Christopher McMichael, Open Democracy, 5 January 2012
Lead by the pugnacious Helen Zille, the Democratic Alliance is South
Africa’s official opposition party and the governing party of the
Western Cape, the only one of nine national provinces not under the
control of the ruling ANC. Despite recent successes the party has failed
to win substantial support among South Africa’s black majority, due to a
widespread perception that, notwithstanding its meretricious rhetoric
of an ‘ Open Society’, the party remains a bastion of white privilege.
Further scepticism has been created by the parties’ aggressively neoliberal
policies which propose to reduce the country’s already partial
post-apartheid social welfare system . However, the DA is hoping that
the increasingly overt internecine fighting with the ANC will alter
South Africa’s political landscape to give it a credible chance of
becoming the ruling party by the end of the decade. With the ANC beset
by corruption scandals, a growing intolerance for political dissent
and the seeming inability to robustly tackle growing levels of social
inequality, the DA is attempting to position itself as a pragmatic and
efficient government in waiting.
Central to the strategy is the promotion of the City of Cape Town as
an exemplar of good governance. The DA’s Cape Town manifesto promotes
the city as beacon of ‘world class services, order and stability’ (and
by extension paints ANC run urban areas as decrepit ‘feral cities’).
Notably, in a country where inequality has sustained high levels of
violent crime, the DA’s Cape Town model offers humanistic sounding
injunctions about improving safety through reducing historical legacies
of underdevelopment, poverty reduction and ‘’violence prevention
through urban upgrading’’. The DA’s official line on urban safety
promises to enrol ordinary people in the improvement of the city through
social crime reduction strategies: as one memorable slogan in the
recent local election campaign
noted "a child in sport, is a child out of court". Notably, the DA
claims that its policies are linked by a concern for individual freedom
and the limitation of abusive state power.
However, as the last few years have shown much of the self-proclaimed
success of this model is in fact contingent on state violence and the
perpetuation of a low level social war against the urban poor. Rather
than an aberration this betrays a basal authoritarianism within the DA,
which views the poor as targets for pacification, containment and
‘warehousing’.
Take for example the saga of the N2 Gateway housing project. In
conjunction with the ANC led National government the city has attempted
to move thousands of people from the city to Delft. Despite all the talk
about meeting housing ‘’backlogs’’, most activists and researchers
argue that the construction of ‘beautiful formal housing opportunities’
between the international airport and the city was a pretext for massive
forced removals fast tracked ahead of the 2010 World Cup. Indeed, the
quality of these housing opportunities was quickly revealed to people
who had been moved from shack settlements into the two Temporary
Relocation Areas (TRA) associated with the project. The DA managed
Symphony Way TRA ( better know as Blikkiesdorp) greeted
its new residents with government built corrugated iron shacks, barbed
wired fencing, access control by the South African Police Service (SAPS)
and regular patrols by apartheid era Casspier armed personal carriers.
The residents of the Symphony Way informal settlement were so
unenamoured with the prospect of being forced into a glorified refugee
camp that they occupied
a nearby road in Delft for 21 months, the longest political action of
its kind in South African history. And as the city was continually warned
by residents this uprooting of communities has seen Blikkiesdorp
invaded by gang related violence. With Blikkiesdorp as its premier
dumping ground for unwanted and ‘risky’ populations, the ‘world class’
security of the city is often bought at the expense of creating
insecurity on the periphery.
For example, immediately prior to the World Cup last year, hundreds
of homeless people were evicted from the areas around the Greenpoint
stadium to Blikkiesdorp, a sudden influx of people which seemed to bear
all the hallmarks of an orchestrated clean up. The international media
had a field day with this story,
especially because of the camp's disturbing similarities to the titular
zone of exception in the film District 9. However, the DA’s slick press
cadres denied that there were any links between this and the upcoming
World Cup. Indeed, when conducting research for my PhD, one City
spokesperson even told me that they were not even aware of any
controversy about the evictions. These denials looked slightly farcical
in light of the city's public unveiling of its philanthropic sounding
'Winter Readiness Plan for street people’, which aimed to "rehabilitate"
its "participants" by offering vaguely described "activities" which
would keep them out of the city bowl. Coincidently, the plan was
initiated a month before the World Cup and happened to fit exactly into
FIFA imposed by-laws about restricting the visible presence of poverty
within host cities. Most tellingly, the plan stressed the importance of
ensuring that "our task is to get to people living on the streets before
they acquire survival skills on the streets. Once a person survives a
winter on the streets it is even more difficult to persuade him to
consider getting back home." Using language that wouldn’t be out of
place in the control of wild animals, the statement reveals much about
the status of the down and out in the eyes of the Cape Town authorities.
The creation of a far flung prison camp, whose architecture serves as
a weaponised form of containment is one thing, but the city
considerably upped the ante with last year's attempt to evict the
residents of Hangberg. As gruellingly recorded in the Uprising of Hangberg
documentary the police were clearly told to prepare for war: without
provocation the SAPS opened fire with rubber bullets, destroyed homes,
beat up schoolchildren. Several residents lost eyes. This shock and awe
campaign was undergird by a sophisticated DA strategy of disinformation,
in which the press was assured that the police were ‘liberating’ the
area from ‘ drug dealers’ and it was falsely claimed that violence had
been initiated by the community.
One of the most telling scenes in the film is Zille’s petulant
response to the community’s anger about this officially legislated
brutality. Surrounded by her police praetorian guard she storms off when
the understandably furious community refuses to accept a pious lecture
about their own best interests. Among activists Zille has become
notorious for this kind of behaviour, with radical community groups who
deviate from the official agenda set down in meetings accused of
undermining ‘development’ through talking ‘politics’. As seen in
Hangberg, this rapidly transmutes into the vilification of protest as
‘criminal’. The DA script entails a division between the ‘deserving
poor’ who want development and ‘troublemakers’ who make the cardinal sin
of demanding to be engaged in the political process.
The violence at Hangberg was so extreme that containing the negative
publicity proved a challenge even for the party’s finely honed
techniques of reality management. At a local election meeting this year I
saw a normally slick councillor reduced to half-baked evasions when the
issue was raised. After mumbling something about a ‘tragic
misunderstanding’ his conclusion was "you know how the police get in
these situations". While the level of state violence unleashed was
perhaps exceptional, this kind of militarised policing is not. As an
aspirant ‘World City’, the DA has managed Cape Town by drawing on a
transnational repertoire of what Stephen Graham calls
the new military urbanism : ‘crowd control’ which aligns ‘non-lethal’
weaponry with hyper aggressive tactics and campaigns of media
dissemination. While this is initially tested on groups which the state
considers marginal it may quickly become the norm. Indeed, the party’s
official security policy reveals
an eagerness to rollout such ‘first world security measures’ if in
power, from mandatory prison labour to the pre-emptive identification
and tracking of ‘potential’ criminals. To this end, Cape Town’s central
business district (CBD) has seen the establishment of a CCTV network of
Orwellian proportions whose surveillance footprint far exceeds any other
city in the country. However, this funnelling of resources into the CBD
stands in strong contrast
to the epidemic violence in the sprawling Cape Flats to the south east,
in which children have exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress
comparable to a warzone.
As the party supporters are quick to point out, ANC dominated
councils in other cities have engaged in similar actions, from
orchestrated attack on the shack-dwellers' movement, Abahlali base Mjondolo in 2009 to last year's dramatic upsurge in recorded cases
of police brutality. Indeed, it can be argued that this is a problem
which transcends parties as urban authorities’ efforts to create
sanitised world class cities fuses with historical legacies of
authoritarianism. Despite the troubling developments, post-apartheid
South Africa has a vibrant civil society which continually exposes and
challenges these abuses. However, the nature of our recent past means
that ordinary South Africans must be continually vigilant about the
application of state power, especially when this is glossed in a
packaged coat of ‘’international best practise’’.
Thus, despite the service it pays to liberal platitudes about an open
society, the DA’s approach to Cape Town's ‘peripheral’ areas and
populations appears to replicate a governmental strategy of disgusting
inequality by force and lashing out at society’s most vulnerable. As
Jean Pierre de La Porte has put it, the DA’s Cape Town model is divided
into a Manichean “world of orderly haves and embarrassing have-nots,
mocking the weak has become acceptable, since their own failure to be
prudent and follow the rules has brought their every misfortune upon
themselves – the vulnerable are dunces’’. Under Zille’s botox hardened smile lies a ready resort to the fists of iron which fortify this divide.
