Richard Pithouse, The Con
In 2005, early in her in
her first term as Minister of Housing, Lindiwe Sisulu announced that the state
had resolved to ‘eradicate slums’ by 2014. This was a time when the
technocratic ideal had more credibility than it does now and officials and
politicians often spoke, with genuine conviction, as if it were an established
fact that this aspiration would translate into reality. It was not unusual for
people trying to engage the state around questions of urban land and housing to
be rebuffed as troublemakers, either ignorant or malicious, on the grounds that
it was an established fact that there would be no more shacks by 2014.
As we head towards the
end of 2014 there are considerably more people living in shacks than there were
in 2005, in 1994 or at any point in our history. The gulf between the state’s
aspirations to shape society and what actually happens in society has also been
starkly illustrated at the more local level. Sisulu’s flagship housing project,
the N2 Gateway project in Cape Town, resulted in acute conflict and remains in
various kinds of crisis to this day.
One of the lessons to be
learnt from the denialism around the nature and scale of the urban crisis that
characterised Thabo Mbeki’s Presidency is that although the state is certainly
a powerful actor, it has often been profoundly wrong about its capacity to
understand and to shape social reality.
But Sisulu’s first term
as the Minister of Housing is not only remembered for her failure to grasp
either the scale of the demand for urban land and housing or the limits of the
state’s response. There was also a marked authoritarianism to her approach. She
did not oppose the escalating and consistently unlawful violence with which
municipalities across the country were attempting to contain the physical
manifestation of the urban crisis via land occupations.
Sisulu also offered her
full support to the failed attempt, first proposed in the Polokwane
Resolutions, and then taken forward in the KwaZulu-Natal parliament in the form
of the Slums Act in 2007, to roll back some of the limited rights that had been
conceded in the early years of democracy to people occupying land without the
consent of the state or private land owners.
At the same time she also
earned some notoriety for her unilateral, and clearly unlawful, declaration in
2007 that residents of the Joe Slovo settlement in Cape Town would be
permanently removed from the (entirely mythical) ‘housing list’ for opposing
forced removal.
She was also silent in
the face of the violence marshalled through party structures against shack
dwellers who had had the temerity to organise around issues of urban land and
housing independently of the ANC in both Durban and on the East Rand in 2009
and 2010.
Her second term as
Minister, in a portfolio now termed Human Settlements, has been marked by a
similar silence in response to the even more brazen forms of repression, including
assassination, now visited on people organised outside of the ANC in shack
settlements in Durban.
But there have been some
important shifts in her position. One is that like her predecessor Tokyo
Sexwale, she no longer speaks as if the ‘eradication of slums’ is imminent. In
this regard the state has developed a more realistic understanding of the
situation it confronts.
Another shift is Sisulu’s
opposition to unlawful evictions in Cape Town. This is, given her on-going
silence in response to violent and unlawful evictions elsewhere in the country,
clearly an expedient rather than a principled position. But in a context where
land occupations are routinely misrepresented through the lens of criminality
or political conspiracy her framing of her opposition to eviction in Cape Town
in the language of justice may open some space in elite publics to politicise
the contestation over urban land, something that is relentlessly expelled from
the terrain of the political by a variety of elite actors.
But it is Sisulu’s recent
declaration that the state intends to do away with the provision of free
housing and that people under forty will no longer be eligible for public
housing that has been particularly controversial.
Both aspects of this
comment position her in direct contradiction to the law and the policies to
which the government is, at least in principle, committed. This is nothing new.
When it comes to its response to the urban land occupation the state routinely
speaks and acts in direct contradiction to both law and policy. What is
significant here is the indication that the state, increasingly short of cash,
intends to step back from some of its commitments to sustain some forms of
public welfare.
Sisulu is presenting the
state’s public housing programme as if it were a temporary state response to
apartheid, which now that things have been normalised, can be abandoned. Both
parts of this equation are seriously problematic.
The ANC, in a posture
that these days is simply farcical given that it is Vladimir Putin rather than
Vladimir Lenin that restores the sparkle to Zuma’s eyes in tough times, likes
to pretend to itself that it is a revolutionary organisation. But public
housing, far from being some kind of unique and temporary South African
exception to the general status quo, is a standard part of even basic social
democratic programmes.
Countries in the South
like Bolivia, Brazil and Venezuela all have public housing programmes of
various kinds. These programmes all have serious flaws, but the fact that they
exist and that other states are committed to public housing as a principle,
should not be denied.
In Venezuela the public
housing programme includes housing that is entirely free for entirely
impoverished people. There are also governments in the South that have actively
sought to legalise land occupations and support the improvement of conditions
in shack settlements.
Sisulu’s assertion that
people under forty “have lost nothing [to apartheid]” is one of the most
extraordinary statements to have escaped from the mouth of a cabinet minister
since 1994.
The pretence that
apartheid’s consequences came to an end in 1994 is the sort of denialism that
is so out of touch with reality – and in a way that works to naturalise
inequalities inherited from a long history of brutal oppression that turned
race into class – that it’s almost obscene to even engage it as if it were a
serious proposition.
In a situation in which
millions of people cannot access housing through the market, the state should
recognise the social value of land occupations, offer all the support that it
can to improve conditions in shack settlements and develop the best and most
extensive public housing programme possible.
But if the state
continues to see most land occupations as criminal and to curtail its own
public housing programme, it will place millions of people in a situation that
is just not viable. The inevitable
consequence of the state committing itself to an urban agenda that simply has
no place for millions of people will be a radical escalation of the already
intense conflict in our cities.
