties and weddings that cost no less than a million while the people they claim to represent go to bed on an empty stomach and live in absolute poverty. They do not find this morally troubling. They have no conscience, otherwise they would not shoot us with rubber bullets when we protest because they have neglected us. Power and wealth forms a hard shell around their consciousness so that they do not see that it is fellow human beings suffering in the poverty around them.

We live in a society where the unemployment rate is said to be 23% while the truth is different but the government is committed to falsifying figures. The real unemployment rate is closer to 40%. We live in a society where to be black and unemployed is held to mean only one thing - laziness and expecting too much from the government. We live in a society where to speak out against government injustice is said to mean that you are lazy and ungrateful. We live in a society where people that speak out against the injustice that we live with every day means that we are told that we are being used by someone else. We live in a society where the poor are denied basic health care because of our inability to pay. Every time the poor go to the clinics we are certain of getting a Panadol pill regardless of our illness. We live in a society where the affluent elite live in their fortress and bubbles and see nothing wrong with the excessive amount of poverty and inequalities. They see the poor majority as a threat to society. They do not see this society as a threat to the majority. Yes we live in a society where slavery, colonialism and apartheid were abolished and yet the majority of black people live below the poverty line.

Apartheid was only abolished on paper not in real life. What is the difference between the secrecy act of apartheid and the current protection of the information bill? What is the difference between the apartheid homeland leaders and chiefs and the current traditional courts bill? What is the difference between the death of Hector Peterson in  1976 uprising and the recent murder of Andries Tatane? What is the difference between the corrupt apartheid government and the current government that is corrupt beyond repair. Think of the arms deals and all the local municipalities that have become milking cows for the leadership of the ruling party, and then spot the difference. Think of Zuma’s mansion in Enkandla, paid for by the taxpayer’s money and think of the mud house that are surrounding his mansion, mud houses that are crumbling down.

Our leaders are part of the machine that is oppressing us today. They have become stooges of capital. They have not confronted white racism seriously. We are important as far as voting is concerned to them but all they see in us is that we are voting cattle. Our new elite has taken the old masks of the colonialists and is proudly wearing them. The new elite has nothing to do with transforming the nation except to camoflage capitalism.

This whole society needs to be transformed. It needs to be opened up to the participation of the people. Political power and control over resources must be shared. We need revolutionary change. Our unity has never been as urgent a necessity as it is today. The students and the youth, the rural and the poor, the Unemployed People’s Movement and other movements such as Abahlali base Mjondolo, Ilizwi Lamafama, etc. need to unite and form once progressive bloc. We are the agents of change not the new elite that has betrayed the struggle. We need to unite outside their movements because they have privatised our struggle. Like the formation of the Black Consciousness Movement did in the 1970s, we need to unite in our own space, define our own struggle and politics and shake the foundations of capitalism. Forging a real unity of poor people’s movements. The Unemployed People’s Movement was formed in August 2009 to respond to the crisis of unemployment and the commoditization of essential services in a society dominated by corruption and greed. As Steve Biko said, we blacks are tired of standing at the touchlines to witness a game that we should be playing. We want to do things for ourselves and all by ourselves. This is a realisation that we are the protagonists of our lives and nobody will free us but ourselves; we – the unemployed - will have to be our own liberators.

 “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce” - Karl Marx. Apartheid was the tragedy, the post-apartheid economic divide is the farce.

Taken and adapted from
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/81680

Comrades?

Freedom and democracy in post-apartheid South Africa has meant white minority rule being replaced by rich minority rule. People pretended as if they were freedom fighters while they were freedom robbers. They were wolves wearing the attire of the Freedom Charter and so we thought that they were lambs

Do we still call them "comrades" those who steal the money that is supposed to go the poor? How can we call somebody who got rich by stealing from the poor a comrade?

Why in such a good country are there people sleeping on the roads while billions goes missing from the money set aside to develop the people? Even now, even with everything that we have seen, with the mansions and sports cars and Johnny Walker Blue on one side and old ladies looking for rotting food in rubbish bins on the other side, when people are arrested for stealing from the people others will come with placards written 'innocent until proven guilty'. But at the time when that person was committing the crime he or she never thought anything about the people. Is politics now just about each little group supporting their own thief so that they can get something too?

Are we really free? Democracy has made some of us multimillionaires but these multimillionaires are not even willing to help those that are suffering. Was this country and its resources created for them? The Freedom Charter said that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it". It didn't say that "South Africa belongs to the whites now but in the future it will belong to the rich".

Those who have become rich are trying to redefine freedom and democracy to suit themselves. Those who have remained faithful to what freedom and democracy really mean, to what they meant when the people got united, are labelled as traitors of our new democracy. If you say in 2012 what you said in 1994 or in 1984 or in 1976 or in 1960 you are a traitor.

How on earth can they sleep peacefully when they know  that the people that elected them to improve their lives are sleeping on the road?

These people that are ruling us know they told us that there is not even one country in the world that has got such a good Constitution like our country. But now they are planning to amend it. They say that the Constitution is the reason why the poor are still poor! In fact the real reason is that poor people are using the Constitution to know the truth. We are using the Constitution to defend ourselves. They say that they want to change the Constitution and that they are the real custodians of human rights and the people's dignity. They say that they are the ones that really want equality. But where are the views of the people on the ground? Have they ever visited the people to seek their views?

Why all of a sudden is there this plan to amend the constitution? The government has been in power since 1994. Is it because corruption is escalating and because protests are escalating? They didn't start with the Constitution. They started with the newspapers. They wanted to make sure that the newspapers are not exposing their secrets. Some of these same newspapers exposed our struggles while we were under white minority rule but know that we are under rich minority rule they want to cut their wings. What is it that they are intending to do to us? Why do they want to ensure that we don't have all the information that we need to understand things properly? It was the newspapers that exposed how the bosses of Aurora Mines were getting so rich while they were not paying their workers. People on the ground must ensure that they oppose this autocratic thinking and that the stands as united as against the rule of the rich minority as they did against the rule of the white minority. Democracy is the rule of the people. It is not the rule of a rich minority instead of a white minority.

We have not forgotten that they told us that there will be nothing that they will do without the people. But when they say 'people' who are they referring to? Do they just mean the people like them, who are becoming richer as the rest of us become poorer? One thing is for sure. If you do not belong to a political party and you believe in a living politics, if you believe that poor people can think and that we should all make this country together then it means that you are not a human being. We thought that are our involvement in the struggle to liberate ourselves we would harvest the fruit of our toil. But it seems as if we were just wasting our time and energy for those who now think for us. These days it looks like the politicians think that they can do whatever they want. But we still remember that they were supposed to be taking our agenda forward. They were supposed to be working for us, not stealing from us and repressing us. While they are planning to amend the Constitution we are dying in shack fires, from floods and from AIDS. Many of us are looking for work every day and are becoming exhausted and depressed. Some of us that have work are not treated as human beings at work and still have to live in shacks because the pay is so bad.

During the World Cup so much money was wasted to make things for the visitors from all over the world. Our government loves to impress rich people from other countries but we don't count to them. They are ashamed of us. In fact we must be evicted so that we can be hidden away from international appearance. But of course when the elections come then these same people will be needed to vote.

We are still living under minority rule. The minority passes the laws that it wants, it uses its muscles to force the people to accept its domination. The rule of the rich minority is very similar in some ways to the rule of the white minority. Instead of trying to eradicate racism in South Africa the government is just making sure that no one will stand in their way so that they can do what they like. Whether we like to talk about it or not Africans are still regarded Africans, Indians are still regarded Indians and whites are still regarded as whites. The government is not looking for ways to change this so that we can all just be South Africans. We are still treated according to the colour of our skins. Some racists are using poor African security guards to do their dirty work. This is even happening in the shopping malls which are supposed to be places in which all that counts is your money. We really have a gift for ignoring things that are true but that will create division. Sithi ke thina za sithetha inyaniso ikrakra (truth is bitter).

Now is the time for us all to realise that there is a struggle inside every struggle. Now is the time when we must stop being used as the tools of the capitalists and make sure that what belongs to the people must go to the people.


Taken and adapted from here 
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/81688