A Murder in Durban, CounterPunch
by RICHARD PITHOUSE
Durban, South Africa.
In the last days of June Nkululeko Gwala was
assassinated in Cato Crest – a shack settlement in Durban that is in the
process of being upgraded with formal housing. Just over three months ago
Thembinkosi Qumbelo was gunned down in the same streets. Both men had been
prominent figures in the increasingly bitter struggles around housing that have
convulsed Cato Crest in recent months. There have been road blockades, a land
occupation – named, as they often are these days, ‘Marikana’ – and the offices
of two municipal councillors have been burnt down.
Five people from the area all, like Gwala,
members of the shack dweller’s movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, are in hiding
after being subject to death threats from local party structures. Others have
been told that their access to what counts as work – ‘volunteering’ to work as
a cleaner in the grandly named Expanded Public Works Programme in exchange for
food vouchers – will be withdrawn. At times these threats have been openly
issued in public meetings by ANC leaders.
In situations like these there are always all
kinds of rumours. But there’s no question that people are scared. Nothing of
possible political consequence is discussed on the telephone, meetings are held
furtively and when a new person arrives with an account of threats from the
local party structures they are very carefully checked out before even being
allowed to enter a room.
People are certain that Gwala was murdered by
the same men who killed Qumbelo and that one of the assassins is still hanging
around, in a long black coat and a black cap pulled low, waiting for his chance
to strike again. It’s often pointed out that these assassinations look like
those that have become routine in the taxi industry and that the local Councillor,
Mzimuni Ngiba, is a taxi owner.
One man says that he saw a municipal VIP vehicle
parked around the corner on the day when Gwala was murdered. A whole busload of
people say that while they were travelling back to Cato Crest from Gwala’s
funeral in Inchanga they saw Ngiba in a car, a white Toyota Tazz, with the
Mayor. Most people seem to think that it was the comments made by the ANC
chairperson in Durban, Sibongeseni Dhlomo, in a public meeting on the day of
Gwala’s murder that authorised the hit.
It’s not usually clear how far up the party
hierarchy sanction for political violence goes. But given that in the past
senior figures in both the municipal and provincial government have offered
open endorsement for violence against independently organised activists, that
this violence has been carried out with impunity and the escalating rate of
assassination within the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal naivety in this regard seems as
ill-advised as paranoia.
A few years ago state violence at the hands of
the police and private security companies in Durban was most often driven by
attempts to beat back popular opposition to evictions. Today demands for
housing or services like sanitation and electricity can still result in
conflict. But now that the Municipality’s attempt to resegregate large swathes
of the city on the basis of class by removing shack settlements from middle
class suburbs has been thoroughly defeated it is the arrival of ‘delivery’ that
most often tends to result in protest and violence at the hands of the police
or party thugs.
There are a number of reasons why ‘delivery’ is
so acutely contested. One is that it is invariably imposed from above without
any sort of meaningful negotiation. “They will never”, S’bu Zikode from
Abahlali baseMjondolo says in angry resignation, “dirty their hands by
negotiating with poor people.” This means that development that might look good
on a spreadsheet can be experienced as catastrophic by its ‘beneficiaries’. In
one of the more bizarre cases people in eTafuleni, many of whom have large
homes, some with as many as 7 rooms, along with grazing land, have discovered
that the Municipality considers their homes to be shacks and wants them to move
into a transit camp – a government built and controlled shack settlement.
A second common problem is that in open
violation of law and policy attempts are invariably made to exclude large
groups of people from the list of ‘beneficiaries’. This helps the technocrats
because it reduces their estimation of the ‘backlog’. It helps the politicians
because its causes bitter divisions within communities. The most common
strategy to achieve exclusion is that shack renters are left homeless or
sentenced to the limbo of the transit camp, while shack owners are given
houses. Increasingly, although not invariably, this process of excluding some
from the count of who is entitled to receive what the state offers is given an
ethnic inflection. In recent months the idea that the right to public goods
should be mediated by ethnicity has been actively endorsed by senior ANC
figures in Durban who, scurrilously, have blamed their inability to provide
housing to people on migrants from the Eastern Cape – the geographic reference
is a proxy for ethnicity.
Another factor generating conflict is rampant corruption.
Sometimes it takes an informal form, with houses being allocated via deals
struck on the bonnet of a councillor’s car. At other times it becomes a rival
formality that intersects with other aspects of the formal system. There is
even a case of a person presenting a receipt for an illegally bought house to
the courts to justify her demand, as an upstanding property owner, to have her
neighbours, longstanding residents of the area, evicted from their shacks.
People who are moved from their own shacks to
transit camps are invariably told that they will be first on the list to access
housing when houses have been built. But once the houses are built it is not
unusual for people unknown to local residents to be installed in the houses
amidst bitter recrimination driven by allegations of corruption. Because there
is no open process governing allocation, and at times no obvious rationale
behind who gets a house and who doesn’t, there is always the risk that rumours
of corruption can exceed the reality of corruption.
The brazen use of the state’s housing programme
to reward loyalty to the ruling party is also central to the acrimony that more
or less inevitably accompanies ‘delivery’. If you are renting your shack, have
no money to pay a bribe, have not demonstrated your fealty to the local party
bosses and are seen to be of an ethnicity with a lesser claim to the city
‘delivery’ may very well mean eviction. There are also rivalries, sometimes
violent, within the party around who gets access to jobs, tenders and the right
to allocate houses.
All of this explains a lot of the fury that has
accompanied the arrival of ‘delivery’ in Cato Crest. But none of this is unique
to Cato Crest. Last year the Zakheleni shack settlement erupted. Earlier this
year it was KwaNdengezi. In both cases there was serious armed intimidation
from or linked to local party structures and people had to flee their homes.
Right now in places like Siyanda and Uganda tensions resulting from claims of
corruption are running high.
The realities of public housing as it is
actually built and allocated are so far from the technocratic fantasies laid
out in policy documents, and from how the law is supposed to work, that new
forms of power are being developed from above and below to deal with the
situation. Councillors, often accompanied by bodyguards bristling with guns and
menace, are sometimes little more than gangsters, their authority sustained by
intimidation and patronage. The violence required to defend the development
model is still sometimes exercised by the police and private security but it is
increasingly being taken over or outsourced to freelance thugs by local party
structures. Activists report that it’s not unusual for people who have been in
and out of jail to be given key roles in directing housing projects. Appeals to
the Municipality to act against gangster councillors – whether expressed via
fax, protest or the occupation of the City Hall – are invariably ignored.
New forms of social power are emerging in
response to the intersection between elected authority and gangsterism.
Abahlali baseMjondolo has weathered serious repression and currently has fifty
four branches across the city. In KwaNdengezi the local traditional leader and
the Commander at the local police station have both emerged as far more
credible brokers than the local councillor. The Station Commander, embarrassed
at having his officers arrest people, including an old woman, on the orders of
the local councillor is now calling all the constituencies in the area together
to negotiate a way through the mess.
Alliances are also constantly shifting. In
Siyanda the Branch Executive Committee of the ANC has decided to support
Abahlali baseMjondolo in a planned protest against the local councillor. In
Kennedy Road it is the police that have warned Abahlali baseMjondolo about new
plans for violence being hatched by the local ANC. It was a retired nurse, a
Black Consciousness activist in the 70s, who introduced people in Cato Crest to
Abahlali baseMjondolo. She was appalled to discover that her gardener had been
consigned to the Cato Crest transit camp and hooked him up with the movement.
The ANC admits that it has no plan to deal with
the housing crisis in Durban. Its own figures indicate that there are 400 000
people in 500 shack settlements waiting for houses. If the current trajectory
is maintained most of those people will die in their shacks. The municipal
housing programme that does exist is profoundly inadequate in many ways but
there is very little discussion of this for the simple reason that, from the
top to the bottom, it has been captured by people linked into the party. It is
being massively abused for their own pecuniary interests and to secure support
for the party. It can’t meet the needs of Durban’s residents but it can turn a
poor person into a business person with a car and a gun overnight and, with
equal rapidity, it can also turn a business person into the sort
multi-millionaire that collects imported sports cars as a hobby. The questions
that are being posed in Durban from above are about the distribution of state
resources and not how to use them to meet people’s needs more effectively. S’bu
Zikode stresses that an effective challenge from below requires unity to be
built between shack owners and renters, and across ethnicities, by developing a
clear sense of “the real enemy”.
In 2013 the office of the Mayor of Durban may
sit on a street named after Pixely Ka Seme, one of the intellectuals present at
the founding of the ANC in 2012. But the party, with its toxic mix of
millionaires and gangsters, is a world away from the vision of Seme, and the
best of those that followed him. For Mazwi Nzimande, a young militant in
Abahlali baseMjondolo, the lesson is clear: “You must always love justice more
than any organisation.”
