Seven years after the African National Congress swept to office on the promise of "a better life for all", the patience of South Africa's working class and poor is wearing thin. Across the country, community organisation and mobilisation is beginning to revive around demands that the ANC government "deliver". There is an increasingly militant resistance to evictions, and water and electricity cut-offs, that flow inevitably from the ANC's pro-capitalist economic policies. Green Left Weekly's NORM DIXON spent July in South Africa and spoke to some of the activists leading this renewed struggle.
As you travel into the Johannesburg city centre, you notice a few tattered posters on which a beaming President Thabo Mbeki declares: "Speeding up change and fighting poverty". Surviving from the December municipal elections, fixed high enough on freeway pylons and light poles to have escaped being torn down by resentful passers-by or pasted over by organisers of discos and raves, these shabby reminders of ANC promises seem starkly symbolic.
A few hundred metres further on, you enter Hillbrow, a crime-ridden inner-city ghetto. Evicted families, with all their belongings piled on the footpath, are a common sight. Sometimes, usually after nightfall, you catch a glimpse of the baton-wielding gangs of men clad in red overalls (contemptuously dubbed "red ants") who are employed by private security companies to throw people out of their homes because they cannot afford the rent or because corrupt landlords have failed to pay council rates.
During the municipal election campaign, Mbeki accompanied ANC Johannesburg mayoral candidate Amos Masondo to Soweto. Masondo told a rally in Orlando Stadium that an ANC local government would run the city in the interest of its poorest residents and provide free water and electricity. The lifespan of Masondo's promises was shorter than that of the posters they were printed on.
On March 21, Human Rights Day, more than 600 people marched from Orlando West to the council's offices in Jabulani to protest against evictions, water and power cut-offs, and to protest against the national government's moves to privatise Eskom, which provides 98% of South Africa's electricity.
On June 30, angry Soweto residents marched to Masondo's house in the formerly all-white middle-class suburb on Kensington in protest at his failure to respond to their demands. They attempted to disconnect the mayor's electricity and water supply.
The protests were led by the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee. SECC activist Virginia Setshedi told Green Left Weekly that the committee was formed last year in response to an intensification of Eskom's "cost recovery" and "credit control" drive in preparation for its break-up and privatisation by the national ANC government. Thousands have had their power disconnected. The SECC argues that electricity is a basic right, not a privilege as is suggested by Eskom management.
"ANC councillors accuse the SECC of being 'anti-government' and 'anti-ANC'," Setshedi told Green Left Weekly. "They say we should understand that privatisation is a 'positive' process which will bring jobs at a 'later stage'. The question we ask them is: How many people should die so that jobs will be provided 'at a later stage'?
"All the ANC councillors are concerned about is protecting their positions at the expense of the lives of poor people, of the working class. Everyday, we fight them.
"The ANC no longer represents the people on the ground. When people go to the ANC about their electricity problems, they are only told that they must pay. In one meeting in my area, an ANC councillor said it is not a priority to check whether people are able to pay their arrears for electricity or other services. This shows the ANC's agenda."
In the face of such opposition, Setshedi said, SECC activists insist on their political right to organise. "In our mass meetings, we discuss the issue of privatisation and link it to the electricity crisis. The SECC makes sure that it embarks on action. We are not sitting in rooms meeting all the time."
The SECC has launched a defiance campaign called Operation Khanyisa (meaning "to light"). Teams of trained SECC activists reconnect people's electricity. The boldness of Operation Khanyisa has made the SECC very popular. The SECC has been seen to act, unlike the existing civic structures.
Setshedi explained that Operation Khanyisa has helped the SECC to become more organised. "Before, we had only one place people could phone to tell us that their electricity had been cut off. As many as 50 people were phoning each day. Some had been cut off two years ago. Now, when people phone the office, we contact the Khanyisa structure in that township and tell them to go to house so-and-so and switch them back on.
"We see this as a form of mobilising. We don't ask why or when the people were cut off, we just switch them back on. The SECC believes that everyone should have electricity."
While the SECC believes that mass action and grassroots participation is central to its campaign, it does not ignore legal avenues. The SECC argues that electricity and water cut-offs are unconstitutional and is preparing to challenge them in court. Setshedi also said the disconnection process was riddled with corruption.
"Eskom employ sub-contractors to switch off the power. They are paid R70 [A$18] for each disconnection. The sub-contractors present the circuit-breakers they have removed from the meters to prove that they have switched off people's power and are paid according to the number. This goes back to the issue of privatisation because only profits matter, rather than the safety and health of the people."
Setshedi noted that some of ANC councillors are the owners of these sub-contracting firms.
"We are preparing to have in depth discussions on why we want socialism and what is socialism", Setshedi added. "People want an organisation that represents their interests and deals with what is affecting them. We are still in the process of building that and it is going to take time. But our ultimate goal is to form an alternative. Definitely, we need a political alternative."
The SECC does not see its struggle as an isolated one. Together with other action groups — such as the Kathorus Concerned Residents (which also participates in Operation Khanyisa and has successfully resisted evictions through blockading the township), the Lekoa-Vaal Reconstruction Forum and the Vaal Working Class Coordinating Committee — a range of left-wing parties and groups, trade unionists and students, the SECC is affiliated to the Anti-Privatisation Forum.
The APF attempts to link community struggles with the broader struggle against privatisation and the South African government's neo-liberal economic policy, the Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) program.
Trevor Ngwane, the chairperson of the SECC, is also a central leader of the APF. "I was elected to the Johannesburg council as an ANC member in the first democratic local government election", he told Green Left Weekly. "I represented Pimville, in Soweto ... When [Johannesburg council's] Igoli 2002 was announced [in 1998], my constituents, the trade unions and I personally opposed it. I tried to raise my voice inside the party structures but failed.
"I then wrote an article for a newspaper — it was not a planned thing but obviously we were starting to throw caution to the wind — and within three days, I was suspended from all ANC positions. I was chairperson of one of the ANC's four Johannesburg branches and headed the council in which I was working.
"The ANC tried to make a deal with me. They called me and said, 'Look if you apologise publicly, withdraw your criticisms, we'll let you off the hook'. I went to my constituency and they said no, so I continued as an independent councillor for a year."
Ngwane told Green Left Weekly that the APF formed "organically" in opposition to Igoli 2002 and to Wits University's retrenchment of 600 workers when it outsourced cleaning, catering and other services in 2000. These two campaigns decided to form a joint committee, called the APF.
"There are signs of a revival of the movement", Ngwane said. "For a long time, although we could see that the working class was being short-changed, there was no real resistance or voices raising questions. Instead, we saw the creeping consolidation of the grip of the ruling party over political structures and the structures of civil society. Where the ANC had gained a grip, those structures disintegrated.
"Recently, there has been a turn. It is early days yet, but definitely people are asking, 'Why should we take this?'. For example, billions are being spent on arms. Those arms deals are corrupt. ANC politicians were given Mercedes Benz [cars] in return for giving big companies arms contracts. But at the same time, there are evictions, and electricity and water cut-offs, because the government claims it cannot afford to provide these services to people who cannot pay."
The revival of resistance is also evident in other parts of South Africa that Green Left Weekly visited. In Cape Town, there is growing anger at the evictions and water cut-offs in the sprawling working-class townships of the Cape Flats by the Western Cape provincial government and the Cape Town Unicity council — both controlled by the Democratic Alliance, a coalition of the former all-white apartheid-era National Party and the Democratic Party.
Zelda Hintsa, from the Athlone Concerned Residents Association, explained that while the evictions are being carried out by the parties that form the ANC's main opposition at the national level, the reasons cited by the politicians are the same — non-payment of rents and bills. Residents, too, are defending themselves in much the same way as the people of Soweto.
Cape Town communities have begun to organise themselves in a number of the Anti-Eviction Campaign Committees — in Tafelsig, Lavender Hill, Mitchell's Plains, Delft and Khayelitsha — and have organised mass marches, protests and militant mobilisations to defend families from evictions.
On June 27, around 1000 angry Cape Flats residents protested outside Cape Town mayor Peter Marais' office to demand an end to evictions and cut-offs, the scrapping of arrears and the provision of affordable public housing. They waved placards that demanded "Services not profits".
On July 2, more than 100 people mobilised to prevent police from repossessing the furniture of three families in Lavender Hill. In the police violence that followed, one of the residents, Musta Kim Allie, received a fractured skull from the butt of a police gun. Two Anti-Eviction Campaign leaders were also assaulted.
Using defiance tactics similar to the SECC's Operation Khanyisa, evicted families and their belongings have been moved back into their homes by teams of activists after council officials and police have departed.
As in Johannesburg, these grassroots struggle organisations have felt compelled to organise together with left-wing groups and activists under the banner of the APF, which meets in the South African Municipal Workers Union building in Athlone. Local SAMWU leaders play a prominent role in the APF.
In Durban, too, evictions and water cut-offs by the ANC-controlled city council have been the catalyst for poor communities to organise and take political action.
In the predominantly Indian township of Chatsworth, residents have militantly resisted attempts to evict those who, due to decimation of the local clothing industry that resulted from the ANC national government's GEAR policy, can no longer afford to pay rent or water rates. As in Soweto and Cape Town, defiance has taken the form of "struggle" plumbers reconnecting water services.
The community, led primarily by older women, has successfully confronted gun-toting cops, police dogs and tear gas to prevent people being evicted from their humble council flats. In one melee, in February last year, six people were wounded by police gun-fire.
Ashwin Desai, a fiery, left-wing activist who campaigns with, and has written about, the "poors" of Chatsworth, explained to Green Left Weekly that Professor Fatima Meer, a renowned fighter against apartheid for more than 60 years and Nelson Mandela's official biographer, came to Chatsworth in 1999 to urge the people to vote for the ANC.
The people told her that they were "not concerned about their former oppressors but their present oppressors". Meer promptly joined forces with the people of Chatsworth against her own party. She denounced the ANC council's "fascist brutality" against the people of Chatsworth. The Concerned Citizens' Forum (CCF), chaired by Meer, has assisted the "poors" of Chatsworth to organise.
After ANC leaders accused Meer of "acting like a counter-revolutionary", the respected leader hit back, telling filmmaker Ben Cashdan: "If we find ourselves in a situation where the government of the day does not deliver, and we believe the government has the capacity to deliver, we will demand that it delivers. If that is counter-revolutionary, then we will be counter-revolutionary.
"Once a party comes into power and forgets what its revolutionary platform was, then surely another party will replace it and continue the revolutionary struggle.
"I have always stood for the poor and the rights of the poor, and I'm now, again, standing for the poor and the rights of the poor. If that means standing against the ANC, then I'll be standing against the ANC."
In the December 5 municipal elections, the CCF's Preggie Naidoo was elected as Durban council's only independent councillor. Following Naidoo's death, a by-election was held on July 14. The CCF's Angie Pakkiri won a landslide victory in an 11-candidate field, defeating candidates from the ANC, the Democratic Alliance and the Inkatha Freedom Party. SECC and APF activists travelled from Soweto to help Pakkiri's campaign.
These developments have reignited a debate on the South African left. Trevor Ngwane told Green Left Weekly that, while "discussion around building a left political alternative to the ANC is not systematic, ... it is a question that is hanging over every serious socialist, every serious radical democrat, in South Africa, because the ANC is proving to be a failure [for the working class]. Of course, we all acknowledge that a lot of people are still loyal to the ANC to some extent, but that is also a function of there being no alternative."
Some in the APF, Ngwane explained, argue that the APF should become a national structure. "Naturally we want — we need — national coordination of the struggle. But within that argument, there is the idea that perhaps the APF could be an element of the future workers' party. That it has to speak out because it is a home for a defined politics. Others are saying, let's be more cautious.
"My view is — and I am not alone, I work with a small collective of comrades — that we should be discussing the need for a workers' party openly, but it is not going to be formed tomorrow.
"The old line of the far left was 'break the alliance' of the ANC-COSATU-SACP. There was a belief that COSATU would be the basis of the new workers' party."
Ngwane said that COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) and the SACP (South African Communist Party) are not meeting the challenges that the working class face today. "There was a time in 1994 when the SACP could claim to be a mass workers' party, with 70,000 members. But now I don't know of any SACP branch that still functions, except maybe the Johannesburg branch. In the SACP, they teach you that socialists must work in the ANC. Obviously, the SACP has gained influence over COSATU. They have a grip on COSATU.
"Our position is that the alliance is already broken, it exists just on paper. The ANC does what it likes. We can't wait for COSATU. The leadership of COSATU will never act on the workers' party project.
"What we need is a significant minority forming a workers' party — I don't mean 50 people, but thousands. But still it would be a minority in relation to the people who vote for the ANC or support the dominant COSATU/SACP line of working to win the ANC to working class politics ... The new movement must confront the fact that the old anti-apartheid movement is dead, or has sold out. This is the only way that the left can start organising strongly."
The existence of such a "significant minority" party could be important, Ngwane stressed, because "as soon as [the masses] start to move, it is most important to have direction, to coordinate struggles, and to come with the correct positions... This is the kind of situation where talk of revolution makes sense to people ... They can see land invasions here, and struggles against electricity cut-offs there.
"It's small pockets at the moment but it was only 10 years ago that tens of thousands of people were toyi-toying in the street, some getting shot and dying. We are all surprised that it quickly seemed to evaporate after 1994, but the memory is still there."