by Lindela 'Mashumi' Figlan, The Daily Maverick
Apartheid was defeated by the will of the people, but when
freedom arrived, along with it came a parasite. This parasite is eating the
people’s struggle from the inside out. It’s time to rid South Africa of its
unwelcome guest.
At home in Flagstaff my mother used to feed the two pigs
with one big walking dish. One day I noticed that she was no longer feeding the
pigs from one big walking dish and that she had separated one pig from another
and was using two walking dishes. I was very stressed because one was getting
thin and the other was getting fat. I asked my mother about her decision to
feed the pigs separately. She told me the thin pig had a parasite that was
eating it from the inside.
There is an important lesson in this story for South Africa.
Apartheid was defeated by the struggles of the people. But when freedom arrived
there was a parasite inside our movement, eating it from the inside. Then the
movement started to eat us too. During the struggle we were so focussed on the
Boers that we didn’t notice the parasite inside our movement.
Every weekend Abahlali baseMjondolo must go to two or three
new areas. People are rushing to join the movement because they cannot survive
without struggle. Without struggle you will be evicted from your shack, or end
up in a transit camp. The truth is that the government has no plan to house the
people. They are only interested in using the housing budget to make their
friends millionaires. Fraud and corruption are everywhere. Houses said to be
for the poor are given to people such as police officers and teachers, people
who are close to the ruling party. At the same time, our children are dying of
diarrhoea in shacks, women are being raped because there are no toilets and the
fires keep coming. The Constitution says that we have a right to housing and
that we can’t be evicted without a court order. The councillors don’t care
about the Constitution. They just evict people. If you resist you will be
arrested. You might be beaten or tortured. You might even be killed. And people
are losing jobs each and every day, and the government has no plan for them.
It was so easy for the President to sing “Awuleth’ Umshini
wam” to the people, asking them to bring him his machine gun. But now he is
singing “Inde lendlela”, telling the people that this war has gone on too long.
It is true that sometimes struggle is long. But it is also true that it didn’t
take long for the President to secure the wealth of his family and his friends.
It didn’t take long for him to build his own home. It didn’t take long for the
people’s struggles to be repressed. We have to ask ourselves what the President
has been doing with that machine gun some people were so happy to give him.
Millions of people have no work. Others are working for R60
a day through labour brokers. Yet the tenderpreneurs, those who are close to
the leaders of the ruling party, are earning millions and millions. It is clear
that some who were fighting the Boers were doing so in order to become the new
Boers, not because they were committed to justice. These are the same people
who tried to impose the Slums Act on us. They are the same people who are
repressing our struggles by burning our homes, locking us in prison, torturing
us in police stations and killing us. The police went onto the mountain to kill
the workers in Marikana just like they went on to Ingquza Hill to massacre our
fathers in 1960. We really have to ask ourselves: what has changed for the
workers and the poor?
The so-called comrades that lead this country are
hypocrites. They are parasites eating the people’s struggle from the inside.
They are opportunists of worst kind. This is why we call them the black Boers.
It is time to separate the real people’s struggle from the parasites. It is
time to stop giving away our power to politicians. It is time to stop feeding
them. It is time that we look after our own struggles and keep them separate
from the politicians and their tenderpreneurs.
An oppressor is an oppressor, no matter what colour they
are.
We need the workers to take the side of the poor, to join
with us in our struggles. We all know that this is impossible as long as the
workers are controlled by Cosatu, which is under the ANC and influenced by the
SACP too. But now that some workers are organising themselves autonomously from
the ANC, like we have done in Abahlali baseMjondolo since 2005, it might be
possible for the workers and the poor to struggle together.
Some of our fathers were in the mountain committees during
the Pondo Revolt. Some of our brothers are in the strike committees on the
platinum belt. Our wives, our sisters and our daughters are in the shack
committees with us. We know that more of us will be arrested, tortured and killed
in this struggle. But we will stand strong.
Those who come preaching division amongst the poor are our
enemies. Let us be clear who the real parasites in our society are. The
parasites are those who have privatised our struggle for their own gain. The parasites
are those who are growing rich while we are getting poorer. The parasites are
those who send their police or assassins to repress and even murder us when we
organise. We need to stop giving our support to the organisations that are
hosts for these parasites. We need to build healthy organisations, democratic
organisations, honest organisations. We need to build organisations that can
build the power of the workers and the poor.
