Speakers: Pamela Ngwenya & Ben Richardson Date: Thursday 15 November 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: In 2006, the European Union (EU) reformed its sugar regime, reducing the reference price for sugar by 36%. This affected not just European sugar beet producers, but also sugarcane producers in the eighteen African, Caribbean and Pacific countries which had preferential access to the EU. Swaziland, a country with high levels of rural poverty and an acute reliance on sugar exports to the EU, was hit particularly hard by the reform. To cushion the impact, the EU agreed to an ‘Aid for Trade’ programme called the Accompanying Measures for Sugar Protocol countries (AMSP).
This paper explores the impacts of the AMSP in Swaziland. What we find is something of a mixed picture; what we refer to in the title as a ‘bittersweet case’. Firstly, not all vulnerable groups in the Swazi sugar-belt were targeted for support. Most of the aid was allocated to road building and grants for new smallholders to enter into the sugar industry. Meanwhile, the workers who lost their jobs, the communities who lost access to sugar industry welfare assistance and the existing smallholders, who were mired in debt, were further marginalized. Secondly, the uncertain benefits that have accrued to hundreds of new sugarcane smallholders are jeopardised by the on-going process of liberalisation, as well exposure to volatile world market prices. This suggests that the EU should reconsider its priorities for such Aid for Trade programmes.
Presenters: Pamela Ngwenya Having obtained her doctorate on the subject of ‘The Ethical Geographies of Caribbean Sugar’ from the University of Oxford in 2009, Pamela is now a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Built Environment and Development Studies and an affiliate of the Centre for Civil Society. Her research interests include agro-food politics, ethical philosophies, feminist geographies, experimental and creative methodologies. She is currently researching sustainable food strategies in Zimbabwe and is also a participatory and community video facilitator for the CCS, with on-going video projects.
Ben Richardson Based at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick Ben is currently an Associate Professor in International Political Economy. Prior to joining the University of Warwick, he studied at the University of Sheffield where he received his PhD in International Political Economy (IPE) in 2008, on the subject of sugar and the EU Sugar Reform.
Why unions still matter: the case of domestic worker organizing in Maputo, 8 November
Speaker: Ruth Castel-Branco Date: Thursday 8 November 2012 Time: 12:30-14:30 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: As organized labour spirals into crisis, this seminar highlights one innovative example of union organizing among domestic workers in Maputo, Mozambique. Bound up in a history of colonization, domestic work has become a hallmark of modern urban living. Amidst a crumbling public care system, casualization of labour and mass entry of women into the labour force, paid domestic workers perform the reproductive and productive functions necessary to keep households running and the economy churning. Despite their importance to the household and economy at large, domestic workers have been historically undervalued, excluded from labour protections, and ignored by organized labour. This seminar explores the recent drive to formalize and organize domestic workers in Mozambique. It argues that unions still play a pivotal role in securing worker justice, illustrates the ways in which domestic workers have challenged dominant organizing models, and in the process revitalized the labour movement.
Presenter: Ruth Castel-Branco is a Mozambican researcher and labour activist, currently based at the School of the Built Environment and Development Studies. This seminar draws on her MA field work, which explored the formalization of domestic work in Maputo.
Seminar on fracking, 29 October
‘You can’t have your gas and drink your water!’ - the incompatibility of fracking to water rights
Presenter: Liane Greeff Date: Monday 29 October 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: As determined in new research commissioned by the Environmental Monitoring Group (EMG) on linkages between energy, water and climate change, hydraulic fracturing (fracking) will have disastrous impacts on water, in the short term and for generations to come. Fracking will remove vast quantities of fresh water from the water cycle, transforming it into a toxic, radioactive cocktail, with high risks of groundwater contamination. Given the lack of regulatory capacity in South Africa to manage this kind of industry, more and more experts are warning that catastrophic consequences are inevitable if fracking goes ahead. The presentation includes a short overview of the ‘The energy-water nexus’ research report by Brenda Martin & Robert Fischer of Project 90 x 2030 which aims to quantify costs as well as providing policy overviews and recommendations for positive action.
Speaker: Liane Greeff is an environmental activist, writer and videographer who runs an NGO, EcoDoc Africa, which specialises in making environmental information more accessible through video and photography. For many years she has worked in the water sector in South Africa and internationally, focusing on the environmental and social impacts of large dams, water privatisation and fracking. The report on water and fracking was commissioned by the Environmental Monitoring Group as part of their research into the linkages between energy, water and climate change.
Speakers: UThami Mbatha noChina Ngubane bangamaDennis Brutus Community Scholar eCentre for Civil Society-UFaith ka-Manzi uyiCommunity Scholar eCentre for Civil Society, imbongi kanye nombhali-UPercy Ngonyama wenza izifundo zobudokotela kwezomlando eUKZN
Kebbleism, politics and art, 19 October A Centre for Civil Society and Centre for Creative Arts Seminar
Presenter: Allan Kolski Horwitz Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Date: Friday, 19 October, Time:12:30-14:00
The story of Brett Kebble's life seen in Allan Horwitz's 2012 play Comrade Babble, is the story of South Africa's failed liberation, in which inequality, corruption and conspicuous consumption actually increased after apartheid. How artists deal with crony capitalism, in which they themselves can be implicated (for many took Kebble's patronage), is one of the lessons of Horwitz's politicisation of the arts. At a time of elite disquiet over cartoon and artist representations of ruling-party leadership, in which paranoia is a hard currency only slightly devalued by long-standing racial divisions of labour, Horwitz bravely treads on sensitive toes with this drama as well as his poetry and prose. Can civil society keep up with the challenges he poses?
Horwitz's two new books, to be launched at the CCA's Poetry Africa festival, are Two Birds at My Window and Meditations of a Non-White. He was born in Vryburg in 1952 and grew up in Cape Town where he studied political philosophy and literature. Between 1974 and 1985 he lived in the Middle East , Europe and North America, returning to South Africa in 1986 when he worked in the trade unions as an organizer and educator. He currently works for a social housing association and member-controlled provident fund in Johannesburg, and was a founder member of the Botsotso Jesters and Botsotso Publishing.
Are there limits to the freedom of expression? 16 October
A Centre for Civil Society and Centre for Creative Arts Seminar Presenter: Philo Ikonya Date: Tuesday 16 October 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic ‘Freedom of Expression is non-negotiable, paramount and unlimited because spirituality should create and not kill. In the life of what is life and not death there are no stagnant and safe spaces, it is a continuous adventure in which you stand on precipices still looking for freedom. Freedom of Expression is about not being afraid to touch what you do not understand in order to see the other side.’ Philo Ikonya
This seminar explores the role of the literary in its engagement with the freedom of expression.
Speaker Philo Ikonya is a Kenyan poet and novelist dedicated to the struggle for human rights in Africa. With a background in literature, linguistics and the philosophy of education she has authored a number of volumes of poems including ‘Out of prison: Love songs and this bread of piece’ and three novels the latest of which is ‘The night bird still sings’.
Love and Power on the Wild Coast, 15 October
Speaker: Maia Green Date: Monday 15 October 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: This seminar will examine how the intersection of love and power can lead to the betterment of our world. I explore how they interact in the context of creating an effective youth empowerment program for grade ten students at Baleni Secondary School in Pondoland. Using Action Research I explore how Asset-Based Community Development, Integral Theory and the Power Cube can be used in the program design to bring love and power together in an attempt at positive change. This seminar will share my mental, spiritual and academic quest to understand the role of love and power in creating positive and meaningful social change.
Presenter: Maia Green is a visiting scholar from the University of Royal Roads in British Columbia, Canada. She is the founder of an environmental education and youth leadership charity, Friends Uniting for Nature (FUN) Society and has over 15 years of experience working with young people. She is currently completing a Master of Arts degree in Environmental Education and Communication. Her work is focused in the community of Baleni in Pondoland, Eastern Cape and she was awarded one of Canada's top research grants to conduct this action research project.
Speakers: David van Wyk and Chris Molebatsi Date: Tuesday, 9 October 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 601, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The rapid spread of mining and industrial unrest in SA indicates that the massacre was symptomatic of much deeper crises in the economy and society. The Farlam Commission terms of reference are narrow; its findings won’t address root causes.
Speakers: David van Wyk conducts research for the Bench Marks Foundation, a project of the SA Council of Churches, and in August he co-authored a major report documenting conditions of extreme labour, community and ecological exploitation in Marikana. Chris Molebatsi has for years been a community activist based in Marikana, and he works with the Bench Marks Monitoring School.
World support for Palestinian freedom - the sanctions strategy, 2 October
Speaker: Muhammed Desai Date: Tuesday, 2 October 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 601, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: What is the leading strategy for non-violent pressure against what is known as Israeli Apartheid? The Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) South Africa organisation, based in Khotso House in Johannesburg, carries out research on SA-Israel links and develops strategic campaigns challenging these links. For example, members of BDS South Africa were central to the successful academic boycott campaign at the University of Johannesburg, leading to the 2011 termination of UJ's institutional relationship with Israel's Ben-Gurion University. The BDS movement has three demands: that Israel terminate the occupation of all lands occupied in 1967, including the dismantling of the wall and the illegal Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; uphold the right of return of Palestinian refugees as stipulated and guaranteed by international law; and end its system of institutionalized racism and segregation against Palestinian citizens of Israel. BDS has been endorsed by over 170 Palestinian parties, organizations, trade unions and movements representing the Palestinian people in the 1967 and 1948 territories and in the diaspora, and has been gaining international adherents since its inception.
Speaker: Muhammed Desai has been to Palestine on several occasions. In 2004, on his return from spending three months with the (Christian) Liberation Theology organization, Sabeel, he co-founded the Wits University Palestine Solidarity Committee, which he also led for five years. Muhammed is currently employed as the full time coordinator of BDS South Africa.
CCS Film Screening - Does Durban need a post-shopping centre congress?
Films:WAL MART: The High Cost of Low Price directed by Robert Greenwald and Story of Change with Annie Leonard Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Date: 18 September 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00
From 19-21 September, the Durban International Convention Centre hosts a Shopping Centre Congress, sponsored by one of South Africa's most environmentally-destructive financial institutions (the country's second largest coal lender). Delegates will discuss how to spread social alienation, severe economic distortions and ecological chaos. The damages being done by the US-style mall model are severe, and South Africa has an especially pernicious role insofar as our major retailers are also polluting other African countries with malls. This will get worse with the coming invasion of Wal Mart.
What are the eco-social costs of shopping centres? Isn't South Africa massively over-malled and overbuilt for retail sales, coming off a 1997-2008 real estate bubble that was the highest in the world - twice as high as even Ireland's? Aren't South Africa's households hugely overborrowed, especially with unsecured retail credit, thus threatening the local financial system? Hasn't pollution become so extreme that South Africa ranks amongst the five worst countries for environmental management in the world, according to recent Yale/Columbia research? Aren't the lack of rail freight and our deficient public transport to shopping malls contributing to preventable climate change? What about the labour, social and ecological conditions in which consumer goods are produced before we import them? What role has centralised retailing and shopping-globalisation had in destroying local, labour-intensive industries? Are mega-malls like Durban's Gateway responsible for an irrational shift of urban planning towards the new class-insulated edge cities? Will Durban's planned port expansion from 2 to 20 million containers per year by 2040 exacerbate these ecologically and economically catastrophic processes? Are South Africa's social values - ubuntu, democracy, ecology, a better economic balance - threatened by unending US-style marketing and consumption? Hasn't marketing invaded too many aspects of our lives? In short, can we begin talking about a post-shopping society in which our political, environmental, social, community, family and friendship relations take precedence over ineffective 'retail therapy', so as to maximise our life satisfaction and minimise our vast eco-destructive footprints?
If a post-shopping centre congress is needed to one day amass sufficient social power against the retailer/financier behemoths, a good way to raise consciousness about struggles against shopping is viewing two films with the Centre for Civil Society the day before the retailers gather in central Durban.
WAL MART: The High Cost of Low Price is a feature length documentary that uncovers a retail giant's assault on families and American values. The film dives into the deeply personal stories and everyday lives of families and communities struggling to fight a goliath. A working mother is forced to turn to public assistance to provide healthcare for her two small children. A Missouri family loses its business after Wal-Mart is given over $2 million to open its doors down the road. A mayor struggles to equip his first responders after Wal-Mart pulls out and relocates just outside the city limits. A community in California unites, takes on the giant, and wins! http://www.walmartmovie.com/
The Story of Change - Can shopping save the world? The Story of Change urges viewers to put down their credit cards and start exercising their citizen muscles to build a more sustainable, just and fulfilling world. http://www.storyofstuff.org/
Questions for the mall-builders Shopping centres are a foolish, destructive investment destination Patrick Bond 17 September 2012
This week, Durban’s International Convention Centre hosts 1300 delegates to a Shopping Centre Congress sponsored by one of South Africa’s most environmentally-destructive financial institutions. (As the country’s second largest coal lender and a proponent of failed carbon trading, also known as the “privatisation of the air”, Nedbank advertises extra aggressively to brainwash us into thinking it’s a “green” bank.)
Delegates to “the largest gathering of retail and retail property people in Africa” will discuss how to spread social alienation, intensify economic distortions and amplify ecological decay. Damages from the US-style mall model are severe, and South Africa has an especially pernicious role, with our retailers also polluting other African countries with malls. It could get far worse with the invasion of Wal Mart.
Consider some questions that likely won’t be asked at the ICC: What are the eco-social costs? Isn’t South Africa massively overbuilt for retail, coming off a 1997-2008 real estate bubble that was highest in the world – twice as high as even my native Ireland’s?
In Gauteng especially, there was massive recent expansion at Sandton City, The Zone, Eastgate and Menlyn Park. “Without a doubt we have an oversupply of shop space in this country at the moment,” remarked leading property guru, Erwin Rode, on SAfm’s Business Update in April.
The regional escape route is dodgy, according to Human Sciences Research Council official Darlene Miller, whose John Hopkins University doctoral thesis analysed the spread of malls in Southern Africa. “Wittingly or unwittingly, SA retailers followed the path of European colonial traders,” she observed, and their “promises of ‘renaissance’ can be elusive.”
In spite of job creation, “regional exclusion and deprivation may be enhanced”, Miller argues, citing Shoprite’s encounter with labour and farmer resistance in Zambia, not to mention the deindustrialization of local manufacturing when bulk-produced goods are imported more cheaply via SA retailers.
Our pension funds continue to fuel this madness, since major institutional investors favour shopping centre construction over the low-cost housing which our country so desperately needs, as Marikana just demonstrated.
But according to Rode, the malls’ middle-class clients are becoming financially stressed: “I think the consumer is going to be under the whip for many years in this country. There are structural reasons for that, it’s not just a cyclical thing. If you agree with me on that score then you must also be sceptical about prospects for shopping centres.”
Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan also worries that South Africans are overborrowed. By the third quarter of last year, the National Credit Regulator reported an annual rise in unsecured credit of 53% to more than R100 billion rand.
Who gets these loans? Three out of five go to households with less than R10 000/month income, and repayment is harder thanks to usurious interest rates, such as the 40% rate charged by Capitec on a typical six-month loan of R3000, resulting in a total repayment of R4082. Last month, the National Credit Regulator begged Parliament for new regulations to deter such loan-pushing.
Other questions: aren’t shopping centres major contributors to pollution, a problem so extreme that we rank amongst the five worst countries for environmental management in the world, according to recent Yale/Columbia research? Don’t our deficient rail freight and inadequate public transport to shopping malls contribute to preventable climate change?
What about the labour, social and ecological conditions under which consumer goods are produced before we import them, especially from East Asia? What blame does centralised retailing and shopping-globalisation deserve for the demise of our labour-intensive manufacturing industries?
Likewise, aren’t mega-malls like Durban’s Gateway - "biggest in the Southern hemisphere" - responsible for an irrational shift of urban planning towards new class-segregated edge cities? Can struggling Main Street shops survive new malls?
What kinds of people are scoring most from our shopping addiction? Last weekend’s Sunday Times richest-South Africans list put Shoprite/Pepkor owner Christo Wiese’s wealth at second highest. Forbes estimates he’s worth at least R25 billion, while Fin24 remarks that Wiese “had over years declared a relatively negligible taxable income that was in sharp contrast to his obvious wealth.”
Christo Wiese
Wiese became notorious after being stopped at a London airport in 2009 with R8 million he wanted to physically transport to a Luxembourg bank (normal billionaires do this by wire transfer, but then the tax man might find it). He only got it back three months ago, admitting it was “cash taken out of South Africa in the form of travellers’ cheques to avoid exchange controls” in the bad old days.
Back home, the South African Revenue Service has estimated that by using a “network of trusts and offshore companies”, according to a reliable report, Wiese still owes the society R2 billion in unpaid taxes, the most ever in a country notorious for unpatriotic tycoons running money to overseas shelters.
With the likes of Wiese pushing shopping down our throats, aren’t SA’s most laudable social values – ubuntu, democracy, ecology, a better economic balance – threatened by ubiquitous US-style marketing and consumption?
It’s long overdue we begin talking about a post-shopping centre society in which social, environmental, community, family and friendship relations take precedence over the shallow ‘retail therapy’ buzz that some acquire in malls. In Durban, an inspiring precedent at the historic Warwick Junction came from Early Morning Market vegetable traders who repelled former City Manager Mike Sutcliffe’s destructive mall plan, even at the cost of being teargassed and beaten by brutal Durban police one winter night in 2009.
A genuine transformation is needed to maximise life satisfaction and minimise our vast eco-destructive footprints, along with creating “a Million Climate Jobs”, as the Cape Town-based campaign – http://climatejobs.org.za/ – insists be done through meeting basic needs and building a low-carbon infrastructure. And from California where post-mall culture is thriving, the team at “The Story of Stuff” offers a new internet film showing another way forward: “The Story of Change – Why citizens, not shoppers, hold the key to a better world” (http://www.storyofchange.org).
(Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Civil Society.)
16th Annual SA Shopping Centre Congress in September 2012 SA Commercial Prop News 7 September 2012
The 16th Annual SA Shopping Centre Congress, hosted by the South African Council of Shopping Centres (SACSC) and sponsored by Nedbank Corporate Property Finance, will take place at the International Convention Centre, Durban 19-21 September 2012. The International Convention Centre in Durban is the place to be when the largest gathering of retail and retail property people in Africa, with over 1300 delegates kicks off in September this year with the SA Council of Shopping Centres (SACSC) 16th Annual Congress. The congress is supported by the International Council of Shopping Centres.
Sponsored by Nedbank Corporate Property Finance, the SACSC congress is themed Connect: The Power of Personal and spotlights how consumer trends underpin the success of different retail sectors.
The programme offers a range and scope of high-powered speakers – both international and local – that speak to the depth and breadth of the retail industry today.
Consumer trends guru Daniel Levine, executive director of the New-York based Avant-Guide Institute, is scheduled to speak on the first day of the congress. Not only will he look at powerful social trends, but also on the strategies retail professionals can use to take advantage of these trends.
“This conference presents an opportunity for delegates to learn and be challenged and by doing so, to improve their business growth and prospects as well as those of the entire sector,” says SACSC President Greg Azzopardi.
Delegates will also be able to hear insights and lessons learned with some top retail minds including, Nigel Payne Independent Non-Executive Chairman of Mr. Price Group, Pierre van Tonder of Spur Corporation and Andrew McMillan, former customer service leader at John Lewis UK.
Jannie Mouton, Founder and chairman of PSG Financial services, Stafford Masie Techno-Trends Guru as well as Commuter retail specialists Jon During, and rural developers Jason McCormick and Mike Masemola will be presenting on their specific retail sectors. Nedbank Corporate Property Finance is proud to be associated with this flagship event as it provides a platform where industry members from all across Africa can share insights and not only take the industry to greater heights, but their own operations as well,” says Frank Berkeley, Managing Executive: Nedbank Corporate Property Finance.
A golf day planned at Umhlali Country Club and Wild Wild West – themed Congress Dinner round out the networking opportunities provided. http://www.sacommercialpropnews.co.za/
Civil society's microfinance mistakes, 13 September
Topic: The microfinance fad has done enormous damage by way of overindebtedness, mass suicides in India, and ideological indoctrination that together, prevent a coherent narrative regarding poverty and anti-poverty activism. Civil society has often been part of the problem, given the profusion of NGOs, community organisations, women's groups and academics drawn into the industry of promoting a 'right to credit', even where conditions for attacking poverty through banking are terribly adverse. Extremely high interest rates are not the only problem. The microfinance agenda often represents local economic policy nonsense, for it aims to assist the poor to find paid work for themselves through establishing and better managing an informal microenterprise. But this supply-side agenda fails to acknowledge the lack of local demand in poor communities, a factor becoming worse because of the global recession.
Speakers: Milford Bateman is Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Juraj Dobrila Pula, Croatia. His recent book Why Doesn't Microfinance Work? (Zed Books, 2010) has been a crucial corrective to civil society activists, academics, development practitioners, aid agencies and the financial industry.
Microcredit and Marikana: how they are linked Milford Bateman 18 September 2012
Microcredit is the provision of small loans to help establish income-generating micro-businesses or to allow for urgent consumption, whether health care, education bills, home construction or the like. The idea is famously associated with Dr Muhammad Yunus, the US-educated Bangladeshi economist who won the Nobel Peace Prize.
To escape poverty the poor simply needed a microcredit, and then self-help and individual entrepreneurship would do the rest, Yunus claimed. He convinced many international and domestic organisations to fund his efforts to resolve poverty in Bangladesh, starting with the iconic Grameen Bank in 1983.
Later on, the World Bank and the US government became key supporters, and with Ford Foundation and other organisations began to fund Grameen Bank-style microcredit institutions right across the developing world. Pretty soon the poor in almost all developing countries were able to access as much microcredit as they wanted. Massive poverty reduction success seemed just around the corner.
But it didn’t work. In a growing number of countries where microcredit made significant inroads, it is now a development model best known for plunging very large numbers of the poorest into even deeper debt and poverty than ever before. The poorest are all too easily seduced by predatory lenders into taking out way too much debt. High interest rates proved a real burden, and aggressive loan collection techniques spread fear into many poor communities. Microcredit institutions and their supporters always argue in favour of limited regulation, hence little is done to legally prohibit or punish over- lending to the poor.
Thanks to a number of “boom-to-bust” episodes precipitated by over-lending, microcredit has come to be rightly known as the developing world’s own “sub-prime” financial disaster, with “meltdowns” in Bolivia, Bosnia, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Morocco and most catastrophically, in India, site of 250 000 suicides by indebted farmers.
Even in Bangladesh, where it first became a ubiquitous feature in the life of the poor, it is now accepted that there is no genuine evidence of any positive impact on poverty thanks to microcredit. In the site it started in the late 1970s when Yunus made a personal loan to an informal trader – the village of Jobra near Chittagong – today the local population is just as poor as ever, and the only change of any note is that a very significant section of the community is now in very serious debt to the local microfinance institutions.
Most recently, spectacular microcredit profiteering was also taking place in Mexico, Nigeria, Bosnia and India. All told, the accumulated evidence produced by independent researchers and evaluation experts now shows conclusively that microcredit simply does not reduce poverty and deprivation in the longer run. Not surprisingly, the microcredit model has come seriously undone all across the globe.
However, we have perhaps just witnessed one of the most appalling microcredit-related disasters of all in South Africa. Extreme over-indebtedness by workers apparently helped precipitate the Marikana massacre on August 16. Miners employed at Lonmin’s mine were gradually seduced by local lending institutions into accessing far too much microcredit.
Planning Minister Trevor Manuel is just the highest-profile official to recognise, too late, that too many mineworkers depended upon micro-loans and that very high repayment levels left many destitute after their pay-cheques suffered deductions. This is not specific to the mineworkers, so according to Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, “Predatory lending creates overly indebted consumers‚ threatens livelihoods‚ and can trap people in a cycle of poverty.”
With far too many miners apparently forced into spending more on interest payments each week or month than on any other household outlay, no matter how hard they tried, they simply could not prise themselves away from taking out a microcredit in advance of payday. With such micro-debt problems mounting to intolerable levels in recent years in the mining community, Marikana miners felt that they had no other option but to demand a very large pay increase in order to try to clear their accumulated micro-debts. The miners’ desperation and anger was palpable, Lonmin refused to back down, and a massacre ensued.
The Marikana miners are part of a long-standing migrant labour system that, often through a company shop, kept workers in debt as part of their exploitation. Their extreme anger at indebtedness is understandable, and the microcredit institutions – including UBank, an institution owned by the National Union of Mineworkers and the Chamber of Mines – should be held responsible.
And as is often the case after microcredit is granted, Marikana miners were not meaningfully helped to cut debts through special programmes of repayment and counselling. So long as a miner’s salary could very easily be tapped in via a stop-order to repay any outstanding micro-debt at high rates of interest, and the Christmas bonus paid outstanding arrears at year-end, the microcredit institutions had no desire to impose reasonable limits on individual indebtedness.
There is no evidence of government bodies specifically regulating microcredit institutions so as to restrict their lending activities to appropriate levels. The growing crisis of unsecured credit non-repayment is reflected in worsening ratings for the most risky of local financial institutions. Consumer debt is reaching record levels, encouraged until recently as a short-term economic stimulant.
Microcredit was sold to the world by Muhammad Yunus and his acolytes as a simple, and simply fantastic, intervention that would help the poor escape their poverty. Perhaps nowhere more than in the horrific experience of the Marikana miners has such faith been shown to be misplaced, and the potentially catastrophic results of desperation-level micro-debt revealed with such awful clarity. www.iol.co.za
Dr Milford Bateman is Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Juraj Dobrila Pula, Croatia. He authored Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? and tomorrow lectures at 5.30pm at Wits’s John Moffat Building auditorium. To attend, RSVP to ChristianK@idc.co.za
What did COP17 do to SA environmentalism? 7 September 2012
Speaker: Melanie Müller Date: Friday, 7 September 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: What was the impact of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change climate summit (COP17) on the environmental movements in South Africa? Most studies that deal with COP 17 focus on the weak outcome of the conference. But international conferences can also be seen as a merging of transnational, national and local actors and movements, and they especially affect local social movements. Did the environmental movement in South Africa use the conference to push climate change topics in national policies? Did international attention help to develop a common framing on climate change that would help to unite different NGOs and social movement organisations under one umbrella? Did it help to build new networks, allies, and to raise more resources for local work in South Africa? And how will these possible impacts influence on the development of the movement after COP 17? In applying a variety of social movement theories (resource mobilization, political opportunity structures, framing and identity approaches), qualitative research methods will be used over a 3-year-long period (until 2014) to investigate the development of the environmental movement in South Africa in the wake of the COP17.
Speaker: Melanie Müller, a CCS Visiting Scholar, has studied political science in Mainz, Potsdam and Berlin focusing on environmental politics and Global Governance. After working as a freelancer for NGOs and a foundation she started her PhD in sociology at Freie University Berlin in 2011. Melanie is politically active in Germany in environmental politics, solidarity campaigning for Palestinians and combating discrimination experienced by refugees in Germany.
Israeli apartheid's challenge for academics in Gaza, 6 September
Speakers: Muhammed Shabat and Asad Asad Date: Thursday 6 September, 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 601, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Palestine has been under an illegal occupation by the Apartheid Israeli regime for many decades, and is a society struggling to maintain some semblance of normal life under political, military, socio-economic and other forms of repression. Furthermore Gaza has been under siege for the last few years and its citizens have been subjected to a barrage of intensive human rights violations by the Israeli government which have been well documented in a variety of reports such as the John Dugard report. University life in Gaza has come under severe strain due to the abnormal situation on the ground yet despite this, the spirit of academics and students teaching and studying at the Islamic University of Gaza remains strong and they persevere despite the challenges.
Speakers: Prof. Muhammed Shabat and Dr. Asad Asad are based at the Islamic University of Gaza and this seminar will focus on the daily life of staff and students at the university and their efforts to address the constant challenges they encounter. Shabat received his B.Sc. in Physics from Al-Aazhar University, Cairo, Egypt in 1984 and his Ph.D. from the University of Salford, U.K., in 1990. He was a Research Fellow at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, UK, from 1989 to 1992. In April 1992, he joined the Physics Department at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) as an Assistant Professor of physics. He became an Associate Professor in 1996 and a Professor of Physics in 2000. He is Vice President for Administrative Affairs at IUG. He has published more than 200 papers in international journals in Material Science, Optical Science, physics, mathematics and education and presented many papers at local and international conferences. His research interests include newly artificial materials called Metamaterials or Left-handed materials, Nanomaterials, Super-lattices, Nonlinear optical sensor, opto-electronics, magnetostatic surface waves, numerical techniques, mesoscopic systems, energy, applied mathematics, Nanotechnology and physics education. Asad received his Ph.D. in Mathematics (Functional Analysis) 2001, from the shared program between Ain Shams & Aksa Universities. He is Associate Professor of Mathematics at the Islamic University of Gaza. His research interests include Banach Algebra, Operator Theory, Functional Equations and Group Theory.
Carbon forestry in Uganda, 4 September
Seminar: Ugandan carbon forestry, community resistance and environmental management Speaker: Adrian Nel Date: Tuesday 4 September 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: In Uganda, carbon forestry is a component of market environmentalism that occurs across various local, national and transnational scales, interacting with and re-scripting local processes, discourses, institutions and landscapes under the organising principle of carbon.
But the context includes political authoritarianism, rapid deforestation, high population growth and debilitated environmental and forestry management. Utilising the comparative lens of two projects operating on protected areas in the eastern region of Uganda, we can consider the impacts of carbon forestry projects on these dynamics. What with well publicised resistance by local communities, there are critical questions about the assemblages of actors and institutions, the state, and broader problems of forestry management in Uganda and elsewhere.
Speaker: Adrian Nel is a PhD candidate in the Geography Department of Otago University, New Zealand. He is from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe and received a Joint Honours in Economics and Politics from Rhodes University, where he also worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER). He developed his interests in the political economy of natural resource management during a Biodiversity Survey of the coastal dry forests of northern Mozambique in 2009, and after brief research trips to Thailand and Zimbabwe. Nel is co-author with Khadija Sharife of a chapter in the EJOLT CDM report of 2012.
Anti-xenophobia drama: The Crossing Actor: Jonathan Nkala Date: Saturday, 1 September 2012 Time: 5-7pm Venue: Mandebvu residence in Central Durban, 28 Louise Lane (near Carlisle and Yusuf Dadoo Sts) [for more information contact Patrick at 083 425 1401 or China at 072 651 9790]
Topic: The play chronicles the life of a young man who from a situation that seems hopeless, pursues a mission to achieve life in abundance. It is a crossing of many things, borders, cultural differences, innocence, pain and joy. It is a celebration of the human spirit. It is told with humor and love. It has been performed in lounges, garages, classrooms, restaurants and in theatres.
Actor: Based in Johannesburg, Jonathan Nkala Macala is a published playwright, actor, poet and comedian who arrived in South Africa illegally in 2003, and worked as a freelance gardener and handyman. In 2006, he worked with theatre director and actress Bo Petersen and the result was a play about his experiences, The Crossing.
Trade union politics in South Africa and South Korea, 31 August
Speaker: Youngsu Kim Date: Friday 31 August 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Tripartite 'Alliance' politics in trade unions characterise both South Africa (ANC-SACP-COSATU) and South Korea (DLP-KCTU-UDF). How do ideas such as 'National Democratic Revolution' operate in these different contexts? What are the prospects for class politics, socialism and a deeper liberation of poor and working-class people in both societies?
Speaker: Youngsu Kim is Research Professor at the Institute of Social Science at Gyeongsang National University. He was a former team leader within the Presidential Truth Commission on Suspicious Deaths, and the head of the Policy & Organization Department of the Union of Public Transport, Social Service and Labor Organization at the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. His teaching interests include regional and comparative politics, and he has published several books and articles about labour movements in South Africa and South Korea including: The State, Trade Union Movement, and Labour Politics and The Social Revolutionary Movement in South Africa.
South Durban civil society confronts Back of Port planning, 23 August 2012
Speakers: Delwyn Pillay, Dimple Deonath and Vanessa Black Date: Thursday, 23 August 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: In the coming months and years, South Durban will be greatly affected by new spatial development plans whose cost may exceed R250 billion. The work includes the building of a Dugout Port in Isipingo, Merebank and surrounding areas; the Durban Harbour's 'Back of Port plans'; and the building of a new Link Road. What will be the social and environmental costs of such spatial developments? Will benefits such as job creation and a more efficient shipping and freight system exceed the enormous social and environmental impact? Who will benefit most from these developments?
Speakers: Pillay holds a BA degree (with specialization in Environmental Management) from the University of South Africa and is the founder and chairman of Green Squad Alliance, a Brutus Community Scholar at CCS, and the Publicity & Education Officer for Earthlife Africa eThekwini. Deonath is Deputy Chairperson for Earthlife Africa eThekwini, and a Brutus Community Scholar at CCS. Black is the Chairperson of Earthlife Africa eThekwini.
Contesting the frontiers of value in society, nature and capitalism (Cancelled)
(This seminar will be skypecast - contact pbond@mail.ngo.za for access)
Speaker: Sarah Bracking Date: RESCHEDULED FOR EARLY SEPTEMBER Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: New markets and commodities are being created that attribute prices, and thereby a particular kind of value, to previously unpriced (but not necessarily unvalued) things. Carbon, water, ecosystem services, commonly-held land, and even human lives are being valued, and revalued thus. Our task is to understand how valuation technologies are designed in order to understand the deficiencies and possibilities of value in political, social and environmental terms. The research will explore the production of markets and prices, and through these the quantification of value, legitimacy and care in five separate contexts. Its ultimate purpose is to suggest better ways of doing value calculations that will make our economic system less harmful for humans and the non-human world. As demonstrated at the June 2012 Rio+20 Earth Summit, national and world elites and their system of global environmental and economic governance have, since the the Brundtland Commission in 1987, failed miserably in planetary stewardship. As a result, numerous civil society challenges have arisen against their opaque, neoliberal governance technologies, under the rubric of 'global justice'. Which way forward for the strategic empowerment of such challengers, based on more nuanced understandings of what the elites plan next by way of eco-social commodification?
Speaker: CCS Visiting Scholar Sarah Bracking is Chair of International Development at the University of Manchester and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Value (of which CCS is an International Associate). Her books include Corruption and Development (Palgrave, 2007), Money and Power (Pluto Press, 2009) and the forthcoming Financialisation of Power in Africa (Routledge, 2013).
Xolobeni Community resist mining, 21 August
Avatar on the Wild Coast - lessons from Xolobeni against national and global commodification Speakers: Nonhle Mbuthuma, John Clarke and Luc Hoebeke Date: Tuesday, 21 August 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The tenth largest titanium deposit on earth - worth an estimated R1.4 billion at present value pricing - is just 150km south of Durban. In an attempt to extract it, the Austrialian company Minerals Resources Commodities, its subsidiary Transworld Energy and Minerals (sic) and its BEE partner Xolobeni Empowerment Company (sic) discovered that in fact this titanium deposit in the sands is actually 'unobtanium.' So far the titanium has not been extracted, because not even the Australians' alliance with corrupt (and top-level) South African Department of Mineral Resources officials could withstand popular mobilisation and indigenous people's resilience. Cooption, subversion and theft were excellent teaching tools for the victorious Amadiba people of the Wild Coast, who now are teaching more South Africans facing commodification of nearly everything, and other earthlings concerned about the defense of the cosmos. The Sustaining the Wild Coast solidarity organisation tells the story at http://www.sustainingthewildcoast.orghttp://www.sustainingthewildcoast.org
Speakers: Nonhle Mbuthuma is a Xolobeni community activist, John Clarke is a Johannesburg-based social worker and author of the forthcoming book Amadiba Awakening, and Brussels-based Luc Hoebeke is author of Making Work Systems Better.
Apologies for late notice. This seminar will be skypecast - contact pbond@mail.ngo.za for access) Speaker: Michael K. Dorsey Date: Monday, 20 August 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Africa is at the forefront of unfolding climate change with its farm land, non-human species, habitats and humans facing deterioration in their health or economic utility. The Green Climate Fund was established at the sixteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in Cancun, Mexico, COP16, in December 2010. It is latest in a line of funds designed to generate and distribute finance to mitigate and adapt to this climate change. Many were hopeful, but on closer examination, optimism for the role of climate finance is misplaced, because the GCF is badly designed and has flaws in its governance structure. Indeed, as a pooled equity fund using development finance and private investors, such 'financialised' strategies to address climate change are generically misplaced, especially in the absence of effective supranational governance. One example is the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism Policy Dialogue Panel chaired by former SA Environment Minister Valli Moosa, and another is regulatory capture by the carbon trading industry. Hence civil society solutions and regulatory initiatives of a command and control nature are urgently needed to address climate change and its effects in Africa.
Speaker: Michael K. Dorsey is a visiting fellow and professor at Wesleyan University's College of the Environment, and former director of Dartmouth College's Climate Justice Research Project. He is a co-founding board member of Islands First—a multilateral negotiating capacity building organization for small island developing states facing disproportionate threats from unfolding climate change. Since 2008, he has been an Affiliated Researcher on the Sustainability and Climate Research Team at Erasmus University’s Research Institute of Management inside the Rotterdam School of Management. Dorsey contributed to the 2005 book, Trouble in the Air: Global Warming and the Privatised Atmosphere (Durban, South Africa and Amsterdam, The Netherlands: CCS and TNI Press); and the 2009 book Climate Change and Energy Insecurity: The Challenge for Peace, Security and Development (London: Earthscan). From April 2007 until November 2008, he was a member of Senator Barack Obama’s energy and environment Presidential campaign team. In July 2010 Lisa Jackson, the US Environmental Protection Agency (US-EPA) Administrator, appointed Dorsey to the EPA’s National Advisory Committee.
Implications of the Secrecy Bill for Academic Research, 16 August
Speaker: Percy Nhau Date: Thursday 16 August 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: The Secrecy Bill, which will probably be passed into law later this year, will require the the security cluster — police, military and intelligence services — to classify documents and criminalise their unauthorised disclosure. Unjustifiable secrecy in the security cluster is dangerous, because it creates space for the abuse of the coercive capacities of the state. If the Bill in its current form becomes law, what would be the likely consequences for freedom of academics to undertake teaching and research on the cluster — that is, on university contributions that could assist in holding this most sensitive area of government to account? Researchers of SA state security argue that there is too little academic work on the cluster already; yet academics were heavily involved in the drafting of the White Paper on Defence in 1996, within a consultative process. In the interim, there has been a rapid politicisation of the police, military and intelligence, characterised by driven by corruption, authoritarianism, debilitating in-fighting and incompetence. This is precisely the moment when academics and the broader intelligentsia should be observing, learning, publishing and speaking out. But the Secrecy Bill may prove too frightening, and democracy will suffer.
Speaker: Percy Nhau is the Durban Right 2 Know campaign coordinator and a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Civil Society. He is a Zimbabwean political refugee active in progressive social change mobilisation.
Seminar on Zimbabwe, 15 August
PowerPoint by Farai Maguwu
Democratic Transitions from Top Down and Bottom Up: Prospects in Zimbabwe Speaker: Farai Maguwu and Patrick Bond Date: Wednesday 15 August 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: Theories of liberal 'elite transition' are useful up to a point, including in Southern Africa, and few have advocated Washington's vision of democratisation more eloquently than Larry Diamond and Francis Fukuyama of Stanford. With Zimbabwe's new draft Constitution referendum and presidential election to be held in coming months, and with political parties and civil society deeply divided on strategies and tactics of change, the question being posed by transition theorists as well as at the Southern African Development Community summit in Maputo this week, is whether the Inclusive Government is sufficiently robust to ensure a fully-democratic breakthrough? Or are Zimbabwe's political, social and economic tensions so sharp that a top-down process might be foiled on the basis of its internal contradictions?
Speakers: Maguwu of Mutare's Centre for Research and Development is a PhD candidate at UKZN based at the Centre for Civil Society, and has just returned from a Stanford University research fellowship offered by Professors Diamond and Fukuyama; CCS director Bond was in Zimbabwe last week doing research and his two books - Uneven Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe's Plunge - trace the long-term roots of the country's interminable crisis.
Corporate collaboration lets Mugabe continue abuses Patrick Bond 14 August 2012
Zimbabwe’s political-economic crisis continues because dislodging decades of malgovernance has not been achieved by either a Government of National Unity that began in early 2009, civil society activism, or international pressure, including this week’s Maputo summit of the main body charged with sorting out democratisation, the Southern African Development Community (SADC). With a new draft Constitution nearly ready for a referendum vote, followed by a presidential and parliamentary election by next April, the period immediately ahead is critical.
Many examples of chaos appeared over the last week (much of which I spent in a rural area northwest of the capital of Harare). On Monday, for example, 44 activists were arrested in the Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe office at a project launching documentation of the repeated violations of their human rights. Though released, it reminded the society of the power of dictatorship mixed with homophobic social values.
Since the draft Constitution was released on July 18, leaders of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU PF) have repeatedly rejected crucial text within a document that its own negotiators had hammered out this year and issued last month. Amidst the ‘3 percent’ that ZANU PF leaders object to, one hang-up is that wording about presidential running mates complicates the fragile balance of power given how ill the 88 year old Mugabe has been with prostate cancer, according to his close associates.
If a referendum goes ahead with the current text, some in civil society – especially the National Constitutional Assembly, probably to be joined by students and the left-leaning faction of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions – are likely to promote a ‘No’ vote, and ZANU PF might well make the same choice. Nevertheless it is likely that the Movement for Democratic Change led by former trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai (known as MDC-T) would win approval.
Although central powers have been weakened in the new Constitution, according to critics in the NGO Sokwanele, “There remains no age limit for Presidential office, immunity from prosecution remains, and the executive remains in control of defence forces.”
Constitution confirms land redistribution There are other important markers of the society’s balance of power in the draft Constitution. For example, heeding ZANU PF’s wishes, it specifically prohibits that monetary compensation for land will be given to the four thousand whites whose farms were invaded from 2000-08, although improvements (buildings, irrigation and the like, worth around $3 billion) can be compensated, according to the text, while any land reimbursement should be made by the colonial power, Britain.
There is certainly very important anti-imperialist symbolism at stake here, and from this kind of compensation to the need for long-overdue colonial reparations is not too far a conceptual leap. But recall that Mugabe’s ‘jambanja’ (chaotic, violent) land reform was driven partly by his increasingly unpopular ruling party’s need to retain power after a prior Constitutional draft was rejected 55-45 percent in February 2000. Another reason was the immense rural pressures building up from below that were craftily channeled into land invasions of the country’s best land, which white settlers had originally stolen during the sixty years or so after Cecil Rhodes’ ‘Pioneer Column’ invaded in 1890.
Attempts to redress the Land Question after Independence in 1980 failed due to lack of political will and an incorrect technicist assumption that if instead of land redistribution, rural credit was extended to impoverished small farmers, they would be boosted into the mainstream economy (in reality, four out of five had defaulted on their debts by 1988 because the markets were unattractive).
The MDC-T position is that the post-2000 land redistribution is now ‘irreversible’ so white farmers have no basis for confidence they can return, if Tsvangirai wins the presidency. Debate also continues over whether the land redistribution ‘worked’ for the estimated 10 percent of Zimbabweans who directly benefited: 146 000 households who were the main small-farmer beneficiaries of jambanja, and the 16 000 farmers who got access to much larger plots including the most productive commercial farms, according to 2009 government data.
Tragically, as rains failed again this year, 1.6 million Zimbabweans – about 12 percent of the population – will be in need of food aid, the World Food Programme estimates. The country’s best land, with irrigated agriculture that would permit a return to food security, isn’t yet in the hands of the masses, as cronyism on good farmland means a new era of land reform will be needed.
Still, argues Sam Moyo of the African Institute for Agrarian Studies, “Only about 15 percent of the land beneficiaries could be considered ‘elites’, including high-level employees and businesspeople who are connected to Government and the ruling ZANU PF. By far, the largest number of beneficiaries are people who have a relatively low social status and limited political or financial-commercial connections, although some of these may have important local connections and influence.”
Aside from periodic drought, Moyo cites inadequate input supply – fertilizer, pesticides, credit – as the main reason for the failed small resettled farmers, but one in five also suffer “land conflicts, including their lack of ‘title’ and fear of eviction as factors which limit their social reproduction and/or production.” Nevertheless, according to Sussex University researcher Ian Scoones and his colleagues, huge increases in output have been registered by resettled farmers in one central district, especially in small grains, edible dry beans, cotton and tobacco.
On the other hand, the overcrowded ‘Communal Areas’ where Rhodesians forced blacks to live until 1980 appear not to have become decongested, and nor did Mugabe’s ‘Operation Murambatsvina’ – the violent displacement of 700 000 urban residents in 2005 – make the Land Question any easier to answer. The charge that cronyism allowed Mugabe’s allies to cherry-pick the very best farms closest to big cities remains intact, characterized by multiple farm-holdings by leading elites. Along with persistent food aid required annually since 2000, this problem will continue to mar Mugabe’s reputation, as he and his family remain prime cases of abuse.
Gripping to political power requires greedy corporates’ cash In another indication of ongoing political manipulation last week, Mugabe’s army initially threatened to derail the official Census count, scheduled from August 17-28. It is desperately needed not just for socio-economic planning but also future election districting. The army tried to place 10 000 of its troops amongst 30 000 teachers being trained for census taking, and some beat those civil servants who objected.
Until they were finally reigned in this week, why were army troops intent on intervention? Explains Claris Madhuku of the Platform for Youth Development, “As they go through the process of counting, they want to provide some form of intimidation so that the community in the next election, they must vote for ZANU-PF or else.” A victim of such intimidation, Madhuku was arrested last April and after seven court appearances acquitted simply for holding a community meeting to air grievances against a biofuel corporation which was grabbing small-farmer landholdings.
Such experiences drive the desire for a less repressive government. In a free and fair election, Tsvangirai would probably win hands down; in March 2008, he trounced Mugabe in the first round by nearly 10 percent before withdrawing in protest from a run-off vote several weeks later, because meanwhile hundreds of his supporters were killed, tortured or injured by desperate ZANU PF political thugs.
For Mugabe to retain power in what was a financially-broke government in 2008 also required an infusion of enormous financial resources, and as a Mail&Guardian investigation last week revealed, when Mugabe was running out of funds during the election campaign, his regime was bolstered by a $100 million loan from New York-based Och-Ziff Capital Management Group. Ironically, the firm’s financier founder, billionaire Daniel Ochs, is also vice-chair of New York City’s ‘Robin Hood’ Foundation, which according to Fortune magazine, “was a pioneer in what is now called venture philanthropy, or charity that embraces free-market forces.”
Och’s loan was made possible thanks to intermediation by London-based Central African Mining and Exploration Company (Camec), run by famous English cricket spin-bowler and businessman Phil Edmonds, and by Anglo American Platinum, whose gifting of a quarter of its platinum assets to Mugabe’s regime was the basis for securing the deal. The Mail&Guardian reported, “Anglo was granted empowerment credits and foreign exchange indulgences that would allow it to develop a valuable remaining concession.” Zimbabwe slipped further into foreign debt.
When Edmonds was accused of funding Mugabe in 2008 in the context of a business alliance with the notorious Zimbabwean businessman Billy Rautenbach, The Telegraph remarked, “In the boardroom and on the African sub-continent, the two places where Edmonds now conducts most of his business, he is said to have a similar presence, capable of charming and terrifying business rivals at the same time.”
According to The Telegraph, Zimbabwe mining has been profitable, for “It was with Rautenbach's help that the fortunes of Edmonds and Camec rose beyond anyone's expectations in 2006. The company's share price increased by more than 700 per cent in just a year, drawing in blue-chip investors eager to cash in on the boom in mining stocks.”
It is in this context that the ‘sanctions’ critique offered by United Nations Human Rights Commission Navi Pillay in May needs revising. “There seems little doubt that the existence of the sanctions regimes has, at the very least, acted as a serious disincentive to overseas banks and investors,” she said while visiting Mugabe. Yet ‘sanctions’, which are limited to the personal affairs of 112 elites close to Mugabe, were obviously sufficiently porous to allow the Och-Ziff/Camec/Anglo deal.
So who will pay Mugabe’s campaign bill in 2013? The next greedy mining house is Anjin, a diamond mining company co-owned by Beijing investors and the Zimbabwean Ministry of Defense, whose leaders have said they will never accept rule by Tsvangirai’s party. Anjin is the main beneficiary of what is probably the world’s largest diamond field at Marange, near Mutare in eastern Zimbabwe, where hundreds of informal miners were killed by the army in November 2008.
Abuses continue at Marange. Two weeks ago, Anjin fired 1 500 workers who, desperate for decent pay, launched their eighth strike since 2010. Diamond watchdog Farai Maguwu, director of the Mutare-based Centre for Research and Development, termed Anjin’s move “a gross violation of the right of workers to engage in industrial action if their working conditions are appalling.”
Another Marange diamond firm, Mbada, is chaired by Mugabe’s former helicopter pilot Robert Mhlanga, who recently purchased $23 million worth of properties in the highest-priced suburbs of Johannesburg and Durban (Sandton, Umhlanga and Zimbali).
This is the kind of company ZANU PF keeps, notwithstanding rhetoric regularly hostile to foreign capital. For example, at this week’s Heroes Day ceremony, Mugabe intoned, “We should join hands to resist the unjustified pander of our resources by undeserving foreign forces that come to us like friends in the name of democracy and globalization, yet they have sinister ulterior motives.”
Mugabe perfected this talk left, walk right gimmickry; his support for the Marange looting represents one of Africa’s most extreme Resource Curse problems.
For the next election, probably in March, we can expect another tactic – ‘indigenisation’ (giving local people a share in white- or foreign-run corporations) – familiar to those who witnessed Mugabe’s 2000 campaign, explains Bulawayo writer Mary Ndlovu: “The indigenisation agenda ZANU PF is pushing has now replaced the land issue as a programme to simultaneously win support from a new constituency and frustrate the opposition. It seems dishonestly designed to further enrich themselves, consolidate their patronage lines and prevent the MDC getting credit for increased investment, rather than honestly redistributing wealth to the people.”
The first two multinational corporations to play the game of diluting local holdings so as to hold onto immensely valuable resources are platinum exporters Rio Tinto of London and Johannesburg-based Implats. There is no evidence yet that the ordinary Zimbabwean is benefiting, although a new extreme-nationalist ZANU PF political tendency is emerging around 41-year old Savior Kasukuwere – the minister in charge of indigenisation – that may one day threaten the party’s two other core factions, run by potential Mugabe successors Joice Mujuru (now vice president) and Emerson Mnangagwa (defence minister).
Financial and fiscal failings Another source of crony capitalism is the financial sector, through which disgraced Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono and his allies arranged lucrative illicit foreign exchange takeovers prior to the Zimbabwe dollar’s collapse in 2009. Bankers close to ZANU PF made dubious loans which now require the kinds of bailouts that Wall Street and the City of London received from their own purchased politicians in 2008-09.
This is the main reason for Zimbabwe’s banking crisis, and recently compelled Gono to issue a directive that $100 million be kept in capital reserves to prevent a devastating run on the banks. Out of two dozen, only six or so – nearly all foreign headquartered – will survive that degree of regulatory restructuring (the rest must be merged or closed). The adverse impact on credit availability, already hampered by the world’s highest real interest rates, will be devastating.
On top of that is next month’s IMF and World Bank meeting in Washington where Zimbabwe’s nearly $11 billion in unrepayable foreign debt is up for negotiation, not to mention a looming public workers strike which will be uncomfortable for the MDC-T, the party of labour but also under pressure to impose austerity after the state budget was cut from a planned $4 billion to $3.4 billion by Finance Minister Tendai Biti, known in his youth as the country’s leading leftist lawyer.
The main reason for budget cuts is the failure of the mining ministry to collect taxes on diamonds, which continue to be smuggled out of Zimbabwe on flights from Marange to sites including Israel, India, Dubai, Khazakstan and China.
Confirms Maguwu, “Revenue is not being accounted for and a faction of ZANU PF is controlling the diamonds. This is was exactly the situation when the Kimberley Process was formed in 2003 with the financing of rebel wars through diamond revenues in West Africa.”
According to Maguwu, “The KP suffered huge credibility problems because of allowing Marange diamonds to circulate at their last meeting in Kinshasa last November. At the next summit in Washington this November, where ‘diamonds for development’ is a slogan against the Resource Curse, the KP can only regain credibility by ensuring that there is revenue transparency, otherwise Zimbabwe’s next round of election chaos can be blamed on diamond revenues.”
Maguwu insists, “South African President Jacob Zuma is SADC’s lead mediator and his team led by Lindiwe Zulu must put this on their agenda. Regional civil society should also be putting pressure on SADC to ensure that Marange diamonds do not sponsor political violence during the coming elections in Zimbabwe and trigger regional instability.”
While economic growth may technically still top 5 percent this year, the underlying crises are now being amplified, as the bulk of proceeds from Zimbabwe’s 2012 outputs of diamonds ($3 billion), platinum ($600 million), gold ($150 million) and nickel ($140 million) disappear into ZANU PF and multinational corporate pockets, with only crumbs left over for the povo. With a $3 billion trade deficit and only $500 million in donor aid anticipated in 2012, the untenable economics of a modified Mugabe tyranny still don’t add up.
Whether a free and fair election is possible in coming months, or instead ZANU PF loyalists use military might, ill-begotten wealth and crony capitalism to maintain illegitimate power, is too difficult to call. But by the end of this week, SADC regional leaders could have their fingerprints on Zimbabwe’s coming corpse if once again, they turn away from compelling at least the minimal conditions for democracy: insistence on the Constitutional referendum and preparations for the country’s first genuine vote in a dozen years.
(Patrick Bond directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa.)
Farai Maguwu has shown extraordinary courage in documenting the terrible human rights conditions in Marange in Zimbabwe, at great cost to himself and his family.
Tiseke Kasambala, senior researcher, Africa Division
Human Rights Watch's Alison Des Forges Award http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/08/14/awards-rights-activists-congo-libya celebrates the valor of individuals who put their lives on the line to protect the dignity and rights of others. Human Rights Watch collaborates with these courageous activists to create a world in which people live free of violence, discrimination, and oppression.
As director of the Center for Research and Development http://www.crdzim.hostzi.com in eastern Zimbabwe, Farai Maguwu has conducted extensive research documenting horrific abuses taking place in the Marange diamond fields. After the Marange fields were discovered in 2006, they were open to anyone, and illegal mining and smuggling flourished. Maguwu partnered with Human Rights Watch researchers todocument http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/06/26/diamonds-rough-0 beatings, torture, forced labor, and killings of local villagers in Marange at the hands of soldiers controlled by the Zimbabwe African National Union- Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), the one-time ruling party that still controls security in the coalition government.
On May 27, 2010, two days after Maguwu met with a monitor from the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (the world’s diamond control body) to discuss the abuses he uncovered in Marange, Zimbabwean authorities raided his home and offices, and arrested him on charges of providing false information about killings and torture by military officials at the mine. He was imprisoned for more than a month and denied medical care to punish him. The authorities then illegally transferred him to various police cells with deplorable conditions even though he suffered from a serious health condition. Maguwu was released in early July and only finally cleared of all charges in October. His case helped generate international attention to the serious human rights violations taking place in Marange’s diamond fields and led to calls for the Zimbabwean government http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2010/06/21/deliberate-chaos-0 to remove its troops from Marange.
Human Rights Watch honors Farai Maguwu for his tremendous courage in exposing abuses in Zimbabwe’s diamond fields and working to end rampant violations of human rights throughout the region.
Izingqinamba ngezemvelo zaseThekwini, 8 August
Speaker: Faith ka-Manzi (isiZulu & English) Date: Wednesday, 8 August 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Climate, water and destructive development from Maputo to South Durban Speakers: Neima Adamo, Sergio Brito, Ester Uamba, Patrick Bond and Dimple Deonath Date: Friday, 3 August 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The Centre for Civil Society has helped host a project investigating the confluence of climate change, water, municipal governance and social mobilisation in Maputo, Nairobi and Durban, in conjunction with the York University Faculty of Environmental Studies, the Eduardo Mondlane University and the University of Nairobi, as part of the Program on Climate Change and Adaptation in Africa sponsored by the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa. In 2011, a similar seminar interrogated adaptation and mitigation measures in Nairobi and Durban: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?11,61,3,2381 and in this seminar, we further consider how African cities react to climate change. Maputo went literally under water due to flooding in 2000-01 and its notorious problems in supplying clean retail water to households remain a source of concern given the sea-side city's vulnerability to extreme weather. The South Durban case is complicated by the area's role as both victim and villain; the March 2007 destruction of the waterfront is one example of the former, while the incoming R250 billion Back of Ports and Dig-Out Port projects represent a huge increase in petro-chemical, industrial, shipping and freight emissions, not to mention the threat of vast residential displacement and local hazards. How are civil society organisations responding in both cities, and do they have any real chance of defeating the forces behind the eco-social destruction on the horizon?
Speakers: Neima Adamo, Sergio Brito and Ester Uamba are post-graduate students of Environmental Education at the University Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo; Patrick Bond lives on the Bluff, directs CCS and writes extensively on water and climate; and Dimple Deonath is a Merebank resident, a Brutus Community Scholar at CCS and a leading member in Earthlife Africa and Zero Fossils Durban.
South Durban Detox Dimple Deonath
My father almost died on the operating table – he had gangrene in his gall bladder and his lungs were badly infected as well. Through some miracle, I am blessed to still have my dad with us today. His case was extensively used by surgeons as a case study – and why am I telling you all this? On February 23rd this year, my brother and I were blissfully travelling home together after having obtained our bikers licence together, when we were almost killed – again why am I telling you all this?
Well, firstly respectful greetings to all dignitaries present here today and to CCS members. You have just heard one illustrious speaker after another giving you valuable insight into important changes taking place before our very eyes. We live in challenging times, but I’m encouraged by the passion and energy that exists in this very room.
The story of my father is true and directly attributable to the high level of pollution in the South Durban area. I say this with conviction because, as we stood praying outside the operation theatre, wondering why the operation was taking so long, the surgeon walked out of the room and stated that my father’s condition was serious as he had gangrene and the first question he asked was: did my father smoke or consume alcohol? My father has never smoked or touched a drop of alcohol in his life – to which the doctor responded – then where do we live? When we told him Merebank, he just said it made perfect sense then, because they were accustomed to seeing cases like this when a person lived in such highly polluted areas. This ignited my fierce passion for environmental issues and I was motivated to become an eco warrior.
My accident (I was driving) was due to a reckless, massive truck and trailer avoiding another broken down truck on the left lane. He swerved carelessly directly onto our vehicle. Again due to a miracle, or my mother’s ardent impassioned plea every morning to the archangels, our lives were spared, but not without some injury and huge damages to our vehicle, not mentioning the untold, indescribably inconvenience! And it all happened near Solomon Mahlangu drive, where heavy trucking has caused many deaths.
My presentation is very practical since I have lived all my life in this area, which has increasingly gotten worse every single year. The pollution has given rise to strange things here. I can assure you with 100% confidence that there is not a single resident of Merewent who is unaffected, directly or indirectly by the heavy pollution and industrial giants that continuously pump out their obnoxious fumes to the detriment of our health. Everyone I know, knows a family member, friend, child, colleague or neighbour who is suffering from one of a variety of deadly illnesses, including leukaemia, asthma, lung ailments, cancer and other diseases.
Several community organisations and local community members joined forces to pass a very strong vocal message to Transnet and the Municipality: Enough is enough. No more compromises. We say No in loud and clear terms – No to the dugout port, no to bulldozing their plans without consultation with communities, no to profits before people and a loud, resounding NO to corruption!
SDCEA’S Desmond D’Sa presented a lively picture of what is anticipated in the coming months. Professor Brij Maharaj explained what torture residents have lived under for over 40 years as residents of South Durban. Our very own Vanessa spoke about the injustice that prevails and the devious actions of those in authority.
Merewent residents have suffered countless episodes of explosions and pollution from petro giants Engen and Sapref, which was disgustingly played down and the concerns of residents have been trivialised into nothingness. The nightmare of increased trucking, noise and air pollution, illnesses and accidents was highlighted so that anyone who had even the remotest hope that this is a good idea for employment opportunities and lucrative contracts could kiss goodbye to that simplistic idea!
Residents from the Port areas of Umbilo, Clairwood , Bluff , Wentworth, Merebank, Isipingo and Umlazi are facing an unimaginable threat to their lives and livelihoods, families being uprooted and destroyed, communities being torn apart and devastated, all for the sake of profits. The already suffering communities now face their greatest threat to date which must now be transformed to their greatest fight against these selfish giants, Transnet and the Municipality!
Climate change has hit the South Durban area with a vengeance - Rising seawater levels and repeated storms like the one in 2007 testify to the damage and suffering that awaits us. To ignore the warning signs and to show disdain for environmental issues is the height of stupidity, a hallmark of the likes of Sutcliffe and his cronies.
The Back of Port plan should be shelved, no, it should be destroyed in its entirety. There is no room for such diabolical plans, and it is inconceivable that such should be thrust upon us – a classic case of David and Goliath, as Prof Brij Maharaj, so correctly stated.
Speaker after speaker talked about the sale of the race course, community objections, destruction of the fresh produce market, climate change and suffering of residents. Prof Brij Maharaj used the example of the Warwick Market to demonstrate that David can beat Goliath. Not long ago, Mondi wanted a link road as well, but it was defeated by the residents of Merewent – another case of David winning against Goliath. Prices to be paid to those relocating is a paltry R1000 per square metre. This is sheer robbery, exploitation, and greed. But we can fight and win the battle.
Rishi Singh of the Clairwood Ratepayers Association made a valid point when he demanded that a model of the dugout port and link road should be presented to residents. Technical speak must be done away with. A model of the dugout port and link road will show us clearly which houses will be affected and how the plan is going to pan out in reality, not in some jargon that is beyond our comprehension. It is a tactic of theirs to confuse us into submission – not that anyone is stupid, but if everything is in technical jargon how is the public to decide what exactly is going on and how precisely it affects them?
Sega Govender of the farmer’s association spoke briefly on the long term effects of forced removals. He said that fresh and cheap food will no longer be available to the residents of Merewent. He said that farmers filled the hearts and stomachs of people. We have to unite against the link road and trucking. Merebank will be suffocated by trucks.
It has also been observed that young people are moving out of South Durban. At these community meetings, there are scarcely a handful of young people. This leaves us with the problem of the elderly remaining behind to fight the fight. There is an apathy on the part of youth. How many youth organisations are there in South Durban? How can we infiltrate these organisations: religious, social and sporting? What about using schools to educate them about the hazards that come with the dugout port development. Maybe we can call all RCL’s to a meeting and give them the important information required for their buy-in into our projects? We need the youth on board. It’s their future.
What came across very clearly from these meetings are the following:
1. Residential areas will be turned into industrial areas.
2. Homes will be destroyed and families will be uprooted.
3. Fresh produce market and small businesses will be destroyed
4. Community life with all social networks established over the years will be dissolved at the drop of a hat.
5. A harbour within our community will give rise to drug and sex trade, influencing our young people tremendously.
6. People are realising the hard hitting reality of how this will impact on their lives.
7. People are no longer prepared to make any compromises on this issue.
8. Communities are outraged with the manner in which they are being treated in this whole issue.
9. People are ready to combine their strengths, to unite and to fight these dark forces that threaten the very stability of their communities.
10. Besides the marches and other protest action planned, a decision was taken to also go the legal route.
I end with SDCEA’s motto: The Right to know, the Duty to inquire and the Obligation to Act.
I thank you.
Nonviolent pedagogies of Africa's oppressed, 31 July 2012
The Centre for Civil Society within the UKZN School of Built Environment and Development Studies invites you to the seminar - Nonviolent pedagogies of Africa's oppressed, from South Africa to the Great Lakes
Speakers: Matt Meyer and Elavie Ndura Date: Tuesday, 31 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The construction of grassroots movements for sustainable peace and justice in violence-prone South Africa and the Great Lakes Region requires a pedagogical underpinning appropriate for these different contexts. Improving the conditions of education and cultures of peace - through new policy, curriculum and pedagogy - can only be accomplished through the engagement of parents, students and teachers, which in turn requires principles of multicultural education, critical pedagogy and peace education.
Speakers:Matt Meyer is a New York-based educator-activist, co-editor of the two volume Africa World Press series Seeds of New Hope. He serves as co-convener of the War Resisters International Africa Working Group and UN NGO representative of the International Peace Research Association, and blogs at http://wagingnonviolence.org/author/mattmeyer/. His co-editor Elavie Ndura is Associate Professor of Education at George Mason University, following her education at the University of Burundi, University of Exeter and Northern Arizona University. She has also taught at the University of Nevada.
Speaker: Ravindra Kumar Date: 30 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Mahatma Gandhi's view of democracy and fundamental rights is of great currency, as he advanced what he called ‘the art and science of mobilizing the entire political, economic and spiritual resources of all the various sections of people in the service of the common good of all’. Gandhi stressed duty-bound fundamental rights, arguing that the real enjoyment of rights can be possible only by discharging one’s duty. This spirit not only strengthens the foundation of a democracy, but helps in its smooth functioning on the basis of Ahimsa.
Speaker: Ravindra Kumar holds an MA Political-Science, Philosophy, a PGD Gandhian-Studies and a PhD, and is a writer-thinker-scholar, political scientist, peace-worker, humanist and educationist with over 100 books and 400 articles/lectures on great leaders, especially Mahatma Gandhi, on various socio-religious, educational, cultural and academic issues to his credit. An Indologist and former Vice-Chancellor of Meerut University, Dr. Kumar has been associated with many national and international academic, cultural-educational, peace and social organisations. He has delivered about 400 lectures at universities of India and the world on Asian values, civilization-culture-education, Gandhism, co-operation-understanding, religion, ways of life, world peace and youth affairs.
PHOTOS
Solidarities of international urban residents and 'development' students, 25 July
The Centre for Civil Society within the UKZN School of Built Environment and Development Studies invites you to the seminar -Solidarities of international urban residents and 'development' students
Speakers: Peter Muzambwe and Dean Chahim Date: Wednesday, 25 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topics: (two consecutive presentations): 1) Urban solidarities and states of resistance: As part of the International Alliance of Inhabitants network (http://www.habitants.org), Muzambwe discusses the Amandla Centre's positioning in the world urban social justice struggle, including areas of cooperation and conflict between democratic civil society and political society in Zimbabwe.
2) 'Development' solidarities: Chahin's paper, 'From “Saving Africa” to Looking in the Mirror: Reflections on the Critical Development Forum’s Student-Driven Popular Education Initiative to Re-Politicize “Development” at the University of Washington', follows his discouragement with the way conventional “development” organizations like Engineers Without Borders operated and educated students.
Speakers: Peter Muzambwe is director of the Amandla Centre of Zimbabwe, and a former Harare trade union leader. Dean Chahim recently graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle with degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Global Development & Social Change. He co-founded the student-driven Critical Development Forum (students.washington.edu/cdfuw) and is currently traveling on a university fellowship to learn and share: http://anotherworldishappening.wordpress.com
PHOTOS Peter Muzambwe and Dean Chahim with Patrick Bond
Gender, autobiography and social justice, 24 July 2012
Speaker: Terri Barnes Date: Tuesday, 24 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: This seminar addresses ways that women write their own stories of social struggle, drawing upon autobiographical material from Zimbabwe, South Africa and the United States.
Speaker: Teresa Barnes is a scholar of gender and nationalism in Zimbabwe, and her other interests range from soap operas to higher education in South Africa. She graduated from Brown University in 1979 with a degree in International Relations. She lived in Zimbabwe and South Africa for more than 20 years, and her PhD in African Economic History is from the University of Zimbabwe. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Brown University Pembroke Center in 1996-97 and taught at the University of the Western Cape before moving to the University of Illinois where she is presently Associate Professor of History, of African Studies and of Gender and Women's Studies. Her books include We Women Worked So Hard: Gender, Labor and Social Reproduction in Harare, Zimbabwe, 1930-56 (Heinemann, 1999) and (with Everjoice Win) To Live A Better Life: An Oral History of Women in Harare, 1930-60 (Baobab Books, 1990).
PHOTOS
Freedom never rests, when it comes to water commodification and service delivery protests, 23 July 2012
Speaker: Jim Kilgore Date: Monday, 23 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Freedom Never Rests: A Novel of Democracy in South Africa (September 2011) is the second novel from James Kilgore, portraying historical roots of the service delivery revolts that have swept South Africa in recent years. With a precise and at times humorous eye for the details of backroom politics and street level organisation, Freedom Never Rests centres around an engaging and tragic couple: unemployed ex- shop steward revolutionary Monwabisi Radebe and his wife, Constantia, a former nursery school aide turned local councillor in the fictional Eastern Cape township of Sivuyile. As the council implements an American-financed project of prepaid meters, water cut-offs are visited upon dozens of households, leaving the idealistic Monwabisi with the most difficult of choices: to remain loyal to his wife, the mother of his children who represents an increasingly discredited council or take to the streets with disenchanted residents. Avoiding simplistic analyses and triumphant rhetoric, Freedom Never Rests lays bare the political and personal intricacies of community struggles.
Speaker: James Kilgore was a fugitive from the US for 27 years, based in Zimbabwe and South Africa for much of that time. He lived under the alias Dr John Pape and became a respected academic at the University of Cape Town and the International Labour Research and Information Group (Ilrig). In 2002 he was arrested and US authorities extradited him to California where he served six and a half years in prison for his political activities in the 1970s. During his incarceration he wrote several novels, three of which (including Freedom Never Rests) have been published since his release in 2009. He is presently a research scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois.
PHOTOS
On Returning To Where the Heart Is by James Kilgore New Politics Summer 2014 Vol:XV-1 Whole #: 57
[Ed. note: This essay by James Kilgore was the winner of the Daniel Singer Prize for 2013. Kilgore lived in South Africa from 1991-2002. During that time he was a fugitive from U.S. justice living under the pseudonym “John Pape.” He worked as an educator and researcher for unions and social movements. In 2002 he was arrested on the streets of Cape Town, then extradited to the United States where he served six and a half years in prison. In July 2012 he returned to South Africa for the first time since his arrest. Here he presents his reflections on the journey.]
My connections to the “land of Mandela” and his African National Congress (ANC) sustained me during my years of incarceration. Part of it was maintaining the links to my wife Terri and our two sons who still lived there. But it was more than that. While the democratic South Africa may not have lived up to our expectations, the flow of letters, postcards, books, and pictures from Cape Town and Johannesburg was a constant and much needed reminder that the entire planet did not function with the misanthropy and racial hatred of a California state prison. A better world was possible.
Once I paroled in 2009, I was determined to go back for a visit. It took me two years to get a passport. Then the South African government declared me an “undesirable immigrant” because I had lived there under a false name. A mini-campaign by my friends and lawyer convinced the Minister of Home Affairs that I was a desirable after all.
Once I had the green light, I wasn’t quite sure what South Africa would hold for me. Would it feel like the wonderful, comforting, engaging, and complicated home that it once was? Would I have anything to talk about with old friends and comrades? They, after all, had been carrying on with their normal lives during the intervening period. They hadn’t climbed up onto a steel bunk every night and wondered if they would ever see life again outside a concrete box. They had been drinking their Rooibos tea, eating samoosas and pap, taking their kids to school and watching them grow up. We had travelled down very different paths. Even Terri, who would be coming with me and had spent five years there with our children after my arrest, wasn’t sure how this visit would all turn out.
The travel itself went smoothly. I wasn’t on any hit lists, didn’t get pulled into any dark rooms by men in suits and sunglasses asking who I was visiting or if I planned to return to the United States. Laura and Rick, our most stalwart friends, were waiting at the airport. We shared hugs, smiles, laughter, followed by the tedium of retrieving bags, getting a sim card for the cell phone.
As we headed down the freeway toward Cape Town, everything looked at once totally familiar and foreign. The shacks were still there, by their thousands. At least they hadn’t built walls to hide them. I began to recall that part of the psyche of South Africa is living with the intensity of the contradictions. Poverty is in your face, even in the suburbs. At every traffic light, around every corner someone lurks, flaunting their desperation—selling combs and sculptures that no one really wants, slapping water on your windshield before you have time to tell them not to bother, diving into a dumpster to sort through the day’s pickings. Then there is the ample cohort of “tsotsis” [thugs] ready to simply jump on you and implement their own vision of democracy. Unlike the U.S., South Africa has not yet perfected the art of tucking poverty away so thoroughly.
We get off the freeway and enter South Africa’s suburban fortress. There are new developments—more electric fences, more gated communities demanding a thumb print for entry. But then electric fences are familiar territory for me. I slept behind them for more than six years—only they were designed to keep me in rather than keep others out.
For my first few hours this all seems newly strange to me, as if I’ve landed in a place where I’ve never been at all. But after a day my old life resurfaces. I feel like John Pape again. I retrace old steps, walk past the house where I was arrested, a quiet dead end street. The last time I was there, November 8, 2002, a line of police cars and plain clothes detectives had created the first and only traffic jam on Dunluce Ave. I recall my then eight-year-old son as he stood confused next to me while the police closed in. The officers were polite, not like they are in the U.S. or in the townships of South Africa. They let me hold onto him. I felt his little heart pounding in his chest. At least I had the chance to whisper in his ear that I loved him. He didn’t know how to respond.
On day two I return to Community House, where I’d worked for five years at the International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG). We did education and research for unions and social movements. During those years, we thought we could triumph, not in a full-blown revolutionary sense, but in squeezing out major concessions for the poor—housing, electricity, water, education. We never quite believed that the movement that produced Mandela, Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, and Lillian Ngoyi could totally abandon its roots.
By 2012, Community House has transformed. This once dingy building now carries the status of National Heritage site. An influx of state lottery money has yielded striking murals of local struggle heroes on the now shining walls. As I walk through the building, life size images of the martyrs—Imam Haroon, Ashley Kriel, Neil Aggett, and many others—greet me. Something has gone right.
I have been invited by my successor at ILRIG, Lenny Gentle, to sit in on the organization’s mid-year review meeting. It’s a strange way to re-connect, but it works. I dutifully take notes, reassured that in spite of it all, the ILRIG people still care about the working class. As the proceedings carry on, various familiar faces peak through a window into the meeting room. They have come to greet me. I bounce up and go outside for hugs and shrieks of disbelief. They all tell me I haven’t changed, that I look the same. I don’t quite believe them. I have changed but it’s their way of saying they know I have survived prison and I am still that same John Pape they once knew. By reappearing I have reminded them that I am still on their side.
In the meeting Lenny and the others talk much like we did a decade ago, searching for the resistance to the neoliberal path the government has chosen, identifying which social movements show potential and how education and research might help them. Service delivery protests take place nearly every day in South Africa, Lenny reminds us, but the problem is that they “lack structure,” he says. Another issue is the energy many activists devote to supporting various factions of the ANC. Lenny argues that the factions all stand for the same thing. A counter view asserts that the factions actually represent different groupings on the ground, that it is important to know why this broad ANC church is now producing dissident voices.
They call on me for a few words. I can only add that I am pleased to see that such debates still continue. I inform them there are no discussions with this kind of passion and insight in Champaign, Illinois, where I now live. “I never found them in prison either,” I add. They smile.
After ILRIG our trip takes a different course altogether. Terri and I run away to Nature’s Valley, a magnificent resort area seven hours east of Cape Town. It has been almost a decade since I have climbed a hill, walked in a forest or dipped my toes in the ocean. We don’t have such things in Champaign, and High Desert State Prison offered no hiking or swimming opportunities.
Terri and I spend a week there with friends surrounded by this thing called “nature.” The corn fields of Illinois recede. We are gradually finding our place together in our New South Africa. We take time to hold hands, let the damp of the forest seep into our momentarily comfortable togetherness. “I wish the children were here,” she says. Somehow this can’t be “our” South Africa without them. But our two boys are grown up now. Our older son has just graduated from college and gotten a job in China. Our younger boy finished high school in May. They have grown too old to share sentimental moments with parents. Still, as we walk through the forest, it seems they should be tagging along behind us asking about the names of the trees and the songs of the birds.
After a week in the wilderness, we return to business as such. I am here to connect with old friends and comrades but also to talk about various things—my books, my experience of the last nine years, mass incarceration in the United States. Terri has important research to do on apartheid education.
My “tour” begins at the Book Lounge, a cozy shop in the center of Cape Town struggling to survive in the era of Kindle. The owner sets up about a dozen chairs, saying that only nine people have responded to their RSVP. Eighty-five people show up, mostly the ageing white left, my comrades from the unions, the social movements, the NGOs. As I open my talk, I’m overcome by emotion. I falter when I start to thank people for all their support over the years and try to remind them how important family and friends are. The tears come when I mention Terri and my sons. I have instructed the crowd that if I cry they must blubber with me in solidarity. They do, at least enough to get me back on track. I tell them how I wrote Freedom Never Rests in prison, that it is about the struggle of people in a fictitious town in the Eastern Cape to get water, and that I got the idea to write it when I saw steaming hot water pouring out of a shower at Dublin Federal Detention Center and no one bothered to stop the flow for a month. People in U.S. prisons could fill their cups of water with impunity while the poor of South Africa had to pay for every penny. Smiles and congratulations come from the crowd. I sign books, forget to eat dinner, go for drinks afterwards.
Two nights later it’s heavier, back to Community House for what I call a “report back.” The crowd is mostly black. Some trade unionists sing songs and toyi-toyi, the South Africans’ fabled struggle dance. Their song proclaims me a “communist,” a high form of praise for the man they know as “Comrade John Pape.” I morph deeper into that identity, as I wend my way through my arrest, my landing in the “new apartheid” of the California state prison system where even the showers and phones were segregated, where the hegemony of the white supremacists was so extreme that if I dared to give a black person a sip of water from my glass, I would be stabbed by someone with a swastika or SS lightning bolt tattooed across his forehead. I tell them how I survived all this by teaching math and running workshops on the global financial crisis—taking the experience I had with popular education in South Africa to the prison yards of the U.S. There is lots of head nodding. Racial segregation is familiar territory to them. So is fighting back. I feel home here, much more like John Pape than this other person who carries my birth name.
The next day, I meet with two ILRIG people to plan a workshop on “criminalizing the poor” for unemployed youth in Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s biggest black township. Crime is crippling the community people tell me, mob violence is taking the place of the justice system. “People have lost faith in the police,” one youth says. “They never come. Now the residents are killing those who steal their things.” Others claim all the police do is kick them out of the meager shacks they are able to construct from scrap materials, then kick them off whatever small piece of ground they subsequently claim. I’m not sure what I have to say to youth from these communities. I know about the inside of prisons in the United States but I have never lived in a shack, never seen my children sleep by the side of the road with no food, but I agree to do what I can. We set the workshop for my last week in South Africa.
I walk home, rehearsing in my head what I might say to these youngsters, walking along the side of a busy thoroughfare with no sidewalks. Two youth sidle up to me. One asks me for money but I sense these are not beggars. I dig into my pockets and give them a couple Rands. “Give us all your money or we will rob you,” he says. I dig deeper, clearing out my remaining few coins. “What about your bag?” he asks. I assure them there is nothing there but papers. He looks at my finger. “Give us the ring,” he says. I tell him it’s my wedding ring. I leave out the part about how Terri wore this ring around her finger for six and a half years while I was in prison, that one of the first things she did when I got out was put it back on my finger. “Give us the ring or we’re gonna shoot you.” Luckily I am older and wiser because he is a very small man and this wedding ring is perhaps the only possession I have that is worth fighting for. I am almost laughing at myself, a hardened “convict” so to speak, reared in the prison dogma that says if you let someone disrespect you today, you’ll be disrespected by everyone forever. I never got “punked” or robbed in prison. No one ever laid a hand on me. I learned how to stand my ground but now I give in. I slide the ring off and it’s over. Three minutes later a cop car pulls in behind me. The thieves are long gone by now. The cops pull over another young black pedestrian and pat him down. They let me walk past. I don’t say a word. I don’t talk to cops.
Terri doesn’t balk when I tell her the bad news. As usual she sees the big picture. A ring, even with all the sentiment attached, is still just a piece of metal. Rick tells me that someone was murdered on a bus not long ago for refusing to give a thief their wedding ring. I have a cup of tea and a rusk, a great South African tradition, and move on.
From there our trip becomes a blur of speaking engagements, interviews, radio talk shows, and delightful dinners with old friends who ply us with home-brewed prawn curries, bobotie, and South African merlot. Each night surpasses the previous in cuisine and overindulgence. I repeat my Community House performance for a similar crowd in Johannesburg where we lived for six years. Once again there are hugs, smiles, books to be signed, gushing expressions of support and solidarity.
I take time out to visit my friend Ighsaan’s new project in the decaying downtown area of Germiston, about 15 miles east of Johannesburg. He has set up something called the “Casual Workers’ Advice Office (CWAO)” —an effort to serve the fastest growing sector of the working class—casuals, part-timers, contract workers employed by labor brokers.
The traditional unions don’t quite know how to service them and don’t seem to care. Ighsaan’s office is a thrust of idealism in a non-idealistic time. Having worked nearly twenty years in an NGO educating workers and community people, he has sidestepped opportunities for promotion or securing a pension. He earns no salary, lives with the support from his partner, and hopes that somewhere, someone with a bit of money will realize this is work that needs to be done.
Things are quiet at the CWAO. Two admin assistants do something on computers and one woman comes in for advice. Ighsaan tells me of the biggest day yet, when the CWAO helped some postal workers win a judgment and some 300 of them danced and sang in the street in front of the office. He hopes there will be more days like that in the future as the word of the office’s presence spreads. I try to remain as hopeful as he is for we are birds of a feather in a certain way, still knocking our head against the wall when we’ve lost so many more battles than we have won. As I hear him talk I ask myself if I have any real chance of living to see the target of my present passions, mass incarceration in the U.S., undergo substantive change. I don’t bother to ponder it in those terms. For characters like Ighsaan and myself the victory is in the small steps and in knowing you are still fighting the good fight. Setting aside money for retirement or medical insurance in our old age is an elephant we don’t allow to enter our room.
From Johannesburg we go to Durban and land in the company of Patrick Bond, an old friend and academic expert on South African financial markets and many other things economic and otherwise. In his whirlwind style Patrick has arranged a meeting for us with a few Zimbabweans in the middle of downtown Durban. Just an “informal” thing he says. Since Terri and I spent most of the 1980s in Zimbabwe we are anxious to hear what these people have to say.
We arrive at a rundown apartment building in the city center. They’ve filled the courtyard of the building with stacks of metal shipping containers, now converted into houses. They’ve cut openings in the metal siding to fit windows—a mini-refugee camp which houses 35 people.
The residents and a few friends gather in the courtyard while a Zimbabwean tells them they have brought a writer all the way from the U.S. to speak to them. He holds up a copy of my book, We Are All Zimbabweans Now. In Shona, I hear people saying they are tired, that it is time to eat and they want to leave. The speaker continues, then finally introduces me. I am scared to death, feeling like I’ve been parachuted to another planet and then forced to deprive these exhausted people of their dinner. I dig deep and suddenly the Shona that I used to speak reasonably well back in the 1980s starts pouring forth. I apologize for stealing them away from their dinner, tell them back in the early days of Zimbabwean independence I would have never dreamed people like them would end up living in shipping containers in downtown Durban, unable to survive either economically or politically in their country of birth. Suddenly the crowd perks up. I pass the baton back to the M.C. The discussion carries on for another two hours. This is not about the writer from America but rather about their lives in South Africa and how they must organize to fight back. They are victims of police harassment, of xenophobic attacks by local residents. They have become accustomed to being called “makwerekwere” and other derogatory names by South Africans, of being accused of stealing local women. Many have vocational qualifications—lab technicians, motor mechanics, teachers—but here they cut peoples’ grass or sell packets of sweets on the street. Their life is a petty hustle to earn enough money to survive and send a few cents of surplus back home. They talk about the need to organize the other Zimbabweans in Durban, in the rest of South Africa. There is optimism in this dark, oil-stained space. They collectively vow that they will get back home, like all refugees must do from time to time to maintain their sanity and sense of identity. But of course no one can answer the two key questions that determine their future: when will President Robert Mugabe die or leave power and what will come next? As the meeting winds down, one of the men asks me to close up the session. I try to convey in my linguistic masala how inspiring they are, how their determination to carry on in such a situation is remarkable. I close by assuring them “muchawina” – you will win. Of course no one can be certain that they will but it is the best thing to say.
Time to return to Cape Town to that workshop on crime for the youth. I don’t tell the group the story about getting robbed on the way home from the meeting. I decry the vagaries of the school to prison pipeline—the lockdowns, the drug searches, the fancily titled cops in U.S. schools known as Student Resource Officers (SROs). I tell them how I am presenting this message because I fear that some people in South Africa might be tempted to follow the American model, to go the way of “zero tolerance.” I assure them that this is simply a way of criminalizing the survival activities of the poor, in the same way the so-called squatter camps where many of them live are regarded as lawless communities by the authorities.
In the discussions, one participant assures me that he can phone in and get a pizza delivered much faster than he could ever get the cops to come if a crime was in progress. These youth can rattle off names of friends who have died either in gang warfare or at the hands of the police. One young man tells us that when he walks the streets late at night, he fears the police much more than the drug lords. “They can beat you up, take your things,” he says. “Anything is possible.” I’m tempted to reference the apartheid days here, to find out if things are better or worse. But these people are 18-22 years old. They were toddlers or pre-schoolers when Mandela won the first election in 1994.
Like the Zimbabweans, they close their meeting with the determination to come together again, to begin to take on these issues. Then they disperse, rushing to the plates of chicken and rice that ILRIG has provided. The next day the local paper announces that Cape Town is considering a proposal to place police officers in schools in five “troubled” areas. The idea has come from a visit by someone in the local government to the United States.
Our day to return “home” arrives and we are back on the plane to Champaign, where there is drought, 105 degree temperatures. Our sons are waiting for us. Terri and I reflect on our journey. She mentions something we didn’t notice at the time. “We have never laughed that much in our entire time in Illinois.” We usually associate South Africa with rage, outrage, or crying. But for us there was also another dimension.
We try to figure out why. The most important experiences of our adult life took place in southern Africa, our meeting, our marriage, the birth and raising of our children. We experienced the upbeat early years of independence in Zimbabwe and the transition from apartheid in South Africa. We lived life bigger than reality in those days. We were part of making history. We even wrote textbooks for schools entitled People Making History which landed in two thirds of Zimbabwe’s high schools.
Now decades and many complicated journeys later, we live on a smaller, more joyless, but far less dangerous stage. We can walk our dog at two a.m., drive to the other side of town in fifteen minutes. Life is easy, smooth, but something is missing that can never be inserted into the equation of central Illinois or perhaps anywhere in the United States for that matter. That big part of us that still lives in South Africa remains like a big Trust Fund from which we can draw money only by going to the bank and making a withdrawal. There is no internet link to dispense emotion or feelings for friends and comrades. That kind of capital only accumulates through fighting complex battles together and emerging at the other side if not in triumph, at least intact and with the self-satisfaction that you have been on the right side. In the end, this is what makes you able to laugh together, even if it is laughing to keep from crying.
Two and a half weeks after we return to the United States the South African police shoot 34 miners dead in Rustenberg. In the wake of the shootings, the U.S. press reminds us these miners were armed with spears and knives and were charging the police. They also note that these killings look a lot like what used to happen under apartheid only this time the police are black. But they refuse to see the essential truth: that what the police did in Rustenberg is the result of bigger choices made long before. In South Africa, the government chose to abandon redistributing wealth and power to the historically oppressed. Instead, the new rulers opted for the trickle down and a few drops of redistribution have not proved adequate to upend the horrors of history.
Those police bullets cast a grim shadow on our joyous journey to South Africa. Our momentary connection to the past has been severed by new tragedies in a now seemingly distant land. We cannot capture that moment from Champaign. A luta continua, says the southern African slogan for the ages, the struggle continues. For the moment, all we can do is holler out the response, “a luta” from afar. Perhaps no one will hear our cries but we will keep hollering them anyway, at the top of our lungs.
Bhopal's catastrophe and representations of social mobilisation, 20 July 2012
Speaker: Shalini Sharma Date: Friday, 20 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The world's worst industrial disaster was the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India. The suffering continues, prompting victims to fight for justice against Union Carbide (merged into Dow Chemicals), the American corporation responsible for the disaster. In what ways are Bhopal's social movements representing their plight, and which narratives are proving effective in leveraging local and global power?
Speaker: Shalini Sharma is a Felix Scholar in Development Studies at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, where her doctoral research focuses on the political communication that feeds into people's struggles. She is interested in public and political communication, representation and identity, politics and new media, social movements, media politics of dissent, power structures and development politics.
Bhopal disaster From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Bhopal disaster (commonly referred to as Bhopal gas tragedy) was a gas leak incident in India, considered one of the world's worst industrial catastrophes.[1] It occurred on the night of December 2–3, 1984 at the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. A leak of methyl isocyanate gas and other chemicals from the plant resulted in the exposure of hundreds of thousands of people. The toxic substance made its way in and around the shantytowns located near the plant.[2] Estimates vary on the death toll. The official immediate death toll was 2,259 and the government of Madhya Pradesh has confirmed a total of 3,787 deaths related to the gas release.[3] Others estimate 3,000 died within weeks and another 8,000 have since died from gas-related diseases.[4][5] A government affidavit in 2006 stated the leak caused 558,125 injuries including 38,478 temporary partial and approximately 3,900 severely and permanently disabling injuries.[6]
UCIL was the Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), with Indian Government controlled banks and the Indian public holding a 49.1 percent stake. In 1994, the Supreme Court of India allowed UCC to sell its 50.9 percent share. Union Carbide sold UCIL, the Bhopal plant operator, to Eveready Industries India Limited in 1994. The Bhopal plant was later sold to McLeod Russel (India) Ltd. Dow Chemical Company purchased UCC in 2001.
Civil and criminal cases are pending in the United States District Court, Manhattan and the District Court of Bhopal, India, involving UCC, UCIL employees, and Warren Anderson, UCC CEO at the time of the disaster.[7][8] In June 2010, seven ex-employees, including the former UCIL chairman, were convicted in Bhopal of causing death by negligence and sentenced to two years imprisonment and a fine of about $2,000 each, the maximum punishment allowed by law. An eighth former employee was also convicted, but died before judgment was passed.[1] More
Voice, political mobilisation and repression under Jacob Zuma, 19 July
Speaker: Jane Duncan Date: Thursday, 19 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: This paper examines the relationship between shifts in the political opportunity structure, purportedly towards greater openness, political mobilisation and repression under Jacob Zuma's presidency. To what extent has Zuma's presidency opened up spaces for political dissent by social movements and political organisations, or have spaces in fact, been closed down? The state of protest action is one indicator of the state of health (or otherwise) of the country’s democracy under Zuma’s leadership, and several case studies are considered: struggles against the unilateral reincorporation of particular Municipalities from one province to another, the regulation of protest action in the South African National Defence Force, and the regulation of protest action in the buildup to the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
Speaker: Jane Duncan is Highway Africa Chair of Media and Information Society in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University. Before that she worked at the Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) since its establishment in 1994 and was its director from 2001 to mid-2009. She was also coordinator of the FXI's predecessor organisation, the Anti-Censorship Action Group. She also worked at the Funda Centre in Soweto and then at the Afrika Cultural Centre in Newtown. She obtained a BA as well as honours and master's degrees at the University of the Witwatersrand, and completed a PhD through the Wits School of the Arts in 2007. She is a speaker at the UKZN-hosted Annual Conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research.
Voice, political mobilisation and repression under Jacob Zuma Jane Duncan
Abstract This paper examines the relationship between shifts in the political opportunity structure, purportedly towards greater openness, political mobilisation and repression under Jacob Zuma's presidency; so, to what extent has Zuma's presidency opened up spaces for political dissent by social movements and political organisations, or have spaces in fact, been closed down?. This paper examines the veracity of the claims that the Zuma administration has been a more sensitive, ‘listening government’ towards workers and the poor, in the light of Zuma's first year in office. It focusses particularly on the state of protest action as an indicator of the state of health (or otherwise) of the country’s democracy under Zuma’s leadership. The following case studies are used to discuss these themes: struggles against the unilateral reincorporation of particular Municipalities from one province to another, the regulation of protest action in the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) and the regulation of protest action in the buildup to the 2010 FIFA World Cup. With respect to the anti-incorporation protests, there has been a clear shift in the political opportunity structure towards a reconsideration of a previously non-negotiable set of decisions, and greater points of access to the decision making have been created. However, after encouraging signs that the protestor’s demands would be heeded, frustration is setting in at the ANC’s deferral of decision-making on the issue, which raises questions about the extent of openness of the structure and is leading to an escalation of protest action. The paper also explores the attempts by the Zuma administration to exert greater control over the security cluster, leading to greater control being exerted by the South African Police Force (SAPF) over protest policing in strategic cases, and attempts to withdraw basic constitutional rights from the military, including the right to unionise and the right to protest. More
The Decommissioning of Durban's Emissions Trade Pilot, 11 July
Speakers: Khadija Sharife and Patrick Bond Date: Wednesday, 11 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Trading emissions to address climate change is one of the most controversial strategies of global environmental governance, and the pilot project in Durban - the Bisasar Road methane-to-electricity conversion project at Africa's largest formal landfill in Clare Estate - requires constant vigilance. Environmental racism, incineration toxicity, airborne particulates, divide-and-conquer politics and wastepicker abuse are some of the local problems. But a recent admission by a Durban municipal official that the Bisasar Road 'Clean Development Mechanism' (CDM) application made in 2004 was fraudulent (lacking 'additionality'), merits the project's decommissioning. How might such a process unfold in coming months, and what impact might it have on international emissions trading, on the CDM Policy Dialogue assessment led in the UN by former SA Environment Minister Valli Moosa (who had approved the Bisasar application at the time), and on Clare Estate communities? The seminar will be followed by a site visit. (Please contact pbond@mail.ngo.za if interested in joining the trip.)
Speakers: Khadija Sharife is a former resident of Clare Estate; CCS's coordinator of the Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade project and a writer for Africa Report, Capitalism Nature Socialism as well as numerous other periodicals. Patrick Bond is CCS Director and author of the recent UKZN Press book, Politics of Climate Justice, as well as other books that analyse carbon trading. (For access to the seminar skypecast, please contact pbond@mail.ngo.za)
PHOTOS
Interpreting Umlazi's Unrest, Repression and Occupy Resistance, 9 July
Speakers: Bheki Buthelezi and China Ngubane Date: Monday, 9 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The ongoing occupation of space next to an Umlazi's councilor's office in V Section is a new reaction to socio-economic oppression, shifting the 'Service Delivery Protest' so common in South Africa, to a new appropriation of public space. The Umlazi communities which oppose abuse of local 'development' in this area have long struggled to make their voices heard, but in June, protest marches were clamped down with unprecedented force by police and local political thugs. Hundreds of activists have been shot at, teargassed and arrested, but will their next stage of struggle be tolerated - or like Occupy in other sites, will it be deemed too great a challenge to the status quo? (For more, see ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?2,68,3,2675 and http://abahlali.org/node/8915)
Speakers: Buthelezi is an Umlazi civic leader jailed in late June for his role in a non-violent service delivery protest, and an Unemployed People's Movement activist. China Ngubane is with the Democratic Left Front, Right2Know and the Centre for Civil Society where he is a Dennis Brutus Community Scholar.
Resource-cursed Zimbabwe's Marange blood diamonds, 6 July
Speaker: Farai Maguwu Date: Friday, 6 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: What may be judged as the world's largest-ever diamond field, in eastern Zimbabwe, appears to be channeling unprecedented resources to a small elite, including the country's generals and Zanu(PF) officials, and Chinese, Indian, Israeli and Dubai enterprises active in the diamond commodity chain. These are 'blood diamonds' by any reasonable definition, given the death of hundreds of local residents in the Marange area a few years ago, and given how exploitative social, environmental and political processes in Zimbabwe have been amplified by the diamonds' extraction. The case allows further interrogation of the notion of the Resource Curse, associated with malgovernance and inappropriate use of non-renewable natural resources.
Speaker: Farai Maguwu holds a masters from Africa University and is enrolling for his doctorate in development studies at UKZN based at CCS. He was awarded the Africa prize by Human Rights Watch, following weeks in prison and torture given his role in researching Marange diamonds and contesting the Kimberley Process. A recent interview with Farai following the US hosting of the KP earlier this month is at http://www.swradioafrica.com/2012/06/22/transcript-of-farai-maguwu-on-question-time/
“Blood diamonds” were under debate when human rights activist, Mr Farai Maguwu, presented findings of his research into the Marange diamond fields in Zimbabwe to a packed seminar at UKZN’s Centre for Civil Society (CCS).
Making it clear the Marange diamonds could either be a blessing or a curse for Zimbabwe and its people; Maguwu told the audience how he had spent time in prison and had risked his life researching and documenting some of the horrific abuses taking place at the diamond fields.
He referred to the Kimberley Process intercessional meeting in Washington where the diamond monitor was urged to tackle continuing human rights violations at Marange.
‘Violence in Marange has significantly gone down. We still have isolated sporadic incidences of human rights violations and we want government to deal with the problem and also to ensure that the army is completely removed from the area,’ he said.
Maguwu said human rights violations committed by legitimate governments were affecting the diamond industry. ‘When consumers hear of human rights violations in a diamond producing community, they become skeptical.
‘They feel those diamonds could be associated with internal conflict and they don’t want to express love to their loved ones through something that was sourced from a conflict zone or something that led to the death of someone or the killing of a person.’
Maguwu proposed a Diamond Bill as a possible solution to the problem. ‘This Diamond Bill must address the issue of investor identification. Therefore, if the manner in which the companies mining in Marange is identified as not clean, the Bill must address that and ensure an open bidding process where the best players in the industry are identified and awarded the contracts.’
He added that Zimbabwean people displaced by the mining in Marange deserved proper compensation
PHOTOS
Murky world of Marange mining firms
Jason Moyo 6 July 2012
Zimbabwe’s Mines Minister Obert Mpofu estimates that the country’s vast diamond wealth could generate $2-billion a year, but it is increasingly unclear who is benefiting more – the government or the faceless shareholders who own the miners.
Foreigners are still queuing up to get in on the action and South Africa’s Utho Capital is planning to set up a forum of the world’s top diamond companies in Zimbabwe.
The Marange fields cover 123000 hectares, with only 54000 hectares being mined. The remainder is up for grabs, according to the Zimbabwe Mining Development Company (ZMDC), the state mining firm. More
Housing Policy and Liberalism in South Africa, 5 July
Baldwin Date: Thursday, 5 July 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: This research focuses on the work of John Rawls and political liberalism in the context of housing policy in post-apartheid South Africa. In his later work, Rawls produces a conception of political justice independent of any social and moral theory. The non-metaphysical nature of Rawls' conception of political justice allows for the free manifestation of public reason and therefore the liberal state. Twenty years after a democratic transition South Africa is a laboratory for the study of Rawlsian political liberalism. However, the extent of political liberalism is threatened by a series of sociopolitical issues. The end of this research will be to argue that the most substantial of these is a failure to deliver adequate housing to South Africa's most disadvantaged as part of a scheme of basic liberties. As South Africa compromises its status as a liberal state, radical left movements play a critical and unique role in policy formation. Rawls neglected to include provisions in his theory of justice to handle dissident groups of the left. This research asks the question: In their pursuit of housing reform, are dissident groups compromising or strengthening political liberalism? This seminar will be an overview and elucidation of this research in its preliminary stages.
Speaker: Eric Baldwin is a visiting scholar at the Centre for Civil Society. He is a B.Phil candidate in Political Science and a Chancellor's Research Fellow in the University Honors College at the University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, USA). He is co-advised by Michael Goodhart and Andrew Lotz. His defense is tentatively planned for March 2013. Other research interests include: the work of Emma Goldman in the context of anarcho-feminist political thought, epistemologies of power in western societies, and postmodern spatial politics in the urban environment. In addition to his research and academic work he serves as a senior editor for the Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review and president of Alpha Phi Omega a national community service fraternity, and is a longstanding member of the Pitt College Democrats. He is originally from the state of Vermont.
CCS Seminar - Rio+20 report-back, 2 July
Speakers: Khadija Sharife and Patrick Bond Date: Monday, 2 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The Rio+20 Earth Summit held in late June was notable for its failure to generate ideas and policies to save the environment from various forms of destruction, and to assist the many victims of worsening world capitalist crisis. In contrast, the Cupula dos Povos alternative people's summit and three intellectual conferences (Brazilian Political Economists, International Society for Ecological Economics, and Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade research network - http://www.ejolt.org) were much more hopeful sites. In these settings, not only was the orthodox 'Green Economy' criticised for its corporate-centric, dangerous characteristics, but alternatives for research, projects and policies were explored and advanced.
Speakers: Khadija Sharife is CCS's coordinator of EJOLT, a post-graduate student of law and international economics at Liverpool University, and a writer for Africa Report, Capitalism Nature Socialism and numerous other periodicals. Patrick Bond is CCS Director and author of the recent UKZN Press book, Politics of Climate Justice.
State-building & the diaspora in Somaliland, 28 June 2012
State-building in practice: the Somali diaspora and processes of reconstruction in Somaliland
Speaker: Monica Fagioli Date: Thursday 28 June 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: This paper addresses the relationship between the Somali diaspora and ongoing processes of state-building in Somaliland, a self-declared independent state formerly part of the Republic of Somalia until 1991 (the year of the collapse of the Somali state). It will critically discuss the “migration-development nexus” as an instrument of governance to reconstruct state institutions applied in post-conflict societies, such as Somaliland. This critical reading will be informed by recent ethnographic material collected in a year of fieldwork across Kenya (Nairobi), Somaliland and Puntland. The emphasis of this paper is to present the way state-building functions in daily practices enacted by Somalis from the diaspora, Somali civil servants, and international organizations’ officers, in order to highlight and articulate the contradictions and problems of current state-building programs in Africa and possibly elsewhere.
Speaker: Monica Fagioli is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the New School for Social Research (The New School, USA). She holds an MA in Anthropology of Media (SOAS, UK). Her research interests include: African forms of political life, global migration, history of colonialism and development, and race relations. Beyond her academic work, she has been involved in community media projects in the UK, and in media activism across Kenya and South Africa.
Photos
QWASHA! An online archive of community digital content, 21 June
Speakers: Molefi Ndlovu, Niall McNulty & Lwazi Gwijane Date: Thursday 21 June 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The Qwasha! Portal for community digital content is an online public archive of counter narratives, community media productions, interviews, stories and activities. This initiative is addressing the need to increase the use of Information Communication Technologies and related social media platforms to facilitate and amplify citizen voices and grassroots exchange, dialogue, and collaboration at local, regional, continental and global scale in all spheres of public life. The hope is that by putting effort into a more organized public action archiving practice in community based development initiatives within the eThekwini metro area the online platform can be seen as another tool in the hands of citizens, a means through which they can voice their view and move citizens closer to the realization of fundamental human rights to free expression, thought, association, access to information and the right to dissent. The seminar will provoke discussion on the theoretical concerns motivating this initiative, offering a situated reading of the usefulness of such a tool and possible uses it can be put to. The session will connect practical discussions about how the portal works and attempt to test some connecting threads linking critical theory, subjectivity, history and identity in a post-colonial African context.
Qwasha is an isiZulu word: Qwasha. [v/i]; Imperative; Singular of: uku Qwasha (v/i.) Lie awake without sleep, very alert.
Speakers: Molefi Mafereka Ndlovu (Lead Researcher): Molefi's research background includes the planning, designing and execution of participatory research projects; conducting peer training and capacity building with community based activist and advocacy groups. He has worked for the Education Policy Unit (Wits- EPU), with community based activist groups such as the Workers Library (committee member); the Anti Privatization Forum (APF-JHB), Imbawula Trust; Rasa FM (Pimville - Soweto), Indymedia-Africa (JHB, DBN & CT), Prince Africa Zulu Foundation Trust (PAZFT-Trustee-SADC); Dedicated Artists Cultural Arts Organisation (DACAO- Clermont), Non Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC-ICANN- Afrika), Black Pepper (SA: Exc Consultant), Khula Malaika Foundation (KMF- W. Cape: Associate), UmKhumbane Mail (Durban; Associate), Onkweni Royal Cultural Festival (Ulundi) and DeepDish TV (NYC; Associate). Molefi’s approach is based on critical theory and pedagogy of the oppressed with a focus on participatory action oriented research methodologies he has completed his bachelor’s degree in Community Development (UKZN). His current and latest work online includes: www.qwasha.org.za , www.imc-africa.mayfirst.org and www.durbansings.wordpress.com
Niall McNulty (Web Developer). Niall is an experienced content and web manager, with a focus on online community management and user-generated content. He has developed and managed a number of digital projects for local government, academic institutions and other organisations. He manages the development and maintenance of the Ulwazi Programme, an innovative project which uses the Municipal libraries, Web 2.0 technology and community journalists to create an organic, living record of the local history and indigenous knowledge of the city. Volunteers from the community are shown how to use digital audio recorders and cameras, and provided with training in basic IT, oral history and writing skills. They then collect stories from their community and add them to a collaborative Community Memory website. Niall's current and latest work online includes www.ulwazi.org.
Lwazi Gwijane (Graphic designer). Lwazi is a Hip Hop Kulture activist Born in Namibia to South African exile parents he has lived in many parts of the country, now based in Durban. He is founder of THE ART OF HIP HOP FOUNDATION which hosts the popular “OFF THE HOOK” hip-hop events in Durban. Lwazi studied Brand Communication Management specializing in graphic design at Vega School of Brand Leadership (JHB). Lwazi is lead creative input on graphic presentation and utility of the Qwasha! Portal. His current and latest work online includes: http://www.advancedphotoshop.co.uk/user/ILLUSTR8 More
CDM cannot deliver: Lessons from Nigeria, 11 June
Speaker: Fidelis Allen Discussant: Khadija Sharife Date: Monday 11 June 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Reporting back from the Africa’s Stakeholders’ Meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s CDM Policy Review Panel held on the 4th of June Fidelis Allen will outline Nigeria’s draft climate policy – the National Climate Policy and Legislation (NCPL). The policy identifies the country’s vulnerability to climate change as a core interest, yet without any indication of the need to move away from fossil fuel production as a long term goal. The government has accepted the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as a commitment to its role as a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, but also as a fund-raising opportunity. Regardless of its laudable objectives, the CDM is faced with challenges that will ultimately prove correct those who are demanding its replacement with direct climate debt payment to citizens in the developing world.
Speaker: Fidelis Allen obtained his PhD in Politics from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the School of Built Environment and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Discussant: Khadija Sharife is a journalist, visiting scholar at the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is a contributor to the Tax Justice Network and the Africa Report.
Zimbabwean civil society in South Africa, 7 June
The Centre for Civil Society based within the School of Built Environment and Development Studies invites you to the seminar ‑ Zimbabwean civil society in South Africa
Speaker: Michela Gallo Date: Thursday 7 June 2012 Time: 12:30‑14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: This seminar is based on a research proposal focused on Zimbabwean civil society in South Africa. It considers how Zimbabwean civil society finds expression in South Africa, its characteristics and profile of participants as well as the degree and ways Zimbabwean civil society interacts with South African civil society to address challenges faced by Zimbabwean nationals both in Zimbabwe and in South Africa.
About Speaker Michela Gallo is a visiting scholar at CCS and is carrying out her year of European Voluntary Service in South Africa. Her area of interest is community work and migrant rights. Michela is from Italy and has a Master's degree in Development Studies from Universit? di Roma la Sapienza.
Small wars - A micro-level analysis of violence in KwaZulu-Natal, 17 May
Speaker: Maria Schuld Date: Thursday 17 May 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30‑14:00
Topic: It is no secret that the transformation from apartheid to democracy was a violent process that cost the lives of more than 15,000 people, most of them killed in what is today KwaZulu‑Natal. What is less obvious are the civil war patterns that hide behind the newspaper headlines of mere 'unrest in the townships', including warlord systems, professional hit‑squad killings and strategically planned mob massacres. Power struggles between Inkatha and the ANC/UDF appear interwoven with taxi wars, fights over land issues and rent increases, gangsterism, section and faction fights as well as evidence of violence along ethnic lines at the local level. Maria Schuld will present some preliminary findings of her research on local‑level violence in KwaZulu‑Natal. Her focus includes the violent structures and styles that go beyond the anti‑apartheid struggle narrative and the changes and continuities that see various forms of violence persist until today ‑ thus casting a somewhat different light on the province's transition to democracy.
Speaker: Maria Schuld is a post graduate student from the Free University in Berlin. She is currently based at the Centre for Civil Society as a Visiting Scholar conducting research for her dissertation on post conflict violence in Africa.
Improving access to sanitation on a global scale, 10 May
Speakers: Sasha Kramer and Anthony Kilbride Date: Thursday 10 May Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30‑14:00
Topic: This seminar will deal with social complexities associated with sanitation.Can international non‑governmental organizations really improve access to sanitation on a global scale? What is the impact of the Bill Gates initiative to redesign the toilet? Should long‑term sanitation initiatives be free to low‑income users? How to enforce standards in such a diverse and personal area of development?
Presenters: Sasha Kramer is an ecologist (Stanford University doctorate) and a human rights advocate who has been working in Haiti since 2004. She is the Co‑founder and Executive Director of the organization SOIL, which focuses on the transformation of waste into resources, especially ecological sanitation in which human waste is transformed into compost.
Anthony Kilbride is a civil engineer with a focus on water and sanitation interventions who has worked in over 10 countries in the last decade.He has been based in Port au Prince since the earthquake in 2010 and worked with several non‑governmental organizations including Medecins Sans Frontiers, SOIL and Viva Rio.
Charter processes in Zimbabwe and South Africa, 7 May
The Africa People's Charter, Zimbabwe People's Convention Charter and South African Reconstruction and Development Programme
Speakers: China Ngubane and Patrick Bond Date: Monday 7 May 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, Memorial Tower Building, Howard College Time: 12:30‑14:00
Topic: There are at least three important statements of popular politico‑eco‑socio‑economic demands circulating in South Africa and Zimbabwe these past two decades: the new proposed People's Charter for Africa, the 2008 Zim National People's Convention Charter and South Africa's 1994 RDP. What kinds of politics flow from these civil society initiatives? Can the 'red' (social justice) and 'green' (environmental conservation) be reconciled? How democratic are these Charter processes, and how durable are their ideas and concrete programmes? More
Speakers:China Ngubane is a CCS Dennis Brutus Community Scholar engaged in the African People's Charter process, and as an exiled Zimbabwe solidarity activist supported the National People's Convention. CCS Director Patrick Bond was co‑editor of the RDP and of the 2000 book commissioned by the ANC National Executive Committee, /An RDP Policy Audit.
The Secrecy Bill threat to democracy, journalism and research, 4 May
Speakers: Murray Hunter, Percy Nhau and Nosipho Mngoma Date: Friday 4 May Time: 12:30-2pm Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, Memorial Tower Building
Topic: How are academics and journalists affected by the threat of a rising security state? Will this process derail democracy in South Africa? The Secrecy Bill, the General Intelligence Laws Amendment Bill, and the rising securocratic elite are addressed by Murray Hunter. Percy Nhau and Nosipho Mngoma address how to mobilise South Africans, especially in light of experiences in Zimbabwe. Speakers: Hunter is national coordinator of the Right2Know (R2K) campaign, having joined in 2010 as administrator. He was previously a writer, and studied anthropology and media at the University of Cape Town and London School of Oriental and African Studies. Nhau and Mngona are Visiting Scholars at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society, and are officers of R2K. Nhau is a Zimbabwean political refugee active in progressive social change mobilisation. Mngoma studied journalism at the Durban University of Technology and has written for various periodicals, including the Daily News.
SECRECY BILL DISCUSSED AT UKZN
Speakers from the Right2Know campaign, from left: Journalist Ms Nosipho Mngoma; Mr Percy Nhau and Mr Murray Hunter.
The Centre for Civil Society based within UKZN’s School of Built Environment and Development Studies recently hosted a research seminar at which the Protection of Information Bill (Secrecy Bill) was analysed and discussed.
National Co-ordinator of the Right2Know (R2K) campaign, Mr Murray Hunter, said the Bill threatened to turn South Africa into a nation of secrets undermining its hard won freedoms.
‘This Bill is the most contested piece of legislature. Academics and journalists will definitely be affected by the threat of a rising security state in which ordinary citizens and journalists who expose government secrets in the public interest will be imprisoned for up to 25 years,’ said Hunter.
He explained that the Bill, if passed in its current form, would give government officials the power to hide all types of important information from South African citizens under the basis of national security, thus leading to further non-disclosure of corruption and criminal behaviour by public officials.
A member of the Right2Know campaign, Mr Percy Nhau of Zimbabwe, said South Africa was following the same system as Zimbabwe in which instead of opening up democratic spaces, it was closing these spaces through classified information.
‘In KZN, there is very little participation to scrap the Secrecy Bill and this has to change because it is a threat to all of us.’
Nhau also stressed that academics at universities should write articles and produce research on the Secrecy Bill for the public domain. ‘This information would be vital for the man on the street and would help to stop the bill being passed,’ he added. enewsletter.ukzn.ac.za
Implications of global economic crisis for Africa, 25 April
Speaker: Ransom Lekunze Date: Wednesday 25 April 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic:African countries individually and collectively chose to boost their economic activity through international trade even though the world recently experienced its worst economic crisis in seventy years. Durable problems include volatile commodity prices, export-driven investment that distorts economies and societies, infrastructure and debt sustainability, macroeconomic imbalances, exchange rate fluctuation, trade finance, and credit for export-oriented production. African vulnerability is high because export--GDP measures are much higher than the average of the same measures for industrialized economies. In most of Africa, the crisis was preceded by a trade boom which failed to lay strong foundations for financial stability and capital accumulation. Yet as the financial crisis took hold, state policy tended to neglect trade problems, such as market access, halting protectionism, the WTO's controversial 2001 Doha Agenda, and the lack of meaningful reforms to internal and external financial structures that support trade. Civil society should advocate integration of economic policies in order to ensure that trade supports greater domestic financial stability.
Speaker: Ransom Lekunze is an associate professor at the Metropolitan University College, Copenhagen, specializing in fair trade, sustainable development, environmental policy, consumption, markets and Corporate Social Responsibility. Originally from Cameroon, Ransom is a Swedish citizen with a PhD in Development Economics from Lund University. He was a researcher at the South Centre, an intergovernmental organization based in Geneva in 2008 -09 and also worked as consultant for the Center of Concern in Washington, on the effects of global financial crisis on Africa. During the 1990s, Ransom spent several years working with civil society organizations in Cameroon, and he founded the Environmental Management Forum, a youth NGO that won the African Commonwealth Youth Service Awards in 1998. He is currently visiting lecturer at the UKZN.
African climate change and carbon trading politics, 23 April
Speaker: Michele Maynard Date: Monday 23 April 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, Memorial Tower Building, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00 (a skype link will be set up for this seminar - to reserve a space contact pbond@mail.ngo.za)
Topic: COP17 in Durban witnessed the lock-in of developed country pledges to reduce emissions (only 13-17% for most countries and just 3-4% for the US by 2020. At this rate, Africa will be cooked, with five degree temperature increases unavoidable by mid-century, leaving an estimated 180 million deaths on the continent (according to Christian Aid). Can the market provide a solution caused by what is termed - due to unaccounted for pollution externalities - the world's worst market failure? With no new demand for carbon credits in the Kyoto Protocol's emissions trading scheme, the European Union's pilot has all but crashed: carbon prices are now trading around just Euro 6/tonne. Against this backdrop the 4th Africa Carbon Forum convened in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia last week. The disillusioned, deaf and disheartened carbon traders, carbon project developers, UN agencies, European Union representatives and World Bank staff continued to promote the market, especially Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs) for Africa. In contrast, the Centre for Civil Society joined Dartmouth College's Climate Justice Project and the Barcelona-based EJOLT network to insist, CDMs Cannot Deliver the Money: http://cdmscannotdeliver.wordpress.com/ and http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?3,28,11,4007. How did that message go over in Addis, amidst those Africans who are convinced by neoliberal solutions to the climate crisis, in effect the privatisation of Africa's air?
Speaker: Michele Maynard works as a social and environmental activist, a consultant to CCS involved in post-CDM advocacy, and a former PACJA Policy and Advocacy Adviser.
Background:
At a time the carbon markets face a profound crisis, this report provides critical policy analysis and case documentation about the role of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in Africa. Instead of providing an appropriate flow of climate finance for projects related to greenhouse gas mitigation, the CDM has benefited large corporations (both South and North) and the governments they influence and often control. South Africa is a case in point, as both a victim and villain in relation to catastrophic climate change.
Many sites of emissions in Africa – e.g., methane from rotting rubbish in landfills, flaring of gas from oil extraction, coal burning electricity generation, coal to liquid and gas to liquid petroleum refining, deforestation, decomposed vegetation in tropical dams – require urgent attention, as do the proliferation of ‘false solutions’ to the climate crisis such as mega hydro power, tree plantations and biofuels. Across Africa, the CDM subsidizes all these dangerous for-profit activities, making them yet more advantageous to multinational corporations which are mostly based in Europe, the US or South Africa. In turn, these same corporations – and others just as ecologically irresponsible – can continue to pollute beyond the bounds set by politicians especially in Europe, because the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) forgives increasing pollution in the North if it is offset by dubious projects in the South. But because communities, workers and local environments have been harmed in the process, various kinds of social resistances have emerged, and in some cases met with repression or co optation through ‘divide and rule’ strategies.
Chapter One sets the context for the carbon markets and the CDM mechanism, revealing its continuing price collapse and gloomy future prospects. Chapter Two maps the players in CDM markets and voluntary schemes. Chapters Three through Eight are the case studies, beginning with South Africa’s pilot CDM fraud and environmental racism in Durban’s Bisasar Road landfill methane electricity project, along with similar trends in Egypt. Chapter Four dissects the case of Nigerian CDM corruption of local governance, especially where oil companies are receiving subsidies for reducing their Niger Delta gas flaring – an act which by law they are prohibited from doing in the first place. Chapter Five addresses the emergence of trees, plantations and forests within CDM financing debates, with cases from Uganda,Mozambique, the DRC, Tanzania and Kenya. Chapter Six is about two failed CDM proposals both involving exploitation of Mozambique’s gas reserves. Chapter Seven discusses the way mega dams are being lined up for CDM status, with case studies from Ethiopia and the DRC. Chapter Eight considers the rise of the Kenyan and Mozambican Jatropha biofuel industries.
All these cases suggest the need for an urgent policy review of the entire CDM mechanism’s operation (a point we made to the United Nations CDM Executive Board in a January 2012 submission), with the logical conclusion that the system should be decommissioned and at minimum, a moratorium be placed on further crediting until the profound structural and implementation flaws are confronted. The damage done by CDMs to date should be included in calculations of the ‘climate debt’ that the North owes the South, with the aim of having victims of CDMs compensated appropriately.
Will the Inga Hydropower Project meet Africa’s electricity needs?, 20 April
Speaker: Baruti Amisi Date: Friday 20 April 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, Memorial Tower Building, Howard College
Topic: The world's single-largest energy investment - the Inga Hydropower Project (IHP) on the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo - will remain a high-profile megaproject for decades to come. In fact, the increasing electricity needs from power hungry countries and the need to preserve the environment in European countries and thus to destroy natural ecosystems in the poor countries, and the DRC in particular, have intensified the pressure on this unique geological and hydrological site to produce the cheapest hydropower in the world, notwithstanding a construction price tag in the range of $80 billion. In terms of output, the dam will be three times larger than even China's Three Gorges. But civil society locally and globally is asking difficult questions: (1) Is not further development of IHP premature or too ambitious?, (2) Who are the winners and losers in the IHP?, and (3) Is there a net benefit for the those on the ground and throughout the host county? Electricity is desperately needed, because only 6 percent of the DRC population have access. But the financial performance, net recognised income, the subsequent proceeds from it , and socio-economic and environmental legacy of Inga 1 and 2 together suggest that the DRC is not prepared for a project of such a magnitude. Current capacity - political, institutional, organisational, managerial, financial and technical - and socio-economic instability represent significant risk for investors. Prejudiced agreements insisted upon by investors will undermine benefits to the country. Secondly, IHP electricity could undermine the African poor, given the price and unaffordability. The main material beneficiaries will be multinational corporations and wealthy individuals who already received the returns of the investment and rewards in Inga 1 and 2. Hence a better approach would be to refocus the project's efforts to cover rehabilitation, transparent financial management, and improvement of the internal controls that were seen to be failures in Inga 1 and 2. Otherwise, instead of supplying electricity to the people of Africa, the IHP will be remembered as Africa's largest white elephant.
Speaker: Baruti Amisi is a doctoral candidate at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society and Development Studies discipline, and a leader of the KZN Refugees Forum. He has recently returned from two months of field research in the DRC.
Speaker:Trevor Ngwane Date: Wednesday 18 April 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, Memorial Tower Building, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: Trevor Ngwane's Centre for Civil Society MA dissertation is entitled “Ideology and agency in protest politics: Service delivery struggles in post-apartheid South Africa”. The seminar addresses this thesis and additional pre-doctoral research now underway with Professor Peter Alexander and colleagues at the University of Johannesburg. There, a reliable database of protest events in South Africa is being constructed because there is presently no authoritative factual basis upon which commentators can generate coherent explanations of South African protests. Most researchers rely on police records and on the Municipal IQ, SA Local Government Association and SA Broadcasting Corporation databases, but these have been questioned for accuracy, comprehensiveness and reliability. A related problem is that present estimates of the number of protests suffer from the use of different definitions and methodological approaches that are found in the field. A reliable, verifiable database that covers the past decade or so of protest activity and that is updated regularly will contribute immensely to protest scholarship.
Speaker:http://www.newleftreview.org/A2459). He was previously an African National Congress regional leader in Soweto and Johannesburg city councilor (until being fired in 1999 for questioning water privatisation), a trade union educator, a Wits University sociology lecturer, a co-founder of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, general secretary of the Anti-Privatisation Forum, and recently a national organiser of the Million Climate Jobs campaign.
Speakers: Fidelis Allen and Patrick Bond Date: Wednesday 11 April 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, Memorial Tower Building 6th floor Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: The three candidates for World Bank president - the likely winner Jim Yong Kim (US), the Colombian economist Jose Antonio Ocampo, and the Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala - are being scrutinised by civil society, and all have extreme flaws (e.g. highlighted by Patrick Bond at http://links.org.au/node/2814). Returning last week from Nigeria, CCS post-doctoral student Fidelis Allen reports on conditions that led to the country's most extensive social uprising, in early January after Okonjo-Iweala removed fuel subsidies, and how civil society fought back to rescind the cuts. On the more positive side, what do the extraordinary public health accomplishments of Kim, the brave Keynesian economic interventions advocated by Ocampo, and the pugnacious battle of Okonjo-Iweala against Barack Obama's undemocratic imposition of US monetary-biased voting power teach us about contesting the multilateral financial system and global governance more generally?
Speakers: Fidelis Allen's post-doctoral research is on civil society environmental advocacy spanning the Niger Delta and South Durban; and Patrick Bond has been a long-time critic of and writer about the Bretton Woods Institutions and neoliberal economic policy.
Photos
Who should be President of the World Bank? One of these - or no one?
Promise-breaking at the World Bank, Part 1: Before Patrick Bond 5 April 2012
That 66th birthday month of his, March 2012, was auspicious for adding a little spice to his dreary life, but no, it just can’t last. Born in March 1946 alongside his evil twin, IMF, in Savannah Georgia, after conception in what must have been a rather sleazy New Hampshire hotel (the ‘Bretton Woods’) in mid-1944, the old geezer known as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or much better by his nickname World Bank (but let me just use WB), really ought to be considering retirement.
Not to be ageist (ok just this once), but still, it’s patently obvious that WB’s relentless WashCon ideology is so last-century, so discredited by recent world financial melting, and so durably dangerous in today’s world. His presidents have reflected the worst of the old yankee imperialist mindset. And let’s not even start on IMF’s extremist lads and lass, who in recent years have migrated their austerity dogma from North Africa to Southern Europe and to my native Ireland, meeting growing resistance along the way.
Even that one moment in 1997-98 when, obviously in mid-life crisis and slightly destabilised by his East Asian buddies’ spills, WB developed a little moral spine and sensibility – witnessed by his chief economist Joseph Stiglitz’s loose talk of a new Post-Washington Consensus – the devil on WB’s right-hand shoulder (named Larry Summers) told his then president James Wolfensohn to boot Stiglitz out, in September 1999, if Wolfensohn wanted to hang around WB for another five years. Order given, and immediately executed. More
Why Jim Kim should consider resigning as World Bank president-designate Patrick Bond 18 April 2012
The situation for the many constituencies hopeful about Jim Yong Kim’s ‘election’ as World Bank president is comparable to early 2009.
Barack Obama entered a US presidency suffering institutional crisis and faced an immediate fork in the road: make the change he promised, or sell out his constituents’ interests by bailing out Wall Street and legitimizing a renewed neoliberal attack on society and ecology, replete with undemocratic, unconstitutional practices suffused with residual militarism. As president-elect, surrounding himself with the likes of Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Paul Volcker, William Gates, Rahm Emmanuel and Hillary Clinton, it was obvious which way he would go.
Unlike the corporate-oriented politician Obama, by all accounts Jim Kim is a genuine progressive, a wunderkind Harvard-trained physician and anthropologist with a terrific track record of public health management and advocacy, especially against AIDS and TB. So unlike predecessor Robert Zoellick, who in the service of power broke everything he touched since the late 1980s,1 Kim spent the last quarter century building an extraordinary institution, the Boston NGO Partners in Health, and improving another by working at its top level, the ultra-bureaucratic World Health Organisation in Geneva.
Accomplishing spectacular AIDS and TB breakthroughs required making alliances with grassroots activists, including South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign, to win an historic fight against Big Pharma and the World Trade Organisation’s Intellectual Property rights protections in 2001. The payoff was provision of generic and discounted AIDS medicines to several million poor people at an affordable price, whereas a decade earlier those medicines cost $15,000/patient/year. It was one the greatest recent victories against corporate-facilitated oppression, ranking with the demise of apartheid in 1994 and the rise of Latin America’s centre-left governments since the late 1990s.
For these reasons, Kim should be proud to come under fire from die-hard, unreconstructed economists like Bill Easterly2 and Lant Pritchett,3 who is forever famous (with plagiarist Summers) for using an internal World Bank bully pulpit to advocate the dumping of toxic waste on low-income people, since after all, Africa “is vastly under-polluted”.4 Alleges AIDS activist Gregg Gonsalves, “Pritchett has vociferously complained about the provision of Anti-Retroviral Therapy in the developing world as a prime example of palliative humane development and misguided philanthropy.”5 So balance surely requires that instead of just being attacked from the wickedly anti-social and anti-environmental right, Kim receives a constructive critique from the left?
Indeed we will soon learn whether Kim’s commitment to progressive change is as strong as his record suggests, or whether he will instead repeat his deplorable role in the notorious Dartmouth fraternity hazing scandal where as the College president apparently intimidated by rich alumni and bolshi ‘vomelette’-making students, he did nothing at all, deploying the bizarre excuse, “One of the things you learn as an anthropologist, you don’t come in and change the culture.”6
We might learn most by watching what happens to the Bank’s fossil fuel portfolio and culture of wanton climate change. The first test is a huge, irrational Kosovo coal-fired powerplant loan he will probably sign off on in his first few weeks on the job. His new underlings are, after all, the main financiers of coal-fired electricity, including their largest project loan ever ($3.75 billion), which was here in South Africa exactly two years ago.7 The contradictions will be spectacular. The scholar who co-edited the great anti-neoliberal book Dying for Growth will be compelled to actively ignore data (from Christian Aid) which suggest 185 million African deaths in the 21st century will be due to climate change, in addition to immediate coal-related health problems.
Scientists working for the Environmental Defence Fund found that “between roughly 6000 and 10,700 annual deaths from heart ailments, respiratory disease and lung cancer can be attributed to the 88 coal-fired power plants and companies receiving public international financing”.8 Furthermore, writing in Geotimes on “Health Impacts of Coal,” three other scientists observe the rise in cancers, bone deformation, black lung and other respiratory diseases, sterilization, and kidney disease associated with coal. And they point out, “In the 13th century, the dense, sulfurous air in London attracted the attention of the British royalty, who issued proclamations banning the use of coal in London.”9 To get Kim to catch up to eight-century old preventative healthcare is going to be impossible given the balance of forces amongst Third World elites in sites like South Africa, within the fossil-addicted World Bank itself, and a few blocks away at the White House and Treasury where mega-energy interests hold enormous sway. This is what multinational capital requires of Kim: a revitalized image for a crucial subsidized financier of coal-fired power plants and carbon markets when both are in extreme disrepute.
The sickening signs of Kim’s retreat in the face of power were unmistakeable beginning in early April, just after his nomination was announced by Obama. Kim’s book Dying for Growth questioned neoliberalism in part because Washington’s model didn’t actually create broad-based growth, but instead austerity and parasitical finance-oriented GDP ‘growth’. But Kim tried running away from that uncontroversial conclusion, telling an uncritical New York Times journalist, “That book was written based on data from the early and mid-1990s. Our concern was that the vision was not inclusive enough, that it wasn’t, in the bank’s words, ‘pro-poor.’ The bank has shifted tremendously since that time, and now the notion of pro-poor development is at the core of the World Bank.”10
This is nonsense, of course, as was the follow-up article in The Washington Post last week hyping his candidacy by his co-editors Paul Farmer and John Gershman: “In the 1990s, when the book was researched and written, too many of the world’s poorest had been left behind by the growth of the global economy” but “Thanks in part to Kim’s trailblazing work, development approaches have changed.”
Huh? Farmer and Gershman provide no evidence of real change, only of rhetoric, using a throwaway line in a 2006 World Bank World Development Report: “We now have considerable evidence that equity is also instrumental to the pursuit of long-term prosperity in aggregate terms for society as a whole.” But such banal phrasing can be found in Bank reports right through neoliberal era, as Bank economists regularly wrote left (putting a ‘human face’ on structural adjustment) so they could walk right.
Farmer and Gershman brag of “greater investments in areas such as health and education, which help countries grow.” But the week before they made this emollient claim, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development reported a 3 percent decline in Overseas Development Aid by rich countries in 2011.11 Reflecting on such cuts, the Brookings Institute produced a major study last August, concluding that “The future of bilateral aid to basic education is at risk, placing the educational opportunities of many of the world’s poorest girls and boys on the line.”12
As the Education for All Global Monitoring Report blog complained in early April, “the World Bank, the most important donor to basic education, massively decreased its support after a boost in 2009 and 2010” – whereas the poorest countries actually need “$16 billion in aid annually to meet their basic education goals by 2015” (of around $5 billion in aid to education, they presently only get $2 billion). The Bank’s website shows that its own highly-subsidised loans for basic education to the poorest countries fell from $1.3 billion in 2010 to $400 million in 2011, a level last seen a decade earlier.13
As for health, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria ashamedly conceded last November that it would offer no new grants through 2014 because of funding shortfalls.14 Obama is to blame, in large part, for these aid cuts.
I’ve met both Farmer and Gershman, and like everyone else, I immensely respect their traditional role: haranguing powerful institutions to do less harm. What they did in the Washington Post was the opposite, offering excuses for the World Bank and its status quo ideology because their friend is about to take over.
What might Kim do to change the Bank? As he told Bank directors who interviewed him last week, “The Bank is an unparalleled resource for its members, not only for financing but also knowledge and convening power. These strengths were apparent in the Bank’s timely response to the recent financial crisis. The Bank must remain an effective partner in strengthening the foundations and fairness of the global economy, and in ensuring that the benefits of growth are widely shared.”15
It is just too tempting to rearrange these words to get a more honest view, one Kim probably would have agreed with not long ago: “The Bank is an unparalleled force of social and ecological destruction, not only in its financing on behalf of multinational capital, but also its lack of real development knowledge and its overweening power. These flaws were apparent in the Bank’s surprised response to the recent financial crisis, which it helped cause by increasing indebtedness, vulnerability and financial deregulation through decades of loan conditionality and an ideology of financial liberalisation. The Bank has systematically weakened the foundations and fairness of the global economy, and ensured that the benefits of growth are enjoyed only by the top 1%.” In his interview, Kim went on to argue, “The World Bank has taken steps to realign voting power to increase the voice and responsibility of developing countries in the governance of this institution.”16
But what kind of steps, and who got stepped on? The last time such realignment happened, in April 2010, the watchdog Bretton Woods Project noted that Africa’s vote rose less than 0.2 percent, and domination by the rich North remains formidable: “In reality then, high-income countries will cling onto almost 61 per cent of the vote, with middle-income countries getting under 35 percent, and low-income countries on just 4.46 percent.”17
Kim’s weasel-like distortions are disturbing, because in the global justice movement, the now common-sense analysis of imperialism’s multilateral institutions is that because efforts to reform them over the past quarter century consistently failed, they are better off decommissioned, as part of what Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South has termed ‘deglobalization’.18
If instead, Kim relegitimizes the World Bank the way that Obama has done US imperialism, and if it is apparent he and his otherwise trustworthy friends Farmer and Gershman stoop to fibbing in defense of his career, then we have a great step backwards to contemplate.
In Obama’s case it took 30 months before the Occupy Movement finally sprang up to contest his reactionary economic policies and ultra-rich beneficiaries. It better not take so long to mount a struggle against Jim Kim’s World Bank, for too many lives depend upon weakening that killer institution. The only constructive thing Kim can do at this stage, I suspect, is immediately tender his resignation and start a run on the Bank.19
Speakers: Pamela Ngwenya & Ben Richardson Date: Thursday 15 November 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: In 2006, the European Union (EU) reformed its sugar regime, reducing the reference price for sugar by 36%. This affected not just European sugar beet producers, but also sugarcane producers in the eighteen African, Caribbean and Pacific countries which had preferential access to the EU. Swaziland, a country with high levels of rural poverty and an acute reliance on sugar exports to the EU, was hit particularly hard by the reform. To cushion the impact, the EU agreed to an ‘Aid for Trade’ programme called the Accompanying Measures for Sugar Protocol countries (AMSP).
This paper explores the impacts of the AMSP in Swaziland. What we find is something of a mixed picture; what we refer to in the title as a ‘bittersweet case’. Firstly, not all vulnerable groups in the Swazi sugar-belt were targeted for support. Most of the aid was allocated to road building and grants for new smallholders to enter into the sugar industry. Meanwhile, the workers who lost their jobs, the communities who lost access to sugar industry welfare assistance and the existing smallholders, who were mired in debt, were further marginalized. Secondly, the uncertain benefits that have accrued to hundreds of new sugarcane smallholders are jeopardised by the on-going process of liberalisation, as well exposure to volatile world market prices. This suggests that the EU should reconsider its priorities for such Aid for Trade programmes.
Presenters: Pamela Ngwenya Having obtained her doctorate on the subject of ‘The Ethical Geographies of Caribbean Sugar’ from the University of Oxford in 2009, Pamela is now a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Built Environment and Development Studies and an affiliate of the Centre for Civil Society. Her research interests include agro-food politics, ethical philosophies, feminist geographies, experimental and creative methodologies. She is currently researching sustainable food strategies in Zimbabwe and is also a participatory and community video facilitator for the CCS, with on-going video projects.
Ben Richardson Based at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick Ben is currently an Associate Professor in International Political Economy. Prior to joining the University of Warwick, he studied at the University of Sheffield where he received his PhD in International Political Economy (IPE) in 2008, on the subject of sugar and the EU Sugar Reform.
Why unions still matter: the case of domestic worker organizing in Maputo, 8 November
Speaker: Ruth Castel-Branco Date: Thursday 8 November 2012 Time: 12:30-14:30 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: As organized labour spirals into crisis, this seminar highlights one innovative example of union organizing among domestic workers in Maputo, Mozambique. Bound up in a history of colonization, domestic work has become a hallmark of modern urban living. Amidst a crumbling public care system, casualization of labour and mass entry of women into the labour force, paid domestic workers perform the reproductive and productive functions necessary to keep households running and the economy churning. Despite their importance to the household and economy at large, domestic workers have been historically undervalued, excluded from labour protections, and ignored by organized labour. This seminar explores the recent drive to formalize and organize domestic workers in Mozambique. It argues that unions still play a pivotal role in securing worker justice, illustrates the ways in which domestic workers have challenged dominant organizing models, and in the process revitalized the labour movement.
Presenter: Ruth Castel-Branco is a Mozambican researcher and labour activist, currently based at the School of the Built Environment and Development Studies. This seminar draws on her MA field work, which explored the formalization of domestic work in Maputo.
Seminar on fracking, 29 October
‘You can’t have your gas and drink your water!’ - the incompatibility of fracking to water rights
Presenter: Liane Greeff Date: Monday 29 October 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: As determined in new research commissioned by the Environmental Monitoring Group (EMG) on linkages between energy, water and climate change, hydraulic fracturing (fracking) will have disastrous impacts on water, in the short term and for generations to come. Fracking will remove vast quantities of fresh water from the water cycle, transforming it into a toxic, radioactive cocktail, with high risks of groundwater contamination. Given the lack of regulatory capacity in South Africa to manage this kind of industry, more and more experts are warning that catastrophic consequences are inevitable if fracking goes ahead. The presentation includes a short overview of the ‘The energy-water nexus’ research report by Brenda Martin & Robert Fischer of Project 90 x 2030 which aims to quantify costs as well as providing policy overviews and recommendations for positive action.
Speaker: Liane Greeff is an environmental activist, writer and videographer who runs an NGO, EcoDoc Africa, which specialises in making environmental information more accessible through video and photography. For many years she has worked in the water sector in South Africa and internationally, focusing on the environmental and social impacts of large dams, water privatisation and fracking. The report on water and fracking was commissioned by the Environmental Monitoring Group as part of their research into the linkages between energy, water and climate change.
Speakers: UThami Mbatha noChina Ngubane bangamaDennis Brutus Community Scholar eCentre for Civil Society-UFaith ka-Manzi uyiCommunity Scholar eCentre for Civil Society, imbongi kanye nombhali-UPercy Ngonyama wenza izifundo zobudokotela kwezomlando eUKZN
Kebbleism, politics and art, 19 October A Centre for Civil Society and Centre for Creative Arts Seminar
Presenter: Allan Kolski Horwitz Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Date: Friday, 19 October, Time:12:30-14:00
The story of Brett Kebble's life seen in Allan Horwitz's 2012 play Comrade Babble, is the story of South Africa's failed liberation, in which inequality, corruption and conspicuous consumption actually increased after apartheid. How artists deal with crony capitalism, in which they themselves can be implicated (for many took Kebble's patronage), is one of the lessons of Horwitz's politicisation of the arts. At a time of elite disquiet over cartoon and artist representations of ruling-party leadership, in which paranoia is a hard currency only slightly devalued by long-standing racial divisions of labour, Horwitz bravely treads on sensitive toes with this drama as well as his poetry and prose. Can civil society keep up with the challenges he poses?
Horwitz's two new books, to be launched at the CCA's Poetry Africa festival, are Two Birds at My Window and Meditations of a Non-White. He was born in Vryburg in 1952 and grew up in Cape Town where he studied political philosophy and literature. Between 1974 and 1985 he lived in the Middle East , Europe and North America, returning to South Africa in 1986 when he worked in the trade unions as an organizer and educator. He currently works for a social housing association and member-controlled provident fund in Johannesburg, and was a founder member of the Botsotso Jesters and Botsotso Publishing.
Are there limits to the freedom of expression? 16 October
A Centre for Civil Society and Centre for Creative Arts Seminar Presenter: Philo Ikonya Date: Tuesday 16 October 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic ‘Freedom of Expression is non-negotiable, paramount and unlimited because spirituality should create and not kill. In the life of what is life and not death there are no stagnant and safe spaces, it is a continuous adventure in which you stand on precipices still looking for freedom. Freedom of Expression is about not being afraid to touch what you do not understand in order to see the other side.’ Philo Ikonya
This seminar explores the role of the literary in its engagement with the freedom of expression.
Speaker Philo Ikonya is a Kenyan poet and novelist dedicated to the struggle for human rights in Africa. With a background in literature, linguistics and the philosophy of education she has authored a number of volumes of poems including ‘Out of prison: Love songs and this bread of piece’ and three novels the latest of which is ‘The night bird still sings’.
Love and Power on the Wild Coast, 15 October
Speaker: Maia Green Date: Monday 15 October 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: This seminar will examine how the intersection of love and power can lead to the betterment of our world. I explore how they interact in the context of creating an effective youth empowerment program for grade ten students at Baleni Secondary School in Pondoland. Using Action Research I explore how Asset-Based Community Development, Integral Theory and the Power Cube can be used in the program design to bring love and power together in an attempt at positive change. This seminar will share my mental, spiritual and academic quest to understand the role of love and power in creating positive and meaningful social change.
Presenter: Maia Green is a visiting scholar from the University of Royal Roads in British Columbia, Canada. She is the founder of an environmental education and youth leadership charity, Friends Uniting for Nature (FUN) Society and has over 15 years of experience working with young people. She is currently completing a Master of Arts degree in Environmental Education and Communication. Her work is focused in the community of Baleni in Pondoland, Eastern Cape and she was awarded one of Canada's top research grants to conduct this action research project.
Speakers: David van Wyk and Chris Molebatsi Date: Tuesday, 9 October 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 601, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The rapid spread of mining and industrial unrest in SA indicates that the massacre was symptomatic of much deeper crises in the economy and society. The Farlam Commission terms of reference are narrow; its findings won’t address root causes.
Speakers: David van Wyk conducts research for the Bench Marks Foundation, a project of the SA Council of Churches, and in August he co-authored a major report documenting conditions of extreme labour, community and ecological exploitation in Marikana. Chris Molebatsi has for years been a community activist based in Marikana, and he works with the Bench Marks Monitoring School.
World support for Palestinian freedom - the sanctions strategy, 2 October
Speaker: Muhammed Desai Date: Tuesday, 2 October 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 601, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: What is the leading strategy for non-violent pressure against what is known as Israeli Apartheid? The Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) South Africa organisation, based in Khotso House in Johannesburg, carries out research on SA-Israel links and develops strategic campaigns challenging these links. For example, members of BDS South Africa were central to the successful academic boycott campaign at the University of Johannesburg, leading to the 2011 termination of UJ's institutional relationship with Israel's Ben-Gurion University. The BDS movement has three demands: that Israel terminate the occupation of all lands occupied in 1967, including the dismantling of the wall and the illegal Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; uphold the right of return of Palestinian refugees as stipulated and guaranteed by international law; and end its system of institutionalized racism and segregation against Palestinian citizens of Israel. BDS has been endorsed by over 170 Palestinian parties, organizations, trade unions and movements representing the Palestinian people in the 1967 and 1948 territories and in the diaspora, and has been gaining international adherents since its inception.
Speaker: Muhammed Desai has been to Palestine on several occasions. In 2004, on his return from spending three months with the (Christian) Liberation Theology organization, Sabeel, he co-founded the Wits University Palestine Solidarity Committee, which he also led for five years. Muhammed is currently employed as the full time coordinator of BDS South Africa.
CCS Film Screening - Does Durban need a post-shopping centre congress?
Films:WAL MART: The High Cost of Low Price directed by Robert Greenwald and Story of Change with Annie Leonard Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Date: 18 September 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00
From 19-21 September, the Durban International Convention Centre hosts a Shopping Centre Congress, sponsored by one of South Africa's most environmentally-destructive financial institutions (the country's second largest coal lender). Delegates will discuss how to spread social alienation, severe economic distortions and ecological chaos. The damages being done by the US-style mall model are severe, and South Africa has an especially pernicious role insofar as our major retailers are also polluting other African countries with malls. This will get worse with the coming invasion of Wal Mart.
What are the eco-social costs of shopping centres? Isn't South Africa massively over-malled and overbuilt for retail sales, coming off a 1997-2008 real estate bubble that was the highest in the world - twice as high as even Ireland's? Aren't South Africa's households hugely overborrowed, especially with unsecured retail credit, thus threatening the local financial system? Hasn't pollution become so extreme that South Africa ranks amongst the five worst countries for environmental management in the world, according to recent Yale/Columbia research? Aren't the lack of rail freight and our deficient public transport to shopping malls contributing to preventable climate change? What about the labour, social and ecological conditions in which consumer goods are produced before we import them? What role has centralised retailing and shopping-globalisation had in destroying local, labour-intensive industries? Are mega-malls like Durban's Gateway responsible for an irrational shift of urban planning towards the new class-insulated edge cities? Will Durban's planned port expansion from 2 to 20 million containers per year by 2040 exacerbate these ecologically and economically catastrophic processes? Are South Africa's social values - ubuntu, democracy, ecology, a better economic balance - threatened by unending US-style marketing and consumption? Hasn't marketing invaded too many aspects of our lives? In short, can we begin talking about a post-shopping society in which our political, environmental, social, community, family and friendship relations take precedence over ineffective 'retail therapy', so as to maximise our life satisfaction and minimise our vast eco-destructive footprints?
If a post-shopping centre congress is needed to one day amass sufficient social power against the retailer/financier behemoths, a good way to raise consciousness about struggles against shopping is viewing two films with the Centre for Civil Society the day before the retailers gather in central Durban.
WAL MART: The High Cost of Low Price is a feature length documentary that uncovers a retail giant's assault on families and American values. The film dives into the deeply personal stories and everyday lives of families and communities struggling to fight a goliath. A working mother is forced to turn to public assistance to provide healthcare for her two small children. A Missouri family loses its business after Wal-Mart is given over $2 million to open its doors down the road. A mayor struggles to equip his first responders after Wal-Mart pulls out and relocates just outside the city limits. A community in California unites, takes on the giant, and wins! http://www.walmartmovie.com/
The Story of Change - Can shopping save the world? The Story of Change urges viewers to put down their credit cards and start exercising their citizen muscles to build a more sustainable, just and fulfilling world. http://www.storyofstuff.org/
Questions for the mall-builders Shopping centres are a foolish, destructive investment destination Patrick Bond 17 September 2012
This week, Durban’s International Convention Centre hosts 1300 delegates to a Shopping Centre Congress sponsored by one of South Africa’s most environmentally-destructive financial institutions. (As the country’s second largest coal lender and a proponent of failed carbon trading, also known as the “privatisation of the air”, Nedbank advertises extra aggressively to brainwash us into thinking it’s a “green” bank.)
Delegates to “the largest gathering of retail and retail property people in Africa” will discuss how to spread social alienation, intensify economic distortions and amplify ecological decay. Damages from the US-style mall model are severe, and South Africa has an especially pernicious role, with our retailers also polluting other African countries with malls. It could get far worse with the invasion of Wal Mart.
Consider some questions that likely won’t be asked at the ICC: What are the eco-social costs? Isn’t South Africa massively overbuilt for retail, coming off a 1997-2008 real estate bubble that was highest in the world – twice as high as even my native Ireland’s?
In Gauteng especially, there was massive recent expansion at Sandton City, The Zone, Eastgate and Menlyn Park. “Without a doubt we have an oversupply of shop space in this country at the moment,” remarked leading property guru, Erwin Rode, on SAfm’s Business Update in April.
The regional escape route is dodgy, according to Human Sciences Research Council official Darlene Miller, whose John Hopkins University doctoral thesis analysed the spread of malls in Southern Africa. “Wittingly or unwittingly, SA retailers followed the path of European colonial traders,” she observed, and their “promises of ‘renaissance’ can be elusive.”
In spite of job creation, “regional exclusion and deprivation may be enhanced”, Miller argues, citing Shoprite’s encounter with labour and farmer resistance in Zambia, not to mention the deindustrialization of local manufacturing when bulk-produced goods are imported more cheaply via SA retailers.
Our pension funds continue to fuel this madness, since major institutional investors favour shopping centre construction over the low-cost housing which our country so desperately needs, as Marikana just demonstrated.
But according to Rode, the malls’ middle-class clients are becoming financially stressed: “I think the consumer is going to be under the whip for many years in this country. There are structural reasons for that, it’s not just a cyclical thing. If you agree with me on that score then you must also be sceptical about prospects for shopping centres.”
Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan also worries that South Africans are overborrowed. By the third quarter of last year, the National Credit Regulator reported an annual rise in unsecured credit of 53% to more than R100 billion rand.
Who gets these loans? Three out of five go to households with less than R10 000/month income, and repayment is harder thanks to usurious interest rates, such as the 40% rate charged by Capitec on a typical six-month loan of R3000, resulting in a total repayment of R4082. Last month, the National Credit Regulator begged Parliament for new regulations to deter such loan-pushing.
Other questions: aren’t shopping centres major contributors to pollution, a problem so extreme that we rank amongst the five worst countries for environmental management in the world, according to recent Yale/Columbia research? Don’t our deficient rail freight and inadequate public transport to shopping malls contribute to preventable climate change?
What about the labour, social and ecological conditions under which consumer goods are produced before we import them, especially from East Asia? What blame does centralised retailing and shopping-globalisation deserve for the demise of our labour-intensive manufacturing industries?
Likewise, aren’t mega-malls like Durban’s Gateway - "biggest in the Southern hemisphere" - responsible for an irrational shift of urban planning towards new class-segregated edge cities? Can struggling Main Street shops survive new malls?
What kinds of people are scoring most from our shopping addiction? Last weekend’s Sunday Times richest-South Africans list put Shoprite/Pepkor owner Christo Wiese’s wealth at second highest. Forbes estimates he’s worth at least R25 billion, while Fin24 remarks that Wiese “had over years declared a relatively negligible taxable income that was in sharp contrast to his obvious wealth.”
Christo Wiese
Wiese became notorious after being stopped at a London airport in 2009 with R8 million he wanted to physically transport to a Luxembourg bank (normal billionaires do this by wire transfer, but then the tax man might find it). He only got it back three months ago, admitting it was “cash taken out of South Africa in the form of travellers’ cheques to avoid exchange controls” in the bad old days.
Back home, the South African Revenue Service has estimated that by using a “network of trusts and offshore companies”, according to a reliable report, Wiese still owes the society R2 billion in unpaid taxes, the most ever in a country notorious for unpatriotic tycoons running money to overseas shelters.
With the likes of Wiese pushing shopping down our throats, aren’t SA’s most laudable social values – ubuntu, democracy, ecology, a better economic balance – threatened by ubiquitous US-style marketing and consumption?
It’s long overdue we begin talking about a post-shopping centre society in which social, environmental, community, family and friendship relations take precedence over the shallow ‘retail therapy’ buzz that some acquire in malls. In Durban, an inspiring precedent at the historic Warwick Junction came from Early Morning Market vegetable traders who repelled former City Manager Mike Sutcliffe’s destructive mall plan, even at the cost of being teargassed and beaten by brutal Durban police one winter night in 2009.
A genuine transformation is needed to maximise life satisfaction and minimise our vast eco-destructive footprints, along with creating “a Million Climate Jobs”, as the Cape Town-based campaign – http://climatejobs.org.za/ – insists be done through meeting basic needs and building a low-carbon infrastructure. And from California where post-mall culture is thriving, the team at “The Story of Stuff” offers a new internet film showing another way forward: “The Story of Change – Why citizens, not shoppers, hold the key to a better world” (http://www.storyofchange.org).
(Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Civil Society.)
16th Annual SA Shopping Centre Congress in September 2012 SA Commercial Prop News 7 September 2012
The 16th Annual SA Shopping Centre Congress, hosted by the South African Council of Shopping Centres (SACSC) and sponsored by Nedbank Corporate Property Finance, will take place at the International Convention Centre, Durban 19-21 September 2012. The International Convention Centre in Durban is the place to be when the largest gathering of retail and retail property people in Africa, with over 1300 delegates kicks off in September this year with the SA Council of Shopping Centres (SACSC) 16th Annual Congress. The congress is supported by the International Council of Shopping Centres.
Sponsored by Nedbank Corporate Property Finance, the SACSC congress is themed Connect: The Power of Personal and spotlights how consumer trends underpin the success of different retail sectors.
The programme offers a range and scope of high-powered speakers – both international and local – that speak to the depth and breadth of the retail industry today.
Consumer trends guru Daniel Levine, executive director of the New-York based Avant-Guide Institute, is scheduled to speak on the first day of the congress. Not only will he look at powerful social trends, but also on the strategies retail professionals can use to take advantage of these trends.
“This conference presents an opportunity for delegates to learn and be challenged and by doing so, to improve their business growth and prospects as well as those of the entire sector,” says SACSC President Greg Azzopardi.
Delegates will also be able to hear insights and lessons learned with some top retail minds including, Nigel Payne Independent Non-Executive Chairman of Mr. Price Group, Pierre van Tonder of Spur Corporation and Andrew McMillan, former customer service leader at John Lewis UK.
Jannie Mouton, Founder and chairman of PSG Financial services, Stafford Masie Techno-Trends Guru as well as Commuter retail specialists Jon During, and rural developers Jason McCormick and Mike Masemola will be presenting on their specific retail sectors. Nedbank Corporate Property Finance is proud to be associated with this flagship event as it provides a platform where industry members from all across Africa can share insights and not only take the industry to greater heights, but their own operations as well,” says Frank Berkeley, Managing Executive: Nedbank Corporate Property Finance.
A golf day planned at Umhlali Country Club and Wild Wild West – themed Congress Dinner round out the networking opportunities provided. http://www.sacommercialpropnews.co.za/
Civil society's microfinance mistakes, 13 September
Topic: The microfinance fad has done enormous damage by way of overindebtedness, mass suicides in India, and ideological indoctrination that together, prevent a coherent narrative regarding poverty and anti-poverty activism. Civil society has often been part of the problem, given the profusion of NGOs, community organisations, women's groups and academics drawn into the industry of promoting a 'right to credit', even where conditions for attacking poverty through banking are terribly adverse. Extremely high interest rates are not the only problem. The microfinance agenda often represents local economic policy nonsense, for it aims to assist the poor to find paid work for themselves through establishing and better managing an informal microenterprise. But this supply-side agenda fails to acknowledge the lack of local demand in poor communities, a factor becoming worse because of the global recession.
Speakers: Milford Bateman is Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Juraj Dobrila Pula, Croatia. His recent book Why Doesn't Microfinance Work? (Zed Books, 2010) has been a crucial corrective to civil society activists, academics, development practitioners, aid agencies and the financial industry.
Microcredit and Marikana: how they are linked Milford Bateman 18 September 2012
Microcredit is the provision of small loans to help establish income-generating micro-businesses or to allow for urgent consumption, whether health care, education bills, home construction or the like. The idea is famously associated with Dr Muhammad Yunus, the US-educated Bangladeshi economist who won the Nobel Peace Prize.
To escape poverty the poor simply needed a microcredit, and then self-help and individual entrepreneurship would do the rest, Yunus claimed. He convinced many international and domestic organisations to fund his efforts to resolve poverty in Bangladesh, starting with the iconic Grameen Bank in 1983.
Later on, the World Bank and the US government became key supporters, and with Ford Foundation and other organisations began to fund Grameen Bank-style microcredit institutions right across the developing world. Pretty soon the poor in almost all developing countries were able to access as much microcredit as they wanted. Massive poverty reduction success seemed just around the corner.
But it didn’t work. In a growing number of countries where microcredit made significant inroads, it is now a development model best known for plunging very large numbers of the poorest into even deeper debt and poverty than ever before. The poorest are all too easily seduced by predatory lenders into taking out way too much debt. High interest rates proved a real burden, and aggressive loan collection techniques spread fear into many poor communities. Microcredit institutions and their supporters always argue in favour of limited regulation, hence little is done to legally prohibit or punish over- lending to the poor.
Thanks to a number of “boom-to-bust” episodes precipitated by over-lending, microcredit has come to be rightly known as the developing world’s own “sub-prime” financial disaster, with “meltdowns” in Bolivia, Bosnia, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Morocco and most catastrophically, in India, site of 250 000 suicides by indebted farmers.
Even in Bangladesh, where it first became a ubiquitous feature in the life of the poor, it is now accepted that there is no genuine evidence of any positive impact on poverty thanks to microcredit. In the site it started in the late 1970s when Yunus made a personal loan to an informal trader – the village of Jobra near Chittagong – today the local population is just as poor as ever, and the only change of any note is that a very significant section of the community is now in very serious debt to the local microfinance institutions.
Most recently, spectacular microcredit profiteering was also taking place in Mexico, Nigeria, Bosnia and India. All told, the accumulated evidence produced by independent researchers and evaluation experts now shows conclusively that microcredit simply does not reduce poverty and deprivation in the longer run. Not surprisingly, the microcredit model has come seriously undone all across the globe.
However, we have perhaps just witnessed one of the most appalling microcredit-related disasters of all in South Africa. Extreme over-indebtedness by workers apparently helped precipitate the Marikana massacre on August 16. Miners employed at Lonmin’s mine were gradually seduced by local lending institutions into accessing far too much microcredit.
Planning Minister Trevor Manuel is just the highest-profile official to recognise, too late, that too many mineworkers depended upon micro-loans and that very high repayment levels left many destitute after their pay-cheques suffered deductions. This is not specific to the mineworkers, so according to Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, “Predatory lending creates overly indebted consumers‚ threatens livelihoods‚ and can trap people in a cycle of poverty.”
With far too many miners apparently forced into spending more on interest payments each week or month than on any other household outlay, no matter how hard they tried, they simply could not prise themselves away from taking out a microcredit in advance of payday. With such micro-debt problems mounting to intolerable levels in recent years in the mining community, Marikana miners felt that they had no other option but to demand a very large pay increase in order to try to clear their accumulated micro-debts. The miners’ desperation and anger was palpable, Lonmin refused to back down, and a massacre ensued.
The Marikana miners are part of a long-standing migrant labour system that, often through a company shop, kept workers in debt as part of their exploitation. Their extreme anger at indebtedness is understandable, and the microcredit institutions – including UBank, an institution owned by the National Union of Mineworkers and the Chamber of Mines – should be held responsible.
And as is often the case after microcredit is granted, Marikana miners were not meaningfully helped to cut debts through special programmes of repayment and counselling. So long as a miner’s salary could very easily be tapped in via a stop-order to repay any outstanding micro-debt at high rates of interest, and the Christmas bonus paid outstanding arrears at year-end, the microcredit institutions had no desire to impose reasonable limits on individual indebtedness.
There is no evidence of government bodies specifically regulating microcredit institutions so as to restrict their lending activities to appropriate levels. The growing crisis of unsecured credit non-repayment is reflected in worsening ratings for the most risky of local financial institutions. Consumer debt is reaching record levels, encouraged until recently as a short-term economic stimulant.
Microcredit was sold to the world by Muhammad Yunus and his acolytes as a simple, and simply fantastic, intervention that would help the poor escape their poverty. Perhaps nowhere more than in the horrific experience of the Marikana miners has such faith been shown to be misplaced, and the potentially catastrophic results of desperation-level micro-debt revealed with such awful clarity. www.iol.co.za
Dr Milford Bateman is Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Juraj Dobrila Pula, Croatia. He authored Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? and tomorrow lectures at 5.30pm at Wits’s John Moffat Building auditorium. To attend, RSVP to ChristianK@idc.co.za
What did COP17 do to SA environmentalism? 7 September 2012
Speaker: Melanie Müller Date: Friday, 7 September 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: What was the impact of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change climate summit (COP17) on the environmental movements in South Africa? Most studies that deal with COP 17 focus on the weak outcome of the conference. But international conferences can also be seen as a merging of transnational, national and local actors and movements, and they especially affect local social movements. Did the environmental movement in South Africa use the conference to push climate change topics in national policies? Did international attention help to develop a common framing on climate change that would help to unite different NGOs and social movement organisations under one umbrella? Did it help to build new networks, allies, and to raise more resources for local work in South Africa? And how will these possible impacts influence on the development of the movement after COP 17? In applying a variety of social movement theories (resource mobilization, political opportunity structures, framing and identity approaches), qualitative research methods will be used over a 3-year-long period (until 2014) to investigate the development of the environmental movement in South Africa in the wake of the COP17.
Speaker: Melanie Müller, a CCS Visiting Scholar, has studied political science in Mainz, Potsdam and Berlin focusing on environmental politics and Global Governance. After working as a freelancer for NGOs and a foundation she started her PhD in sociology at Freie University Berlin in 2011. Melanie is politically active in Germany in environmental politics, solidarity campaigning for Palestinians and combating discrimination experienced by refugees in Germany.
Israeli apartheid's challenge for academics in Gaza, 6 September
Speakers: Muhammed Shabat and Asad Asad Date: Thursday 6 September, 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 601, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Palestine has been under an illegal occupation by the Apartheid Israeli regime for many decades, and is a society struggling to maintain some semblance of normal life under political, military, socio-economic and other forms of repression. Furthermore Gaza has been under siege for the last few years and its citizens have been subjected to a barrage of intensive human rights violations by the Israeli government which have been well documented in a variety of reports such as the John Dugard report. University life in Gaza has come under severe strain due to the abnormal situation on the ground yet despite this, the spirit of academics and students teaching and studying at the Islamic University of Gaza remains strong and they persevere despite the challenges.
Speakers: Prof. Muhammed Shabat and Dr. Asad Asad are based at the Islamic University of Gaza and this seminar will focus on the daily life of staff and students at the university and their efforts to address the constant challenges they encounter. Shabat received his B.Sc. in Physics from Al-Aazhar University, Cairo, Egypt in 1984 and his Ph.D. from the University of Salford, U.K., in 1990. He was a Research Fellow at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, UK, from 1989 to 1992. In April 1992, he joined the Physics Department at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) as an Assistant Professor of physics. He became an Associate Professor in 1996 and a Professor of Physics in 2000. He is Vice President for Administrative Affairs at IUG. He has published more than 200 papers in international journals in Material Science, Optical Science, physics, mathematics and education and presented many papers at local and international conferences. His research interests include newly artificial materials called Metamaterials or Left-handed materials, Nanomaterials, Super-lattices, Nonlinear optical sensor, opto-electronics, magnetostatic surface waves, numerical techniques, mesoscopic systems, energy, applied mathematics, Nanotechnology and physics education. Asad received his Ph.D. in Mathematics (Functional Analysis) 2001, from the shared program between Ain Shams & Aksa Universities. He is Associate Professor of Mathematics at the Islamic University of Gaza. His research interests include Banach Algebra, Operator Theory, Functional Equations and Group Theory.
Carbon forestry in Uganda, 4 September
Seminar: Ugandan carbon forestry, community resistance and environmental management Speaker: Adrian Nel Date: Tuesday 4 September 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: In Uganda, carbon forestry is a component of market environmentalism that occurs across various local, national and transnational scales, interacting with and re-scripting local processes, discourses, institutions and landscapes under the organising principle of carbon.
But the context includes political authoritarianism, rapid deforestation, high population growth and debilitated environmental and forestry management. Utilising the comparative lens of two projects operating on protected areas in the eastern region of Uganda, we can consider the impacts of carbon forestry projects on these dynamics. What with well publicised resistance by local communities, there are critical questions about the assemblages of actors and institutions, the state, and broader problems of forestry management in Uganda and elsewhere.
Speaker: Adrian Nel is a PhD candidate in the Geography Department of Otago University, New Zealand. He is from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe and received a Joint Honours in Economics and Politics from Rhodes University, where he also worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER). He developed his interests in the political economy of natural resource management during a Biodiversity Survey of the coastal dry forests of northern Mozambique in 2009, and after brief research trips to Thailand and Zimbabwe. Nel is co-author with Khadija Sharife of a chapter in the EJOLT CDM report of 2012.
Anti-xenophobia drama: The Crossing Actor: Jonathan Nkala Date: Saturday, 1 September 2012 Time: 5-7pm Venue: Mandebvu residence in Central Durban, 28 Louise Lane (near Carlisle and Yusuf Dadoo Sts) [for more information contact Patrick at 083 425 1401 or China at 072 651 9790]
Topic: The play chronicles the life of a young man who from a situation that seems hopeless, pursues a mission to achieve life in abundance. It is a crossing of many things, borders, cultural differences, innocence, pain and joy. It is a celebration of the human spirit. It is told with humor and love. It has been performed in lounges, garages, classrooms, restaurants and in theatres.
Actor: Based in Johannesburg, Jonathan Nkala Macala is a published playwright, actor, poet and comedian who arrived in South Africa illegally in 2003, and worked as a freelance gardener and handyman. In 2006, he worked with theatre director and actress Bo Petersen and the result was a play about his experiences, The Crossing.
Trade union politics in South Africa and South Korea, 31 August
Speaker: Youngsu Kim Date: Friday 31 August 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Tripartite 'Alliance' politics in trade unions characterise both South Africa (ANC-SACP-COSATU) and South Korea (DLP-KCTU-UDF). How do ideas such as 'National Democratic Revolution' operate in these different contexts? What are the prospects for class politics, socialism and a deeper liberation of poor and working-class people in both societies?
Speaker: Youngsu Kim is Research Professor at the Institute of Social Science at Gyeongsang National University. He was a former team leader within the Presidential Truth Commission on Suspicious Deaths, and the head of the Policy & Organization Department of the Union of Public Transport, Social Service and Labor Organization at the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. His teaching interests include regional and comparative politics, and he has published several books and articles about labour movements in South Africa and South Korea including: The State, Trade Union Movement, and Labour Politics and The Social Revolutionary Movement in South Africa.
South Durban civil society confronts Back of Port planning, 23 August 2012
Speakers: Delwyn Pillay, Dimple Deonath and Vanessa Black Date: Thursday, 23 August 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: In the coming months and years, South Durban will be greatly affected by new spatial development plans whose cost may exceed R250 billion. The work includes the building of a Dugout Port in Isipingo, Merebank and surrounding areas; the Durban Harbour's 'Back of Port plans'; and the building of a new Link Road. What will be the social and environmental costs of such spatial developments? Will benefits such as job creation and a more efficient shipping and freight system exceed the enormous social and environmental impact? Who will benefit most from these developments?
Speakers: Pillay holds a BA degree (with specialization in Environmental Management) from the University of South Africa and is the founder and chairman of Green Squad Alliance, a Brutus Community Scholar at CCS, and the Publicity & Education Officer for Earthlife Africa eThekwini. Deonath is Deputy Chairperson for Earthlife Africa eThekwini, and a Brutus Community Scholar at CCS. Black is the Chairperson of Earthlife Africa eThekwini.
Contesting the frontiers of value in society, nature and capitalism (Cancelled)
(This seminar will be skypecast - contact pbond@mail.ngo.za for access)
Speaker: Sarah Bracking Date: RESCHEDULED FOR EARLY SEPTEMBER Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: New markets and commodities are being created that attribute prices, and thereby a particular kind of value, to previously unpriced (but not necessarily unvalued) things. Carbon, water, ecosystem services, commonly-held land, and even human lives are being valued, and revalued thus. Our task is to understand how valuation technologies are designed in order to understand the deficiencies and possibilities of value in political, social and environmental terms. The research will explore the production of markets and prices, and through these the quantification of value, legitimacy and care in five separate contexts. Its ultimate purpose is to suggest better ways of doing value calculations that will make our economic system less harmful for humans and the non-human world. As demonstrated at the June 2012 Rio+20 Earth Summit, national and world elites and their system of global environmental and economic governance have, since the the Brundtland Commission in 1987, failed miserably in planetary stewardship. As a result, numerous civil society challenges have arisen against their opaque, neoliberal governance technologies, under the rubric of 'global justice'. Which way forward for the strategic empowerment of such challengers, based on more nuanced understandings of what the elites plan next by way of eco-social commodification?
Speaker: CCS Visiting Scholar Sarah Bracking is Chair of International Development at the University of Manchester and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Value (of which CCS is an International Associate). Her books include Corruption and Development (Palgrave, 2007), Money and Power (Pluto Press, 2009) and the forthcoming Financialisation of Power in Africa (Routledge, 2013).
Xolobeni Community resist mining, 21 August
Avatar on the Wild Coast - lessons from Xolobeni against national and global commodification Speakers: Nonhle Mbuthuma, John Clarke and Luc Hoebeke Date: Tuesday, 21 August 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The tenth largest titanium deposit on earth - worth an estimated R1.4 billion at present value pricing - is just 150km south of Durban. In an attempt to extract it, the Austrialian company Minerals Resources Commodities, its subsidiary Transworld Energy and Minerals (sic) and its BEE partner Xolobeni Empowerment Company (sic) discovered that in fact this titanium deposit in the sands is actually 'unobtanium.' So far the titanium has not been extracted, because not even the Australians' alliance with corrupt (and top-level) South African Department of Mineral Resources officials could withstand popular mobilisation and indigenous people's resilience. Cooption, subversion and theft were excellent teaching tools for the victorious Amadiba people of the Wild Coast, who now are teaching more South Africans facing commodification of nearly everything, and other earthlings concerned about the defense of the cosmos. The Sustaining the Wild Coast solidarity organisation tells the story at http://www.sustainingthewildcoast.orghttp://www.sustainingthewildcoast.org
Speakers: Nonhle Mbuthuma is a Xolobeni community activist, John Clarke is a Johannesburg-based social worker and author of the forthcoming book Amadiba Awakening, and Brussels-based Luc Hoebeke is author of Making Work Systems Better.
Apologies for late notice. This seminar will be skypecast - contact pbond@mail.ngo.za for access) Speaker: Michael K. Dorsey Date: Monday, 20 August 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Africa is at the forefront of unfolding climate change with its farm land, non-human species, habitats and humans facing deterioration in their health or economic utility. The Green Climate Fund was established at the sixteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in Cancun, Mexico, COP16, in December 2010. It is latest in a line of funds designed to generate and distribute finance to mitigate and adapt to this climate change. Many were hopeful, but on closer examination, optimism for the role of climate finance is misplaced, because the GCF is badly designed and has flaws in its governance structure. Indeed, as a pooled equity fund using development finance and private investors, such 'financialised' strategies to address climate change are generically misplaced, especially in the absence of effective supranational governance. One example is the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism Policy Dialogue Panel chaired by former SA Environment Minister Valli Moosa, and another is regulatory capture by the carbon trading industry. Hence civil society solutions and regulatory initiatives of a command and control nature are urgently needed to address climate change and its effects in Africa.
Speaker: Michael K. Dorsey is a visiting fellow and professor at Wesleyan University's College of the Environment, and former director of Dartmouth College's Climate Justice Research Project. He is a co-founding board member of Islands First—a multilateral negotiating capacity building organization for small island developing states facing disproportionate threats from unfolding climate change. Since 2008, he has been an Affiliated Researcher on the Sustainability and Climate Research Team at Erasmus University’s Research Institute of Management inside the Rotterdam School of Management. Dorsey contributed to the 2005 book, Trouble in the Air: Global Warming and the Privatised Atmosphere (Durban, South Africa and Amsterdam, The Netherlands: CCS and TNI Press); and the 2009 book Climate Change and Energy Insecurity: The Challenge for Peace, Security and Development (London: Earthscan). From April 2007 until November 2008, he was a member of Senator Barack Obama’s energy and environment Presidential campaign team. In July 2010 Lisa Jackson, the US Environmental Protection Agency (US-EPA) Administrator, appointed Dorsey to the EPA’s National Advisory Committee.
Implications of the Secrecy Bill for Academic Research, 16 August
Speaker: Percy Nhau Date: Thursday 16 August 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: The Secrecy Bill, which will probably be passed into law later this year, will require the the security cluster — police, military and intelligence services — to classify documents and criminalise their unauthorised disclosure. Unjustifiable secrecy in the security cluster is dangerous, because it creates space for the abuse of the coercive capacities of the state. If the Bill in its current form becomes law, what would be the likely consequences for freedom of academics to undertake teaching and research on the cluster — that is, on university contributions that could assist in holding this most sensitive area of government to account? Researchers of SA state security argue that there is too little academic work on the cluster already; yet academics were heavily involved in the drafting of the White Paper on Defence in 1996, within a consultative process. In the interim, there has been a rapid politicisation of the police, military and intelligence, characterised by driven by corruption, authoritarianism, debilitating in-fighting and incompetence. This is precisely the moment when academics and the broader intelligentsia should be observing, learning, publishing and speaking out. But the Secrecy Bill may prove too frightening, and democracy will suffer.
Speaker: Percy Nhau is the Durban Right 2 Know campaign coordinator and a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Civil Society. He is a Zimbabwean political refugee active in progressive social change mobilisation.
Seminar on Zimbabwe, 15 August
PowerPoint by Farai Maguwu
Democratic Transitions from Top Down and Bottom Up: Prospects in Zimbabwe Speaker: Farai Maguwu and Patrick Bond Date: Wednesday 15 August 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: Theories of liberal 'elite transition' are useful up to a point, including in Southern Africa, and few have advocated Washington's vision of democratisation more eloquently than Larry Diamond and Francis Fukuyama of Stanford. With Zimbabwe's new draft Constitution referendum and presidential election to be held in coming months, and with political parties and civil society deeply divided on strategies and tactics of change, the question being posed by transition theorists as well as at the Southern African Development Community summit in Maputo this week, is whether the Inclusive Government is sufficiently robust to ensure a fully-democratic breakthrough? Or are Zimbabwe's political, social and economic tensions so sharp that a top-down process might be foiled on the basis of its internal contradictions?
Speakers: Maguwu of Mutare's Centre for Research and Development is a PhD candidate at UKZN based at the Centre for Civil Society, and has just returned from a Stanford University research fellowship offered by Professors Diamond and Fukuyama; CCS director Bond was in Zimbabwe last week doing research and his two books - Uneven Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe's Plunge - trace the long-term roots of the country's interminable crisis.
Corporate collaboration lets Mugabe continue abuses Patrick Bond 14 August 2012
Zimbabwe’s political-economic crisis continues because dislodging decades of malgovernance has not been achieved by either a Government of National Unity that began in early 2009, civil society activism, or international pressure, including this week’s Maputo summit of the main body charged with sorting out democratisation, the Southern African Development Community (SADC). With a new draft Constitution nearly ready for a referendum vote, followed by a presidential and parliamentary election by next April, the period immediately ahead is critical.
Many examples of chaos appeared over the last week (much of which I spent in a rural area northwest of the capital of Harare). On Monday, for example, 44 activists were arrested in the Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe office at a project launching documentation of the repeated violations of their human rights. Though released, it reminded the society of the power of dictatorship mixed with homophobic social values.
Since the draft Constitution was released on July 18, leaders of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU PF) have repeatedly rejected crucial text within a document that its own negotiators had hammered out this year and issued last month. Amidst the ‘3 percent’ that ZANU PF leaders object to, one hang-up is that wording about presidential running mates complicates the fragile balance of power given how ill the 88 year old Mugabe has been with prostate cancer, according to his close associates.
If a referendum goes ahead with the current text, some in civil society – especially the National Constitutional Assembly, probably to be joined by students and the left-leaning faction of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions – are likely to promote a ‘No’ vote, and ZANU PF might well make the same choice. Nevertheless it is likely that the Movement for Democratic Change led by former trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai (known as MDC-T) would win approval.
Although central powers have been weakened in the new Constitution, according to critics in the NGO Sokwanele, “There remains no age limit for Presidential office, immunity from prosecution remains, and the executive remains in control of defence forces.”
Constitution confirms land redistribution There are other important markers of the society’s balance of power in the draft Constitution. For example, heeding ZANU PF’s wishes, it specifically prohibits that monetary compensation for land will be given to the four thousand whites whose farms were invaded from 2000-08, although improvements (buildings, irrigation and the like, worth around $3 billion) can be compensated, according to the text, while any land reimbursement should be made by the colonial power, Britain.
There is certainly very important anti-imperialist symbolism at stake here, and from this kind of compensation to the need for long-overdue colonial reparations is not too far a conceptual leap. But recall that Mugabe’s ‘jambanja’ (chaotic, violent) land reform was driven partly by his increasingly unpopular ruling party’s need to retain power after a prior Constitutional draft was rejected 55-45 percent in February 2000. Another reason was the immense rural pressures building up from below that were craftily channeled into land invasions of the country’s best land, which white settlers had originally stolen during the sixty years or so after Cecil Rhodes’ ‘Pioneer Column’ invaded in 1890.
Attempts to redress the Land Question after Independence in 1980 failed due to lack of political will and an incorrect technicist assumption that if instead of land redistribution, rural credit was extended to impoverished small farmers, they would be boosted into the mainstream economy (in reality, four out of five had defaulted on their debts by 1988 because the markets were unattractive).
The MDC-T position is that the post-2000 land redistribution is now ‘irreversible’ so white farmers have no basis for confidence they can return, if Tsvangirai wins the presidency. Debate also continues over whether the land redistribution ‘worked’ for the estimated 10 percent of Zimbabweans who directly benefited: 146 000 households who were the main small-farmer beneficiaries of jambanja, and the 16 000 farmers who got access to much larger plots including the most productive commercial farms, according to 2009 government data.
Tragically, as rains failed again this year, 1.6 million Zimbabweans – about 12 percent of the population – will be in need of food aid, the World Food Programme estimates. The country’s best land, with irrigated agriculture that would permit a return to food security, isn’t yet in the hands of the masses, as cronyism on good farmland means a new era of land reform will be needed.
Still, argues Sam Moyo of the African Institute for Agrarian Studies, “Only about 15 percent of the land beneficiaries could be considered ‘elites’, including high-level employees and businesspeople who are connected to Government and the ruling ZANU PF. By far, the largest number of beneficiaries are people who have a relatively low social status and limited political or financial-commercial connections, although some of these may have important local connections and influence.”
Aside from periodic drought, Moyo cites inadequate input supply – fertilizer, pesticides, credit – as the main reason for the failed small resettled farmers, but one in five also suffer “land conflicts, including their lack of ‘title’ and fear of eviction as factors which limit their social reproduction and/or production.” Nevertheless, according to Sussex University researcher Ian Scoones and his colleagues, huge increases in output have been registered by resettled farmers in one central district, especially in small grains, edible dry beans, cotton and tobacco.
On the other hand, the overcrowded ‘Communal Areas’ where Rhodesians forced blacks to live until 1980 appear not to have become decongested, and nor did Mugabe’s ‘Operation Murambatsvina’ – the violent displacement of 700 000 urban residents in 2005 – make the Land Question any easier to answer. The charge that cronyism allowed Mugabe’s allies to cherry-pick the very best farms closest to big cities remains intact, characterized by multiple farm-holdings by leading elites. Along with persistent food aid required annually since 2000, this problem will continue to mar Mugabe’s reputation, as he and his family remain prime cases of abuse.
Gripping to political power requires greedy corporates’ cash In another indication of ongoing political manipulation last week, Mugabe’s army initially threatened to derail the official Census count, scheduled from August 17-28. It is desperately needed not just for socio-economic planning but also future election districting. The army tried to place 10 000 of its troops amongst 30 000 teachers being trained for census taking, and some beat those civil servants who objected.
Until they were finally reigned in this week, why were army troops intent on intervention? Explains Claris Madhuku of the Platform for Youth Development, “As they go through the process of counting, they want to provide some form of intimidation so that the community in the next election, they must vote for ZANU-PF or else.” A victim of such intimidation, Madhuku was arrested last April and after seven court appearances acquitted simply for holding a community meeting to air grievances against a biofuel corporation which was grabbing small-farmer landholdings.
Such experiences drive the desire for a less repressive government. In a free and fair election, Tsvangirai would probably win hands down; in March 2008, he trounced Mugabe in the first round by nearly 10 percent before withdrawing in protest from a run-off vote several weeks later, because meanwhile hundreds of his supporters were killed, tortured or injured by desperate ZANU PF political thugs.
For Mugabe to retain power in what was a financially-broke government in 2008 also required an infusion of enormous financial resources, and as a Mail&Guardian investigation last week revealed, when Mugabe was running out of funds during the election campaign, his regime was bolstered by a $100 million loan from New York-based Och-Ziff Capital Management Group. Ironically, the firm’s financier founder, billionaire Daniel Ochs, is also vice-chair of New York City’s ‘Robin Hood’ Foundation, which according to Fortune magazine, “was a pioneer in what is now called venture philanthropy, or charity that embraces free-market forces.”
Och’s loan was made possible thanks to intermediation by London-based Central African Mining and Exploration Company (Camec), run by famous English cricket spin-bowler and businessman Phil Edmonds, and by Anglo American Platinum, whose gifting of a quarter of its platinum assets to Mugabe’s regime was the basis for securing the deal. The Mail&Guardian reported, “Anglo was granted empowerment credits and foreign exchange indulgences that would allow it to develop a valuable remaining concession.” Zimbabwe slipped further into foreign debt.
When Edmonds was accused of funding Mugabe in 2008 in the context of a business alliance with the notorious Zimbabwean businessman Billy Rautenbach, The Telegraph remarked, “In the boardroom and on the African sub-continent, the two places where Edmonds now conducts most of his business, he is said to have a similar presence, capable of charming and terrifying business rivals at the same time.”
According to The Telegraph, Zimbabwe mining has been profitable, for “It was with Rautenbach's help that the fortunes of Edmonds and Camec rose beyond anyone's expectations in 2006. The company's share price increased by more than 700 per cent in just a year, drawing in blue-chip investors eager to cash in on the boom in mining stocks.”
It is in this context that the ‘sanctions’ critique offered by United Nations Human Rights Commission Navi Pillay in May needs revising. “There seems little doubt that the existence of the sanctions regimes has, at the very least, acted as a serious disincentive to overseas banks and investors,” she said while visiting Mugabe. Yet ‘sanctions’, which are limited to the personal affairs of 112 elites close to Mugabe, were obviously sufficiently porous to allow the Och-Ziff/Camec/Anglo deal.
So who will pay Mugabe’s campaign bill in 2013? The next greedy mining house is Anjin, a diamond mining company co-owned by Beijing investors and the Zimbabwean Ministry of Defense, whose leaders have said they will never accept rule by Tsvangirai’s party. Anjin is the main beneficiary of what is probably the world’s largest diamond field at Marange, near Mutare in eastern Zimbabwe, where hundreds of informal miners were killed by the army in November 2008.
Abuses continue at Marange. Two weeks ago, Anjin fired 1 500 workers who, desperate for decent pay, launched their eighth strike since 2010. Diamond watchdog Farai Maguwu, director of the Mutare-based Centre for Research and Development, termed Anjin’s move “a gross violation of the right of workers to engage in industrial action if their working conditions are appalling.”
Another Marange diamond firm, Mbada, is chaired by Mugabe’s former helicopter pilot Robert Mhlanga, who recently purchased $23 million worth of properties in the highest-priced suburbs of Johannesburg and Durban (Sandton, Umhlanga and Zimbali).
This is the kind of company ZANU PF keeps, notwithstanding rhetoric regularly hostile to foreign capital. For example, at this week’s Heroes Day ceremony, Mugabe intoned, “We should join hands to resist the unjustified pander of our resources by undeserving foreign forces that come to us like friends in the name of democracy and globalization, yet they have sinister ulterior motives.”
Mugabe perfected this talk left, walk right gimmickry; his support for the Marange looting represents one of Africa’s most extreme Resource Curse problems.
For the next election, probably in March, we can expect another tactic – ‘indigenisation’ (giving local people a share in white- or foreign-run corporations) – familiar to those who witnessed Mugabe’s 2000 campaign, explains Bulawayo writer Mary Ndlovu: “The indigenisation agenda ZANU PF is pushing has now replaced the land issue as a programme to simultaneously win support from a new constituency and frustrate the opposition. It seems dishonestly designed to further enrich themselves, consolidate their patronage lines and prevent the MDC getting credit for increased investment, rather than honestly redistributing wealth to the people.”
The first two multinational corporations to play the game of diluting local holdings so as to hold onto immensely valuable resources are platinum exporters Rio Tinto of London and Johannesburg-based Implats. There is no evidence yet that the ordinary Zimbabwean is benefiting, although a new extreme-nationalist ZANU PF political tendency is emerging around 41-year old Savior Kasukuwere – the minister in charge of indigenisation – that may one day threaten the party’s two other core factions, run by potential Mugabe successors Joice Mujuru (now vice president) and Emerson Mnangagwa (defence minister).
Financial and fiscal failings Another source of crony capitalism is the financial sector, through which disgraced Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono and his allies arranged lucrative illicit foreign exchange takeovers prior to the Zimbabwe dollar’s collapse in 2009. Bankers close to ZANU PF made dubious loans which now require the kinds of bailouts that Wall Street and the City of London received from their own purchased politicians in 2008-09.
This is the main reason for Zimbabwe’s banking crisis, and recently compelled Gono to issue a directive that $100 million be kept in capital reserves to prevent a devastating run on the banks. Out of two dozen, only six or so – nearly all foreign headquartered – will survive that degree of regulatory restructuring (the rest must be merged or closed). The adverse impact on credit availability, already hampered by the world’s highest real interest rates, will be devastating.
On top of that is next month’s IMF and World Bank meeting in Washington where Zimbabwe’s nearly $11 billion in unrepayable foreign debt is up for negotiation, not to mention a looming public workers strike which will be uncomfortable for the MDC-T, the party of labour but also under pressure to impose austerity after the state budget was cut from a planned $4 billion to $3.4 billion by Finance Minister Tendai Biti, known in his youth as the country’s leading leftist lawyer.
The main reason for budget cuts is the failure of the mining ministry to collect taxes on diamonds, which continue to be smuggled out of Zimbabwe on flights from Marange to sites including Israel, India, Dubai, Khazakstan and China.
Confirms Maguwu, “Revenue is not being accounted for and a faction of ZANU PF is controlling the diamonds. This is was exactly the situation when the Kimberley Process was formed in 2003 with the financing of rebel wars through diamond revenues in West Africa.”
According to Maguwu, “The KP suffered huge credibility problems because of allowing Marange diamonds to circulate at their last meeting in Kinshasa last November. At the next summit in Washington this November, where ‘diamonds for development’ is a slogan against the Resource Curse, the KP can only regain credibility by ensuring that there is revenue transparency, otherwise Zimbabwe’s next round of election chaos can be blamed on diamond revenues.”
Maguwu insists, “South African President Jacob Zuma is SADC’s lead mediator and his team led by Lindiwe Zulu must put this on their agenda. Regional civil society should also be putting pressure on SADC to ensure that Marange diamonds do not sponsor political violence during the coming elections in Zimbabwe and trigger regional instability.”
While economic growth may technically still top 5 percent this year, the underlying crises are now being amplified, as the bulk of proceeds from Zimbabwe’s 2012 outputs of diamonds ($3 billion), platinum ($600 million), gold ($150 million) and nickel ($140 million) disappear into ZANU PF and multinational corporate pockets, with only crumbs left over for the povo. With a $3 billion trade deficit and only $500 million in donor aid anticipated in 2012, the untenable economics of a modified Mugabe tyranny still don’t add up.
Whether a free and fair election is possible in coming months, or instead ZANU PF loyalists use military might, ill-begotten wealth and crony capitalism to maintain illegitimate power, is too difficult to call. But by the end of this week, SADC regional leaders could have their fingerprints on Zimbabwe’s coming corpse if once again, they turn away from compelling at least the minimal conditions for democracy: insistence on the Constitutional referendum and preparations for the country’s first genuine vote in a dozen years.
(Patrick Bond directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa.)
Farai Maguwu has shown extraordinary courage in documenting the terrible human rights conditions in Marange in Zimbabwe, at great cost to himself and his family.
Tiseke Kasambala, senior researcher, Africa Division
Human Rights Watch's Alison Des Forges Award http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/08/14/awards-rights-activists-congo-libya celebrates the valor of individuals who put their lives on the line to protect the dignity and rights of others. Human Rights Watch collaborates with these courageous activists to create a world in which people live free of violence, discrimination, and oppression.
As director of the Center for Research and Development http://www.crdzim.hostzi.com in eastern Zimbabwe, Farai Maguwu has conducted extensive research documenting horrific abuses taking place in the Marange diamond fields. After the Marange fields were discovered in 2006, they were open to anyone, and illegal mining and smuggling flourished. Maguwu partnered with Human Rights Watch researchers todocument http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/06/26/diamonds-rough-0 beatings, torture, forced labor, and killings of local villagers in Marange at the hands of soldiers controlled by the Zimbabwe African National Union- Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), the one-time ruling party that still controls security in the coalition government.
On May 27, 2010, two days after Maguwu met with a monitor from the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (the world’s diamond control body) to discuss the abuses he uncovered in Marange, Zimbabwean authorities raided his home and offices, and arrested him on charges of providing false information about killings and torture by military officials at the mine. He was imprisoned for more than a month and denied medical care to punish him. The authorities then illegally transferred him to various police cells with deplorable conditions even though he suffered from a serious health condition. Maguwu was released in early July and only finally cleared of all charges in October. His case helped generate international attention to the serious human rights violations taking place in Marange’s diamond fields and led to calls for the Zimbabwean government http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2010/06/21/deliberate-chaos-0 to remove its troops from Marange.
Human Rights Watch honors Farai Maguwu for his tremendous courage in exposing abuses in Zimbabwe’s diamond fields and working to end rampant violations of human rights throughout the region.
Izingqinamba ngezemvelo zaseThekwini, 8 August
Speaker: Faith ka-Manzi (isiZulu & English) Date: Wednesday, 8 August 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Climate, water and destructive development from Maputo to South Durban Speakers: Neima Adamo, Sergio Brito, Ester Uamba, Patrick Bond and Dimple Deonath Date: Friday, 3 August 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The Centre for Civil Society has helped host a project investigating the confluence of climate change, water, municipal governance and social mobilisation in Maputo, Nairobi and Durban, in conjunction with the York University Faculty of Environmental Studies, the Eduardo Mondlane University and the University of Nairobi, as part of the Program on Climate Change and Adaptation in Africa sponsored by the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa. In 2011, a similar seminar interrogated adaptation and mitigation measures in Nairobi and Durban: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?11,61,3,2381 and in this seminar, we further consider how African cities react to climate change. Maputo went literally under water due to flooding in 2000-01 and its notorious problems in supplying clean retail water to households remain a source of concern given the sea-side city's vulnerability to extreme weather. The South Durban case is complicated by the area's role as both victim and villain; the March 2007 destruction of the waterfront is one example of the former, while the incoming R250 billion Back of Ports and Dig-Out Port projects represent a huge increase in petro-chemical, industrial, shipping and freight emissions, not to mention the threat of vast residential displacement and local hazards. How are civil society organisations responding in both cities, and do they have any real chance of defeating the forces behind the eco-social destruction on the horizon?
Speakers: Neima Adamo, Sergio Brito and Ester Uamba are post-graduate students of Environmental Education at the University Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo; Patrick Bond lives on the Bluff, directs CCS and writes extensively on water and climate; and Dimple Deonath is a Merebank resident, a Brutus Community Scholar at CCS and a leading member in Earthlife Africa and Zero Fossils Durban.
South Durban Detox Dimple Deonath
My father almost died on the operating table – he had gangrene in his gall bladder and his lungs were badly infected as well. Through some miracle, I am blessed to still have my dad with us today. His case was extensively used by surgeons as a case study – and why am I telling you all this? On February 23rd this year, my brother and I were blissfully travelling home together after having obtained our bikers licence together, when we were almost killed – again why am I telling you all this?
Well, firstly respectful greetings to all dignitaries present here today and to CCS members. You have just heard one illustrious speaker after another giving you valuable insight into important changes taking place before our very eyes. We live in challenging times, but I’m encouraged by the passion and energy that exists in this very room.
The story of my father is true and directly attributable to the high level of pollution in the South Durban area. I say this with conviction because, as we stood praying outside the operation theatre, wondering why the operation was taking so long, the surgeon walked out of the room and stated that my father’s condition was serious as he had gangrene and the first question he asked was: did my father smoke or consume alcohol? My father has never smoked or touched a drop of alcohol in his life – to which the doctor responded – then where do we live? When we told him Merebank, he just said it made perfect sense then, because they were accustomed to seeing cases like this when a person lived in such highly polluted areas. This ignited my fierce passion for environmental issues and I was motivated to become an eco warrior.
My accident (I was driving) was due to a reckless, massive truck and trailer avoiding another broken down truck on the left lane. He swerved carelessly directly onto our vehicle. Again due to a miracle, or my mother’s ardent impassioned plea every morning to the archangels, our lives were spared, but not without some injury and huge damages to our vehicle, not mentioning the untold, indescribably inconvenience! And it all happened near Solomon Mahlangu drive, where heavy trucking has caused many deaths.
My presentation is very practical since I have lived all my life in this area, which has increasingly gotten worse every single year. The pollution has given rise to strange things here. I can assure you with 100% confidence that there is not a single resident of Merewent who is unaffected, directly or indirectly by the heavy pollution and industrial giants that continuously pump out their obnoxious fumes to the detriment of our health. Everyone I know, knows a family member, friend, child, colleague or neighbour who is suffering from one of a variety of deadly illnesses, including leukaemia, asthma, lung ailments, cancer and other diseases.
Several community organisations and local community members joined forces to pass a very strong vocal message to Transnet and the Municipality: Enough is enough. No more compromises. We say No in loud and clear terms – No to the dugout port, no to bulldozing their plans without consultation with communities, no to profits before people and a loud, resounding NO to corruption!
SDCEA’S Desmond D’Sa presented a lively picture of what is anticipated in the coming months. Professor Brij Maharaj explained what torture residents have lived under for over 40 years as residents of South Durban. Our very own Vanessa spoke about the injustice that prevails and the devious actions of those in authority.
Merewent residents have suffered countless episodes of explosions and pollution from petro giants Engen and Sapref, which was disgustingly played down and the concerns of residents have been trivialised into nothingness. The nightmare of increased trucking, noise and air pollution, illnesses and accidents was highlighted so that anyone who had even the remotest hope that this is a good idea for employment opportunities and lucrative contracts could kiss goodbye to that simplistic idea!
Residents from the Port areas of Umbilo, Clairwood , Bluff , Wentworth, Merebank, Isipingo and Umlazi are facing an unimaginable threat to their lives and livelihoods, families being uprooted and destroyed, communities being torn apart and devastated, all for the sake of profits. The already suffering communities now face their greatest threat to date which must now be transformed to their greatest fight against these selfish giants, Transnet and the Municipality!
Climate change has hit the South Durban area with a vengeance - Rising seawater levels and repeated storms like the one in 2007 testify to the damage and suffering that awaits us. To ignore the warning signs and to show disdain for environmental issues is the height of stupidity, a hallmark of the likes of Sutcliffe and his cronies.
The Back of Port plan should be shelved, no, it should be destroyed in its entirety. There is no room for such diabolical plans, and it is inconceivable that such should be thrust upon us – a classic case of David and Goliath, as Prof Brij Maharaj, so correctly stated.
Speaker after speaker talked about the sale of the race course, community objections, destruction of the fresh produce market, climate change and suffering of residents. Prof Brij Maharaj used the example of the Warwick Market to demonstrate that David can beat Goliath. Not long ago, Mondi wanted a link road as well, but it was defeated by the residents of Merewent – another case of David winning against Goliath. Prices to be paid to those relocating is a paltry R1000 per square metre. This is sheer robbery, exploitation, and greed. But we can fight and win the battle.
Rishi Singh of the Clairwood Ratepayers Association made a valid point when he demanded that a model of the dugout port and link road should be presented to residents. Technical speak must be done away with. A model of the dugout port and link road will show us clearly which houses will be affected and how the plan is going to pan out in reality, not in some jargon that is beyond our comprehension. It is a tactic of theirs to confuse us into submission – not that anyone is stupid, but if everything is in technical jargon how is the public to decide what exactly is going on and how precisely it affects them?
Sega Govender of the farmer’s association spoke briefly on the long term effects of forced removals. He said that fresh and cheap food will no longer be available to the residents of Merewent. He said that farmers filled the hearts and stomachs of people. We have to unite against the link road and trucking. Merebank will be suffocated by trucks.
It has also been observed that young people are moving out of South Durban. At these community meetings, there are scarcely a handful of young people. This leaves us with the problem of the elderly remaining behind to fight the fight. There is an apathy on the part of youth. How many youth organisations are there in South Durban? How can we infiltrate these organisations: religious, social and sporting? What about using schools to educate them about the hazards that come with the dugout port development. Maybe we can call all RCL’s to a meeting and give them the important information required for their buy-in into our projects? We need the youth on board. It’s their future.
What came across very clearly from these meetings are the following:
1. Residential areas will be turned into industrial areas.
2. Homes will be destroyed and families will be uprooted.
3. Fresh produce market and small businesses will be destroyed
4. Community life with all social networks established over the years will be dissolved at the drop of a hat.
5. A harbour within our community will give rise to drug and sex trade, influencing our young people tremendously.
6. People are realising the hard hitting reality of how this will impact on their lives.
7. People are no longer prepared to make any compromises on this issue.
8. Communities are outraged with the manner in which they are being treated in this whole issue.
9. People are ready to combine their strengths, to unite and to fight these dark forces that threaten the very stability of their communities.
10. Besides the marches and other protest action planned, a decision was taken to also go the legal route.
I end with SDCEA’s motto: The Right to know, the Duty to inquire and the Obligation to Act.
I thank you.
Nonviolent pedagogies of Africa's oppressed, 31 July 2012
The Centre for Civil Society within the UKZN School of Built Environment and Development Studies invites you to the seminar - Nonviolent pedagogies of Africa's oppressed, from South Africa to the Great Lakes
Speakers: Matt Meyer and Elavie Ndura Date: Tuesday, 31 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The construction of grassroots movements for sustainable peace and justice in violence-prone South Africa and the Great Lakes Region requires a pedagogical underpinning appropriate for these different contexts. Improving the conditions of education and cultures of peace - through new policy, curriculum and pedagogy - can only be accomplished through the engagement of parents, students and teachers, which in turn requires principles of multicultural education, critical pedagogy and peace education.
Speakers:Matt Meyer is a New York-based educator-activist, co-editor of the two volume Africa World Press series Seeds of New Hope. He serves as co-convener of the War Resisters International Africa Working Group and UN NGO representative of the International Peace Research Association, and blogs at http://wagingnonviolence.org/author/mattmeyer/. His co-editor Elavie Ndura is Associate Professor of Education at George Mason University, following her education at the University of Burundi, University of Exeter and Northern Arizona University. She has also taught at the University of Nevada.
Speaker: Ravindra Kumar Date: 30 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Mahatma Gandhi's view of democracy and fundamental rights is of great currency, as he advanced what he called ‘the art and science of mobilizing the entire political, economic and spiritual resources of all the various sections of people in the service of the common good of all’. Gandhi stressed duty-bound fundamental rights, arguing that the real enjoyment of rights can be possible only by discharging one’s duty. This spirit not only strengthens the foundation of a democracy, but helps in its smooth functioning on the basis of Ahimsa.
Speaker: Ravindra Kumar holds an MA Political-Science, Philosophy, a PGD Gandhian-Studies and a PhD, and is a writer-thinker-scholar, political scientist, peace-worker, humanist and educationist with over 100 books and 400 articles/lectures on great leaders, especially Mahatma Gandhi, on various socio-religious, educational, cultural and academic issues to his credit. An Indologist and former Vice-Chancellor of Meerut University, Dr. Kumar has been associated with many national and international academic, cultural-educational, peace and social organisations. He has delivered about 400 lectures at universities of India and the world on Asian values, civilization-culture-education, Gandhism, co-operation-understanding, religion, ways of life, world peace and youth affairs.
PHOTOS
Solidarities of international urban residents and 'development' students, 25 July
The Centre for Civil Society within the UKZN School of Built Environment and Development Studies invites you to the seminar -Solidarities of international urban residents and 'development' students
Speakers: Peter Muzambwe and Dean Chahim Date: Wednesday, 25 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topics: (two consecutive presentations): 1) Urban solidarities and states of resistance: As part of the International Alliance of Inhabitants network (http://www.habitants.org), Muzambwe discusses the Amandla Centre's positioning in the world urban social justice struggle, including areas of cooperation and conflict between democratic civil society and political society in Zimbabwe.
2) 'Development' solidarities: Chahin's paper, 'From “Saving Africa” to Looking in the Mirror: Reflections on the Critical Development Forum’s Student-Driven Popular Education Initiative to Re-Politicize “Development” at the University of Washington', follows his discouragement with the way conventional “development” organizations like Engineers Without Borders operated and educated students.
Speakers: Peter Muzambwe is director of the Amandla Centre of Zimbabwe, and a former Harare trade union leader. Dean Chahim recently graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle with degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Global Development & Social Change. He co-founded the student-driven Critical Development Forum (students.washington.edu/cdfuw) and is currently traveling on a university fellowship to learn and share: http://anotherworldishappening.wordpress.com
PHOTOS Peter Muzambwe and Dean Chahim with Patrick Bond
Gender, autobiography and social justice, 24 July 2012
Speaker: Terri Barnes Date: Tuesday, 24 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: This seminar addresses ways that women write their own stories of social struggle, drawing upon autobiographical material from Zimbabwe, South Africa and the United States.
Speaker: Teresa Barnes is a scholar of gender and nationalism in Zimbabwe, and her other interests range from soap operas to higher education in South Africa. She graduated from Brown University in 1979 with a degree in International Relations. She lived in Zimbabwe and South Africa for more than 20 years, and her PhD in African Economic History is from the University of Zimbabwe. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Brown University Pembroke Center in 1996-97 and taught at the University of the Western Cape before moving to the University of Illinois where she is presently Associate Professor of History, of African Studies and of Gender and Women's Studies. Her books include We Women Worked So Hard: Gender, Labor and Social Reproduction in Harare, Zimbabwe, 1930-56 (Heinemann, 1999) and (with Everjoice Win) To Live A Better Life: An Oral History of Women in Harare, 1930-60 (Baobab Books, 1990).
PHOTOS
Freedom never rests, when it comes to water commodification and service delivery protests, 23 July 2012
Speaker: Jim Kilgore Date: Monday, 23 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Freedom Never Rests: A Novel of Democracy in South Africa (September 2011) is the second novel from James Kilgore, portraying historical roots of the service delivery revolts that have swept South Africa in recent years. With a precise and at times humorous eye for the details of backroom politics and street level organisation, Freedom Never Rests centres around an engaging and tragic couple: unemployed ex- shop steward revolutionary Monwabisi Radebe and his wife, Constantia, a former nursery school aide turned local councillor in the fictional Eastern Cape township of Sivuyile. As the council implements an American-financed project of prepaid meters, water cut-offs are visited upon dozens of households, leaving the idealistic Monwabisi with the most difficult of choices: to remain loyal to his wife, the mother of his children who represents an increasingly discredited council or take to the streets with disenchanted residents. Avoiding simplistic analyses and triumphant rhetoric, Freedom Never Rests lays bare the political and personal intricacies of community struggles.
Speaker: James Kilgore was a fugitive from the US for 27 years, based in Zimbabwe and South Africa for much of that time. He lived under the alias Dr John Pape and became a respected academic at the University of Cape Town and the International Labour Research and Information Group (Ilrig). In 2002 he was arrested and US authorities extradited him to California where he served six and a half years in prison for his political activities in the 1970s. During his incarceration he wrote several novels, three of which (including Freedom Never Rests) have been published since his release in 2009. He is presently a research scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois.
PHOTOS
Bhopal's catastrophe and representations of social mobilisation, 20 July 2012
Speaker: Shalini Sharma Date: Friday, 20 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The world's worst industrial disaster was the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India. The suffering continues, prompting victims to fight for justice against Union Carbide (merged into Dow Chemicals), the American corporation responsible for the disaster. In what ways are Bhopal's social movements representing their plight, and which narratives are proving effective in leveraging local and global power?
Speaker: Shalini Sharma is a Felix Scholar in Development Studies at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, where her doctoral research focuses on the political communication that feeds into people's struggles. She is interested in public and political communication, representation and identity, politics and new media, social movements, media politics of dissent, power structures and development politics.
Bhopal disaster From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Bhopal disaster (commonly referred to as Bhopal gas tragedy) was a gas leak incident in India, considered one of the world's worst industrial catastrophes.[1] It occurred on the night of December 2–3, 1984 at the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. A leak of methyl isocyanate gas and other chemicals from the plant resulted in the exposure of hundreds of thousands of people. The toxic substance made its way in and around the shantytowns located near the plant.[2] Estimates vary on the death toll. The official immediate death toll was 2,259 and the government of Madhya Pradesh has confirmed a total of 3,787 deaths related to the gas release.[3] Others estimate 3,000 died within weeks and another 8,000 have since died from gas-related diseases.[4][5] A government affidavit in 2006 stated the leak caused 558,125 injuries including 38,478 temporary partial and approximately 3,900 severely and permanently disabling injuries.[6]
UCIL was the Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), with Indian Government controlled banks and the Indian public holding a 49.1 percent stake. In 1994, the Supreme Court of India allowed UCC to sell its 50.9 percent share. Union Carbide sold UCIL, the Bhopal plant operator, to Eveready Industries India Limited in 1994. The Bhopal plant was later sold to McLeod Russel (India) Ltd. Dow Chemical Company purchased UCC in 2001.
Civil and criminal cases are pending in the United States District Court, Manhattan and the District Court of Bhopal, India, involving UCC, UCIL employees, and Warren Anderson, UCC CEO at the time of the disaster.[7][8] In June 2010, seven ex-employees, including the former UCIL chairman, were convicted in Bhopal of causing death by negligence and sentenced to two years imprisonment and a fine of about $2,000 each, the maximum punishment allowed by law. An eighth former employee was also convicted, but died before judgment was passed.[1] More
Voice, political mobilisation and repression under Jacob Zuma, 19 July
Speaker: Jane Duncan Date: Thursday, 19 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: This paper examines the relationship between shifts in the political opportunity structure, purportedly towards greater openness, political mobilisation and repression under Jacob Zuma's presidency. To what extent has Zuma's presidency opened up spaces for political dissent by social movements and political organisations, or have spaces in fact, been closed down? The state of protest action is one indicator of the state of health (or otherwise) of the country’s democracy under Zuma’s leadership, and several case studies are considered: struggles against the unilateral reincorporation of particular Municipalities from one province to another, the regulation of protest action in the South African National Defence Force, and the regulation of protest action in the buildup to the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
Speaker: Jane Duncan is Highway Africa Chair of Media and Information Society in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University. Before that she worked at the Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) since its establishment in 1994 and was its director from 2001 to mid-2009. She was also coordinator of the FXI's predecessor organisation, the Anti-Censorship Action Group. She also worked at the Funda Centre in Soweto and then at the Afrika Cultural Centre in Newtown. She obtained a BA as well as honours and master's degrees at the University of the Witwatersrand, and completed a PhD through the Wits School of the Arts in 2007. She is a speaker at the UKZN-hosted Annual Conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research.
Voice, political mobilisation and repression under Jacob Zuma Jane Duncan
Abstract This paper examines the relationship between shifts in the political opportunity structure, purportedly towards greater openness, political mobilisation and repression under Jacob Zuma's presidency; so, to what extent has Zuma's presidency opened up spaces for political dissent by social movements and political organisations, or have spaces in fact, been closed down?. This paper examines the veracity of the claims that the Zuma administration has been a more sensitive, ‘listening government’ towards workers and the poor, in the light of Zuma's first year in office. It focusses particularly on the state of protest action as an indicator of the state of health (or otherwise) of the country’s democracy under Zuma’s leadership. The following case studies are used to discuss these themes: struggles against the unilateral reincorporation of particular Municipalities from one province to another, the regulation of protest action in the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) and the regulation of protest action in the buildup to the 2010 FIFA World Cup. With respect to the anti-incorporation protests, there has been a clear shift in the political opportunity structure towards a reconsideration of a previously non-negotiable set of decisions, and greater points of access to the decision making have been created. However, after encouraging signs that the protestor’s demands would be heeded, frustration is setting in at the ANC’s deferral of decision-making on the issue, which raises questions about the extent of openness of the structure and is leading to an escalation of protest action. The paper also explores the attempts by the Zuma administration to exert greater control over the security cluster, leading to greater control being exerted by the South African Police Force (SAPF) over protest policing in strategic cases, and attempts to withdraw basic constitutional rights from the military, including the right to unionise and the right to protest. More
The Decommissioning of Durban's Emissions Trade Pilot, 11 July
Speakers: Khadija Sharife and Patrick Bond Date: Wednesday, 11 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Trading emissions to address climate change is one of the most controversial strategies of global environmental governance, and the pilot project in Durban - the Bisasar Road methane-to-electricity conversion project at Africa's largest formal landfill in Clare Estate - requires constant vigilance. Environmental racism, incineration toxicity, airborne particulates, divide-and-conquer politics and wastepicker abuse are some of the local problems. But a recent admission by a Durban municipal official that the Bisasar Road 'Clean Development Mechanism' (CDM) application made in 2004 was fraudulent (lacking 'additionality'), merits the project's decommissioning. How might such a process unfold in coming months, and what impact might it have on international emissions trading, on the CDM Policy Dialogue assessment led in the UN by former SA Environment Minister Valli Moosa (who had approved the Bisasar application at the time), and on Clare Estate communities? The seminar will be followed by a site visit. (Please contact pbond@mail.ngo.za if interested in joining the trip.)
Speakers: Khadija Sharife is a former resident of Clare Estate; CCS's coordinator of the Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade project and a writer for Africa Report, Capitalism Nature Socialism as well as numerous other periodicals. Patrick Bond is CCS Director and author of the recent UKZN Press book, Politics of Climate Justice, as well as other books that analyse carbon trading. (For access to the seminar skypecast, please contact pbond@mail.ngo.za)
PHOTOS
Interpreting Umlazi's Unrest, Repression and Occupy Resistance, 9 July
Speakers: Bheki Buthelezi and China Ngubane Date: Monday, 9 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The ongoing occupation of space next to an Umlazi's councilor's office in V Section is a new reaction to socio-economic oppression, shifting the 'Service Delivery Protest' so common in South Africa, to a new appropriation of public space. The Umlazi communities which oppose abuse of local 'development' in this area have long struggled to make their voices heard, but in June, protest marches were clamped down with unprecedented force by police and local political thugs. Hundreds of activists have been shot at, teargassed and arrested, but will their next stage of struggle be tolerated - or like Occupy in other sites, will it be deemed too great a challenge to the status quo? (For more, see ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?2,68,3,2675 and http://abahlali.org/node/8915)
Speakers: Buthelezi is an Umlazi civic leader jailed in late June for his role in a non-violent service delivery protest, and an Unemployed People's Movement activist. China Ngubane is with the Democratic Left Front, Right2Know and the Centre for Civil Society where he is a Dennis Brutus Community Scholar.
Resource-cursed Zimbabwe's Marange blood diamonds, 6 July
Speaker: Farai Maguwu Date: Friday, 6 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: What may be judged as the world's largest-ever diamond field, in eastern Zimbabwe, appears to be channeling unprecedented resources to a small elite, including the country's generals and Zanu(PF) officials, and Chinese, Indian, Israeli and Dubai enterprises active in the diamond commodity chain. These are 'blood diamonds' by any reasonable definition, given the death of hundreds of local residents in the Marange area a few years ago, and given how exploitative social, environmental and political processes in Zimbabwe have been amplified by the diamonds' extraction. The case allows further interrogation of the notion of the Resource Curse, associated with malgovernance and inappropriate use of non-renewable natural resources.
Speaker: Farai Maguwu holds a masters from Africa University and is enrolling for his doctorate in development studies at UKZN based at CCS. He was awarded the Africa prize by Human Rights Watch, following weeks in prison and torture given his role in researching Marange diamonds and contesting the Kimberley Process. A recent interview with Farai following the US hosting of the KP earlier this month is at http://www.swradioafrica.com/2012/06/22/transcript-of-farai-maguwu-on-question-time/
“Blood diamonds” were under debate when human rights activist, Mr Farai Maguwu, presented findings of his research into the Marange diamond fields in Zimbabwe to a packed seminar at UKZN’s Centre for Civil Society (CCS).
Making it clear the Marange diamonds could either be a blessing or a curse for Zimbabwe and its people; Maguwu told the audience how he had spent time in prison and had risked his life researching and documenting some of the horrific abuses taking place at the diamond fields.
He referred to the Kimberley Process intercessional meeting in Washington where the diamond monitor was urged to tackle continuing human rights violations at Marange.
‘Violence in Marange has significantly gone down. We still have isolated sporadic incidences of human rights violations and we want government to deal with the problem and also to ensure that the army is completely removed from the area,’ he said.
Maguwu said human rights violations committed by legitimate governments were affecting the diamond industry. ‘When consumers hear of human rights violations in a diamond producing community, they become skeptical.
‘They feel those diamonds could be associated with internal conflict and they don’t want to express love to their loved ones through something that was sourced from a conflict zone or something that led to the death of someone or the killing of a person.’
Maguwu proposed a Diamond Bill as a possible solution to the problem. ‘This Diamond Bill must address the issue of investor identification. Therefore, if the manner in which the companies mining in Marange is identified as not clean, the Bill must address that and ensure an open bidding process where the best players in the industry are identified and awarded the contracts.’
He added that Zimbabwean people displaced by the mining in Marange deserved proper compensation
PHOTOS
Murky world of Marange mining firms
Jason Moyo 6 July 2012
Zimbabwe’s Mines Minister Obert Mpofu estimates that the country’s vast diamond wealth could generate $2-billion a year, but it is increasingly unclear who is benefiting more – the government or the faceless shareholders who own the miners.
Foreigners are still queuing up to get in on the action and South Africa’s Utho Capital is planning to set up a forum of the world’s top diamond companies in Zimbabwe.
The Marange fields cover 123000 hectares, with only 54000 hectares being mined. The remainder is up for grabs, according to the Zimbabwe Mining Development Company (ZMDC), the state mining firm. More
Housing Policy and Liberalism in South Africa, 5 July
Baldwin Date: Thursday, 5 July 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: This research focuses on the work of John Rawls and political liberalism in the context of housing policy in post-apartheid South Africa. In his later work, Rawls produces a conception of political justice independent of any social and moral theory. The non-metaphysical nature of Rawls' conception of political justice allows for the free manifestation of public reason and therefore the liberal state. Twenty years after a democratic transition South Africa is a laboratory for the study of Rawlsian political liberalism. However, the extent of political liberalism is threatened by a series of sociopolitical issues. The end of this research will be to argue that the most substantial of these is a failure to deliver adequate housing to South Africa's most disadvantaged as part of a scheme of basic liberties. As South Africa compromises its status as a liberal state, radical left movements play a critical and unique role in policy formation. Rawls neglected to include provisions in his theory of justice to handle dissident groups of the left. This research asks the question: In their pursuit of housing reform, are dissident groups compromising or strengthening political liberalism? This seminar will be an overview and elucidation of this research in its preliminary stages.
Speaker: Eric Baldwin is a visiting scholar at the Centre for Civil Society. He is a B.Phil candidate in Political Science and a Chancellor's Research Fellow in the University Honors College at the University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, USA). He is co-advised by Michael Goodhart and Andrew Lotz. His defense is tentatively planned for March 2013. Other research interests include: the work of Emma Goldman in the context of anarcho-feminist political thought, epistemologies of power in western societies, and postmodern spatial politics in the urban environment. In addition to his research and academic work he serves as a senior editor for the Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review and president of Alpha Phi Omega a national community service fraternity, and is a longstanding member of the Pitt College Democrats. He is originally from the state of Vermont.
CCS Seminar - Rio+20 report-back, 2 July
Speakers: Khadija Sharife and Patrick Bond Date: Monday, 2 July 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The Rio+20 Earth Summit held in late June was notable for its failure to generate ideas and policies to save the environment from various forms of destruction, and to assist the many victims of worsening world capitalist crisis. In contrast, the Cupula dos Povos alternative people's summit and three intellectual conferences (Brazilian Political Economists, International Society for Ecological Economics, and Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade research network - http://www.ejolt.org) were much more hopeful sites. In these settings, not only was the orthodox 'Green Economy' criticised for its corporate-centric, dangerous characteristics, but alternatives for research, projects and policies were explored and advanced.
Speakers: Khadija Sharife is CCS's coordinator of EJOLT, a post-graduate student of law and international economics at Liverpool University, and a writer for Africa Report, Capitalism Nature Socialism and numerous other periodicals. Patrick Bond is CCS Director and author of the recent UKZN Press book, Politics of Climate Justice.
State-building & the diaspora in Somaliland, 28 June 2012
State-building in practice: the Somali diaspora and processes of reconstruction in Somaliland
Speaker: Monica Fagioli Date: Thursday 28 June 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: This paper addresses the relationship between the Somali diaspora and ongoing processes of state-building in Somaliland, a self-declared independent state formerly part of the Republic of Somalia until 1991 (the year of the collapse of the Somali state). It will critically discuss the “migration-development nexus” as an instrument of governance to reconstruct state institutions applied in post-conflict societies, such as Somaliland. This critical reading will be informed by recent ethnographic material collected in a year of fieldwork across Kenya (Nairobi), Somaliland and Puntland. The emphasis of this paper is to present the way state-building functions in daily practices enacted by Somalis from the diaspora, Somali civil servants, and international organizations’ officers, in order to highlight and articulate the contradictions and problems of current state-building programs in Africa and possibly elsewhere.
Speaker: Monica Fagioli is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the New School for Social Research (The New School, USA). She holds an MA in Anthropology of Media (SOAS, UK). Her research interests include: African forms of political life, global migration, history of colonialism and development, and race relations. Beyond her academic work, she has been involved in community media projects in the UK, and in media activism across Kenya and South Africa.
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QWASHA! An online archive of community digital content, 21 June
Speakers: Molefi Ndlovu, Niall McNulty & Lwazi Gwijane Date: Thursday 21 June 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: The Qwasha! Portal for community digital content is an online public archive of counter narratives, community media productions, interviews, stories and activities. This initiative is addressing the need to increase the use of Information Communication Technologies and related social media platforms to facilitate and amplify citizen voices and grassroots exchange, dialogue, and collaboration at local, regional, continental and global scale in all spheres of public life. The hope is that by putting effort into a more organized public action archiving practice in community based development initiatives within the eThekwini metro area the online platform can be seen as another tool in the hands of citizens, a means through which they can voice their view and move citizens closer to the realization of fundamental human rights to free expression, thought, association, access to information and the right to dissent. The seminar will provoke discussion on the theoretical concerns motivating this initiative, offering a situated reading of the usefulness of such a tool and possible uses it can be put to. The session will connect practical discussions about how the portal works and attempt to test some connecting threads linking critical theory, subjectivity, history and identity in a post-colonial African context.
Qwasha is an isiZulu word: Qwasha. [v/i]; Imperative; Singular of: uku Qwasha (v/i.) Lie awake without sleep, very alert.
Speakers: Molefi Mafereka Ndlovu (Lead Researcher): Molefi's research background includes the planning, designing and execution of participatory research projects; conducting peer training and capacity building with community based activist and advocacy groups. He has worked for the Education Policy Unit (Wits- EPU), with community based activist groups such as the Workers Library (committee member); the Anti Privatization Forum (APF-JHB), Imbawula Trust; Rasa FM (Pimville - Soweto), Indymedia-Africa (JHB, DBN & CT), Prince Africa Zulu Foundation Trust (PAZFT-Trustee-SADC); Dedicated Artists Cultural Arts Organisation (DACAO- Clermont), Non Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC-ICANN- Afrika), Black Pepper (SA: Exc Consultant), Khula Malaika Foundation (KMF- W. Cape: Associate), UmKhumbane Mail (Durban; Associate), Onkweni Royal Cultural Festival (Ulundi) and DeepDish TV (NYC; Associate). Molefi’s approach is based on critical theory and pedagogy of the oppressed with a focus on participatory action oriented research methodologies he has completed his bachelor’s degree in Community Development (UKZN). His current and latest work online includes: www.qwasha.org.za , www.imc-africa.mayfirst.org and www.durbansings.wordpress.com
Niall McNulty (Web Developer). Niall is an experienced content and web manager, with a focus on online community management and user-generated content. He has developed and managed a number of digital projects for local government, academic institutions and other organisations. He manages the development and maintenance of the Ulwazi Programme, an innovative project which uses the Municipal libraries, Web 2.0 technology and community journalists to create an organic, living record of the local history and indigenous knowledge of the city. Volunteers from the community are shown how to use digital audio recorders and cameras, and provided with training in basic IT, oral history and writing skills. They then collect stories from their community and add them to a collaborative Community Memory website. Niall's current and latest work online includes www.ulwazi.org.
Lwazi Gwijane (Graphic designer). Lwazi is a Hip Hop Kulture activist Born in Namibia to South African exile parents he has lived in many parts of the country, now based in Durban. He is founder of THE ART OF HIP HOP FOUNDATION which hosts the popular “OFF THE HOOK” hip-hop events in Durban. Lwazi studied Brand Communication Management specializing in graphic design at Vega School of Brand Leadership (JHB). Lwazi is lead creative input on graphic presentation and utility of the Qwasha! Portal. His current and latest work online includes: http://www.advancedphotoshop.co.uk/user/ILLUSTR8 More
CDM cannot deliver: Lessons from Nigeria, 11 June
Speaker: Fidelis Allen Discussant: Khadija Sharife Date: Monday 11 June 2012 Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Reporting back from the Africa’s Stakeholders’ Meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s CDM Policy Review Panel held on the 4th of June Fidelis Allen will outline Nigeria’s draft climate policy – the National Climate Policy and Legislation (NCPL). The policy identifies the country’s vulnerability to climate change as a core interest, yet without any indication of the need to move away from fossil fuel production as a long term goal. The government has accepted the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as a commitment to its role as a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, but also as a fund-raising opportunity. Regardless of its laudable objectives, the CDM is faced with challenges that will ultimately prove correct those who are demanding its replacement with direct climate debt payment to citizens in the developing world.
Speaker: Fidelis Allen obtained his PhD in Politics from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the School of Built Environment and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Discussant: Khadija Sharife is a journalist, visiting scholar at the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is a contributor to the Tax Justice Network and the Africa Report.
Zimbabwean civil society in South Africa, 7 June
The Centre for Civil Society based within the School of Built Environment and Development Studies invites you to the seminar ‑ Zimbabwean civil society in South Africa
Speaker: Michela Gallo Date: Thursday 7 June 2012 Time: 12:30‑14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: This seminar is based on a research proposal focused on Zimbabwean civil society in South Africa. It considers how Zimbabwean civil society finds expression in South Africa, its characteristics and profile of participants as well as the degree and ways Zimbabwean civil society interacts with South African civil society to address challenges faced by Zimbabwean nationals both in Zimbabwe and in South Africa.
About Speaker Michela Gallo is a visiting scholar at CCS and is carrying out her year of European Voluntary Service in South Africa. Her area of interest is community work and migrant rights. Michela is from Italy and has a Master's degree in Development Studies from Universit? di Roma la Sapienza.
Small wars - A micro-level analysis of violence in KwaZulu-Natal, 17 May
Speaker: Maria Schuld Date: Thursday 17 May 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30‑14:00
Topic: It is no secret that the transformation from apartheid to democracy was a violent process that cost the lives of more than 15,000 people, most of them killed in what is today KwaZulu‑Natal. What is less obvious are the civil war patterns that hide behind the newspaper headlines of mere 'unrest in the townships', including warlord systems, professional hit‑squad killings and strategically planned mob massacres. Power struggles between Inkatha and the ANC/UDF appear interwoven with taxi wars, fights over land issues and rent increases, gangsterism, section and faction fights as well as evidence of violence along ethnic lines at the local level. Maria Schuld will present some preliminary findings of her research on local‑level violence in KwaZulu‑Natal. Her focus includes the violent structures and styles that go beyond the anti‑apartheid struggle narrative and the changes and continuities that see various forms of violence persist until today ‑ thus casting a somewhat different light on the province's transition to democracy.
Speaker: Maria Schuld is a post graduate student from the Free University in Berlin. She is currently based at the Centre for Civil Society as a Visiting Scholar conducting research for her dissertation on post conflict violence in Africa.
Improving access to sanitation on a global scale, 10 May
Speakers: Sasha Kramer and Anthony Kilbride Date: Thursday 10 May Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30‑14:00
Topic: This seminar will deal with social complexities associated with sanitation.Can international non‑governmental organizations really improve access to sanitation on a global scale? What is the impact of the Bill Gates initiative to redesign the toilet? Should long‑term sanitation initiatives be free to low‑income users? How to enforce standards in such a diverse and personal area of development?
Presenters: Sasha Kramer is an ecologist (Stanford University doctorate) and a human rights advocate who has been working in Haiti since 2004. She is the Co‑founder and Executive Director of the organization SOIL, which focuses on the transformation of waste into resources, especially ecological sanitation in which human waste is transformed into compost.
Anthony Kilbride is a civil engineer with a focus on water and sanitation interventions who has worked in over 10 countries in the last decade.He has been based in Port au Prince since the earthquake in 2010 and worked with several non‑governmental organizations including Medecins Sans Frontiers, SOIL and Viva Rio.
Charter processes in Zimbabwe and South Africa, 7 May
The Africa People's Charter, Zimbabwe People's Convention Charter and South African Reconstruction and Development Programme
Speakers: China Ngubane and Patrick Bond Date: Monday 7 May 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, Memorial Tower Building, Howard College Time: 12:30‑14:00
Topic: There are at least three important statements of popular politico‑eco‑socio‑economic demands circulating in South Africa and Zimbabwe these past two decades: the new proposed People's Charter for Africa, the 2008 Zim National People's Convention Charter and South Africa's 1994 RDP. What kinds of politics flow from these civil society initiatives? Can the 'red' (social justice) and 'green' (environmental conservation) be reconciled? How democratic are these Charter processes, and how durable are their ideas and concrete programmes? More
Speakers:China Ngubane is a CCS Dennis Brutus Community Scholar engaged in the African People's Charter process, and as an exiled Zimbabwe solidarity activist supported the National People's Convention. CCS Director Patrick Bond was co‑editor of the RDP and of the 2000 book commissioned by the ANC National Executive Committee, /An RDP Policy Audit.
The Secrecy Bill threat to democracy, journalism and research, 4 May
Speakers: Murray Hunter, Percy Nhau and Nosipho Mngoma Date: Friday 4 May Time: 12:30-2pm Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, Memorial Tower Building
Topic: How are academics and journalists affected by the threat of a rising security state? Will this process derail democracy in South Africa? The Secrecy Bill, the General Intelligence Laws Amendment Bill, and the rising securocratic elite are addressed by Murray Hunter. Percy Nhau and Nosipho Mngoma address how to mobilise South Africans, especially in light of experiences in Zimbabwe. Speakers: Hunter is national coordinator of the Right2Know (R2K) campaign, having joined in 2010 as administrator. He was previously a writer, and studied anthropology and media at the University of Cape Town and London School of Oriental and African Studies. Nhau and Mngona are Visiting Scholars at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society, and are officers of R2K. Nhau is a Zimbabwean political refugee active in progressive social change mobilisation. Mngoma studied journalism at the Durban University of Technology and has written for various periodicals, including the Daily News.
SECRECY BILL DISCUSSED AT UKZN
Speakers from the Right2Know campaign, from left: Journalist Ms Nosipho Mngoma; Mr Percy Nhau and Mr Murray Hunter.
The Centre for Civil Society based within UKZN’s School of Built Environment and Development Studies recently hosted a research seminar at which the Protection of Information Bill (Secrecy Bill) was analysed and discussed.
National Co-ordinator of the Right2Know (R2K) campaign, Mr Murray Hunter, said the Bill threatened to turn South Africa into a nation of secrets undermining its hard won freedoms.
‘This Bill is the most contested piece of legislature. Academics and journalists will definitely be affected by the threat of a rising security state in which ordinary citizens and journalists who expose government secrets in the public interest will be imprisoned for up to 25 years,’ said Hunter.
He explained that the Bill, if passed in its current form, would give government officials the power to hide all types of important information from South African citizens under the basis of national security, thus leading to further non-disclosure of corruption and criminal behaviour by public officials.
A member of the Right2Know campaign, Mr Percy Nhau of Zimbabwe, said South Africa was following the same system as Zimbabwe in which instead of opening up democratic spaces, it was closing these spaces through classified information.
‘In KZN, there is very little participation to scrap the Secrecy Bill and this has to change because it is a threat to all of us.’
Nhau also stressed that academics at universities should write articles and produce research on the Secrecy Bill for the public domain. ‘This information would be vital for the man on the street and would help to stop the bill being passed,’ he added. enewsletter.ukzn.ac.za
Implications of global economic crisis for Africa, 25 April
Speaker: Ransom Lekunze Date: Wednesday 25 April 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic:African countries individually and collectively chose to boost their economic activity through international trade even though the world recently experienced its worst economic crisis in seventy years. Durable problems include volatile commodity prices, export-driven investment that distorts economies and societies, infrastructure and debt sustainability, macroeconomic imbalances, exchange rate fluctuation, trade finance, and credit for export-oriented production. African vulnerability is high because export--GDP measures are much higher than the average of the same measures for industrialized economies. In most of Africa, the crisis was preceded by a trade boom which failed to lay strong foundations for financial stability and capital accumulation. Yet as the financial crisis took hold, state policy tended to neglect trade problems, such as market access, halting protectionism, the WTO's controversial 2001 Doha Agenda, and the lack of meaningful reforms to internal and external financial structures that support trade. Civil society should advocate integration of economic policies in order to ensure that trade supports greater domestic financial stability.
Speaker: Ransom Lekunze is an associate professor at the Metropolitan University College, Copenhagen, specializing in fair trade, sustainable development, environmental policy, consumption, markets and Corporate Social Responsibility. Originally from Cameroon, Ransom is a Swedish citizen with a PhD in Development Economics from Lund University. He was a researcher at the South Centre, an intergovernmental organization based in Geneva in 2008 -09 and also worked as consultant for the Center of Concern in Washington, on the effects of global financial crisis on Africa. During the 1990s, Ransom spent several years working with civil society organizations in Cameroon, and he founded the Environmental Management Forum, a youth NGO that won the African Commonwealth Youth Service Awards in 1998. He is currently visiting lecturer at the UKZN.
African climate change and carbon trading politics, 23 April
Speaker: Michele Maynard Date: Monday 23 April 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, Memorial Tower Building, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00 (a skype link will be set up for this seminar - to reserve a space contact pbond@mail.ngo.za)
Topic: COP17 in Durban witnessed the lock-in of developed country pledges to reduce emissions (only 13-17% for most countries and just 3-4% for the US by 2020. At this rate, Africa will be cooked, with five degree temperature increases unavoidable by mid-century, leaving an estimated 180 million deaths on the continent (according to Christian Aid). Can the market provide a solution caused by what is termed - due to unaccounted for pollution externalities - the world's worst market failure? With no new demand for carbon credits in the Kyoto Protocol's emissions trading scheme, the European Union's pilot has all but crashed: carbon prices are now trading around just Euro 6/tonne. Against this backdrop the 4th Africa Carbon Forum convened in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia last week. The disillusioned, deaf and disheartened carbon traders, carbon project developers, UN agencies, European Union representatives and World Bank staff continued to promote the market, especially Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs) for Africa. In contrast, the Centre for Civil Society joined Dartmouth College's Climate Justice Project and the Barcelona-based EJOLT network to insist, CDMs Cannot Deliver the Money: http://cdmscannotdeliver.wordpress.com/ and http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?3,28,11,4007. How did that message go over in Addis, amidst those Africans who are convinced by neoliberal solutions to the climate crisis, in effect the privatisation of Africa's air?
Speaker: Michele Maynard works as a social and environmental activist, a consultant to CCS involved in post-CDM advocacy, and a former PACJA Policy and Advocacy Adviser.
Background:
At a time the carbon markets face a profound crisis, this report provides critical policy analysis and case documentation about the role of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in Africa. Instead of providing an appropriate flow of climate finance for projects related to greenhouse gas mitigation, the CDM has benefited large corporations (both South and North) and the governments they influence and often control. South Africa is a case in point, as both a victim and villain in relation to catastrophic climate change.
Many sites of emissions in Africa – e.g., methane from rotting rubbish in landfills, flaring of gas from oil extraction, coal burning electricity generation, coal to liquid and gas to liquid petroleum refining, deforestation, decomposed vegetation in tropical dams – require urgent attention, as do the proliferation of ‘false solutions’ to the climate crisis such as mega hydro power, tree plantations and biofuels. Across Africa, the CDM subsidizes all these dangerous for-profit activities, making them yet more advantageous to multinational corporations which are mostly based in Europe, the US or South Africa. In turn, these same corporations – and others just as ecologically irresponsible – can continue to pollute beyond the bounds set by politicians especially in Europe, because the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) forgives increasing pollution in the North if it is offset by dubious projects in the South. But because communities, workers and local environments have been harmed in the process, various kinds of social resistances have emerged, and in some cases met with repression or co optation through ‘divide and rule’ strategies.
Chapter One sets the context for the carbon markets and the CDM mechanism, revealing its continuing price collapse and gloomy future prospects. Chapter Two maps the players in CDM markets and voluntary schemes. Chapters Three through Eight are the case studies, beginning with South Africa’s pilot CDM fraud and environmental racism in Durban’s Bisasar Road landfill methane electricity project, along with similar trends in Egypt. Chapter Four dissects the case of Nigerian CDM corruption of local governance, especially where oil companies are receiving subsidies for reducing their Niger Delta gas flaring – an act which by law they are prohibited from doing in the first place. Chapter Five addresses the emergence of trees, plantations and forests within CDM financing debates, with cases from Uganda,Mozambique, the DRC, Tanzania and Kenya. Chapter Six is about two failed CDM proposals both involving exploitation of Mozambique’s gas reserves. Chapter Seven discusses the way mega dams are being lined up for CDM status, with case studies from Ethiopia and the DRC. Chapter Eight considers the rise of the Kenyan and Mozambican Jatropha biofuel industries.
All these cases suggest the need for an urgent policy review of the entire CDM mechanism’s operation (a point we made to the United Nations CDM Executive Board in a January 2012 submission), with the logical conclusion that the system should be decommissioned and at minimum, a moratorium be placed on further crediting until the profound structural and implementation flaws are confronted. The damage done by CDMs to date should be included in calculations of the ‘climate debt’ that the North owes the South, with the aim of having victims of CDMs compensated appropriately.
Will the Inga Hydropower Project meet Africa’s electricity needs?, 20 April
Speaker: Baruti Amisi Date: Friday 20 April 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, Memorial Tower Building, Howard College
Topic: The world's single-largest energy investment - the Inga Hydropower Project (IHP) on the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo - will remain a high-profile megaproject for decades to come. In fact, the increasing electricity needs from power hungry countries and the need to preserve the environment in European countries and thus to destroy natural ecosystems in the poor countries, and the DRC in particular, have intensified the pressure on this unique geological and hydrological site to produce the cheapest hydropower in the world, notwithstanding a construction price tag in the range of $80 billion. In terms of output, the dam will be three times larger than even China's Three Gorges. But civil society locally and globally is asking difficult questions: (1) Is not further development of IHP premature or too ambitious?, (2) Who are the winners and losers in the IHP?, and (3) Is there a net benefit for the those on the ground and throughout the host county? Electricity is desperately needed, because only 6 percent of the DRC population have access. But the financial performance, net recognised income, the subsequent proceeds from it , and socio-economic and environmental legacy of Inga 1 and 2 together suggest that the DRC is not prepared for a project of such a magnitude. Current capacity - political, institutional, organisational, managerial, financial and technical - and socio-economic instability represent significant risk for investors. Prejudiced agreements insisted upon by investors will undermine benefits to the country. Secondly, IHP electricity could undermine the African poor, given the price and unaffordability. The main material beneficiaries will be multinational corporations and wealthy individuals who already received the returns of the investment and rewards in Inga 1 and 2. Hence a better approach would be to refocus the project's efforts to cover rehabilitation, transparent financial management, and improvement of the internal controls that were seen to be failures in Inga 1 and 2. Otherwise, instead of supplying electricity to the people of Africa, the IHP will be remembered as Africa's largest white elephant.
Speaker: Baruti Amisi is a doctoral candidate at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society and Development Studies discipline, and a leader of the KZN Refugees Forum. He has recently returned from two months of field research in the DRC.
Speaker:Trevor Ngwane Date: Wednesday 18 April 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, Memorial Tower Building, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: Trevor Ngwane's Centre for Civil Society MA dissertation is entitled “Ideology and agency in protest politics: Service delivery struggles in post-apartheid South Africa”. The seminar addresses this thesis and additional pre-doctoral research now underway with Professor Peter Alexander and colleagues at the University of Johannesburg. There, a reliable database of protest events in South Africa is being constructed because there is presently no authoritative factual basis upon which commentators can generate coherent explanations of South African protests. Most researchers rely on police records and on the Municipal IQ, SA Local Government Association and SA Broadcasting Corporation databases, but these have been questioned for accuracy, comprehensiveness and reliability. A related problem is that present estimates of the number of protests suffer from the use of different definitions and methodological approaches that are found in the field. A reliable, verifiable database that covers the past decade or so of protest activity and that is updated regularly will contribute immensely to protest scholarship.
Speaker:http://www.newleftreview.org/A2459). He was previously an African National Congress regional leader in Soweto and Johannesburg city councilor (until being fired in 1999 for questioning water privatisation), a trade union educator, a Wits University sociology lecturer, a co-founder of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, general secretary of the Anti-Privatisation Forum, and recently a national organiser of the Million Climate Jobs campaign.
The World Bank presidential race, 11 April African interests and personality profiles
Speakers: Fidelis Allen and Patrick Bond Date: Wednesday 11 April 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, Memorial Tower Building 6th floor Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: The three candidates for World Bank president - the likely winner Jim Yong Kim (US), the Colombian economist Jose Antonio Ocampo, and the Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala - are being scrutinised by civil society, and all have extreme flaws (e.g. highlighted by Patrick Bond at http://links.org.au/node/2814). Returning last week from Nigeria, CCS post-doctoral student Fidelis Allen reports on conditions that led to the country's most extensive social uprising, in early January after Okonjo-Iweala removed fuel subsidies, and how civil society fought back to rescind the cuts. On the more positive side, what do the extraordinary public health accomplishments of Kim, the brave Keynesian economic interventions advocated by Ocampo, and the pugnacious battle of Okonjo-Iweala against Barack Obama's undemocratic imposition of US monetary-biased voting power teach us about contesting the multilateral financial system and global governance more generally?
Speakers: Fidelis Allen's post-doctoral research is on civil society environmental advocacy spanning the Niger Delta and South Durban; and Patrick Bond has been a long-time critic of and writer about the Bretton Woods Institutions and neoliberal economic policy.
Photos
Who should be President of the World Bank? One of these - or no one?
Promise-breaking at the World Bank, Part 1: Before Patrick Bond 5 April 2012
That 66th birthday month of his, March 2012, was auspicious for adding a little spice to his dreary life, but no, it just can’t last. Born in March 1946 alongside his evil twin, IMF, in Savannah Georgia, after conception in what must have been a rather sleazy New Hampshire hotel (the ‘Bretton Woods’) in mid-1944, the old geezer known as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or much better by his nickname World Bank (but let me just use WB), really ought to be considering retirement.
Not to be ageist (ok just this once), but still, it’s patently obvious that WB’s relentless WashCon ideology is so last-century, so discredited by recent world financial melting, and so durably dangerous in today’s world. His presidents have reflected the worst of the old yankee imperialist mindset. And let’s not even start on IMF’s extremist lads and lass, who in recent years have migrated their austerity dogma from North Africa to Southern Europe and to my native Ireland, meeting growing resistance along the way.
Even that one moment in 1997-98 when, obviously in mid-life crisis and slightly destabilised by his East Asian buddies’ spills, WB developed a little moral spine and sensibility – witnessed by his chief economist Joseph Stiglitz’s loose talk of a new Post-Washington Consensus – the devil on WB’s right-hand shoulder (named Larry Summers) told his then president James Wolfensohn to boot Stiglitz out, in September 1999, if Wolfensohn wanted to hang around WB for another five years. Order given, and immediately executed. More
Why Jim Kim should consider resigning as World Bank president-designate Patrick Bond 18 April 2012
The situation for the many constituencies hopeful about Jim Yong Kim’s ‘election’ as World Bank president is comparable to early 2009.
Barack Obama entered a US presidency suffering institutional crisis and faced an immediate fork in the road: make the change he promised, or sell out his constituents’ interests by bailing out Wall Street and legitimizing a renewed neoliberal attack on society and ecology, replete with undemocratic, unconstitutional practices suffused with residual militarism. As president-elect, surrounding himself with the likes of Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Paul Volcker, William Gates, Rahm Emmanuel and Hillary Clinton, it was obvious which way he would go.
Unlike the corporate-oriented politician Obama, by all accounts Jim Kim is a genuine progressive, a wunderkind Harvard-trained physician and anthropologist with a terrific track record of public health management and advocacy, especially against AIDS and TB. So unlike predecessor Robert Zoellick, who in the service of power broke everything he touched since the late 1980s,1 Kim spent the last quarter century building an extraordinary institution, the Boston NGO Partners in Health, and improving another by working at its top level, the ultra-bureaucratic World Health Organisation in Geneva.
Accomplishing spectacular AIDS and TB breakthroughs required making alliances with grassroots activists, including South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign, to win an historic fight against Big Pharma and the World Trade Organisation’s Intellectual Property rights protections in 2001. The payoff was provision of generic and discounted AIDS medicines to several million poor people at an affordable price, whereas a decade earlier those medicines cost $15,000/patient/year. It was one the greatest recent victories against corporate-facilitated oppression, ranking with the demise of apartheid in 1994 and the rise of Latin America’s centre-left governments since the late 1990s.
For these reasons, Kim should be proud to come under fire from die-hard, unreconstructed economists like Bill Easterly2 and Lant Pritchett,3 who is forever famous (with plagiarist Summers) for using an internal World Bank bully pulpit to advocate the dumping of toxic waste on low-income people, since after all, Africa “is vastly under-polluted”.4 Alleges AIDS activist Gregg Gonsalves, “Pritchett has vociferously complained about the provision of Anti-Retroviral Therapy in the developing world as a prime example of palliative humane development and misguided philanthropy.”5 So balance surely requires that instead of just being attacked from the wickedly anti-social and anti-environmental right, Kim receives a constructive critique from the left?
Indeed we will soon learn whether Kim’s commitment to progressive change is as strong as his record suggests, or whether he will instead repeat his deplorable role in the notorious Dartmouth fraternity hazing scandal where as the College president apparently intimidated by rich alumni and bolshi ‘vomelette’-making students, he did nothing at all, deploying the bizarre excuse, “One of the things you learn as an anthropologist, you don’t come in and change the culture.”6
We might learn most by watching what happens to the Bank’s fossil fuel portfolio and culture of wanton climate change. The first test is a huge, irrational Kosovo coal-fired powerplant loan he will probably sign off on in his first few weeks on the job. His new underlings are, after all, the main financiers of coal-fired electricity, including their largest project loan ever ($3.75 billion), which was here in South Africa exactly two years ago.7 The contradictions will be spectacular. The scholar who co-edited the great anti-neoliberal book Dying for Growth will be compelled to actively ignore data (from Christian Aid) which suggest 185 million African deaths in the 21st century will be due to climate change, in addition to immediate coal-related health problems.
Scientists working for the Environmental Defence Fund found that “between roughly 6000 and 10,700 annual deaths from heart ailments, respiratory disease and lung cancer can be attributed to the 88 coal-fired power plants and companies receiving public international financing”.8 Furthermore, writing in Geotimes on “Health Impacts of Coal,” three other scientists observe the rise in cancers, bone deformation, black lung and other respiratory diseases, sterilization, and kidney disease associated with coal. And they point out, “In the 13th century, the dense, sulfurous air in London attracted the attention of the British royalty, who issued proclamations banning the use of coal in London.”9 To get Kim to catch up to eight-century old preventative healthcare is going to be impossible given the balance of forces amongst Third World elites in sites like South Africa, within the fossil-addicted World Bank itself, and a few blocks away at the White House and Treasury where mega-energy interests hold enormous sway. This is what multinational capital requires of Kim: a revitalized image for a crucial subsidized financier of coal-fired power plants and carbon markets when both are in extreme disrepute.
The sickening signs of Kim’s retreat in the face of power were unmistakeable beginning in early April, just after his nomination was announced by Obama. Kim’s book Dying for Growth questioned neoliberalism in part because Washington’s model didn’t actually create broad-based growth, but instead austerity and parasitical finance-oriented GDP ‘growth’. But Kim tried running away from that uncontroversial conclusion, telling an uncritical New York Times journalist, “That book was written based on data from the early and mid-1990s. Our concern was that the vision was not inclusive enough, that it wasn’t, in the bank’s words, ‘pro-poor.’ The bank has shifted tremendously since that time, and now the notion of pro-poor development is at the core of the World Bank.”10
This is nonsense, of course, as was the follow-up article in The Washington Post last week hyping his candidacy by his co-editors Paul Farmer and John Gershman: “In the 1990s, when the book was researched and written, too many of the world’s poorest had been left behind by the growth of the global economy” but “Thanks in part to Kim’s trailblazing work, development approaches have changed.”
Huh? Farmer and Gershman provide no evidence of real change, only of rhetoric, using a throwaway line in a 2006 World Bank World Development Report: “We now have considerable evidence that equity is also instrumental to the pursuit of long-term prosperity in aggregate terms for society as a whole.” But such banal phrasing can be found in Bank reports right through neoliberal era, as Bank economists regularly wrote left (putting a ‘human face’ on structural adjustment) so they could walk right.
Farmer and Gershman brag of “greater investments in areas such as health and education, which help countries grow.” But the week before they made this emollient claim, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development reported a 3 percent decline in Overseas Development Aid by rich countries in 2011.11 Reflecting on such cuts, the Brookings Institute produced a major study last August, concluding that “The future of bilateral aid to basic education is at risk, placing the educational opportunities of many of the world’s poorest girls and boys on the line.”12
As the Education for All Global Monitoring Report blog complained in early April, “the World Bank, the most important donor to basic education, massively decreased its support after a boost in 2009 and 2010” – whereas the poorest countries actually need “$16 billion in aid annually to meet their basic education goals by 2015” (of around $5 billion in aid to education, they presently only get $2 billion). The Bank’s website shows that its own highly-subsidised loans for basic education to the poorest countries fell from $1.3 billion in 2010 to $400 million in 2011, a level last seen a decade earlier.13
As for health, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria ashamedly conceded last November that it would offer no new grants through 2014 because of funding shortfalls.14 Obama is to blame, in large part, for these aid cuts.
I’ve met both Farmer and Gershman, and like everyone else, I immensely respect their traditional role: haranguing powerful institutions to do less harm. What they did in the Washington Post was the opposite, offering excuses for the World Bank and its status quo ideology because their friend is about to take over.
What might Kim do to change the Bank? As he told Bank directors who interviewed him last week, “The Bank is an unparalleled resource for its members, not only for financing but also knowledge and convening power. These strengths were apparent in the Bank’s timely response to the recent financial crisis. The Bank must remain an effective partner in strengthening the foundations and fairness of the global economy, and in ensuring that the benefits of growth are widely shared.”15
It is just too tempting to rearrange these words to get a more honest view, one Kim probably would have agreed with not long ago: “The Bank is an unparalleled force of social and ecological destruction, not only in its financing on behalf of multinational capital, but also its lack of real development knowledge and its overweening power. These flaws were apparent in the Bank’s surprised response to the recent financial crisis, which it helped cause by increasing indebtedness, vulnerability and financial deregulation through decades of loan conditionality and an ideology of financial liberalisation. The Bank has systematically weakened the foundations and fairness of the global economy, and ensured that the benefits of growth are enjoyed only by the top 1%.” In his interview, Kim went on to argue, “The World Bank has taken steps to realign voting power to increase the voice and responsibility of developing countries in the governance of this institution.”16
But what kind of steps, and who got stepped on? The last time such realignment happened, in April 2010, the watchdog Bretton Woods Project noted that Africa’s vote rose less than 0.2 percent, and domination by the rich North remains formidable: “In reality then, high-income countries will cling onto almost 61 per cent of the vote, with middle-income countries getting under 35 percent, and low-income countries on just 4.46 percent.”17
Kim’s weasel-like distortions are disturbing, because in the global justice movement, the now common-sense analysis of imperialism’s multilateral institutions is that because efforts to reform them over the past quarter century consistently failed, they are better off decommissioned, as part of what Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South has termed ‘deglobalization’.18
If instead, Kim relegitimizes the World Bank the way that Obama has done US imperialism, and if it is apparent he and his otherwise trustworthy friends Farmer and Gershman stoop to fibbing in defense of his career, then we have a great step backwards to contemplate.
In Obama’s case it took 30 months before the Occupy Movement finally sprang up to contest his reactionary economic policies and ultra-rich beneficiaries. It better not take so long to mount a struggle against Jim Kim’s World Bank, for too many lives depend upon weakening that killer institution. The only constructive thing Kim can do at this stage, I suspect, is immediately tender his resignation and start a run on the Bank.19
Film documentaries and discussion Date: Tuesday 10 April 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, Memorial Tower Building 6th floor Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: Dennis Brutus, 1924-2009, was one of South Africa's - and the world's - most forceful advocates of social justice as well as one of Africa's greatest poets. At the UKZN Centre for Civil Society, where he spent most of his last five years, ongoing tributes to his legacy include the recent launch of the Brutus Community Scholars project with six scholar-activists from Durban. We will be reviewing the CCS portfolio of videos, photos and written material about Brutus - http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?4,79 - as well as considering aspects of his literary, political, sporting, ecological and other accomplishments that have ongoing relevance in this, the world's most unequal major society, in which social protest continues at a world-leading rate.
'Occupy': what kind of social movement is it?, 3 April Film documentary: Al-Jazeera Date: Tuesday 3 April 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, Memorial Tower Building 6th floor Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: In the fall of 2011, New York's Zuccotti Park grabbed the world’s attention as the hub of Occupy Wall Street, a movement that set off a chain of rage against the country’s financial and political elite. Even in the face of police repression and media ridicule, the movement mobilised thousands of people fed up with the deep economic divide in the US. And within two months hundreds of Occupy Wall Street camps swept across the country changing the political discourse in the US. In part 1, Fault Lines tells the definitive history of Occupy Wall Street from its early days through the movement's rapid spread up to the brutal crackdown by state authorities. But the protesters had no intention of abandoning a movement that had already brought out thousands of Americans to demand attention to the country’s economic inequalities. Hundreds of protests and actions have continued around the country. In part 2, Fault Lines looks at how Occupy Wall Street continued to build itself through the winter months by following key organisers through planning meetings, days of action and assemblies - and how the movement must battle political co-optation in a US election year.
Slums, states and citizens in Durban, Nairobi and Delhi, 29 March
Speakers: Jens Andvig, Tiberius Barasa, Stein Sundstøl Eriksen, Sanjay Kumar, Faith Manzi and Knut Nustad Date: Thursday 29 March 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, Memorial Tower Building 602 Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: How are relations developing between the state and citizenries in the slums of Durban, Nairobi and Delhi? Researchers are asking thorny questions: Does the state provide security and welfare services and channels for political representation? Do the urban poor utilise services provided by the state? Do they seek protection from the state against local oppressors, or do they seek to avoid the state altogether? What is the role of non-state actors relative to the state in urban slums in terms of security, welfare, and representation? Are there differences between men and women in terms of how they view and relate to the state? What can explain the character of the relations between the urban poor and the state? Which factors can best account for the nature of these relations, and the variations in these relations between the three cities?
Speakers: Jens Andvig is a senior researcher at the Norsk Utenrikspolitisk Institutt (NUPI) in Oslo, Tiberius Barasa is a Governance and Public Policy Specialist at the Centre for Research and Technology Development in Nairobi, Stein Sundstøl Eriksen is a senior researcher at NUPI, Sanjay Kumar is in the Programme for Comparative Democracy at Delhi’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Faith Manzi is based at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society and Knut Nustad is the NUPI scholar focusing most on South Africa.
CCS/DevStudies seminar on urban ecology, 27 March
Who can claim to be in the know of “urban ecology”? A seminar on plants, people, politics and collective action in post-apartheid Cape Town. Speaker: Henrik Ernstson Date: Wednesday 28 March 2012 Venue: Development Studies Seminar Room Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: With increasing urbanization and ecological crisis, “urban ecology” has been engaged by academia and civil society. This presentation prepares for a discussion about who can claim to be in the know about urban ecology, about epistemological and ontological politics, and how that is played out in the political ecology of Cape Town in particular. I will depart from my ethnographic research of a grassroots’ initiative to rehabilitate a fynbos vegetation wetland habitat in Grassy Park, Cape Town, a lower-middle class area classified as a ‘Coloured’ area during apartheid. This case study will be contrasted with the efforts by biologists and civil servants to produce a biodiversity map for Cape Town, and later also the use of the framework of ‘ecosystem services’ to build a “business case” for the city’s “natural assets”. Through the collective action at Grassy Park we learn that there are ways to undermine the neat separation of Nature and Culture often upheld by biologists and experts. Thus, rather than counting the number of species to account for value, there is an attempt to infuse “biodiversity” with memories of oppression engendering a politics of knowing and being. Although only using material from Cape Town, I hope the seminar can help to engage other urban realities to lay bare similar patterns and help to ask (i) how urban ecology is, and could be part of forging civic collective action in various forms, but also (ii) how urban ecology could be part of practices that silences or neglects unequal socioenvironmental patterns. A description will also be included of an idea on how to study civic collective action as networks of collaboration.
Presenter: Henrik Ernstson (PhD) is an ecologist/sociologist, who draws on systems ecology, sociology, and political ecology to explore the governance and politics of urban ecologies. Currently he is a Visiting Scholar at the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at University of Cape Town, but also affiliated to the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. He leads two research projects - Ways of Knowing Urban Ecology and Socioecological Movements in Urban Ecosystems with project case studies in Cape Town, New Orleans, Stockholm and later also Sydney. Read more at his website www.rhizomia.net
Corruption, authoritarianism and the challenge for civil society, 23 March
Seminars of the Centre for Civil Society with Centre for Creative Arts
Speaker: Ronnie Kasrils Date: Friday 23 March 2012 Time: 12:30-1400 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Corruption, authoritarianism and the challenge for civil society examines the roots of corruption that comes with the ascent to power and how it is possible for former freedom fighters to succumb to self-interest and greed. The growth of corruption in government and the private sector, unless dealt with, would lead as elsewhere in history to the emergence of the authoritarian state (conflation of party and state; militarization of police; manipulation of intelligence and security services; media control, curtailment of freedoms, erosion of human rights, emergence of demagogues) in an effort to deal with popular discontent. An end result could well be the end of democracy as occurred in the decline and final collapse of Eastern European socialism and demise of hopeful expectations in Africa from Angola to Zimbabwe. Kasrils believes that the health and strength of any democratic society lies in the character and capacity of civil society. The battle must be waged to link with democratic elements within all political, economic, social, educational and cultural formations in order to safeguard, strengthen and deepen democracy and counter authoritarianism in all its forms. He argues that a healthy ANC and Revolutionary Alliance working with Civil Society is a historic possibility in our country, that our 1994 Democracy will not inevitably descend into an Orwellian 1984 Big Brother model, but that we must remain vigilant and not tolerate complacency. In the final analysis the touchstone for those elected to any level of power must be service to all the people and not themselves.
Presenter: Ronnie Kasrils served as South African Deputy Minister of Defense from 1994 to 1999. He then became Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry from 1999 to 2004, when he was appointed Minister of Intelligence Services until he submitted his resignation in September 2008. He joined the ANC in 1960 and was also an active member of Umkhonto we Sizwe. Kasrils is author of the best-selling autobiography, Armed and Dangerous (1993), and Sunday Times Alan Paton Award winner for The Unlikely Secret Agent (2011).
Organized by the Centre for Civil Society and the Centre for Creative Arts (University of KwaZulu-Natal) 15th Time of the Writer festival - supported by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (principal funder), the French Institute of South Africa, Pro-Helvetia Arts Council of Switzerland, Goethe Institut of South Africa, City of Durban, Adams Campus Books, Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Personal Wealth or Real People’s Power? Ronnie Kasrils (original in Amandla, 2009)
History may well record the year 2009 as a time in which South Africa was forced to confront the inadequacies of an economic system which divides rich from poor. South African society is more unequal than Brazil, our HIV/AIDS infection rate is higher than Malawi (that country has a confirmed HIV infection rate of 12% while South Africa’s hovers above 20%) and most disturbingly, newly elected cabinet ministers purchase vehicles in a recession year, which exceed R1 million, and as workers lose their jobs by the thousands, the General Secretary of the largest federation in the country, COSATU, accepts a salary increase of 100%. Ronnie Kasrils, reflects on a South African society edging closer to the corrupting influence of absolute power.
I well recall in the early years of Angola’s independence the sight of struggle icon, Lucio Lara driving around the congested streets of Luanda in a modest yellow Opel. Lucio was Agostinho Neto’s right-hand man, comrade-in-arms during the liberation struggle, Political Bureau member of the MPLA Workers’ Party, Central Committee Secretary for Organisation and a senior Cabinet Minister revered by the masses. It was soon clear that many of his colleagues resented his display of modesty and fervent grass roots concerns as they succumbed to the fruits of office and sped around in their top of the range BMW or Mercedes--Benze limousines – the emergent WaBenzi class. After Neto’s death in 1980 it was Lucio Lara who introduced the young Eduardo dos Santos as the MPLAs choice as leader and President of Angola. Before long, as the flashy life-style of a new political elite gained ground, Lucio Lara was increasingly marginalised by the new leadership, his revolutionary wisdom and experience ignored and even despised, although he remained totally loved by the urban and rural poor whom he had served with such vigour and loyalty. As petro-dollars and war-time profiteering became the name of the game in oil-boom Angola, an ailing Lucio Lara sought to explain to close friend and journalist, Victoria Brittain, what had become of the great liberating ideals of the MPLA:
“I don’t have illusions about many things anymore,” he reminisced. “In the Angolan struggle perhaps we didn’t have philosophers or sociologists, but we had those words of Neto’s: ‘The most important thing is to solve the people’s problems.’ Once in the Council of Ministers I heard someone say that we should stop using this phrase. I thought maybe he was right because no one spoke against him. In my opinion that was when the Party began to collapse. The leaders felt they all had the right to be rich. That was the beginning of the destruction of our life.”1
Victoria Brittain, long-time supporter of the MPLA, seeing at close quarters the rise to power of those for whom personal wealth had become more important than serving the people, entitled the book she was writing on the country, Death of Dignity. No doubt Lucio Lara would approve of the concerns repeatedly raised by Cosatu General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi and the statement of his ANC counterpart and SACP Chairman, Gwede Mantashe in today’s South Africa: “The biggest threat to our movement is the intersection between business interests and holding of public office. It is frightening to observe the speed with which the election to a position is seen to be the creation of an opportunity for accumulation (of wealth)...If we do not deal decisively with this tendency, the ANC will only move one way, that is downward”2.
As South Africa is regaled by one revelation after another involving luxury limousines, lavish banquets, expensive hotel bills and other extravagant follies – our political leaders would do well to read Victoria Brittain’s book and closer to home, take a look at a most illuminating article written by Rusty Bernstein in The African Communist way back in 1991 (No. 124, First Quarter 1991), which has been referred to in the latest 50th anniversary issue of the journal (No. 178, Third Quarter 2009). The 1991 article was entitled “The Corridors to Corruption” and its warnings about the pitfalls ahead for the struggle generation, and the dangers of falling into them, are prescient and uncanny for today’s South Africa.
The article was accompanied by a cartoon of a limousine with motor-cycle outriders and a pedestrian remarking: “There goes a ‘Man of the People’.” Bernstein, a luminary of the communist party and liberation movement, key draftsman of the Freedom Charter, and co-accused with Mandela in the Rivonia Trial, was well-placed to formulate his observations and concerns. Writing under his pen name “Toussaint,” Bernstein reflected on the failure of East European Communism, and the role that a creeping corruption had played in undermining the integrity of formerly dedicated revolutionaries in Africa and elsewhere. “I want to try and examine some of the forces that shape the bahaviour of leaders of socialism,” he wrote, “and try to establish whether it is their characters and personalities which determine the system – or, on the contrary, whether there are factors in the system which create their character and behaviour.” He was able to spot the hazards as the ANC Alliance prepared to take power and wrote:
“I want to draw on factors which can be seen in embryo in our own South African liberation movement...the subtle process by which the fore-taste of power corrupts seems to be creeping upon us unnoticed. We ignore the warning signals at our peril. Unless we can identify and eliminate the factors which have corrupted good honest leaders and organisations elsewhere, could well repeat the experience of their decline and fall”.
Bernstein considered how a process that had corroded the moral integrity of good honest revolutionaries once power had been achieved could well be repeated in South Africa. He considered the metamorphosis from Comrade to Minister of the typical respected People’s Leader whose life had formerly been devoted to serving the poor and oppressed in an exemplary way. He imagined, sensitively and not without sympathy, how the new life-style – appropriate suits and dress; limousine with chauffeur and body-guards; ministerial residence with retinue of servants; champagne and smoked salmon; the demands of “Protocol” and “Security” -- could come to take charge.
Despite these radical changes the “Comrade Minister”, in Bernstein’s view, was determined not to be seduced and diverted from the objective of representing the interests of the ordinary people. The trouble, Bernstein continued, was that he or she no longer would really interact with the people: “He meets only other officials, or diplomats and businessmen wanting special favours from the government. He sees ordinary people from the windows of his car, and from the platforms of public meetings. But he no longer hears what they say or think or want.”
As for the aides in the ministerial office, only a few could be called “veterans of the struggle.” Most were formerly young activists, bright and specially trained for the posts, and supporters of the new government. But few of them were motivated like their Minister by selfless idealism. They developed a style of work suited to a regular civil-service career, where it was better to do nothing than make a mistake. Publicly they must be seen to toe the official line, and where they were not prepared to do so, they could resign from their jobs, or conspire secretly in order not to lose the confidence of the Party leadership.
Bernstein, basing his story-line on the upheavals of East European communism, contemplated with the growth of corruption and a failure to redress the needs of the people, a scenario of rising popular discontent. “Things are not going well for the new government”, he wrote about an imagined near future. “The opposition has reorganised, and is obstructing the new government’s policies. There are even rumours of sabotage. Foreign investors are withdrawing. Prices are rising and jobs are being lost. The servants of state want to combat discontent and bolster the government. They want to show the world that things are not as bad as the gossip suggests. They have the best of intentions – to encourage investors, improve the morale of the government’s supporters, and dismay its opponents. Gradually they develop the habit of hiding the bad news, or “massaging the statistics” to make things look better than they really are. Only the good news must be allowed to get out.”
Rusty Bernstein believed that the East European experience, first of crisis then of fall, could happen in the new South Africa. We South Africans, he wrote, needed to learn from what had happened in Eastern Europe. Those events of 1989-90 could provide several different story-lines, all ending in much the same way. From his often close experience and study of the socialist camp up to the time of the dramatic collapse in one country after another, he offered the following scenario as a possible example:
“The opposition to the government grows stronger and more active. Some people are said by ‘Security’ to be planning a coup of uprising. The Security chiefs might be right, or they may be exaggerating the danger. They may just be building up a case for demanding a larger departmental budget and wider powers. Who knows? Who, even in the government, can any longer distinguish between what is being alleged by officials and what is actually happening in the country? Dare any Minister oppose the Security Department’s demand for a State of Emergency? Detention without trial? Suppression of opposition parties or newspapers? Should public meetings be prohibited and new elections postponed indefinitely? Should strikes be made illegal to protect the supplies of food and power? The Minister’s are nor reckless men. They know the whole future of the country depends on their decision. If they could trust their own instincts against the whole weight of ‘Security’s’ assessments, they might turn down the demand for emergency powers. But if their judgement should be wrong, all will end in disaster. They decide to be safe rather than sorry. Reluctantly they decide to accept special security measures. Democracy is buried, and replaced with rule by emergency decree. This marks the end of all the high idealism with which the people’s government set out.”
Bernstein foresaw a Security Department with growing power playing on paranoia and alleging, where it suited them, that some people were planning a coup or uprising. In the circumstances of growing opposition he imagined how frightened ministers would not oppose the demand from the security establishment for a State of Emergency and detentions without trial. “An end result could well be the burial of democracy. This marked the end of all the high idealism with which the people’s government set out.”
Bernstein stressed: “My story is not either totally factual or totally fictional. It is not the story of a particular country or a particular party. But I believe it is a fair example of the real tragic story of socialism’s decline and fall almost everywhere in Eastern Europe. It contains within it.....the separation of the leaders from the people....That separation lays open even the most honest and dedicated comrade to irresistible pressures in high office. It explains, in part at least, what they do – and what they fail to do.”
Bernstein did not hold the view that power must inevitably corrupt. But he argued that we must understand that the “trappings of power”, passed on from generation to generation, system to system -- if unchanged -- kept the policy makers separate from the people, underpinned existing power relations and insulated them from the forces of change. In reference to the Freedom Charter, he reminded us that “the ending of white supremacy...requires the total overturn of the status quo” of which the existing apparatus of state was an essential part. “Since the trappings of state power serve to uphold the status quo,” he argued, “the trappings of protocol and privilege which surround apartheid power must be essentially hostile to our cause.” And he continued: “They are incompatible with our aim of transforming society to ensure equal rights for all, and contradict the democratic spirit of our programme.”
Whilst not wishing to suggest that the only cause of failure should be ascribed to such mechanisms of power, Bernstein averred that the case studies provided much evidence for the conclusion that the existing trappings of power are incompatible with the social transformation of society. “In Eastern Europe”, he continued, “attempts were made to take over the trappings of capitalist power, complete with all their diplomatic usages and privileges, and use them to serve the cause of socialist power. The results have been too disastrous for us to ignore.”
As an outstanding Marxist, Rusty Bernstein was well aware that socialist theory had always noted that the transition from capitalism to socialism cannot be a matter of transforming the economy alone. “It has always stressed”, he emphasised, “that it is equally necessary to change the whole superstructure of the system. Eastern European socialists generally followed that teaching. They made sweeping changes on a wide canvas – some critics say too wide. They changed institutions and customs of all kinds – parliaments, administrations, armies, factory managements, schooling, religion, social relations. They acted in the conviction that all former social institutions had to be changed if they were to serve the building of socialism. But surprisingly not in respect of the trappings of power and its diplomatic modalities (my emphasis – RK). These were simply left unchanged. Whether this was because they were simply overlooked, or whether they were given a low priority until they were too well established to be altered, or whether they were deliberately preserved is unclear... Whatever the reason, the fact is that the trappings were not changed...they kept the old trappings, worked within them, and were undermined by them...” The article concluded as follows:
“We can benefit now from the examples of those who have not tackled the problem in Eastern Europe, and in newly independent Africa. Their experience demonstrates the corrupting consequence of simply taking the trappings of capitalist power over into a new social order... we have the chance to seal off in advance the Corridors of Corruption, where others tried and failed. .... It demands that we debate the matter openly...it also demands that we measure ourselves against the standards of honesty, incorruptibility and dedication which we expect – and generally get – from our leaders; and that we understand the pressures that they will be subject to if we cannot find the right answers. The task is nothing less than setting the world of liberation and socialism on a new path, where dreams of power without the corrupting restraints of the old order can be made real. Real people’s power!”
It is worth repeating that those words were written in 1991, three years short of South Africa’s first democratic election which voted the ANC into power!
Of course there have been efforts at transforming the South African state and its practices since, but clearly not in the systemic sense envisaged by Bernstein. It is not sufficient, however, to simply insist that public office bearers resign from business positions and directorships or that ministers overhaul their own regulations governing such things as vehicle and travel standards. Witness the lame excuses recently provided by some ministers that they were ignorant of the costs of their cars or hotel accommodation because this was in the hands of their officials and security honchos. Behold the talk about militarising the police and the intolerant attacks on Kader Asmal for daring to raise concern. This speaks volumes on just how incisive Bernstein’s views were and Lucio Lara’s explanation of what went wrong in Angola. It is important that we understand that this is not simply a problem of good or bad personalities – although it makes a huge difference who runs the show – but of a system, its structures of governance, the accountability of leadership to the people, ultimately the relations of power.
What can be done? Bernstein suggested: “A public campaign by our movement, against the entrenched trappings of power...” We did not take notice when he urged:
“We dare not wait until our leaders occupy the seats of power before we find alternative ways. We have the opportunity now to debate and reach consensus about alternative modes of behaviour and conduct which would be suitable for our own leaders in high places. Such alternatives might well offend against the existing behavioural codes of the hide-bound ranks of today’s great and powerful. No matter. The offence given by such alternatives is less important than our need for new ways which will be appropriate to a new society based on social justice and equal rights. And inimical to corruption in high places.”
We must work to ensure that such a debate is not simply left to government ministers debating the ministerial regulations handbook on what is appropriate or not to their status and needs. Such a debate needs to become a public campaign, broadened to involve civil society as a whole, in the interests of deepening and defending our hard-won democracy. The lead must be taken by the left in our country, embracing those within the ANC and Alliance together the social movements, and not left to the machinations of the media moguls and opposition parties or big business allies in government whose interests lie in maintaining the economic status quo.
I want to believe that it is not too late nor that all our leaders are selfish AmaBenzi upstarts – the South African equivalent of neo-colonial Africa’s WaBenzi elite. I am quite sure that many of those sincere women and men in positions of power, those coming from an authentic struggle background, and honestly striving to cope with the pressures of office, would in fact welcome such a move in the interests of their own responsibilities and of the people who have elected them to serve the country. Nor all should be tarred with the same brush, for as much as some of the egocentrics show scant regard for thrift others illustrate a sober disposition in keeping expenditure within reasonable bounds and the genuine needs of office – with which there can be no objection. The trouble is that whilst some may opt for Lucio Lara’s equivalent of an Opel the signs are of an overwhelming trend to splurge-out on the most expensive brand images – from limousines to the latest Prado and Gucci outfits; accommodation and dining at only the top hotels and restaurants; ministerial residences boasting the most expensive imported furniture and newly installed swimming pools. Like any a contagious virus such crass materialism spreads with alacrity and needs to be kept in check by public censure.
Our elected government and leaders need to be assisted to stick to the commitment exemplified by Agostinho Neto’s words and take heed of Lucio Lara and Rusty Bernstein’s warnings. The mission is not about enjoying the trappings of power and becoming personally rich but of serving the people. That has been the purpose of all the sacrifice -- not the accumulation of personal wealth. The choice for the socialist left in South Africa is do nothing and be afraid or lead the debate for a full overhaul of the system of governance and its modalities in the interests of “Real People’s Power!”
Ronnie Kasrils is a member of the African National Congress, a former Minister of Intelligence in the Mbeki government, and is a founding member of the Not In My Name solidarity group which speaks out against Israeli atrocities. >
Reference 1. “Death of Dignity” by Victoria Brittain” Pluto Press, page 95; and “African Communist”, 3rd Quarter 1995, Lucio Lara interview by Victoria Brittain; 2. 2.“Cape Times”, September 18, 2009
Post-Arab Spring: Literary freedom of expression in Egypt, 22 March
Seminars of the Centre for Civil Society with Centre for Creative Arts
Seminar: Post-Arab Spring: Literary freedom of expression in Egypt Speaker: Bahaa Taher Date: Thursday 22 March 2012 Time: 12:30-1400 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: It is premature to pass judgment or to draw conclusions about the near future of Egyptian or Arabic literature in the countries that witnessed an Arab spring. In Egypt it is time to ask serious questions rather than to give definite answers. There is still a process of change characterized by many ups and downs. The transitional authority in power is headed by a military council and a newly elected parliament led by hard-line Islamists. Both the Military and Islamists are not cordial to Freedom of Expression. It is true that there is no censorship officially imposed, but censorship is not the greatest danger facing freedom of expression. Writers all over the world throughout time have been able to bypass censorship and express themselves. The real threat now is the possibility of manipulating the public in the name of religion to create what I call street censorship against free-thinking and free expression. There are also other elements of danger, and, fortunately, reasons for hope, - these will be elaborated in the seminar.
Presenter: Bahaa Taher is a writer and literary critic based in Cairo, Egypt. He has held posts at Academy of Arts, Cairo (1964-1966), the Faculty of Mass Communications, Cairo University (1974-1975), and L'ecole d'Interpretes, Geneva University (1993-1994). He left Egypt in the mid-seventies due to political reasons, to work as a freelance translator and editor with different United Nations organizations (UNESCO, FAO, WHO, UNIDO, and UN Secretary) and NGOS in Rome, Vienna, Paris, Dakar and Delhi. Taher obtained the Egypt State Award of Merit in 1998 and the Inaugural International Prize for Arabic Literature ( The Arabic Booker Prize) in 2008
Organized by the Centre for Civil Society and the Centre for Creative Arts (University of KwaZulu-Natal) 15th Time of the Writer festival - supported by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (principal funder), the French Institute of South Africa, Pro-Helvetia Arts Council of Switzerland, Goethe Institut of South Africa, City of Durban, Adams Campus Books, Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Climate Change narratives – experiences from the COP 17, 20 March
Speaker: Felix Platz Date: 20 March 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: There were numerous competing narratives about the workings and outcomes of COP 17. The seminar paper interrogates understandings of the term “climate change” and focuses on the role of civil society and its mobilizing processes. It especially considers the roles of communities and intellectuals.
Speaker: Felix Platz studies social anthropology, sociology and educational science at Mainz University, Germany, and is currently in Durban carrying out a research project on experiences with the COP 17 as a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Civil Society.
A hostile climate - civil society impact on the COP17, 15 March
Speakers: David Hallowes and Tristen Taylor Date: Thursday, 15 March Time: 12:30-14:00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College
Topic: Earthlife Africa Johannesburg has commissioned research into civil society's impact at COP17 and into the organisation of C17 activities such as the Global Day of Action and the People's Space on the UKZN Howard College Campus. The research looks at perspectives of government, South African civil society, international civil society, and donors. It further outlines a series of lessons learnt, which we hope will spark discussion on how best should civil society approach COP in the future.
Speakers: David Hallowes is an independent researcher with a focus on environmental justice. He had no intention of attending a COP until one arrived in his home town, but he has been following the climate process since the Convention was signed in Rio in 1992; and Tristen Taylor is the Project Coordinator of Earthlife Africa Johannesburg, a social and environmental justice organisation based in Gauteng. Earthlife Africa Johannesburg was heavily involved in organising civil society interaction with COP17.
Deforestation: Why YOU need to stop it NOW, 13 March
Presentation of book: “Deforestation: Why YOU need to stop it NOW” Speaker: Leigh Collingwood Date: Tuesday 13 March 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: Deforestation is just one of many crises facing the world. It is both pivotal to related environmental crises (such as climate change) and a gateway to a broader discussion of modern human relationships with nature which are dysfunctional at the most profound of levels and which, on the current trajectory, can only lead to an ecological catastrophe similar to that which befell Easter Island – only this time on a global scale. All orthodoxies currently underpinning the current status quo are shown to be founded in delusion at best, fraud at worst – such as those pertaining to “capitalist” economics, the energy question, secular humanism, religious fundamentalism, and the post-Royal Society “Enlightenment”, including science itself. This book gets back to basics, showing why we need to, and how we can, re-claim our power from a self-interested global elite, founded in a proper understanding of how Nature and the World works, in order to save the planet, and save ourselves.
Speaker: Leigh Collingwood is a graduate of Rhodes University, holding a B. Social Science degree in Psychology and Economics. He is however mostly self-taught, having been a reader in the full spectrum of the natural and human sciences since his early teens. Having avoided what he regards as the trap of specialisation in his lifelong quest for truth, he is a generalist in the most meaningful sense, as evidenced by the necessarily broad scope of his book. This is the foundation for his independence of thought and his current role as an “intelligent layman” activist, this term borrowed from dissident economist EF Schumacher, author of the book Small is Beautiful – a Study of Economics as if People Mattered.
Boycotting Israeli apartheid, 6 March
Seminar Speakers: Lubna Nadvi and Patrick Bond Date: Tuesday, 6 March Venue: 602 Memorial Tower Bldg, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Film Screening: Roadmap To Apartheid Date:Tuesday, 6 March Time: 14h00 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, Memorial Tower Building, Howard College Campus, University of KwaZulu-Natal)
South Africa’s liberation was won in part through the use of business sanctions – called for by Albert Luthuli and Martin Luther King in the early 1960s – against a regime in which economic interests were aligned to racism. In addition, sanctions included the discouragement of tourism and academic, cultural and sporting ties. In Apartheid Israel, such sanctions are beginning to bite, as the world’s people of conscience tighten the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) strategy called for by Palestinians to end the Occupation and release prisoners, to free Israeli Palestinians of racist discrimination, and to ensure the right of return by those exiled by Israel’s ethnic cleansing dating to 1948. ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ during early March is an international event designed to raise consciousness about non-violent, democratic opposition by oppressed Palestinians.
Lubna Nadvi is Lecturer in Political Science at UKZN and a community activist;
Patrick Bond is Senior Professor and Director of CCS, and in 2010-11 made trips to the West Bank and Gaza to consult Palestine movement leadership on civil society strategy and tactics, and to give talks on how apartheid was defeated in part through sanctions.
Pictures from Seminar
About 'Roadmap to Apartheid'
Dear Friends, The Tri-Continental Film Festival (www.tcff.org.za), IAW South Africa Team and BDS South Africa have secured permission to premiere the film, Roadmap to Apartheid (www.roadmaptoapartheid.org). The movie will be screened from 5 to 11 March at several South African universities, schools and community centers as one of the official 2012 Israeli Apartheid Week events (see below for schedule). 'Roadmap to Apartheid' is a full-feature film that explores the comparison between former South Africa and current Israel.
'Roadmap to Apartheid' involves some interesting personalities: Ana Nougeira (a South African woman) and Eron Davison (born in Israel but now living in USA) are the directors, and Alice Walker (the acclaimed author of, The Color Purple) is the narrator. The movie also features never seen before interviews with people such as the legendary sports boycott organizer, Dennis Brutus and the former SA Council of Churches General Secretary, Eddie Makue.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has seen the film, and commented: Roadmap To Apartheid is very powerful and compelling, and the visuals of house demolitions are appalling. Religion is repeatedly misused by politicians. One of the lessons of Jewish history is that God is always on the side of the oppressed. Another is that those who dehumanise others, dehumanise themselves.
See below or CLICK HERE for the IAW 2012 Roadmap to Apartheid National Film Tour Schedule.
CLICK HERE for the Complete IAW 2012 Schedule, including all speakers, events and film screenings.
BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT AND SANCTIONS in SOUTH AFRICA (BDS SOUTH AFRICA)
BDS South Africa is a registered Non-Profit Organization. NPO NUMBER: 084 306 NPO BDS South Africa is a registered Public Benefit Organisation with Section 18A status. PBO NUMBER: 930 037 446
NATIONAL FILM TOUR SCHEDULE: ROADMAP TO APARTHEID
Cape Town Wednesday, 07 March @ 15h30 (Room D, RW James Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town) Thursday, 08 March @ 13h00 (Room D, RW James Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town) Sunday, 11 March @14h30 (Joseph Stone Auditorium, Klipfontein Road, Athlone)
Durban Tuesday, 06 March @ 14h00 (CCS Seminar Room, Memorial Tower Building, Howard College Campus, University of KwaZulu-Natal) Wednesday, 07 March @ 14h00 (Factory Cafe, 369 Magwaza Maphalala Street (Gale Street), Glenwood) Sunday, 11 March @ 14h00 (Al Ansaar Hall, West Road, Overport, Durban)
Grahamstown Monday, 05 March @ 18h00 (Barat/Humanities Department, Rhodes University) Saturday 10 March @ 13h00 (Monastery Club, Rhodes University)
Johannesburg Tuesday, 06 March @ 12h30 (C-Ring 315, Auckland Park Campus, University of Johannesburg) Wednesday, 07 March @ 13h00 (Room 2, Umthombo Building, University of Witwatersrand) Wednesday, 07 March @ 20h00 (Trade Route Mall, Lenasia, Johannesburg)
Modimolle/Nylstroom Sunday, 11 March @ 14h00 (Venue to be confirmed)
Pietermaritzburg Tuesday, 06 March @ 17h00 (Room 107, New Arts Building, Pietermaritzburg Campus, University of KwaZulu-Natal)
Polokwane Saturday, 10 March @ 14h00 (Venue to be confirmed)
Port Elizabeth Tuesday, 06 March @ 12h00 (South Campus Auditorium, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University)
Pretoria Tuesday, 06 March@ 12h30 (EMB 1-18, University of Pretoria) Thursday, 08 March @ 12h30 (L2-69, Graduate Centre, University of Pretoria)
Soweto Thursday, 08 March @ 10h00 (Ipelegeng Community Centre, Cnr. Khumalo & Phera Roads, Soweto)
Stellenbosch Wednesday, 07 March @ 15h30 (Neelsie Cinema, Stellenbosch University)
THE IAW SOUTH AFRICA TEAM IS MADE UP OF 25 MEMBERS STRETCHED ACROSS THE COUNTRY. PARTNERS AND PARTICIPATING GROUPS INCLUDE: Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), South African Communist Party (SACP), South African Students Congress (SASCO), Young Communist League of South Africa (YCL), South African Council of Churches (SACC), Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), Kairos Southern Africa, Kaliedoscope Youth Network, Students for Social Justice, SA Artists Against Apartheid, GangsofGraffiti, Palestine Solidarity Alliance (Gauteng), Palestine Solidarity Alliance (Port Elizabeth), Palestine Solidarity Campaign (South Africa), UCT Palestine Solidarity Forum (University of Cape Town), UJ Palestine Solidarity Forum (University of Johannesburg), UKZN Action Group on Palestine (University of KwaZulu-Natal), Wits University Palestine Solidarity Committee (Wits University) If your organization would like to participate or endorse Israeli Apartheid Week send us an email at: iawsouthafrica@apartheidweek.org
Speaker: Simphiwe Nojiyeza Date: Thursday, 1 March Venue: CCS Seminar Room, 602 MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: Climate change and adaptation are already evident in Umbumbulu in South Durban; in Wood Glen, Zamani B and Kwandeni in Durban West; in Soweto and Piesang River Area in Durban North Central and in Umzinyathi, North of Durban. Evidence is found in land use management, wetlands, lightening conductors, river health, and pollution associated with Urinary Diversion and VIP toilets, as well as water scarcity. The crux of the problem is that the municipal Climate Change Protection Unit adopted a ‘climate-resilient’ strategy on the one hand, but on the other, city electricity officials build power stations in flood plains; the Economic Development unit promotes a shopping mall in a wetland; and eThekwini Water is introducing unpopular UD toilets to deal with water scarcity, without looking at externalities in wetlands and the discharge of faecal waste from broken sewers that compromise biodiversity and ecosystem balances. How can a climate-resilient municipality build more dams while 20 km of water hyacinth infects the Inanda Dam? The infrastructure motive that dominated President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation address will likely result in Hazelmere Dam’s augmentation and then the resurfacing of more siltation and sedimentation. What can civil society do about these contradictions?
Speaker: Simphiwe Nojiyeza is a UKZN doctoral candidate in Development Studies attached to the Centre for Civil Society. He has two decades of environmental and climate change activism as chair of the KZN Environmental Justice Networking Forum (mid-1990s), chair of Earthlife Africa Durban (early 2000s) and founder-member of the South African Water Caucus. He was recently Chair of South African Water and Sanitation.
The spoken word movement in Zimbabwe, 29 February
SHOKO! Festival Documentary (Zimbabwe)
Magamba Cultural Activist Network: Documentary Short (Zimbabwe)
Speaker: Comrade Fatso (Samm Monro) Date: Wednesday, 29 February Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: Zimbabwe has gone through a decade of intensified political oppression and economic crisis. Opposition members have been killed, independent newspapers banned and freedom of expression heavily attacked. Yet the spoken word movement has consistently grown during these last ten years of the country’s decline. Poetry slams and events emerged as spaces for disaffected youth to express their passions, desires and political beliefs. While other art forms suffered under the weight of economic and political turmoil performance poetry flourished with the proliferation of new poets and poetry organizations. The spoken word emerged as a weapon for the young and the defiant. The spoken word movement offers a powerful way to communicate, to reflect and to rebel against the status quo. The poets, hip hop artists and cultural activists on the Zimbabwe scene are using their words as weapons to build a more just Zimbabwe.
Speaker: Samm Monro, aka Comrade Fatso, is one of Zimbabwe’s pioneering spoken word artists. His poetry is street, urban, hip hop and African and is studied at universities all over the world including the US, UK, South Africa, Germany, Denmark and France. Comrade Fatso's poetry has been published in Barbados, Germany and Holland. He is part of the band Chabvondoka, a genre-busting, insurgent act that defies musical boxes. This multi-racial African band seamlessly blends sounds as diverse as rock, hip hop, chimurenga, jiti, kwaito and reggae. The band’s debut album House of Hunger was praised internationally but banned in Zimbabwe due to its ‘political content’. Chabvondoka has performed extensively throughout Europe, USA, Caribbean and Africa including in 2010 at one of Europe’s biggest events, the prestigious Exit Festival. It was included in Discograph's Africa 50 Years of Music, a compilation of the best African music over the last 50 years. Comrade Fatso is a dedicated cultural activist and organiser, having founded Zimbabwe's first poetry slam, The House of Hunger Poetry Slam, as well as the Shoko Festival, the country's first international spoken word and hip hop festival. He currently runs Magamba - the Cultural Activist Network, a youth organization formed in 2007 that uses arts and culture in the struggle for democracy in Zimbabwe. Comrade Fatso is also a Centre for Civil Society research masters student.
it's all fair enough, and the tactical idea of anarchic swarming sounds like a step forward in addition to occupying central squares. but what in the world do you need one simple demand? it's fairly unlikely that his will be fulfilled anyways, but even if: it wouldn't change the balance of power one substantial bit.
On the ECONOMIC FRONT we throw our movement’s weight behind one simple demand: the implementation of a 1% Robin Hood Tax on all financial transactions and currency trades.
and then what? capitalists would still be capitalists, wage laborers would still be wage laborers. some part of who are now rather profiting from the system would probably be affected by that tax, but only to fuel competition between them, making some of those that are powerful already more powerful, while others go down. this would in the end mainly increase pressure on working people to work more for less money to ensure profits.
please don't make the false separation of good capital investing in (material) production and evil capital of some seemingly separate group of gambling financial jugglers. there is no structural difference, and none of them can exist without the other.
capital is a social power relation, not just piles of money in the safes of bankers and investors. it's the fact that some own and others work to just get by. this will not change the slightest bit if you pressure politicians to implement this text.
and even if you say we are aware of these things, but we believe that winning the struggle about one demand will strengthen the movement and motivate people to go further, you are still at least partly mistaken. this is because the politicians, who you choose to engage in a power game with, are better at this game. they have access to the mass media, their ideological explanations are in tune with the predominant (even if distorted) picture of the world. and they are getting paid to do that job, so they can do it full time while we still have to find ways to make our basic living.
so even if one day they implement your proposed tax, they will have played the game long enough for any movement to die down while waiting for the illusion of some success on this singular front. they will have waited and probably done their part for the movement to split, arresting and intimidating some vital part of the radical wings while parties, ngos and other agents of the existing order seep into the reformist parts of the movement.
these struggles are old and even the idea of your robin hood tax is nothing but a replay of the tobin tax with which attac once got big and in the end fostered a split in the anti-globalization movement of the last decade.
moreover, it is fairly unlikely that ever there will be anything like a global tax that all the capitalist states on this planet would or could agree on. they are by definition in constant competition against each other and such a thing as you propose would always affect some much more than others, so agreement on this point is almost impossible, unless maybe if this economical order called capitalism is at the verge of collapsing due to people's movements developing a power that is really challenging to the system.
and, think for yourself, if we ever really reach that point, are you sure all you would do then is to demand some stupid tax that would only help to re-establish power for those whose power you are trying to challenge, because it would give them some moral credit because now even the evil financial investors pay their share. so be obedient an go back to work. time for more demands is gonna come when the economy has recovered.
so if your are serious about wanting to change the world, rethink your approach of having one simple demand (look what is the outcome of the example for this approach that was cited when adbusters first made the call to occupy wallstreet - egypt got rid of mubarak but still has the military ruling the country). forget the idea about some global tax that will help to bring about justice - there's no justice in capitalism, only different models of distributing the injustice that is inherent to it.
you say you want to tell Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy, Putin, Merkel... and the NATO military leaders to stop the warmongering and start fighting for peace. well if you really think you can get these people to fight for peace, take off your blurry glasses and start getting a clear picture of the world.
you suggest to rise up and start fighting for a different kind of future because otherwise we don't have a future. agreeable. but the future won't be much different if it remains a future of capitalism. we will have to change the way we work and produce substantially, and for this we'll need to change who owns the means of production. we'll need to expropriate the owners and return almost everything into collective, communal hands, and produce in a self managed way. the state is not an institution that represents the people, it's function is to keep the capitalist system working, and it will, even if it takes millions of deaths. so what good would the money generated by that 1% robin hood tax do in the hands of the state?
you don't make an insurrection with one simple demand, you make an insurrection because you are fed up with the way things are running, completely fed up. and your goal is to negate the existing order and to build something completely different.
if you really want some tax, go voting. if you want to change the world, rise up. but demand nothing from the rulers of the current order. by doing that, you would only strengthen their position. rather, occupy everything, and build a new commons apart from states, nations and capital.
the time for an uprising on a global scale has for long not been as good as now. but by ideas like that of a global robin hood tax, the emerging movement could be mislead into insignificance.
take the squares, the factories, organize to collectively default on debts and to stop paying rent. block the functioning of governments and start social self organization.
Hey you wild cats, dreamers, redeemers, horizontals,
The stage is set for a climactic showdown in Chicago.
The crisis of capitalism is deepening. Youth unemployment has reached 50% in Spain and Greece… 30% in Portugal and Italy… 22% in the UK… almost 20% in the US. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are waking up to the fact that their future does not compute… that their lives will be a never ending series of ecological, financial, political and personal crises… and that if we don’t rise up and start fighting for a different kind of future, we won’t have a future.
That struggle ignites again May 1.
#OCCUPYCHICAGO will be the focal point of this global spiritual insurrection… 50,000 of us will converge on the windy city and confront the G8 and NATO leaders with an ultimatum. We will set up impromptu encampments throughout the city and wage a full-spectrum memewar backed up by new tactics of anarchic swarming. Our militant in-your-face nonviolence will inspire thousands of towns, cities and campuses around the world to rise up in solidarity just like they did last October.
This is a worldwide, multi-front mutiny against the way our economic and military leaders are running the world.
On the CULTURAL FRONT we confront the corpo-commercial lie machine – we shift the way information flows and meaning is produced. We train a new breed of livestreamers, citizen journos and p2p visionaries and unleash them in the streets to be the eyes of the world during the month of May.
On the ENVIRONMENTAL FRONT we demand the G8 reach consensus on drastically reducing their carbon footprints and immediately ratifying a binding international accord on climate change.
On the ECONOMIC FRONT we throw our movement’s weight behind one simple demand: the implementation of a 1% Robin Hood Tax on all financial transactions and currency trades.
On the GEOPOLITICAL FRONT we tell Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy, Putin, Merkel, Noda, Monti, Harper and the NATO military leaders to stop the warmongering and start fighting for peace. We block the looming Iran war with a preemptive global initiative that just about everyone in the world can get behind: a nuclear-free world starting with a nuclear-free Middle East that includes both Israel and Iran.
On the PERSONAL FRONT, hundreds of millions of us vow to live the month of May without dead time… to experience joyous camaraderie… to open ourselves to an imminent life changing epiphany. We follow Miles Davis’ advice on how to play jazz: be spontaneously alive and “play what’s not there.”
Occupy has taught us all. It innovates, fractures, grows resilient and more diverse. In this spirit we celebrate the Gandhian ferocity of the Zuccottis who launched this movement with their magical assemblies and nonviolent ways … we extol the growing crop of working groups with their desire for a positive program of social and political change. And on the wild side we honor those in Oakland who have lost their fear against all odds. With this rainbow coalition, we hold our heads high and embrace the heady days of Spring.
The state of South Durban's industrial basin, 23 February
Speaker: Lushendrie Naidu Date: Thursday 23 February 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: The petro-chemical and industrial corporations of South Durban - especially Mondi, Engen and Sapref - have caused ongoing ecological disasters as well as health crises for nearby communities to contend with. The South Durban Community Environmental Alliance is a community-based network that also carries out technical research and organises mass actions. SDCEA played a leading role in opposing the United Nations Conference of the Parties 17 conference in late 2011 on grounds that it was a site of climate injustice and 'false solutions'. The ability to think globally while acting locally, demanding that society 'leave the oil in the soil', makes SDCEA one of the most visionary and effective socio-environmental activist groups in Africa. However, the recent fatal explosion at a chemical plant in Jacobs reminds that the South Durban industrial basin - home to more than 300 000 people of all races and classes - is Africa's toxic armpit, hosting the continent's largest collection of oil refineries and some of its most irresponsible polluters.
Presenter: Lushendrie Naidu graduated with a BSc in Microbiology from UKZN and is project officer at SDCEA. She is an environmental activist dedicated to seeking justice for poor communities.
Twitter revolutions and cyber-crackdowns, 22 February
Speaker:Alex Comninos Date: Wednesday 22 February 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6th Floor, MTB Tower, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: Alex Comninos investigates the role of user-generated content distributed over social networks in the Arab spring and other protests in 2011. While the use of user-generated internet content shared over social networks can prove a powerful tool in the hands of protest movements, it has also proved a powerful tool by governments for use of crackdowns on protest. This seminar focuses on the contemporary terrain of electronic protests and the challenges and opportunities presented to social movements.
Presenter: Alex Comninos (MSocSci International Relations, University of Cape Town) is an independent researcher focusing on the internet and human rights. He is a doctoral candidate at Justus-Liebig University, Giessen Germany; his research is on the use of online mapping software for activism in Egypt, Libya, Sudan and South Sudan.
Shifting to local governance?, 16 February
Speaker: Fumhiko Saito Date: Thursday, 16 February Venue: CCS Seminar Room, 602, 6th Floor, Memorial Tower Building, Howard College Time: 12:30‑14:00
Topic: In recent years the ?shift from local government to local governance? has become widely popular. But the shift derives from different rationales and there are diverse problems associated with this fashionable discourse. Based on cross‑national research from Japan, Europe and Africa, I argue that shifts toward local governance and increasing emphasis on new arrangements such as local public‑private partnerships need careful interpretation. Civil society has a vital role to play, and perhaps experiences in Durban can highlight the intricate relations between the municipal state and society.
Speaker: Fumhiko Saito is a professor at Ryukoku University, the oldest university in Japan. He was educated at Ryukoku University in Kyoto (PhD in Economics); Yale (MA in International Relations); Amherst College (BA magna cum laude); and Doshisha University in Kyoto. He previously worked with the United Nations Development Programme in Bangladesh and Uganda. He was, until recently, co‑directing a large research project examining comparative experiences of decentralization in developing countries. One of his books received an award from Japan Society for International Development.
The Tunisian democratic revolution, Islam and the left, 1 February 2012
TheTunisian revolution last December-January inspired the Arab Spring, and Tunisia remains the most durable democratic, anti-imperialist site of struggle in the subsequent year. How, though, should we interpret the post-uprising re-emergence of political Islam in Middle East and North Africa, and how do generate new narratives about Islamists given their alliance with democratic leftists? And what is the role of progressive civil society in a democratic Tunisia?
Said Ferjani is advisor to the Prime Minister of Tunisia, Hamadi Jebali. He is spokesperson for the Al-Nahda party, one of its founding members, and a senior member of its constitutional council and political bureau. He was arrested and tortured in 1987 before going into exile in the UK for 23 years. Ferjani is also a founding trustee of Families Relief, a UK-registered charity for Relief work in Tunisia, and a founding member of the Tunisian International Association for the Support of Political Prisoners. He is visiting South Africa hosted by the Afro-Middle East Centre.
Photo's from seminar
Tunisia: “The mass of people continue to struggle” Interview with two Tunisian socialists, one year after the fall of Ben Ali The Socialist, paper of the Socialist Party (CWI in England and Wales) 31 January 2012
14 January marked the first anniversary of the downfall of the hated dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali by the Tunisian revolution. ‘The Socialist’, paper of the Socialist Party (CWI in England and Wales) spoke to two socialists who are campaigning in Tunisia and who sympathise with the politics of the Committee for a Workers’ International.
Can you describe the situation in Tunisia today? Revolution is a process, not a single act. This process is still continuing, which can be seen by the new wave of protests which has taken place in Tunisia, especially since the beginning of the year.
Every day, new protests against the authorities, new strikes for better social conditions, sit-ins by people expressing their grievances are occurring all over the country.
The anniversary of the revolution has provided a momentum for what seems to be the biggest wave of mobilisations since one year ago, which has taken in some areas an almost ‘insurrectional’ character. In the mining areas around Gafsa, the situation is explosive, with regular strikes and demonstrations, and entire localities being self-run by inhabitants.
A regional general strike has also taken place and lasted five days in the governorate (region) of Siliana, in the south, between 13 and 18 January, to protest against poverty and the social marginalisation of the region.
’Revolution’, in Arabic, means a complete, fundamental break from the past; but this has not happened. All these protests show that people have still got much to fight for, that conditions for the majority have not fundamentally changed.
The objective conditions in society that caused the revolutionary upheaval are still present. In many respects daily life for the majority has actually got worse. Unemployment has literarily exploded, while this issue was at the heart of people’s demands in the first place.
Since 14 January of last year, there have been 107 cases of new self-immolations in the country, with at least six during the first week of this year. Most of them are unemployed people, desperate and ready to do anything to get a job.
There has been no fundamental break from the past system; consequently it is entirely predictable that the mass of people continue to struggle. So it is clear that the revolution – people looking for real change in society, and erupting en masse onto the scene to impose it – is still alive.
After the first stage of the revolution can you draw up a balance sheet of what has been won and what is still to be won? The first thing to note is that the capitalist class was relying on the old regime of President Ben Ali to defend its interests. When Ben Ali was overthrown, the capitalists were initially destabilised. Faced with a revolution that threatened their social existence, they had to concede important demands especially in the political sphere, in an attempt to restore a certain control.
Under the pressure of the mobilisations, a lot of leading figures in the state machine were removed, the ex-ruling party, Ben Ali’s RCD, was dissolved, etc. The movement was so powerful that even the commentators in the capitalist-controlled media were forced to admit that this was a revolution.
Seminar and Film Screening: The politics of microfinance, 25 January
Presenter: Tom Heinemann, Danish filmmaker (http://tomheinemann.dk/the-micro-debt/ ) Discussants: Patrick Bond and Khadija Sharife Date: Wednesday 25 January 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, 602, 6th Floor, Memorial Tower Building, Howard College Time: 12:00-14:00 (NEW TIME to accommodate 57-minute film)
Topic: Though widely celebrated in civil society, access to microcredit is often accompanied by suffocation by microdebt. What does Nigeria's Life Above Poverty Organization - peddling a 100% interest rates to microfinance clients - have in common with the benevolent philanthropy of Grameen Bank, founded and run by Nobel winner Muhammad Yunus? Both are partners in self-proclaimed poverty eradication based on the idea that people in poverty should have the opportunity to get small loans. So convinced was Yunus of his formula, that in the late 1970s he claimed within a generation, poverty would eradicated to the point where people would have to go to a 'poverty museum to see what all the fuss was about'. But as Tom Heinneman's documentary and numerous new books and articles on similar exploitation reveal, the myth of microcredit has consistently elided the reality: crushing debt. Results include more than 250 000 suicides in India, abuse of criminal law in Egypt and Bangladesh to punish debtors for owing miniscule sums, stigmatization of women in African villages, the use of violence to force repayment, and frequent use of loan sharks to refinance interest. South Africa has not been immune to the myth and the harsh reality, as Centre for Civil Society research has shown: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?3,28,11,3955
Discussants: following the film and an input (via skype) by Heinemann, discussants include CCS director Patrick Bond and Khadija Sharife, a journalist and CCS researcher.
Synopsis of “The Micro Debt”: The dark side of my story Tom Heinemann 21 January 2012
Tom Heinemann, a multiple award winning investigative journalist recounts his experience after a critical investigation into the dark side of Microcredit: “The Micro Debt”. “The US-based Grameen Foundation has launched a World-wide campaign in a bid to intimidate me in a way I have never seen before,” says Heinemann.
In December 2007, we met with a woman by the name of Jahanara - living in a slum-like house two hours drive outside the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka. Shortly before the meeting she had sold her house to pay her weekly installments. For months, she had been intimidated, harassed and abused by members of her loan group and loan officers from various Micro Finance Institutions (MFI) - including the Grameen Bank - who had provided her with loans. This was, in fact, the first encounter my team and I did in a year-long research on Microcredit. In 2010 we went back to investigate whether Jahanara had succeeded in hauling herself out of poverty. She had not. Not at all.
“Not all that glitters is gold” The meeting with Jahanara was only the first in a long string of interviews with poor people in Bangladesh, Andhra Pradesh in India and in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico. The Microcredit loan-takers told the same story over and over again: Most of them had taken loans from various NGO’s and Micro Finance Institutions - and many had taken new loans to cover old ones. They were paying annual interest rates ranging from 30-200 percent and under extreme social pressure from other members of their groups. The cruel and rude behaviour of some of the loan officers when they defaulted a single weekly payment added even more pressure. Our investigative film coverage also highlights interviews with renowned Microfinance experts such as Thomas Dichter, Milford Bateman, Alex Counts, Jonathan Morduch and David Roodman, among others.
A Nobel banker “The Micro Debt” takes a closer and critical look at the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus. The film reveals a number of secret documents proving how Yunus, back in the mid-90’s, transferred $ 100 million - most of which were grants or donations from Norway, Sweden, Germany, USA and Canada - to a new company in the Grameen-family to save future taxes. 12 years on, and for the first time, the public has come to terms with what really happened to the taxpayers’ money.
However, the interesting thing about Yunus is that he never felt the need to answer critical questions about his operations. The one exemption was in fact a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article back in 2001. Since then, Yunus has refused to stand up to any critical journalist. For more than 4 months we tried to get answers from Yunus on all critical points raised in the film, to no avail. We even tracked him down to Valencia in Spain, but he declined our invitation and missed a chance to give his opinion.
And when the Norwegian version of the film was released, later followed by the international version: “The Micro Debt”, it was too late for Yunus to rethink his strategy. Hardly any newspaper or news broadcaster around the globe missed commenting about the film, whose release saw the emergence of a bitter fight between the government of Bangladesh and Yunus.
In a recent interview with the Norwegian media, under the heading “Yunus axes NRK”, Mohammad Yunus described how the film had caused his departure as head of Grameen Bank. For now, nobody knows his career plan. However, being close friends with some of the most influential people including the Clintons as well as some kings and queens one is led to believe that he will pull through.
The Challenge One of the biggest challenges in doing a story like this is that hardly anyone trusts your arguments even if they are backed by proof from research. Friends and colleagues struggled to understand the dark sides of Micro credit, as a result of having been presented with “smiling faces” on numerous websites hailing Microcredit for years.
But after digging even deeper and identifying scientists and academic researchers around the globe, who for years have warned against the idea of the “silver bullet” and argued that there was no academic proof that Microcredit had eradicated poverty, I knew that the Microcredit story had to be investigated.
The empire strikes back In the aftermath and over the last three or four months, I have come to realise what powerful forces I am up against. The US-based Grameen Foundation has launched a World-wide campaign in a bid to intimidate me in a way I have never seen before. Burson-Marsteller and the law firm Clifford Change have been hired whilst so-called “independent” filmmakers have begun retracing my footsteps in an effort to question the documentary film. Scandinavian broadcasters have received “complaint-letters” about me and the film but my various editors have rejected all those claims.
UKZN Centre for Civil Society SEMINAR: What went right and what went wrong at the COP17?
Speaker: Bobby Peek Date: Thursday, 19 January 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, 602 Memorial Tower Building, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: Inside last month's 2011 United Nations climate summit in Durban's Luthuli International Convention Centre, a deal to save the planet from catastrophic climate change was again foiled by powerful state, multilateral and corporate forces. Civil society critics inside and outside, including the Climate Justice movement, denounced what went wrong - but did anything go right? And what were the strengths and weaknesses of the consciousness-raising, debating, educational, research, advocacy, campaigning, protest and disruptive activities of civil society? Several autopsies of the 'Conference of Polluters' have been written since the COP17 closed on December 11, but from Durban, an autocritical review of environmentalists, NGOs, community groups, labour, youth and the women's movement has yet to appear.
Presenter: Bobby Peek directs the environmental justice NGO, groundWork, affiliated to Friends of the Earth International. A leading strategist within Durban civil society, he received international recognition for his campaigning work in the South Durban basin against toxic industry, pollution and waste. He is a recipient of the prestigious Goldman Foundation award: http://www.goldmanprize.org/node/154
SKYPE access will permit national and international participation; please contact Patrick Bond at bondp@ukzn.ac.za before 18 January if desired.
INTRO: Impressions of COP17 five weeks on
Patrick Bond: statement of COP17 failures both above and below (including missed opportunities)
Priths Dullay (DUT): COP17 confirmed worst fears about elites and corporates; only civ soc from below can move beyond protest movement to call shots, following Arab Spring and Occupy movements in 2011; next challenges are Secrecy Bill and R1 trillion nuclear power
Charlotte Mbali (Centre for Higher Ed Studies): disappointed at participation in Faith Communities event, but impressed with exhibition tents, especially solar energy
Liz Palmer (350.org): overdose of activities; Pablo Solon and Tibet discussion were highlights; avoided trade fair; generally felt disempowered Orlean Naidoo (Chatsworth & CCS): too many organisations were under-resourced and lost, but in Chatsworth many people are doing micro-level interventions (tree planting) Vanessa Pillay (Westcliff Flat Residents) Sanay Ibrahim (CCNS and Green Hub) David Hallowes (groundWork researcher) Odette Geldenhuys (probono.org) China Ngubane (Zim refugee): green bombers are a bad precedent! Anthony Stern (probono.org) Jenny Sprong (Diakonia): faith-based orgs at Diakonia, a great interfaith experience Bapiwe Khumalo (Diakonia) Megan Nurse (groundWork) Alex Mbilo (SDS PhD Student) John Ngubane (probono.org) Di Scott (UKZN SDS) Min Jung (Korean Post-Doc from CCS) Ed Cousins (School of Law, Environmental Law Association): int'l law interests Melissa Lewis (UKZN School of Law) Rose Williams (Biowatch) Mikail Peppas (DUT) Alan Murphy (Ecopeace) Baruti Amisi (CCS)
Bobby:
- This talk will consist of reflections on bits and pieces from COP17
- did it connect to communities?
- looking to inside for successes is mistaken
- did we muster enough depth in our mobilisations to call the outside a success?
- the result was a disconnect between inside and outside
- SA government was initially worried about so many struggles being articulated and connected, especially on delivery
- Africa said there needed to be emissions cuts but we did not get this; instead we are lined up for a 7 degrees temperature rise for Africa) and no financing.
- climate messaging was inadequate, and the police presence was overkill: policeman who people spoke to on the streets thought that the COP17 was a cop convention!
- failure of civ soc to get that message deeper
- COP17 was a broad failure pushed from elites
- contestation amongst major polluters about who would take on commitments; and India/China need to be challenged to do more in near future
- US position to draw in India/China was a smokescreen
- SA government enabled and justified use of informal violence (Green
Bombers) against legitimate protest, first on 3 Dec on March, and then on 8 Dec in City Hall
What went well?
- environmental groups, NGOs, social movements and labour worked together
- climate is seen now in a broader developmental way
- climate negotiations understood as saving capital, not climate
- understanding that SA state allowed/facilitated Green Bombers suggested state was genuinely worried about depth of critique
- in City Hall on 8 Dec, the political elite was uncomfortable with silent placards which were reasonable
C17
- C17 had decided early on to open a public, democratic space, but difficulties emerged
- failure to get a strong position within C17 because it only looked at creating the democratic space
- excessive emphasis on neutrality
- reason: in Cancun, there were three different nodes of civ soc activity which fragmented our voices
- a few organisations did the majority of the work, and C17 suffered too much embeddedness in NGOs
- lack of funding to organise from the outset
- all major NGOs had their own programmes that distracted from unity, and things happening in the space:
faith groups at Diakonia; Million Climate Jobs; Dirty Energy Week by groundWork
- unsuccessful negotiations with DUT over space
- success was that C17 actually pulled it off, and a big thanks to CCS for coming in with space at the last moment here
- government never threatened it would set up another competing space so we held as the only alternative space
- bulk of money only came in on the Thursday, 1 December, from SA government, it was very late
- funders did not come to the table as had been expected
- a fair number of people came out for the big march, though organisation was problematic
- the fact that there weren't many more people reflected inadequate organisation
- march didn't end properly, and disruptive beginning - a lack of experience helps explain that
- space itself here at UKZN was too far off public access route and very little public came
- buses to UKZN organised at the last minute because of venue change
- but there were great sessions with great engagement
- debate groundWork was involved with on energy was very rich
- we need the sponteneity of World Social Forum
- Durban's turnout for march was fairly weak
- is there a lack of awareness in places like South Durban? no, possibly a despondency and apathy
- major change in SA law has been because of resistance in south Durban. As the resistance to the SA Weather Services Bill now
- despite the S.Durban success south Durban still facing big challenges of pollution and there is possible despondency
- SDCEA as main local community host did a phenomenal amount of work getting the COP going
- what suffered was the lack of deeper organisation that they would have
- they did, however, go up North Coast and down south and way into central KZN
Reflecting on Green Bombers, this was a political attack; someone went in and said 'disrupt'
- both the SA state and the UN was involved (because of use of UN logo - but UN said nothing)
- concerns about Malema coming to disrupt was one rumoured justification for Green Bombers
- repeated attempts by organisers to speak to police and suggestions to move Green Bombers away did not succeed - but voice from above was 'allow it to happen'
Inside protest
- on Friday 9 December, 350.org raised protests in Occupy style
- lack of clarifying roles of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth International led to failure of communication; 350.org stepped back
- eventually two ‘old men’ (Bobby and Kumi) were standing in front of crowds of people making decisions for all these people, but fortunately Will Bates, from 350.org stepped and took charge, which changed how decision making took charge
- instead of decision-making with police, they had to deal with the crowds
- as at Copenhagen, people can get thrown out of the COP but it doesn't change the power relation
- once we were thrown out, there was no fight to get back in
- we should have been thrown out earlier
- as soon as the debadging threat occurred the numbers dwindled to 25
- many more should have been demanding also to be thrown out
African Civil Society
- As far as African civ soc goes, there was debates on inside action which never took off. - chief African negotiator came out to meet Rural Women's Network, which was really phenomenal
- how could we make Africa insiders take more vocal public action?
- not dissing to the African position, but an action that would say to the world that African governments should hold firm
- PanAfrican Climate Justice Alliance and Friends of the Earth Africa and Third World Network Africa members hadstrong engagement with negotiators. But did people really understand the power they had?
- when there was a push to make the resistance open up, there was a response from Africans, to push Europeans to be more vocal against the EU's position (which was to push Africa hard)
- the Europeans not standing up clearly and disruptively inside goes back to the European/northern NGO fears of alienating their audience at home, including home governments; they want to be seen as realistic
- but climate politics needs drastic action
- African participation also hampered by need to be seen to be allies with states; and not be embarrassing the nation state in international arenas.
Occupy Space- Occupy space was good for nearly two weeks, with lots of activities intersecting
- but Occupy movement hasn't reached SA yet
- civil society disruption should have been greater, given our strong and proud history
- But that history is not present in the movement now. Our disruptive action in spontaneous.
- our sense of civil disobedience was weak
- part of it is that people are not yet feeling the pain of climate change
Media
- media coverage was typical; getting message across is difficult
- Media was seeking more clear messaging for readership. Stuff coming through was often complex.
Way Forward some possibilities
- UNFCCC is the 1%
- Qatar in late 2012 will confirm this
- we need decentralised local and national actions the arena of our energy
- 350.org action shows that many NGOs won't leave the inside easily
- there is a bizarre belief that they are being heard there
- we need to challenge our brothers and sisters to say: 'why be there'?
- as Africans we have a complicated relationship negotiating on the inside, where you recognise the depth, but that vibrancy could be used in a different manner
- the nature of People's Space should be handled with more vibrancy, like the Cochabamba 2010 Rights of Mother Earth conference
- processes need planning longer than a year ahead
- many NGOs concerned about what happens at home - and this is a challenge - but they are too scared to demand radical change, the change then know is needed.
- as Africans we need to be more honest, and we need a new multilateral process amongst ourselves
- this has conscientised SA and we need to build on this
- electricity, coal mining, oil refineries, nuclear challenge, labour, million climate jobs - to link as a strong climate justice movement - stronger link needed to our own communities
Lubna Nadvi (UKZN): what is state of the left movement in the country?are we in serious crisis?
Bobby: in the context of brutal assault on the poor, it is a strengthening we need... but people organising is critical; leftists, NGOs and community people have to create a type of acceptance of each others' concerns; groundWork can't go to a community and say 'let's fight climate change' and even where people are dealing with implications of climate it is done very differently; SA left is, after all, always in crisis... but we need to find some strength from what happened there at COP and use it
Ed: what were you debadged for?
Bobby: for continuing to protest - a protest of 25 people doing a sit-in... it was a disruption... but leadership on decision-making should not have been Kumi and myself... and in terms of the debate with Anne Petermann, there was a threat at the back from the UN, saying, 'if you don't get out we'll have to call in the SA Police'... and we didn't know what it would mean if the SA Police came in and 350.org was concerned about this ... ... People at the back of the protest were been threatened with SA police action. We did not know this in front. Anne was arrested and LRC was asked to step in to assist and before that happened she was already dropped off and freed... and the big problem was that there were only 25 of us, and mixed messages came across; 350.org wanted to be thrown out. Mikael: a few days before, the Faith event at ABSA Stadium on 25 November with wide publicity but turnout was terrible, free tickets, free transport, range of bands... totally empty; what went so badly?
Bobby: that was a big concern, buses put on throughout the province
Jenny: communities were simply not educated
Alan: reflecting on global prognosis, the Durban Platform is to save face, so if governments and UN are locked in, it seems like doom and gloom
Bobby: will society ever be strong enough to challenge governments?
there's no way you can get anything positive out of Durban Platform, so how do we build our power?; the important thing is to get public to understand that what is happening on the inside is a farce; our fault for not getting that message across; we need to relook at the Wolpe Lectures, for example, in a more interesting way that is longer term that builds them; groundWork and CCS should look at internal processes and change these so we need self-criticism
Shepherd: did SA government as chair and host do enough? at City Hall, President Zuma said he couldn't chair and participate at the same time, and what is the position in relation to coal-fired power stations, and nukes?
Bobby: for Zuma, the chair is facilitiating over the next year, and those processes are undemocratic; the UN is supposedly democratic, but is not given the huge divisions between the US and small countries; and Green Room processes are the site of the UN dividing and managing dissent; what's wrong with SA taking a pro-African position if it's right?; we were in Kusile during the COP and they kicked us out - two weeks after Greenpeace had their action; the entire security apparatus came down on us and kicked us out; we must not stop trying to stop Kusile and we need to stop nuclear and future coal; Cosatu is with us against nuclear
Ed: international environmental law as a subject is just 125 years old, and climate is hardest and most difficult issue to find agreement, and there are so many vested interests and complications - so don't look at Durban as a meeting in and of itself but as a step in the process...
most have forgotten what came out of Joburg in 2002 - but it did at least keep momentum going; I spent time with a CDM official who said public protests and information gathering by NGOs were what was driving the process; nothing about Qatar interests me and nothing will come out of it, but it is important that we keep the momentum going; an anecdote from Kenya shows how difficult it is - fairly early on Korea and Qatar were competing, and Korea hosts the prep meeting, but Russia protested it would not go because their ambassador had been beaten up - because Russia supported the NATO invasion of Libya - and that's the kind of battling going on... yet over 130 years there has been a body of international environmental law
Bobby: at global scale, civ soc needs to gain more power first, and we are in a serious environmental crisis with no political strength to overcome the neoliberal context at global scale.
Orlean: sense of hopelessness in civ soc, a will to engage where it is most meaningful, e.g. electricity, so we need to look in practical ways at finding unity, such as we found in 2001 when we could take larger numbers to the streets; we have to look at where we fail and deal with these
Bobby: we need to look at things beyond a WCAR or WSSD to bring us together, we need practical working alliances that link electricity to land to climate and others
What’s going on in China? Boom, bust and battles from below, 10 January
Speaker: Patrick Bond Date: Tuesday, 10 January 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, 602 Memorial Tower Building, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: China is going through the first stages of a major economic correction. In even the most dynamic site of accumulation, Chongqing, the excesses are apparent and notwithstanding exceptionally powerful municipal leadership, the country's profound socio-economic contradictions and ecological mistakes suggest a turbulent period ahead.
Presenter: CCS Director Patrick Bond took part in an 11-day study tour to south and central China in December. He summarised the experiences at triplecrisis.com
China’s coming crises With economic crashes and ecological calamities so prevalent in 2011, concluding with a do-little November G20 meeting in Cannes and a do-nothing December climate summit in Durban, January has opened with intense fear of Eurozone deterioration. In this uncertain context loom the two most potent forces shaping the period ahead: China’s capital accumulation process and class struggle.
Because of the country’s uneven and combined development, within an extraordinary boom we can see the beginnings of a potentially world-scale bust, plus prodigious socio-economic battles from below alongside brutal attacks on the environment such as coal-fired power and the Three Gorges Dam (notwithstanding exceptional ‘green economy’ advances).
Some observers of China are optimistic, but they’re mostly from the Bretton Woods Institutions. Six weeks ago, opined World Bank Chief Economist Justin Yifu Lin, “China can continue its dynamic economic growth for at least another 20 years,” and six months ago, the International Monetary Fund’s Executive Board Assessment “noted that China’s near-term growth prospects continue to be vigorous and are increasingly self-sustained, underpinned by structural adjustment.” After all, “A broad-based recovery is well in train and there has been a hand-off to private investment as the stimulus winds down.”
My guides on a mid-December trip to south and central China were Professors Wen Tiejun of Renmin University and Lau Kin Chi of Lingnan University. We began at the South South Forum in Hong Kong, http://www.southsouthforum.org/eng/ whose core theme reflected the Chinese ‘New Left’ perspective: “Mainstream scholars and commentators, purposefully or unconsciously at the service of vested interests, have often been too eager to attribute developmental experiences to generic and reified concepts such as marketization and globalization.”
To debunk mainstream stories requires understanding state (especially municipal) power to shape China’s capitalist development trajectory. In central China, the world’s fastest-growing major city, Chongqing, has since 1997 enjoyed self-management status equivalent to Shangai, Beijing and Tianjin. With 7 million urban residents (rising a million a year), this is where China best marries efficiency and equity. The historian Philip Huang argues that a ‘Third Hand’ – the municipal corporation, between socialism and capitalism – is creating Chongqing’s extraordinary landscape. http://en.lishiyushehui.cn/modules/topic/detail.php?topic_id=106
Elsewhere in China, the vast speculative housing boom, part state-driven but then joined by private investors who overbuilt, created vast ghost cities with tens of millions of empty apartments at a time worker housing was unaffordable. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E In contrast to the developers’ over-priced, for-profit housing, Chongqing is building 700,000 low-cost public units for two million people in just seven years. This is critical to both labour supply management (generously state subsidised at the point of reproduction) and consumer demand, especially for appliances and other household goods.
Behind this is the model for ‘nonmingong’ migrant workers, operating similarly to what Southern Africans refer to as ‘articulations of modes of production’: male workers in capitalist firms are reproduced through gendered superexploitation because they lack urban citizens’ rights, relying instead upon rural women for childcare, healthcare for sick workers and old-age care. That apartheid-like system helps explain China’s persistently low wage rates (alongside a state-controlled, low-value currency).
A crucial factor in rearranging Chongqing’s social and economic space over the last four years is the role played by Bo Xilai, son of a former deputy premier who has the vision, determination and raw power to cut through bureaucratic red tape. He has crushed protests but also made concessions such as much higher land payments to the rural dispossessed, as well as public housing – because so far, state profits from rising land prices provide the neeed subsidy.
Most estimates of annual protests in China are in excess of 100,000. University of California geographer You-Tien Hsing explains how the system can be challenged from below, to increase the compensation given via social protest of the type underway recently in Wukan. “What this new regime of social stabilisation has brought is the commodification of citizens perception of justice and rights… Constrained by the limited political space, in their struggle, cash became the goal of their struggle and the measure of justice.” http://www.aftermathproject.nl/downloads/transcripts/Transcript%20Hsing.pdf
In sum, it strikes me that five ‘s’ contradictions are rising that even the finest Chinese managers will probably not overcome. First, subsidies flow from central government to select industrial sites – about $15 billion to Chongqing annually – and into the transport system, but can these continue?
Second, surpluses earned from the proletariat – which in China are unusually high, as migrants push reproduction costs back to women – may not be so easy to realize when exporting to shaky world markets. (Chongqing’s take has been $30 billion/year.) Can the model shift quickly enough from dependence on foreign trade?
Third, structure/struggle dialectic means that from above, on the one hand, socio-political leadership from the likes of Bo Xilai is rare, and required a sustained attack on Chongqing’s strong mafioso elements – but how replicable is this leadership? And on the other hand, from below, massive social unrest continues from peasants and workers – but can it link beyond the current localized grievance expressions and pay-outs?
Fourth, the maniacal speculation in real estate required for ever-increasing municipal revenue appears now to have peaked, threatening even Chongqing’s model.
Fifth, sustainability in ecological terms is failing, with severe air and land pollution, climate change and water shortages. Beyond the fast trains, massive tree-planting and vast solar panel production, the broader western fossil-fuel model of accumulation needs questioning.
The extraordinary accomplishments made possible by a strong state taming capital accumulation may not withstand such contradictions. Given the troubles above and turbulence below, it is overdue for China’s emerging New Left to take its critiques to scale and connect these dots.
Governing markets from below? From e-commerce to emissions trading, 6 January
Speaker: Keyvan Kashkooli Date: Friday, 6 January 2012 Venue: CCS Seminar Room, 602 Memorial Tower Building, Howard College Time: 12:30-14:00
Topic: E-commerce (e.g. eBay) and carbon markets are contested sites. What kinds of accumulation processes and civil society advocacy are constructing and deconstructing these new markets? Hw do Durban community groups view emissions trading in the wake of the COP17, which (unsuccessfully) attempted to bolster the markets?
Presenter: Keyvan Kashkooli is an Acting Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at UCLA Anderson School of Management. His research examines the challenge of building new markets around and with modern technologies. In particular, his work explores the construction of alternative forms of governance of online markets, the formation and organization of on-line seller communities and their influence on market rules, and the emerging e-commerce industry. He received his PhD and Masters in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and a development studies BA from Brown University.
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