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In climate of repression, who can surf South Africa’s micro-protest wave?
Patrick Bond 17 July 2012
The recent surge of unconnected community protests across South Africa confirms the country’s profound social, economic and environmental contradictions. But if activists fall before a new hail of police bullets, or if they lack an overarching political strategy, won’t their demonstrations simply pop up and quickly fall back down again – deserving the curse-words ‘popcorn protests’ – as they run out of steam, or worse, get channelled by opportunists into a new round of xenophobic attacks?
It’s been a hot winter, and we’re just halfway through July (the Centre for Civil Society’s Social Protest Observatory keeps tabs: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za). Consider evidence from just the past two weeks, for example, in Johannesburg’s distant Orange Farm township south of Soweto, where residents rose up against city councillors and national electricity officials because of the unaffordable R2000 installation charged for hated prepayment (i.e. self-disconnection) meters, not to mention a 130% increase in electricity prices since 2008.
Nearby, in Boksburg’s Holomisa shack settlement, 50 activists were arrested after blocking roads with burning tyres. Likewise, in the port city of East London’s Egoli township, house allocation controversies led to a brief uprising, and down the coast, high-profile Port Elizabeth road barricade protests again broke out over failing services in Walmer township.
Near the Botswana border close to Northwest Province’s Morokweng village, a dozen residents angry about inadequate state services were arrested for arson, public violence and malicious damage to school property, following months of frustrated non-violent protest; while in the provincial capital of Mahikeng, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate began an investigation into a death on July 4: “The deceased was allegedly shot and run over by a police vehicle during a service delivery protest in the area.”
In Free State Province’s capital of Bloemfontein, 300 community protesters barricaded a main road with rocks, and in a separate incident, when municipal police began forcibly removing street traders from a shopping centre, a community demonstration shifted targets: from a cruel city council to the nearest Other victims, immigrant hawkers. The protest forced 500 to flee, reviving memories of the deadly copy-cat anti-immigrant attacks of mid-2008 and mid-2010; the police arrested more than 100.
Days later, the same thing happened twice in Cape Town, at the huge Mitchells Plains township and close to the International Airport, with community xenophobes targeting Somali-owned spaza shops. Cretins from the Western Cape provincial African National Congress (ANC) executive had fuelled these flames with a blatant policy proposal aimed at outlawing foreign-owned shops.
More and more frequently, it seems, community-based popcorn protests can hang in the air long enough for opportunists to blow them onto xenophobic terrain, if the political wind shifts from left to right and residents think and act only with localistic perceptions, inconsiderate about why so many refugees are forced into South Africa thanks to Pretoria’s subimperialist political and economic policies.
Surfing Durban’s protest wave Durban may have been South Africa’s most active protest site in recent days, including high-profile middle-class demonstrations close to the town centre: a peaceful march against rhino poachers and a picket against animal abuse at the Brian Boswell Circus.
The city’s most disruptive recent demonstration was the occupation of a key spine road, Umgeni, last Wednesday by furious residents of Puntan’s Hill shack settlement. One protester was killed and two others injured, run over at 4am by a motorist who has been charged with culpable homicide, though he claims he was innocently trying to escape the blockade.
The latter incident was sparked by community ANC loyalists victimised by the ANC-run municipality’s disconnections of illegal electricity hook-ups to their shacks. They also complained of non-delivery of housing notwithstanding their councillor’s repeated promises. As a result of the protest, Puntan’s Hill activists received a new commitment from authorities that new houses would be fast-tracked and that some families would be relocated to a long-promised housing project, Cornubia, near the city’s wealthiest new suburb, Umhlanga.
Last Thursday, another Durban protest march – by AIDS treatment activists – ended at City Hall but was aimed mainly against Barack Obama, who recently cut the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS, thus canceling life-saving treatment for thousands of local residents at two downtown hospitals and an NGO clinic in Umlazi township. On Sunday, some of Durban’s treatment activists will protest again at the International AIDS Conference in Washington, in a coalition called Keep the Promise supported by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other notables.
I witnessed two other manifestations of social unrest last week in South Durban. In the petro-chemical complex of Jacobs on Friday morning, the notorious corporate polluter FFS Refiners, specialising in waste oil recovery, was targeted by the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance’s 75 protesters. The company’s chief executive, Don Hunter, long denied that FFS emissions were the source of an awful ‘cats-wee’ (methanethiol) stench, but he was finally caught by the lethargic municipal environmental health department (the smell began nearly two years ago), so the protest spirit was fiery after this small but significant victory.
Racial integration of this protest, in a very divided, neo-apartheid urban context, occurred with the arrival of ‘Occupy Umlazi’ and Abahlali baseMjondolo activists. The same solidarity was offered nearby a few months earlier, when truck transport firms’ irresponsibility compelled 400 mainly working-class white protesters to invade the main Solomon Mahlangu (Edwin Swales) Drive that links South Durban to the M4 highway.
The broader struggle here is to retake the South Durban Basin’s sprawling valley from ecologically-poisonous capital and an uncaring municipality, a struggle that continues on Thursday night at the Merebank Community Centre when activists consider how to reverse the city’s R250 billion ‘Back-of-Port’ construction project. Thanks to the deepening of Durban harbour – already Africa’s largest – and its capacity to unload mega-ships holding 15,000 containers at a time, the new container terminals and proposed dug-out harbour (on the old airport site) will wipe out large neighbourhoods.
These include Clairwood, where Indian and African residents, ranging from the middle-class to shackdwellers, have been oppressed by illegal trucking and toxic petro-chemical operations for years. Just a half year following Durban’s hosting of the UN Climate Summit, the extreme emissions associated with port and petro-industrial expansion ridicule our managers’ claims to be environmentally conscious.
About 15 minutes drive south of the port, Occupy Umlazi continues on bush land taken in the huge township’s Ward 88, not far from the infamous Max’s Lifestyle Club frequented by local black elites. A large tent was erected next door to the office of ANC councillor Nomzamo Mkhize, who for the last fortnight has tried to ignore the protest. At Sunday afternoon’s meeting of two hundred residents, Abahlali secretary Bandile Mdlalose gave fearless leadership, observing that ANC supporters were doing the power structure’s dirty work in nearby Zakhele shack settlement. There, late last month, Occupy Umlazi activists Noxolo Mkanyi and Mkhayi Simelani were shot and hospitalized in a late night raid by political thugs.
A few kilometres further south, in Folweni Reserve township, teenager Mxolisi Buthelezi was fatally shot in the back with an R5 rifle while running away from police, during a July 1 service delivery protest of 1500 people. A few days before that incident, 43 people were arrested in a similar protest. Their efforts at least managed to reverse a 25% taxi price increase. The cop who allegedly killed the youth, Msizi Chiliza, committed suicide a few days later.
Violence in the air Durban can be a wickedly violent town, rife with internecine political rivalries settled by the bullet. Bodyguards are now required by leading municipal officials – including the police chief – who have become justifiably frightened by how high the crony-capitalist stakes became after an anti-corruption investigation, the Mamase Report, fingered not only former mayor Obed Mlaba and municipal manager Mike Sutcliffe, but numerous councillors and allied businesses. Several well-connected construction firms still get housing contracts in spite of past work that is so shoddy, hundreds of their structures collapse during stormy weather.
The air of violence explains the scare last Friday night, when Durban police in an unmarked car suspiciously followed the national metalworkers’ union secretary, Irvin Jim, from the SA Communist Party’s big conference in northern KwaZulu-Natal. This raised speculation of a potential hit job given how the union is being targeted by elites for being too independent-minded and for advocating large-scale nationalisation.
Communist Party leader Blade Nzimande downplayed Jim’s concerns, claiming the men were simply guarding Durban mayor James Nxumalo but got lost. Unconvinced, union spokesperson Castro Ngobese remarked of the car’s passengers, whom Jim’s bodyguards confronted, “Surprisingly they did not know the name of the mayor, and even worse they could not produce authentic SA Police Service identification cards. The cars had false registration plates and were heavily armed.”
The incident comes just after the unsolved murder of regional ANC leader Wandile Mkhize on July 2, immediately following the ruling party’s controversial policy conference. Mkhize’s last SMS – to former ANC Youth League leader Fikile Mbalula – included the confession, “The stories and lies we fed as members to some of you in leadership further served to deepen the contradiction,” i.e., between the youth and ruling party’s national executive.
Party infighting is also blamed for last July’s hit on Durban’s leading ANC official, Sbu Sibiya, shortly after ANC councillor Wiseman Mshibe was shot dead. Several leaders of a small breakaway from the Inkatha Freedom Party – the National Democratic Party – were also executed in cold blood last year.
Many other Durban civil society activists have lost their lives to assassinations or police murders over the past five years, including Mbongeleni Zondi in Umlazi, the South African National Civic Organization’s Jimmy Mtolo in New Germany, Clairwood activist Ahmed Osman, Merebank’s Rajah Naidoo, and University of South Africa student Mthoko Nkwanyana.
Challenging power durably In many such cases, just as during apartheid, assassinations can be understood as an honour: acknowledgement that activists are doing a good job targeting the local power structure, which in turn is often being squeezed by national and international pressures to clamp down on dissent, so as to more decisively impose the austerity policies generating these sorts of uprisings across the world.
South Africa, however, suffers from far too many activists and analysts who promote a localist ideology that begins and ends with the municipal councillor, city manager or mayor. There are too many turf-conscious leaders who look inward, failing to grasp golden opportunities to link labour, community and environmental grievances and protests, and to think globally while acting locally.
Most encouragingly, perhaps, in Cape Town the South African Municipal Workers’ Union and local civic organisations signaled a future direction for protest, when on July 5 several hundred marched in unity against both poor service delivery and mayor Patricia DeLille’s neoliberal version of a public works programme, which amounts to union-busting outsourcing. Declared union leader Mario Jacobs, “In the future we plan to involve more organisations and will bring thousands of people to take part.”
The tests in Cape Town are whether further community protests attract labour’s support and whether they, like others emerging across the land, succumb to resurgent xenophobia and hijacking (or repression) by ANC cadre. Across South Africa, similar efforts to unite unions with township, rural and green groups – especially by the Democratic Left Front led by ex-communists, and the Million Climate Jobs campaign based at Cape Town’s Alternative Information and Development Centre – are another test of progress.
If the wave of courageous protests continues, it is because new layers of activists are emerging whose backs are up against the wall, but who won’t give in. If police or party thugs do not intimidate them, their next step towards power will be to link up, meld micro-protests into a movement much bigger than the sum of the parts, and then make the political case: not only against a local councillor here or there, but against the broader economic system responsible for our standing as the world’s most unequal society. www.zcommunications.org
In Durban, Puntan's Hill activists take the Umgeni Road
Johannesburg's Orange Farm revolts against local elites
Mass meeting at Occupy Umlazi in South Durban
Mxolisi Buthelezi, murdered in Durban's Folweni Reserve by cop who then committed suicide
Port Elizabeth's Walmer township protesters
Fighting 'cat-wee' emissions at FFS in South Durban
The alleged Cato Manor Police Station hit squad celebrate after an assassination (victim's widow on right)
WENDY'S BOOK LOUNGE kindly invites you to the official book launch of Time with Dennis Brutus: Conversations, Quotations and Snapshots, by Cornelius Thomas
Host: Wendy’s Book Lounge Presenter: Cornelius Thomas Venue: South End Museum, Port Elizabeth Date: Wednesday, 11 July 2012, 6.00 for 6.30pm Price of book – R239.00
Foreword In Time with Dennis Brutus, Cornelius Thomas provides exquisite glimpses of how Dennis lived his last five years. I was with him most of that time in Durban, where the Centre for Civil Society was blessed to have him as honorary professor. But he did more than pontificate, he drove my colleagues and me in ways that expanded our horizons by making real the Centre’s epistemology: praxis. By that I mean the production of knowledge in struggle, such that by challenging power – in all sorts of guises – the most extraordinary revelations are produced. We learn far more than might any armchair academic, about a system’s ability to repress, to coopt, to consolidate, to concede and to challenge the powerless, and how those various reactions by power to its critics, in turn, change the critics. Dennis always pushed us, even until the month before he died – where his last public talk was at the ‘Crisis and Commons’ conference, which he had spent the prior six months helping to conceptualise and organize.
From 2005-09, the several trips Dennis made to the Eastern Cape were punctuated with exceptional statements of ‘truth to power’. The most memorable was perhaps his triple crown of celebrations at Paterson High, Nelson Mandela Metro University and Rhodes University (the latter two conferring honorary doctorates) on 16-17 April 2009. On these and so many other occasions I recall Dennis returning from Port Elizabeth, East London or Alice with exceptional energy and pride, that his work was taken seriously, his ideas respected, and his political vision acknowledged. One reason was Cornelius Thomas’ friendship and comradeship, of which Dennis often spoke.
Would this friendship – so lovingly and honestly documented in the pages that follow – warrant a reader’s time in this era of information overload? I think so because we all can do so much more to live our lives if Dennis’ model of warm-hearted, solidaristic networking is our own. In his 1978 testimonial poem on being a troubadour, Dennis talked of his ‘Knight-erranting, jousting up and down, with justice for my theme, weapons as I find them, and a world-wide scatter of foes.’ It was only the world-wide scatter of friends that made this possible, dating a half-century back to the global campaign against apartheid South Africa’s whites-only presence in the Olympics.
It is not only because of the world-class political poetry and that victorious campaign – less than a decade in time spent, even without internet access and with terribly poor phone systems across the African continent, whose self-interested leaders he had to unite against mighty, wealthy Pretoria – that historians will address Dennis’ legacy with enormous respect.
I think, too, the autocritical capacities in Dennis’ work, as Thomas also found, were exceptional, especially for those who would follow in Dennis’ footsteps as a committed independent progressive. Being a political junkie whose first exposure to Dennis – at university (Swarthmore College), like so many of us radicalized in the early 1980s during the heyday of the US anti-apartheid solidarity movement – was in understanding the connections between local and global, and between race and corporate power, his poems were often beyond my comprehension. They were surgically delivered, at times breathtaking, at times didactic, at times counterposing society and nature with dramatic insight, capable of breaking free from accepted form – and his internal punning and literary references were typically lost on many such followers. But here in Durban, our University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Creative Arts made him a fixture at the Time of the Writer and Poetry Africa festivals, and still carry a ‘Letter to Dennis’ feature in their poetry week.
At least one overarching impression sings out from the cacophony of warm memories from Dennis’ last five years: the philosophy that genuine liberation – not the half measures won in 1994, when class apartheid replaced racial domination – represents a war to be waged on many fronts because as one battle is won and many more usually lost, there are still others on the horizon that make an engaged life fulfilling, that keep the fires of social change desire burning long into the night. No South African threw themselves more passionately into so many global and local battles.
But from where did the indominable energy emerge? In his youth, Brutus was radicalized in part by the denial of opportunities to play sports across Port Elizabeth’s neighbourhoods. He was restricted to competitions in the black townships, hence his first campaign was for athletic fairness. This was an entrypoint into revolutionary politics, initially with the Teachers League and then the Congress movement. By 1968, Brutus had lobbied sixty Third World countries to boycott the Olympics if the white South African team participated, and thus defeated the notorious International Olympic Committee leader, Avery Brundage, a man who was pro-Berlin in the 1936 Nazi games, pro-Salisbury after Ian Smith took over in 1965, and very pro-Pretoria at the Mexico Games.
In the process, Brutus received deep battlefield scars, suffering bannings (both personal in 1961 and affecting most of his poetry until 1994), a 1963 police kidnapping in Maputo followed by a near-fatal shooting outside Anglo American’s central Johannesburg headquarters during an escape attempt, imprisonment and torture at the Hillbrow Fort Prison and on Robben Island from 1963-66, and alienating times in exile from 1966-1991. It was partly his infinite mischievousness that prevented exile from wearing Brutus down. Former Bureau of State Security agent Gordon Winter called him “one of the twenty most dangerous South African political figures overseas.”
He was extremely effective. At the 1971 Wimbledon tournament, Brutus disrupted a semifinal match played by Cliff Drysdale, winning acquittal for his deed from the House of Lords. Other pranks with a bite included the weed killer he and local students poured onto the rugby pitch to spell out “Oxford Rejects Apartheid” just as a key match began, forcing cancellation, following a march of 18,000 Londoners against racist sport, which compelled the Springboks to cancel their 1970 tour. Such fun never quite washed away the bitter taste of apartheid. The residue lingered long after, especially when Ali Bacher won membership in Naas Botha’s SA Sports Hall of Fame, because the cricket administrator “organised international rebel tours in the early 1980s.”
Brutus was on the verge of induction at the same December 2007 ceremony, but upon mounting the stage, he handed back the statue, announcing, “I cannot be party to an event where unapologetic racists are also honoured, or to join a Hall of Fame alongside those who flourished under racist sport. Their inclusion is a deception because of their unfair advantage, as so many talented black athletes were excluded from sport opportunities. Moveover, this Hall ignores the fact that some sportspersons and administrators defended, supported and legitimised apartheid.” Such deep principle had, in 1983, led Judge Irving Schwartz to declare, “There is no question that Professor Brutus has made himself hated by just about every [white] South African.” Schwartz rebuffed Reagan Administration efforts to expel Brutus from the United States.
Those three decades in the US spent teaching at leading universities (Northwestern, Pittsburgh, Dartmouth, Swarthmore and others) gave Brutus opportunities for high-profile support to every doomed lefty political struggle: ending the unfair incarceration of Philadelphia poet Mumia Abu Jamal, American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier and Guantanamo Bay prisoners, halting sweatshops, imposing Boycott Divestment Sanctions on Israel, building Burmese solidarity, opposing Washington’s militarism by following Thoreau’s lead and refusing to pay a portion of his taxes, and attempting to prosecute George Bush for war crimes.
Without much if anything to show for these efforts, what did Brutus do, then, upon returning to South Africa? In 1998, he and Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane inaugurated Jubilee South Africa to, first, demand rejection of inherited apartheid debt, which Trevor Manuel’s finance ministry was dutifully repaying, and then launch a World Bank Bonds Boycott aimed at defunding the Washington nerve centre of free market ideology. Brutus and Trevor Ngwane initiated the latter campaign at the April 2000 protests against a Bank and International Monetary Fund meeting. At the world’s largest private pension fund, TIAA-CREF, Brutus then persuaded trustees to divest Bank investments, just as he had twenty years earlier during the anti-apartheid struggle.
War on ‘global apartheid’ was now Brutus’ apparently Quixotic campaign. Yet exactly three months before the infamous Battle of Seattle at the World Trade Organisation summit in November 1999, he addressed a major rally with a scarily accurate premonition: “We are going to set in motion a movement and a demand and a protest around the world which is going to say no to the WTO and it is going to start right here in Seattle!” The WTO never recovered, and as recently as last April, the IMF also looked down and out – losing major borrowers, operating in the red and retrenching a tenth of its economists – until Manuel spearheaded a $750 billion bailout by the G20 group of large economies, infuriating Brutus.
Other SA-based campaigning included leading demonstrations against the World Conference Against Racism in 2001 and World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, anti-privatisation, climate, apartheid reparations (which Pretoria finally has conceded make sense), a reversal of the US travel ban on Centre for Civil Society founder Adam Habib (who insulted Washington at the outset of the 2003 occupation of Iraq), fighting World Cup forced removals, Zimbabwe and Tamil solidarity, and in Durban, support for Warwick Junction small traders facing eviction and a variety of other local eco-social justice struggles. For this Brutus was labeled ‘ultra-left’, or as Mbeki aide Essop Pahad put it in a 2002 statement to The Sowetan, “Dennis the Menace!... We cannot not allow our modest achievements to be wrecked through anarchy. Opponents of democracy seek such destruction.”
Instead, as Noam Chomsky recounted more accurately upon his death, Brutus was “a great artist and intrepid warrior in the unending struggle for justice and freedom. He will long be remembered with honor, respect, and affection, and his life will be a permanent model for others to try to follow, as best they can.” Most followers will find his legacy of politico-literary contributions reason to adopt the title of a seminal Brutus poetry collection: Stubborn Hope.
And that hope translates into another idea, stubborn friendship: given by Dennis to Cornelius, and repaid handsomely with these valuable memories. Patrick Bond, March 2012
I will be the world’s troubadour if not my country’s knight-erranting jousting up and down with justice for my theme weapons as I find them and a world-wide scatter of foes
Being what I am compound of speech and thoughts and song and girded by indignation and accoutred with some undeniable scars surely I may be this cavalier? 1978
RIO DE JANEIRO - Given the worsening world economic crisis, the turn to ‘Green Economy’ rhetoric looms as a potential saviour for footloose financial capital, and is also enormously welcome to those corporations panicking at market chaos in the topsy-turvy fossil-fuel, water, infrastructure construction, technology and agriculture sectors.
On the other hand, for everyone else, the Rio+20 Earth Summit underway this week in Brazil, devoted to advancing Green Economy policies and projects, appears as an overall disaster zone for the people and planet.
Meanwhile in Mexico, the G20 meeting of the real powerbrokers this week included a Green Economy session. But more serious distractions for the elites include ongoing Southern European revulsion at harmful public policies cooked up by bankers, and potential war in the Middle East. Perhaps a few environmentally-decent projects may get needed subsidies as a result of the G20 and Rio talkshops, and we’ll hear of ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ to replace the fatuous UN Millennium Development Goals in 2015.
But the overarching danger is renewed official faith in market mechanisms. No surprise, following the logic of two South African precedents: the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (Rio+10) and last December’s Durban COP17 climate summit. There, the chance to begin urgent environmental planning to reverse ecosystem destruction was lost, sabotaged by big- and medium-governments’ negotiators acting on behalf of their countries’ polluting and privatising corporations.
Market fixes to market failures? It’s useful to interrogate the eco-governance elites’ assumptions. I’m here in Rio at the International Society for Ecological Economics conference (ISEE) within a critical research network – the Barcelona-based Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade (EJOLT) – whose leaders, Joan Martinez-Alier and Joachim Spangenberg, issued a statement appropriately cynical about the Green Economy: “The promises are striking: conserving nature, overcoming poverty, providing equity and creating jobs. But the means and philosophy behind it look all too familiar.”
Unfortunately, after the original 1992 Rio Earth Summit, multinational corporations increasingly dominated the emerging terrain of global environmental governance. The United Nations Environment Programme came to view “the sustainability crisis as the biggest-ever ‘market failure’” – a dangerous distraction, according to the two political-ecologists, because “Describing it this way reveals a specific kind of thinking: a market failure means that the market failed to deliver what in principle it could have delivered, and once the bug is fixed the market will solve the problem.”
Martinez-Alier and Spangenberg reverse this logic: “Unsustainable development is not a market failure to be fixed but a market system failure: expecting results from the market that it cannot deliver, like long-term thinking, environmental consciousness and social responsibility.”
In the same spirit, Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi chastised ISEE’s conventional economists in a plenary: “There are a million struggles in India against pollution that Martinez-Alier calls the ‘environmentalism of the poor’, in contrast to the Green Economy which is the environmentalism of the rich.”
Narain contined, “The issue is not the price of nature, it’s rights and it’s the values of democracy, of governance, of society, of humanity. Let’s be very clear: in today’s Green Economy as it is being shaped in Rio Centro and by many economists, these principles will not help us move ahead. Let’s not get lost in yet another shallow, empty concept.”
It’s critical to pose the Green Economy from this class-analytic and eco-centric standpoint, especially because inside the official Rio Centro, negotiations on a bland pro-market text continue through Saturday. There, progressive civil society strategies to insulate basic human and natural rights – e.g. to water – are being foiled by negotiators and by the host neoliberal Brazilian government which is channelling reactionary positions from Northern negotiators, especially from Washington, Ottawa, Tokyo and Tel Aviv, the main saboteur-regimes when it comes to water justice.
According to Anil Naidoo of the Ottawa-based Blue Planet Project, “the new negotiating text is out and it is terrible! We expected the attacks to continue as we have made strong gains through our pressure, but clearly we must again fight for our human right to water and sanitation.” In spite of excellent anti-privatisation activism by Naidoo’s allies in dozens of cities across the world, water commercialisation remains a major threat, especially thanks to the World Resources Institute’s mapping of scarcity on behalf of thirsty transnational corporations.
Also within the rubric of the Green Economy, corporations are seeking new technological ‘False Solutions’ to the climate and other environmental crises, including dirty forms of ‘clean energy’ (nuclear, so-called ‘clean coal’, fracking ‘natural gas’, hydropower, hydrogen, biofuels, biomass and biochar); dangerous Carbon Capture and Storage experiments; and other whacky geoengineering gimmicks such as Genetically Modified trees to sequester carbon, sulfates in the air to shut out the sun, iron filings in the sea to create algae blooms, and large-scale solar reflection such as industrial-scale plastic-wrap for deserts.
From African ‘natural capital’ to pricing to markets Crazy corporate tactics aside, the philosophical underpinning of the Green Economy needs wider questioning. The precise wording is terribly important, as Africans began to understand after last month’s ‘Gaborone Declaration’ hosted by Botswana president Ian Khama. He brought together leaders from nine other African countries – Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa and Tanzania – to “quantify and integrate into development and business practice” what ordinary people consider to be the innate value of nature.
But these leaders and their conference sponsor Conservation International mean something else, devoid of eco-systemic, spiritual, aesthetic, and intrinsic qualities. The Declaration insists, “Watersheds, forests, fisheries, coral reefs, soils, and all natural resources, ecosystems and biodiversity constitute our vital natural capital and are central to long-term human well-being, and therefore must be protected from overuse and degradation and, where necessary, must be restored and enhanced.”
There are good sentiments as far as they go, yet by relegating our environment to mere natural capital, the next step is to convert value into price and then sell chunks of nature on the market. All manner of financialisation strategies have emerged to securitise ‘environmental services’, most obviously in carbon markets which continue failing miserably to deliver investor funds to slow climate change.
For some institutions we can term yuppie-green due to their pro-market ideology, faith continues in spite of emissions trading’s descent to hell. In a joint paper published last week, the WorldWide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Greenpeace advocated last-gasp reforms to revitalise the European Union carbon markets. Like the Chicago exchange in 2010, the EU Emissions Trading Scheme is in real danger of dying, what with last month’s drop-out announcement from Munich’s leading financiers, who cited a fatal degree of corruption and market oversupply.
The 2010 crash of the Chicago Climate Exchange – and an ongoing civil fraud lawsuit against founder Richard Sandor – is only the most obvious warning to those promoting emissions trading and voluntary offsets. In Africa, we argue based on new research for EJOLT, the ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ (CDM) carbon-trade and offset mechanism ‘Cannot Deliver the Money’.
The Durban COP17 climate gamble – that carbon markets could be revived as part of a renewed Kyoto Protocol mandate – was lost by virtue of the negotiators’ failure to make post-2012 emissions-cut commitments. And the Bonn follow-up meetings of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change last month just amplified the crisis, by all accounts
But the crisis facing the market crew aiming to ‘privatise the air’ is also pushing environmentally-oriented bankers in all sorts of other directions. Explained City of London investor Simon Greenspan, whose firm won World Finance magazine’s ‘Western European Commodities Broker of the Year’ award four months ago, “At Tullett Brown we’ve only ever invested in areas of the market that have truly stood the test of time, such as gold and silver and property. When our analysts were looking for the next great area of growth it was fairly obvious to them. It was the planet, it was the environment.” (Oops, just days later, British financial authorities forced Tullett Brown into provisional liquidation.)
Reacting to the Gaborone Declaration, Nnimmo Bassey from the Niger Delta NGO Environmental Rights Action and Friends of the Earth International warned, “The bait of revenue from natural capital is simply a cover for continued rape of African natural resources.” Thanks to inadequate protection against market abuse, he adds, “The declaration will help corporate interests in Rio while impoverishing already disadvantaged populations, exacerbate land grabs and displace the poor from their territories.”
To illustrate the pernicious way markets undermine nature, Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe would say of the rhino and elephant 15 years ago, “The species must pay to stay” – which in turn allowed him and (white) cronies to offer rich overseas hunters the opportunity to shoot big game for big bucks. The dilemma about hunt marketing is that it doesn’t stop there: black markets in rhino horns and elephant tusks are the incentive for poachers to invade not just poorly defended game parks north of the Limpopo River, but also now in South Africa.
The alternative strategy would have been to tighten the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species’ restrictions against trade in ivory. But South Africa’s game-farm owners and free-market proponents got too greedy, and by influencing Pretoria to press for relaxation of CITES’ ban, hundreds of elephant and rhino corpses denuded of horns and tusks now litter the bush.
From prices to values, and from fees to fines At best, the Gaborone Declaration commits the ten countries to “reducing poverty by transitioning agriculture, extractive industries, fisheries and other natural capital uses to practices that promote sustainable employment, food security, sustainable energy and the protection of natural capital through protected areas and other mechanisms.”
How, though, is the crucial question. It is well and good to protect nature through imposing a prohibitive fine and ban on those who pollute, and it is past time for payment of the ‘climate debt’ from the Global North’s companies and government which take too much of the shrinking carbon space left in the environment, for instance.
As Kathy McAfee from San Francisco State University puts it, “Compensating the poor and other land users for practices that maintain healthy, ‘service-producing’ ecosystems may be an important part of strategies for sustainable and equitable development. Serious problems arise, however, when such compensation schemes are framed as markets.”
It is another matter, entirely, to treat nature as ‘capital’ from which a fee-for-use – at Rio+20, termed ‘payment for environmental services’ – is offered by deep-pocket polluters to continue business-as-usual.
What do we need in coming years? Valuing nature and imposing pollution-bans and prohibitive fines for ecological degradation are the conceptual approach and the strategy required. But given the power balance here, we can instead expect the Earth Summit to promote the pricing of nature based on a pollution-fee system and environmental markets, which in effect will give discredited bankers the job of regulating world ecology.
Then watch out, people and planet – you will be swamped by hunger for profits. www.zcommunications.org
Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society.
CCS fights Green Economy gimmicks at Rio +20
what Brazilians need to know: a political economy of the 2010 World Cup™
Green Economy Buzz moves to Rio
CDM in Africa
Bilderbergers beware
Patrick Bond 6 June
Near the Dulles International Airport west of Washington last weekend, I found myself a couple of dozen meters away from a formidable gathering of 150 powerbrokers – the Bilderberg Group – whose capacity to move money and influence events rivals even the upcoming G20 meeting in Mexico, last month’s G8 summit in Camp David and NATO military meeting in Chicago, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) Spring Meeting in April, or the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January.
The secretive Bilderbergers aren’t normally a protest magnet, but for my purposes, while passing through Washington, this was the best opportunity to hear their critics from the libertarian-populist strain of US civil society. Hundreds of protesters jammed the sidewalk all weekend, mainly motivated by a call to ‘Occupy Bilderberg 2012’ made by Alex Jones, who has a radio audience of three million and a lurid infowars.com website (“There’s a war on for your mind!”).
Protesters hurled creative abuse at the black limousines rolling past towards the Chantilly Marriott Hotel entrance, and to protect them, police arrested a few activists who dared step onto the road. These particular masters of the universe first met at a hotel (The Bilderberg) in Holland in 1954, co-hosted by Dutch royalty, Uniliver and the US Central Intelligence Agency. The obscure brainstorming session would become an annual intellectual and ideological “testing grounds for new initiatives for Atlantic unity,” according to Sussex University scholar Kees van der Pijl, perhaps the world’s most rigorous scholar of transnational ruling classes.
Often compared to the Trilateral Commission (US, European and Japanese leaders), Council on Foreign Relations thinktank in New York and Bohemian Grove confab (near San Francisco) as low-profile talk shops for key strategic role-players, the Bilderberg Group’s website explains that its “regular, off-the-record discussions helped create a better understanding of the complex forces and major trends affecting Western nations in the difficult post-war period. The Cold War has now ended. But in practically all respects there are more, not fewer, common problems – from trade to jobs, from monetary policy to investment, from ecological challenges to the task of promoting international security.”
By inviting a few outside the US-Euro axis, Bilderberg organisers send signals about which regions are considered important – and Africa doesn’t feature. On this year’s agenda were “Transatlantic Relations, Evolution of the Political Landscape in Europe and the US, Austerity and Growth in Developed Economies, Cyber Security, Energy Challenges, the Future of Democracy, Russia, China and the Middle East.”
The 2012 guest list included the top managers of international banks, oil and chemical companies, high tech firms, the World Bank and World Trade Organisation, plus rising government leaders, philanthropists and old imperialists like Henry Kissinger.
This crew is bound to draw the ire of many victims, yet instead of the kind of Occupy protests I witnessed in London last month – a march through The City with socialists and anarchists furious about parasitical banking practices – or at Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park last year and in various subsequent anti-bank protests by US leftists, the weekend’s Bilderberg protest displayed paranoia about the conspiracies being hatched in the Virginia hotel.
These include everything from the vetting of top politicians – after all, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama came to Bilderberg to ‘audition’ just as their star rose – to imposing ‘Agenda 21’ sustainable development strategies, to arranging potential world hyperinflation via the next bail-out round for the shaky financial sector. Conversations revealed fears of a one-world government taking away the patriots’ guns and imposing a solution to climate change.
Many of these libertarians believe climate change is a plot by Al Gore to impose world carbon taxes. If only – for Gore is actually nstead a self-interested huckster for carbon trading, which is failing miserably in Europe, as well as in the US (except California) in the wake of the 2010 closure of the Chicago Climate Exchange.
Mind you, some such conspiracy theories are sufficiently close enough to an accurate reading of power to be taken semi-seriously. But it should be patently obvious that at least since 1987 – when CFCs in our old fridges and deoderants were banned by a UN Montreal Protocol so as to prevent the ozone hole from growing – all subsequent world-government ambitions to regulate ecology, manage trade, fix finance, coordinate military activity and address the myriad of other world problems have been dismal failures.
This is where I found myself differing most with Jones’ supporters: never before in history have world elites been so tempted to address global-scale crises, but – thanks to the adverse power balance represented by neoliberal ideology in the 1990s, neoconservatism in the early 2000s and some fusion of the two since Obama came to power – never before have they acted so incoherently.
Today, the very words ‘global governance’ appear a contradiction in terms. Scholars in this field whom I met at Sussex University for a ‘SouthGovNet’ conference on ‘Rising Powers’ last month were well aware that the subimperialist group of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa cannot yet do imperialism’s heavy lifting, even when it comes to what is considered a ‘global public good’ – non-collapsing international financial networks – via the desired G20 re-bailout of the IMF (the BRICS are objecting to giving their $100 billion share of the $430 billion that Christine Lagarde now seeks for a rainy European day).
Van der Pijl’s exceptionally rich study of Bilderberg and subsequent US-European geopolitical maneuvres, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (which thankfully Verso Press is about to reissue), provides the theoretical underpinning that I feel Jones’ passionately conspiratorialist followers desperately need, if they ever aim to properly judge the world’s complex combinations of structure and agency.
As Marx remarked, “People make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing.” Developing an analysis of political-economic structure – the background conditions – is the vital missing element short-circuited by the libertarian right’s shallow habit of name-calling Bilderbergers ‘Illuminati!’
How do we best understand the Bilderbergers, then? In his most recent major article dissecting their agenda, based on the 2007 meeting, van der Pijl insists, “The West, capital, and the state emerged in a single process in which mutual relations are not external and optional but internal, embodied in transnational classes.”
Such elite networks are, Antonio Gramsci wrote in The Prison Notebooks, like “international political parties which operate within each nation with the full concentration of the international forces. But religion, Freemasonry, Rotary, Jews, etc., can be subsumed into the social category of ‘intellectuals’, whose function, on an international scale, is that of mediating the extremes, of ‘socializing’ the technical discoveries which provide the impetus for all activities of leadership, of devising compromises between, and ways out of, extreme solutions.”
Likewise, van der Pijl sees the Bilderberg Group as an ‘international’ of corporate capital, although possessing a narrower base than the Davos crew because of its Atlanticist character. Hence the biggest geopolitical and economic threat to the Bilderbergers is China.
Initially, he observes, the mood was welcoming, because “Beijing’s decision to peg the Chinese currency on the dollar in 1994, was seen as a move to tie its fate more emphatically to the US economy and a further commitment to become integrated into the expanding West at the height of the Clinton globalisation drive.”
However, van der Pijl continues, “The Chinese challenge to the West and the response to it were in 1996 still in a benign stage and were soon beginning to mutate into a different direction,” namely putting China right after Iraq and Iran on Washington’s enemy list, roughly a decade ago.
Five years back, van der Pijl identified Bilderberger priorities from a list that an insider informant had jotted down: dividing Iraq, invading Iran, controlling other oil and gas supplies, creating more EU-type unions in the American Hemisphere, and “talking about China as the World’s next Evil Empire.”
Retroactively, in 2012, it is fanciful to imagine Washington’s power to fracture Iraq and to compel more economic ‘unions’, in the sense of a single currency, fallen trade barriers (amplifying NAFTA) and increasingly centralised state coordination. As for the other projections five years ago, recall that the bubbly pre-crisis economic period had not yet ended and Peak Oil was feared at an early date (before the fracking boom), so the Bilderbergers’ bravado is not surprising.
But they were nervous, too, of a coming political storm, remarked van der Pijl. Representing both BP and Goldman Sachs in 2007, Peter Sutherland (former WTO director) “was quoted as saying that it had been a mistake to have referenda on the EU constitution. ‘You knew there was a rise in nationalism; you should have let your parliaments ratify the treaty, and it should be done with.’ Kissinger said words to the same effect concerning unification of the Americas, stressing the need to mobilise the enlightened media behind its propagation.”
What kind of political storm did the Bilderbergers chat about last weekend, in the wake of so much revolt across the world? In his 2007 paper, van der Pijl was correct to warn against “US rightwing anti-globalists with a strong conspiratorial bent who consider Bilderberg a permanent quasi-world government rather than a nodal point (among several others) of the Atlantic ruling class as it evolves and seeks to work out a strategic consensus.”
But if the Bilderbergers agreed upon a strategic consensus, it was probably extreme neoliberalism, taking advantage of financial capital’s crises by bailing out the banks and imposing financial capital’s austerity agenda. With Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish and Italian social pressure rising, we can anticipate many more such populist concerns about the anti-democratic IMF, European Central Bank and financial institutions.
(To illustrate, near where I live in South Africa, the mysterious men from Moody’s rating agency are this month arm-twisting the state to reinstate a hugely unpopular highway tolling strategy in the Johannesburg-Pretoria region, in the face of both trade union and middle-class white revolt.)
So there is no doubt that world banker domination – which should have been reduced by the 2008-09 financial melt – will continue. Only the occasional sovereign default – Argentina (2002), Ecuador (2008), Iceland (2008) and maybe Southern Europe this year – or imposition of exchange controls (as rediscovered by Malaysia in 1998 or Venezuela in 2003) reduces the banksters’ grip.
Yet the libertarian protesters’ fear of the elites has only superficial commonality with the Occupy movement’s more robust approach. The latter want a forward-moving ‘system change’ – as we heard from Occupy COP17 in Durban outside the climate summit last December – whereas nationalistic US nativism offers no grounds for broad-based alliances.
As expressed in a fairly typical protest banner on Saturday, “Warning to secret societies: you are pissing off American patriots. We have machine guns also.” The macho, self-described ‘paleo-conservative’ narrative plus the occasional undercurrent of anti-semitism is not language heard from Occupy’s collection of socialists, anarchists, liberals, Greens, labour, civic activists, youth and the progressive faith community.
The strongest political effort by these libertarian anti-Bilderberg protesters is to attempt the election of Texan member of Congress, Ron Paul, as president, and with 20 percent popularity, he remains Mitt Romney’s only irritant within the Republican Party as the November showdown with Obama now looms.
But with Obama continuing to molly-coddle Wall Street (e.g., still no prosecutions for the great 2008-09 financial theft) and openly declaring himself a militarist – personally approving drone assassinations in the Middle East and delighting in the Stuxnet cyberwar attack on Iran, according to The New York Times last week – the paranoid streak about Washington’s surveillance and proto-fascistic policing also resonates.
So long as they leave their guns behind, I wish them well, because to have directed a great deal more media attention and popular hostility against the ‘.0001%’ gathered in the Marriot last weekend, was a public service that the rest of our world should now build upon. But hopefully, with political values more aligned to rainbow than Rambo.
Patrick Bond directs the Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa.
Inclusive green growth or extractive greenwashed decay?
Boiling down a complex argument from her book Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice, University of Sydney-based political ecologist Ariel Salleh observes how a triple externalization of costs ‘takes the form of an extraction of surpluses, both economic and thermodynamic: 1) a social debt to inadequately paid workers; 2) an embodied debt to women family caregivers; and 3) an ecological debt drawn on nature at large.’
At minimum, addressing these problems requires full-fledged re-accounting to toss out the fatally-flawed GDP indicator, and to internalize environment and society in the ways we assess costs and benefits. This exercise would logically both precede and catalyze a full-fledged transformation of financing, extraction, production, transport and distribution, consumption and disposal systems.
But it is only in the struggle for transformation that we learn how institutions of power hold fast to their privileges, and why genuine change won’t happen through mere tampering with national income accounts: ‘torturing the data until they confess’, the old economists’ adage.
The World Bank is one such institution, in part because the man taking charge next month, Jim Yong Kim, is a progressive medic and anthropologist. It’s fair to predict that he’ll add style to the Bank’s ‘talk left, walk right’ break-dance repertoire, spinning out arguments that will make our heads spin, while business continues more or less as usual.
A good example of environmental reformist PR can be found in the new Bank report, Inclusive Green Growth. ‘Care must be taken to ensure that cities and roads, factories, and farms are designed, managed, and regulated as efficiently as possible to wisely use natural resources while supporting the robust growth developing countries still need,’ argue Bank staff led by Inger Andersen and Rachel Kyte, in order to move the economy ‘away from suboptimalities and increase efficiency – and hence contribute to short-term growth – while protecting the environment.’
Of course, certain uses of resources are off limits for polite discussion, as Bank staff dare not question financiers’ commodity speculation, export-led growth or the irrationality of so much international trade, including wasted bunker fuel for shipping not to mention truck freight.
Yet the Bank cannot help but momentarily inject a power variable into its technicist analysis: ‘That so much pricing is currently inefficient suggests complex political economy considerations. Whether it takes the form of preferential access to land and credit or access to cheap energy and resources, every subsidy creates its own lobby. Large enterprises (both state owned and private) have political power and lobbying capacity. Energy-intensive export industries, for example, will lobby for subsidies to maintain their competitiveness.’
Would the Bank dare practice what it preaches about ending ‘inefficient’ subsidization, given how it amplifies irrational power relations when maintaining the world’s largest fossil-fuel financing portfolio? When Inclusive Green Growth argues that ‘Governments need to focus on the wider social benefits of reforms and need to be willing to stand up to lobby groups’, we cannot forget the Bank’s own largest-ever project credit, granted just two years ago. The $3.75 billion loan for a 4800 MW coal-fired power plant (‘Medupi’) was, according to outgoing Bank president Robert Zoellick and his colleagues, aimed at helping poor South Africans.
In reality the benefits are overwhelmingly to mining houses which get the world’s cheapest electricity (around US$0.02/kWh). The costs of Medupi and its successor Kusile are borne not just by all who will suffer from climate change (including an estimated 180 million additionally dead Africans this century). All South Africans are losing access to electricity through disconnections, and as a result, engaging in world-leading rates of community protest because to pay for Medupi and Kusile, price increases have exceeded 100 percent over the past four years.
The Bank’s Inclusive Green Growth arguments always return to profit incentives: ‘If the environment is considered as productive capital, it makes sense to invest in it, and environmental policies can be considered as investment.’
The nature-as-capital narrative leans dangerously close to the maniacal positioning of former Bank officials Larry Summers and Lant Pritchett, who in 1991 wrote their infamous memo in preparation for the original Rio conference: ‘The economic logic of dumping a load of toxic waste on the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.’
Facing up to pollution externalities is deceptively simple within the Bank’s pre-existing neoliberal narrative, of fixing a market problem with a market solution. For example, ‘Lack of property rights in the sea has led to overfishing – in some cases with devastating results. The use of individual transferable quotas can correct this market failure, increasing both output and employment in the fishing industry.’
The Bank’s banal reversion to transferable quotas – also known as cap-and-trade – is most extreme in the greenhouse gas markets, where its writers fail to acknowledge profound flaws that have crashed the price of a ton of carbon from €35 to €7 these last six years. The Bank, which subsidizes carbon trading, mentions only a few allegedly-fixable European Union Emissions Trading Scheme design problems. It ignores the deeper critique of carbon markets developed, for example, in our new report, “CDMs Cannot Deliver the Money to Africa.”
Here’s an unintended consequence of Bank-think, however: if you do factor what it terms ‘natural capital’ into the national accounts, you find that when non-renewable resources are dug out of the soil, there should logically be a debit against genuine national savings (i.e. a decline in a country’s natural capital) instead of just a momentary credit to GDP.
Thus in many situations it becomes logical to leave resources in the ground (sacrilege!), especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, because since the commodity boom began in the early 2000s, according to another recent Bank report (The Changing Wealth of Nations), my home region has suffered negative genuine savings – ‘looting’ – mainly because of non-renewable resource decay in the context of resource-cursed neo-colonial politics. I’ve had this argument with the Bank’s dogmatic chief Africa economist, Shanta Devarajan, and needn’t rehash it. Instead, let’s turn from Bank babble to listen to those at the base with more profound insights:
the Dhaka Declaration of the South Asia Women’s Network, which deserves the last word:
‘Today, those who have created the ecological crisis talk of the Green Economy. For them, the Green Economy means appropriating the remaining resources of the planet for profit — from seed and biodiversity to land and water as well as our skills, such as the environmental services we provide. For us, the privatization and commodification of nature, her species, her ecosystems, and her ecosystem services cannot be part of a Green Economy, for such an approach cannot take into account our traditions. The resources of the Earth are for the welfare of all, not the profits of a few.’ http://triplecrisis.com
UPatrick Bond ungumqondisi kwisizinda iCentre for Civil Society esikhungweni semfundo ephakeme eUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal. UFaith ka-Manzi umhumushi, imbongi, isishoshovu samalungelo esintu kanye nombhali ngaphansi kompheme weCentre for Civil Society.
'Closing the Doors of Learning'
(to the Israeli State) Opens the Doors of Freedom Patrick Bond and Muhammed Desai 25 May 2012
One of South Africa’s largest tertiary institutions, the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Durban, is a site of multiple controversy but a near-disaster on Monday deserves
more reflection because it points us in a positive direction: away from allying with the Israeli state and its apartheid policies during a time of heightened racism. A
representative of Israel had been invited to speak but was then disinvited, after the university was called on by staff and students to respect the “academic boycott” of Israel.
From South Africa, the African continent and everywhere else, it is a critical time to step up pressure against the rogue regime in Tel Aviv. Israel’s hard-right leader,
Benyamin Netanyahu, is in a dangerous career phase, preparing to bomb Iran; illegitimately holding thousands of Palestinian prisoners in worsening conditions; expanding
settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank; terrorizing Gaza; and tightening his militaristic hold over the region.
Netanyahu’s approach to protecting his core constituency was unveiled at a recent cabinet meeting, in his paranoid description of African refugee immigration (mainly from
Eritrea, Ethiopia and South Sudan) last week: “if we don't stop the problem (sic), 60,000 infiltrators (sic) are liable to become 600,000, and cause the negation of the State of
Israel as a Jewish and democratic (sic) state.”
Interior Minister Eli Yishai picked up the same theme: “They [African immigrants] should be put into holding cells or jails… and then given a grant and sent back.” In spite of
police data confirming that Israelis commit more than twice as many crimes per person as African immigrants, Yishai claimed, “most African infiltrators are involved in crime.”
According to the Hotline for Migrant Workers, “In the last month, the number of hate crimes carried out by Israelis against Africans has risen tremendously. Multiple Molotov
cocktails were thrown into houses of Africans in southern Tel Aviv on two separate occasions, a week apart.”
Then on Wednesday night, the logic of Netanyahu/Yishai unfolded at street level when hundreds of their followers attacked Africans in what was widely described as a race riot,
leaving many injured, with a dozen Israelis arrested for violence.
In this context, the Israeli embassy had suggested an input to a UKZN audience about Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. The Wall is the topic of current controversy since Gush Shalom, a
Tel Aviv-based human rights group opposed to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, has just demanded that last Saturday’s ‘Jerusalem Day’ in future be removed from Israel’s
calendar of holidays.
As a celebration of the 1967 War and Occupation of Palestine, it involves a provocative march to the Wall through East Jerusalem. Political scientist, Peter Beinart, author of
The Crisis of Zionism, remarked last week, “I am disturbed that Yom Yerushalayim [Jerusalem Day] has become a nationalistic holiday, observed most publicly by the religious
right. Too often, Yom Yerushalayim celebrations turn violent… most celebrations glorify the violent abuse of power by cruel extremists.”
As Lia Tarachansky of the Real News Network reported from Jerusalem on the weekend, “The celebrators marched through Damascus Gate and the Muslim Quarter chanting ‘Muhammed is
Dead’ and celebrating a 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians in Hebron. Across the road roughly 600 Palestinians protested the celebration and the occupation of East Jerusalem. They
were joined by Israeli peace activists.”
Pretoria-based Israeli official Yaa’kov Finkelstein had informed UKZN’s Social Sciences Dean Nwabufo Okeke-Uzodike that he “would like to give a lecture to staff and students on
the Western Wall in Jerusalem” two days after this incident, but with less than 24 hours to go, UKZN Deputy Vice Chancellor Joseph Ayee emailed staff: “I have re-considered the
sensitivities that the visit of the Israeli Deputy Ambassador has generated. Given the negative publicity that the visit will give UKZN, I hereby cancel the visit and the
lecture.”
That the talk would “be held under a cloud with likely reputational damage for the institution is not in the interests of all of us,” observed Ayee. This resulted from a flurry
of letters by senior academics including Lubna Nadvi, Rozeena Maart and Jerry Coovadia, as well as a vibrant protest planned by hip-hop artist, Iain ‘Ewok’ Robinson, who
generated similar opposition to Finkelstein’s co-sponsorship of the Hilton Arts Festival near Durban last year. Said Robinson, “Hosting the ambassador under the auspices of
creating some kind of neutral space for dialogue is another blatant legitimization of Israel’s policies of oppression.”
A time for dialogue with Israel’s official representatives should wait until nonviolent public pressure against the regime mounts and the extreme power imbalance is lessened. As
the Palestinian solidarity movement argues, this time will come – just as three-decade long sanctions were lifted against South Africa when in the early 1990s there was
irreversible progress towards one-person one-vote democracy (implemented in April 1994) – only when Israel recognises the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self
determination and:
1. ends its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall; 2. guarantees the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinians citizens of Israel to full equity; and 3. respects, protects and promotes the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.
Accepting these three conditions as comparable to the demand for democracy in South Africa, our local movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel got a
boost in 2010 when South African Artists Against Apartheid formed with the announcement, “Collaborating with institutions linked to the state of Israel cannot be regarded as a
neutral act in the name of cultural exchange.”
In this context, severe reputational damage for UKZN would have surely followed had the event gone ahead. Upon hearing of Finkelstein’s talk, Ramallah-based BDS strategist Omar
Barghouti exclaimed, “Why would they invite an Israeli diplomat to UKZN at a time when even the SA government is advising its own ministers not to visit Israel, unless for
absolute necessity? This is what complicity looks like!”
Barghouti continued, “Imagine in the 1980s if a Cuban or Palestinian university had invited a South African official to give a lecture? Wouldn’t the ANC and the great majority
of South Africans have felt betrayed by their best friends in the world? Well, this is how Palestinians feel now if a South African institution is complicit with Israel.”
Universities should be at the forefront of the BDS movement – and thanks to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel this has been the case since
2004 – because by making Israeli officials unwelcome, these opportunities actually open wide the door for learning political ethics, as at UKZN. Three years the same controversy
arose at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, whose officials mandated a leading lawyer, Advocate Geoff Budlender, to investigate. Budlender concluded in favour of
the BDS activists, saying that Wits University “could legitimately decide to make its facilities available to outside organisations only for certain purposes, and not to make
them available for other purposes... [if] a speaker or activity might be so offensive.”
Likewise, the University of Johannesburg (UJ) was requested by over 450 leading South African academics – including nine vice-chancellors and deputy vice-chancellors – to end
its institutional relationship with Israel’s Ben-Gurion University (BGU) last year. UJ did terminate the relationship and, in effect, became the world’s first university to
impose an academic boycott on Israel. Then, according to Nina Butler of the Rhodes University Palestinian Solidarity Forum, writing for the Mail&Guardian Thoughtleader last
week, another local university “was approached by BGU with a large amount of funding for water research, only to be told explicitly that their association and money was not
desirable.”
At BGU itself, this week also an important moment for the academic boycott when a conference on Monday promoting ‘African Entrepreneurs’ was the subject of criticism, given the
university’s ongoing collaboration with the Israeli military and the occupation of Palestine. Laudably, Zimbabwean historian Musiwaro Ndakaripa withdrew as a result of BDS
commitments, but some Africans went ahead to violate the Palestinians’ boycott call, including the Angolan ambassador.
But elsewhere on the Israel-boycott front, matters are slowly improving. Last week, Pretoria’s Ambassador in Tel Aviv was summoned by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a
formal reprimand because the SA Department of Trade and Industry ruled against ‘Made in Israel’ label in the marketing of Ahava Cosmetics, Soda Stream and other products from
the illegal West Bank settlements. This extends existing labeling requirements of the European Union and Britain in a way that will facilitate the boycott of Israeli Settlement
products, so Israel’s Foreign Ministry complained that it is “negatively tagging a state through a special marking, according to national-political criteria. Accordingly, this
is a racist (sic) measure.” In reply: was it racist to oppose SA apartheid by boycotting the state institutions and the companies which made it tick, thus hastening the end of
official racism?
Likewise, Israel’s Pretoria embassy spokesperson Hila Stern ratcheted up the rhetoric upon learning of UKZN’s about-face, describing it as a “campaign of intellectual terror.”
Quite right. When in 2010 US Vice President Joe Biden labeled WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange a terrorist for revealing imperialism’s horrid secrets, and when the US State Department
kept Nelson Mandela on its books as a terrorist from the early 1960s right through 2008 (when Congress forced a change), there was much these two men could be proud of. The UKZN
academic activists who raised the stakes by further educating South Africa about solidarity ethics will hopefully continue to ‘terrorise’ the Israeli apartheid regime, just as
did BDS ‘terrorise’ those on the side of South African apartheid decades ago. www.zcommunications.org
Bond directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society and Desai coordinates BDS South Africa.
South Africa’s dangerously unsafe financial intercourse
Patrick Bond 26 April 2012
Just before last weekend’s meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) board in Washington, South Africa's finance minister dropped us an obscure news item: “Gordhan concerned about rand volatility” (Reuters, April 16).
Hidden away in the business pages, it was nevertheless an important confession. Pretoria can no longer remain in denial about South Africa’s glaring economic HIV+ status, what with our regular breakouts of full-blown financial AIDS, in a world featuring the collapse of so many sickly economies. Indeed, the rampaging plague will infect many more countries now that the IMF has an additional $430 billion to jet around the world with, thanks to careless finance ministers like our Pravin Gordhan.
Three years ago, his predecessor Trevor Manuel was responsible for lobbying the world to grant the IMF a $500 billion capital boost, aimed at firming up world finance after the 2008 melt. Now the banksters’ pimps are back for more, and even the BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – were asked to fork out another $100 billion. Gordhan is on record supporting the bailout, even though the other BRICS haven’t yet paid a cent.
For once in his life, Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch spoke for the world’s masses when on Monday he tweeted about Britain’s contribution: “Govt sending IMF another £10bn to the euro. Must be mad. Not even US or China chipping in.”
Stodgy men like Murdoch may not like the ways of the wilder Europeans. And it’s true that the IMF remains full of unrehabilitated financial libertines, whose advice is inevitably to remove protections against monetary malfeasance, especially exchange controls. To paraphrase their advice with a sickening local anti-condom joke, “You can’t enjoy the sweet if the wrapper is still on.”
Even Nelson Mandela, who mistakenly approved a $750 million IMF loan a few months before our 1994 liberation from political apartheid, adopted the same suicidal philosophy – we may call it 'economic apartheid'. So as Gordhan is correct to finally now lament, the South African currency, the rand, became intensely ‘volatile’ – i.e., crashing dramatically, akin to a heart attack. Face it, that’s what happens when you play the field bare and unprotected, prone to picking up vile contagions from the world’s diseased financial industry, in an intellectual milieu of rampant economic-AIDS denialism.
Other opportunistic infections are all too obvious: a persistent current account deficit that by early 2009 had given us the reputation of the world’s riskiest of 17 emerging markets, according to Economist gossip. Last year, that status forced up our prime interest rate – the equivalent of a cheap perfume to attract sleazy one-night-stand banksters – to the world’s second-highest level, after Greece.
SA current account deficit; Economist risk rating; comparative interest rates
Why have we been so unhygienic in our international economic relations? There were those notoriously bad influences on Mandela at the World Economic Forum in 1992 and then two years later, IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus reportedly told him he had to reappoint apartheid’s two main economic managers – both dirty old men with racist, big business swagger – when he took office in May 1994. Perhaps giddy with all the attention he was receiving then, Mandela stupidly agreed.
So it was SA Reserve Bank governor Chris Stals who, in March 1995, gave us a really bad dose of the virus just at the time the rest of the world was becoming aware of the emerging markets epidemic, a few weeks after Mexico caught economic Slim’s Disease and its currency crashed by two thirds. Stals cut a gaping hole in the only condom we had on at the time, the Finrand (‘Financial rand’), our decade-old system of discouraging capital flight. Within a year, in February 1996, the result was a crash of a third of the rand’s value, ironically catalyzed by a rumour that Mandela was ill.
Since then, like blood-letting in the 18th century, those promiscuous Pretoria players – the latter-day Lotharios Stals (1989-99), Tito Mboweni (1999-2009) and now Gill Marcus at the SA Reserve Bank and Chris Liebenberg (1994-95), Manuel (1995-2009) and Gordhan at Treasury – have tried to kill the patient by steadily rolling back that condom, loosening exchange controls more than 30 times. It must have felt relaxing to them and their Sandton financial district buddies, but with potentially fatal risk for the rest of us.
Gordhan (by Zapiro); Marcus; Mboweni (by Zapiro)
The worst period was 1999-2001 when the largest Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed firms – Anglo, DeBeers, Old Mutual, SA Breweries, Mondi, Investec, Didata and others – were given permission by Manuel to take their party to London, switching financial headquarters and primary stock market listings away from Johannesburg.
The blood then hemorrhaged: corporate dividends, rich white people’s apartheid-era loot and ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ tycoons’ tenderpreneurship takings (e.g. Mzi Khumalo’s illegal R1 billion+ of capital flight) spurted out of SA at record rates. In 2007, according to economists from Wits University, the capital outflow amounted to more than a fifth of the country’s GDP that year.
Worse yet, our children will be adversely affected by this generation’s irresponsibility. For in order to pay off the capital-flight financiers, Manuel and Gordhan contracted foreign debt that is now $100 billion higher than the $25 billion Nelson Mandela inherited in 1994 – putting us in danger of reaching mid-1980s levels when South Africa defaulted.
Each time there is a flare-up of the sickness, instead of staying home and recovering through tightened exchange controls, our financial fanatics cock their hips, raise the Reserve Bank’s repo rate to appear more attractive, and go out for more wild-and-crazy unsafe international monetary intercourse in the multiply-afflicted global capital markets. No wonder, as Gordhan has just complained, there’s extreme volatility in the temperature of the economy (the rand’s value). SA’s currency has crashed by more than 15 percent on six separate occasions: 1996, 1998, 2001, 2006, 2008 and 2011.
That’s the worst ongoing currency malady in the world, aside from that fatal case across the Limpopo River, the wretched patient known as Zimdollar who died in January 2009 after Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Gideon Gono gave the country monetary gonorrhea: an inflation rate of trillions of percent. In that sauna-like climate, you can’t just go take a shower to protect yourself from infection, even South African president Jacob Zuma might acknowledge.
Also revealed last week was the secret behind our local ‘growth’: consumer credit binging, which is just another symptom of the underlying disease. The Standard & Poor’s rating agency – usually not so well regarded for timely recognition of financial f*&!-ups – indiscreetly remarked on rising unsecured personal loans for cars, home improvements, overdrafts and credit cards: “There are signs a bubble is forming… there’s no place in the world where unsecured credit has grown at this pace and there hasn’t been a problem with it.”
SA foreign debt soars; consumer debt bubble fit to burst
Our current finance minister, a trained chemist, surely understands these terrible infections. Yet for Gordhan, the cure is simply more globalization, with the vain hope that his intimate partners on Wall Street and the City of London will somehow discover a cure – though all evidence is certainly to the contrary, with Iceland, Ireland, Greece and now Spain keeling over. The Euro itself could be next in the morgue.
This past weekend’s parties in Washington offered more evidence of politicians’ pathological love of the international financial high life. Not even an AIDS specialist like Dr Jim Yong Kim – the just-named World Bank president who while at the World Health Organisation helped get cheap Anti-Retrovirals to millions of HIV+ Africans – has the skills to end this ideological plague, also known as the Washington Consensus.
We thought Dr Kim could at least try, after reading a brilliant book he co-edited a decade ago, Dying for Growth, but he’s since been consorting with Washington quacks, trying as hard as he can to deny his earlier diagnoses by claiming the World Bank is now ‘pro-poor’. Ah, the lies that the terminally ill tell themselves – but no one else is fooled.
None of these fast-lane financiers learnt a lesson in humility from the 2007 firing of World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz due to nepotism (high-salaried favours for a girlfriend), nor from the tragically sex-addicted Dominique Strauss-Kahn, formerly IMF managing director, whose Viagra-fuelled orgies left him in a professionally-vegetated state of decay last May. Strauss-Kahn resigned in disgrace but his influence lingers, as the fast-thinning IMF desperately sought the new capital injection, so that his successor Christine Lagarde (herself still under investigation for politico-financial corruption in Paris) can in turn lend more to the European 1% elites to screw their 99%.
Strauss-Kahn; Zuma and Lagarde; Manuel and Wolfowitz
This is no harmless Mary Poppins, though Lagarde calls her $430 billion benefaction an ‘umbrella’, to disguise its real role: a sharp stick to jab at ordinary people’s bellies.
Gordhan is paying a high price for the company he keeps, if the BRICS go along with Lagarde’s request to add to the bank-bailout kitty. Gordhan was asked by Moneyweb’s Alec Hogg about the $100 million Pretoria is expected to contribute to the IMF: “Many African countries went through hell in the 70s and 80s because of conditionality according to these loans. Are you going to try and insist that there is similar conditionality now that the boot is on the other foot, as it were?”
“Absolutely,” replied hell-raiser Gordhan, “The IMF must be as proactive in developed countries as it is in developing countries. The days of this unequal treatment and the nasty treatment, if you like, for developing countries and politeness for developed countries must pass.”
Such a ‘proactive’ reversion to ‘nasty’ financial intercourse will be a pain in the ass for workers and poor people in Southern Europe, already victims of those men who, during Strauss-Kahn’s reign, earned the informal nickname International Maid Fornicators.
In this daredevil milieu, we can only expect Washington’s virus to spread. So it’s long overdue for those svelte swingers Gordhan and Marcus to take some time off to detox and get some overdue sex education. While well-intentioned but inept Keynesian doctors like Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Jeffrey Sachs still search plaintively for an AIDS cure – an unending process that mainly allows the authorities to continue merrily along in their hedonistic ways – it’s time now to start practicing the ABCs: Abstain; Be faithful; and Condomise
That requires
abstaining from further financial liberalization and from paying IMF pimps.
Being faithful to poor and working people at home, instead of partying with the ever-unfaithful Goldman Sachs mafia (the ones who hired Mboweni after his 2009 firing); and
Condomizing by putting our exchange control system back on as tight as we can.
Others have done so since the pandemic hit emerging markets in the late 1990s. As a result, after an initial shock exposure which weakened their immune system, several countries condomized and even defaulted on Odious Debts, and grew stronger and more self-reliant: Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador and Malaysia. Moreover, China and India never removed their exchange-control condom, and are now healthier, bigger and bolder than ever.
I’m optimistic that South Africans – or at least all those outside the Union Building, the Treasury and Reserve Bank (oh, and Parliament, which appears a lost cause) – can learn these lessons. After all, a caring populace moved, over the past decade, from widespread stigmatization of such afflictions to successful activism in search of affordable treatment, even facing down Big Pharma, the Thabo Mbeki and George W. Bush regimes, and the World Trade Organisation’s Intellectual Property fetish.
If a Financial Treatment Action Campaign arose here in 2012, as did Occupy Wall Street in the belly of the New York beast last September, it would surely do much more than teach the ABCs. Like those in the first TAC, the activists would force Pretoria to first reverse its Washington-Consensus denialism and immediately provide genuine Anti-FinancialViral therapies at clinics, factories, fields, homes and even shopping centres across the country. It’s South Africa’s turn for a new moral regeneration campaign, but this time one that takes seriously the challenge of economic liberation, instead of the current crew’s fascination with unending financial liberalization. www.counterpunch.org
Patrick Bond’s recent books are Politics of Climate Justice, Durban’s Climate Gamble and Zuma’s Own Goal.
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
Nigeria: A Bill of Rights for road, marine and rail users needed
Fidelis Allen First Published in Pambazuka 7 April 2012
A bill of rights that protects Nigerians from insecurity and violence on the roads is also needed alongside the coming bill of rights for air travellers.
‘Travellers Bill of Rights for the unfriendly sky’ was the title of a recent report in a daily newspaper in Nigeria, in which the civil aviation authority notes that Nigerian air travellers will soon heave a sigh of relief. [1] Now that frequent fliers will soon have a bill of rights that will protect them from the abuse of unnecessary delays, unfriendly flying and so on in Nigeria, can we also expect a bill or rights for road travellers who are mostly poor Nigerians without the cash to fly? The roads are bad, full of pot holes, infested with kidnappers, armed robbers, gas or fumes from cars that are not roadworthy, money-extorting police officers and so on.
The lots of the road traveller are indeed diverse and troubling, within cities, inter-city, inter-state and even in the countryside. Unmistakably, aviation matters fall within the exclusive list of the federal legislative divisions in Nigeria. Road and marine transportation however are generally areas in which all three tiers of local, state and federal government are currently free to engage with service delivery. Unfortunately, it seems that policies, rules, regulations and laws in this sector sometimes portray a dangerous class orientation in Nigeria. The coming Bill is not a bad one. But those who fly are those basically living above the line separating rich from poor. At least, this is an assumption that seems real. After all, how many poor people on the national minimum wage of N18,000 can afford a domestic flight from say, Port Harcourt to Lagos or Abuja. For N18,000 is also the average amount needed for a single adult flying on these domestic routes. Road transportation remains the only alternative for the poor.
In January this year, a mass transit bus that left Port Harcourt for Abuja met its waterloo around the Lokoja axis. Passengers were not only robbed of their monies and personal belongings; all the girls in the bus were raped by the thieves, an experience that is now becoming common on the roads. I cannot forget my own experience in January 2007 on my way from Lagos. I needed to be in Port Harcourt the following morning, do some transactions and return to Lagos, but it was late and I could not catch a flight from Lagos that evening. The alternative was a night bus, which I gladly but fearfully boarded. Just somewhere after Ore, for those familiar with that road, at a very bad spot, where the driver had to slow down, suddenly young men with guns started jumping into the bus from the front. The bus had just one door adjacent to the driver’s seat. The disappearance of the driver and conductor was also swift, shocking and magical, leaving us alone with the thieves who numbered about 16. It was the first time I had ever had such an experience on a night journey. The thieves ordered every one out after emptying our pockets of money. I remember a particular woman whom they insisted must give them N300,000 which they claimed she had. This went on for close to one hour. Eventually we were all asked to lie on one another in the middle of the road, on which trucks and other vehicles were supposed to be plying, with our eyes closed or level to the ground.
The Nigerian police came ten minutes after the thieves successfully robbed us. Fortunately, none of the women in the bus were raped. But the memory is unpalatable. And I vowed to myself never to travel by road nor undertake night journeys again in my life. It took an extra 24 hours to arrive in Port Harcourt; a journey that should have ended seven hours after the incident. This was because we eventually had to spend the whole night at that spot, as we did not know the whereabouts of our driver and conductor. The trauma, devastation and frustration were enough to decide, as I did, never to travel in the night again. Yet there are many others who cannot take such a decision. They are probably getting robbed at other times too. Insecurity on the roads will be the next monster that will mar the Nigerian nation if nothing is done now.
We cannot quantify the value of effective security and smoothness of the roads for road travellers. The local economy and prosperity at the level of individual economic trading concerns - even for farmers who need to transport their farm produce to neighbouring villages, towns or markets - currently depends mainly on unsafe roads and crude marine transportation. Another dimension to this is the rate of automobile accidents on Nigerian roads. Most of the time, it is because road users are either trying to avoid bad spots, are driving at top speed for fear of robbery attack, or driving cars that do not receive regular maintenance. Alcohol plays a negative role as well. The public transport operators are not excluded from the problems. Marginal public regulation and control to ensure standards does not only add a dangerous dimension, it has become rationalised with inefficiency and poor service delivery by government workers in relevant ministries at the state and federal government levels. The local government councils constitute a different problem area. They set up task forces that become a problem for the free-flow of traffic for road users on inter-state or inter-local government journeys.
The rail system has long broken down. But how did we get here? This is something working in many parts of the world. For Nigeria, the rail system was basically a colonial creation to facilitate transportation of agricultural produce from the hinterland to the ports for easy export. It was not intended to serve the local domestic transportation needs, which is why one must keep wondering why the post-colonial state in Nigeria has deteriorated so badly in service delivery. Governments are fast withdrawing from public service delivery on the excuse of privatisation. Yet, there are many areas where this is not working. The responsibility of fixing the roads is not any private investors. Maybe eventually, the roads will be privatised, at which point one can be sure that some poor people will never think of travelling again. Resources for effective and efficient air, marine, road and rail transportation in Nigeria are available. This has been the truth, especially since the Nigerian state began to flaunt itself as oil resource rich. It is clear that the oil resource has only encouraged corruption and class-oriented programmes. It is no surprise then that only the rich can fly in Nigeria.
Recently I was in the city of Geneva where the tram, which is free for commuters, is powered with energy generated from a lake in the city. It was amazing, but it called my attention to the wroth in Nigerian cities’ transportation deficiencies, where the numbers of cars alone emit dangerous substances that can kill residents faster than any other disease. The poor are left to solve their own problems while the rich: oil block owners, oil workers, politicians in Abuja, States and local governments, local petty bourgeois, foreign capitalists, top civil servants, some neoliberal local and foreign professional NGO practitioners and so on, are now seemingly being able to extract a bill of rights for travellers from the political class. But who will do the same for road travellers? Who takes responsibility for the wroth in the country’s road, marine and rail transport systems? The problem is even worse for riverine states and communities like Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta, Lagos, Cross Rivers and so on, where villages separated by water do not even have well organised transport systems facilitated by government to reduce the pain of the poor. In some of these villages, for instance in Rivers State, oil companies make huge money from oil wells, but leave their host communities stranded with nothing, not even the assistance needed in the area of inter-village transportation of goods and persons. A bill of rights that protects Nigerians from insecurity on the roads, compels government to fix the roads, resuscitate or build a modern rail system, ensures a developed marine transport system and so on, is also needed alongside the coming bill of rights for air travellers in Nigeria. www.pambazuka.org
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Fidelis Allen,PhD, is based at the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Howard College Campus.
Kebble, Crony Capitalism 2.0 and the Wretched of South Africa
Crony capitalism in South Africa - discussion on Redi Thlabi's Radio 702 talkshow Political Economist, Patrick Bond, penned an insightful article on how cronyism in South Africa is alive and well. He used one of the most infamous recent example, that of failed and disgraced mining magnate ‑ Brett Kebble. Bond goes on to illustrate how the naked cronyism of Kebble, still infests South African life beyond the grave. Listen to Audio
Patrick Bond 4 April 2012
Brett Kebble and his advisee, Jacob Zuma
Do Pretoria and Johannesburg deserve the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, cities along the ancient Jordan River which were, according to The Book of Genesis, consumed by fire and brimstone as punishment for sinful hedonism?
Etymologically, Sodom – today just a salt pan at the Dead Sea – comes from ‘fortified’ and Gomorrah meant ‘deep’ with ‘copious water.’ So the names match nicely, given the respective catastrophes besetting Pretoria’s police – national commissioners Jackie Selebi and Bheki Cele implicated in corruption with a potential third, Richard Mdluli, nearly there – and Joburg’s goldmines: Acid Mine Drainage; a corrupt Paris firm’s 2001-06 water commercialization (causing a decade’s worth of Soweto community protests); and at the city’s main post-apartheid water source in Lesotho’s dams, notorious eco-destructive graft.
Sodom and Gomorrah initially existed in an Eden-type setting on the Jordan River (this, of course, a couple of millennia before Israel occupied the West Bank, stealing all the good land and water). Before sin became pervasive, the Jordan Valley was politically comparable to at least the image of a contemporary Rainbow Nation, one born in 1994 of heroic struggle after a national liberation movement overcame apartheid crimes against humanity, led by Saint Nelson Mandela.
Eighteen years later, with the scale of state-related corruption reaching R25 billion per year, according to the Special Investigating Unit, and private-sector corruption at least twice that according to Transparency-South Africa, God’s wrath against the rulers of Pretoria and Johannesburg appears overdue.
Good riddance, Brett Kebble Why, then, are the relatively minor machinations of the late Brett Kebble during the late 1990s and early 2000s of such enduring interest? (He ripped off maybe a billion and a half rand in his decade of CEO chaos.)
Historians may well decide that Kebble’s career represented a kind of diamond-encrusted-gold-ringed finger rudely pulled from a cracking Mbeki-era dyke – already shaking at the foundations after the Mandela-era Arms Deal – thus swamping the heart and soul of the African National Congress (ANC) leadership with financial malfeasance and political rot.
Kebble was, after all, extremely good at his game, up to the point the inverted pyramid crashed in mid-2005. More brazenly than any other previously-and-still-empowered South African, he utterly scammed the new political elite, investors and the cultural crowd with his patriotic-white-friend-of-black-empowerment-and-the-arts hustle. That’s why a critique on the political terrain that Allan Kolski Horwitz chooses in the parody play Comrade Babble, does so much collateral damage to South Africa’s multiple opportunists. (http://www.goingplacessa.co.za/article_detail.asp?Article_ID=2709)
Though the wreckage Kebble left was extensive, he was killed at the remarkably young age of 41, and is remembered amongst financier peers mainly for having run into the ground the once-proud mining houses JCI, Western Areas and Randgold. Summing up his contribution to South African entrepreneurship, veteran business editor Jim Jones recalls,
Kebble’s modus operandi was the same as that of many fraudsters. He quietly transferred and sold shares in London-listed Randgold & Resources (R&R) to pay pressing creditors, but concealed those transfers so as to fool creditors and shareholders of JCI and R&E into believing their claims against the public companies were backed by R&R shares worth R1.2 billion. And he quietly sold a significant part of JCI’s shareholding in gold company Western Areas for another few hundred million rands. Then there were shares, worth hundreds of millions, in uranium hopeful Afrikander Lease, in Harmony and Anglo Platinum, which have disappeared without trace.
The most detailed autopsy of the scamming was by Barry Sergeant, whose book Brett Kebble: The Inside Story, reveals how much was stripped through unsound financial engineering:
the uneasy truth of the overall matter is that, under Kebble, JCI itself was a gigantic slush fund. A thorough forensic examination and analysis of the JCI group accounts from 1997, including deconsolidation and reconstruction of the accounts, revealed that JCI had posted total losses of R792 million from 1997 to 2004. This is simply staggering, given that at no time during this entire period did JCI have any form of normalised income…
Sweltering under his own flawed delusions, Kebble was forced to fritter about, blowing his off-key clarion, moving from one rats-and-mice deal to the next, concocting one irregular transaction after another. The virtuoso moved into a jejune phase of his business career, seemingly determined to prove that when measured as a conventional businessman, he was a complete and utter disaster.
But he got away with it for way too long, thanks to the lack of regulator oversight, as well as the blindness of South Africa’s business journalists, with the exception of noseweek’s Martin Welz and The Citizen’s Paul Kirk, both of whom made it to Kebble’s ‘hit list’.
Because of slack bureaucrats and newspapers, not much was evident to the outside world until mid-2003. Though his firms were in negative equity in 1999 and personally he was technically insolvent as early as 2001, Kebble’s disasters multiplied mostly under cover. Finally in August 2005, the deathly-ill mining houses were stripped from his control by his leading creditor, Investec, and his main outside investor, the R220 billion Allen Gray fund which owned around a fifth of the three Kebble-controlled firms. (Other Randgold shareholders in turn sued Investec for continuing Kebble’s Ponzi scheming long, after his firms should have been eased out of management’s hands.)
A few weeks later came the near-fatal shooting of Allen Gray investigator Stephen Mildenhall, so ordered by Kebble because of his critical audit of JCI and Randgold books.
Then on 28 September 2005, Kebble suffered what the National Prosecuting Authority termed an ‘assisted suicide’, shocking South Africa. Why did he go in this convoluted manner? The man who hired the shooters, Clinton Nassif, “was looking for means of killing Kebble in a way that would not look like a suicide, so that the insurance could still pay out and look after his family,” Nassif’s main assistant testified in court, confirming Kebble’s scamming orientation right to the very end.
Indemnity from prosecution was given to the three killers, but it was the underworld crime boss Glenn Agliotti – a dear friend of then Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi (‘finish en klaar’) – who confessed to have been the main suicide assister. He nevertheless won acquittal from Judge Frans Kgomo, and the whole episode of prosecuting Kebble’s death still reflects incredibly badly on South African politics, policing and justice.
Kgomo referred to Mario Puzo’s mafia novel The Godfather: “The trickery and shenanigans practised ... as demonstrated in that book was demonstrated by this family, the Kebbles.” In his judgment, Kgomo continued, “‘The Don’ was Brett Kebble, the ‘consiglieri’ was John Stratton, the ‘caporegime’ was the accused, the ‘lower caporegime’ was Clinton Nassif and the ‘button men’ were [self-confessed hitmen] Mikey Schultz and bouncers Nigel McGurk and Faizel Smith.”
But police and prosecutorial incompetence – or worse, conspiracy to sabotage the case – left Kebble’s murder, by seven bullets at near point-blank range in his top-of-the-range Mercedes late one spring night in suburban Johannesburg, shrouded in dust.
To add to the confusion, even after Kebble’s financial fall and disreputable death, a horde of politicians and businessmen proudly considered themselves as friends. Consider this partial list of high-profile attendees of Kebble’s October 2005 Cape Town funeral: Essop Pahad, David Gleason, Brigitte Radebe, Saki Macozoma, Peter Gray, Mafika Mkwanazi, Tokyo Sexwale, Tony Yengeni, Ebrahim Rasool, Mo Shaik, Pam Golding, Nomaindia Mfeketo, Limpho Hani, Mbulelo Goniwe, Baleka Mbete and Dali Tambo.
The pallbearers were ANC youth leaders Lunga Ncwana, Songezo Mjongile, Andile Nkuhlu and Sharif Pandor.
But Kebble’s damage at a systemic level is far more impressive, especially given the loose morals of the man who pulled off what was perhaps South Africa’s worst-ever corporate mauling, on the watch of managers from major financial institutions like Allen Gray, who watched it happen in slow motion, again and again, between 1997 and 2005.
As an aside, it always makes me chuckle to read, repeatedly, how South Africa’s financial system is judged one of the world’s most healthy and well managed – ranking fourth in the World Economic Forum’s most recent Global Competitiveness Report – while thinking of how the major banks and investment houses sunk pension and insurance funds down Kebble’s black hole of corruption.
Charming Kebble’s financial scamming Seducing politicos and investors alike, the Kebble charisma, drilled in early at St Andrews boarding school and then the University of Cape Town Law School, was apparently mesmerizing. As Chris Barron explained in the Sunday Times shortly before Kebble’s murder,
He’s extremely urbane: impeccably dressed and groomed, a polished talker with an accent to match. He plays the great entertainer well. He has a good line in jokes to suit every occasion (even down to a private secretary called Meininghaus), and is clearly a man of culture. He quotes Shakespeare, is a nimble pianist and pays serious money for serious art. Then, of course, he’s clever. His brain operates on a higher level. He can interpret a balance sheet at a glance, make lightning fast mental calculations, spot the gap and visualise the shortest way through it.
Kebble came of age in a time, before the 2002-08 world commodities boom and during the initial debt-loaded-dealing era of black empowerment, when any smart mining house was considering disinvestment (not least for huge forthcoming environmental liabilities including Acid Mine Drainage) and when any huckster could move in. As Barron recalls,
Analysts and journalists were swept along as much by his polished persona as by a gung-ho, devil-may-care attitude that made the local mining world as exciting as during the heady days of Barney Barnato. If they hadn’t been so busy laughing at his jokes, admiring his fancy fingerwork on the ivories and his ability to quote Shakespeare, they might have been more sceptical and noticed vaguely disturbing signs.
As Barron continues, the SA financial industry stood exposed as inexperienced rubes:
From the start he was a heavy share trader, trading up to a million Rand Leases shares a day. It was a tendency that should have sounded a warning. The way he took over Randgold and others was impressive, but it was essentially pushing numbers round a board, not building solid shareholder value. There was no cash in sight. He was simply using one company to take over another by transferring shares. Admittedly value was being added for shareholders along the way, but how much in relation to the value being added to Kebble family interests was a question that the sheer complexity of the structure Kebble was creating made almost impossible to answer.
The first disaster, remarks Barron, did not trip up Kebble for more than a few weeks:
SA investors barred from foreign stocks saw Kebble’s West African mines as the next best thing to Bre-X, and that virtually every local analyst thought Kebble could do no wrong pushed Randgold shares from R4 to R41.50 in 1997. Share options worth millions were granted to the Randgold directors before the Bre-X bubble burst and Randgold shares plummeted to R2.
Kebble responded to failure by raising the stakes:
Years of uncritical adulation had fed Kebble’s always incipient arrogance to the point where it had become uncontrollable. In terms of the mining business he was still an upstart, but he intimidated those with far more experience who disagreed with him. He phoned fund managers and demand to know why they were selling Randgold or related shares.
As if to underline the naivety of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange crew, says Barron,
Rather than accuse Kebble of gross unprofessionalism, analysts still somewhat starry-eyed over his virtuoso personality tut-tutted that this was merely a case of over-enthusiasm, of wanting to move too quickly because to Kebble “slow is boring”… [T]here then came Kebble’s cavalier use of money owing to shareholders of Randfontein, a company in which he had a minority stake, to add cashflow to a Kebble family mine, Western Areas. Still excuses were found for his behaviour, still directors and advisers gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Barry Sargeant picks up the story:
JCI’s auditors throughout the relevant period, Charles Orbach & Company, could well argue that the accounts of JCI and its subsidiaries complied with all the technical rules that auditors are expected to apply, but there can be no question that the economic substance of JCI’s accounts was unmitigated trash. Had they been presented on a see-through basis, as in the various appendixes to this book, JCI would have been stampeded by entire kennels of fiduciary watchdogs, including the SA Institute of Chartered Accountants, the Public Accountants’ and Auditors’ Board, the JSE (which, ironically, has a special committee to monitor accounts), the Financial Services Board and the full gamut of law enforcement agencies. The overweening naivety of these various oversight entities will remain both unthinkable and unpalatable.
One reason he got away with it for so long was that Kebble had an awe-inspiring capacity to not only drop names of political heavyweights, but to deposit small fortunes into their bank accounts.
Playing politics with poison In 2010, thanks to yet another leaked police tape, much more was finally understood regarding Kebble’s strategic maneuvres. He located himself directly within the personality divide between the Mbeki and Zuma camps, a fissure that imploded the ANC during ‘eight days in September 2008’, as Frank Chikane’s book has it. The palace coup was justified by Zuma’s men, on grounds he was being unfairly abused by Mbeki’s organs of the state.
Kebble’s so-called ‘voice from the grave’ tape, recorded in the office of crime intelligence commander Mulangi Mphego at police headquarters in Pretoria in 2003, allowed Mail&Guardian journalists Jackie Mapiloko and Sam Sole to trace some links directly to the president of Interpol, SA Police Commissioner Selebi, who was later imprisoned for corruption charges:
In the meeting, Kebble repeats and fleshes out claims he had already made in private – that he was a victim of an abuse of office by former director of public prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka and his Scorpions investigators… It is clear from the tape that [Kebble right-hand man John] Stratton was in regular contact with Mphego – whom he calls “Mphegs” – and was providing him with information from Kebble’s own private intelligence network. In the meeting Kebble links Ngcuka to the same group of alleged power-brokers who were to emerge in the hoax email allegations and in the so-called Zuma tapes that scotched the Zuma prosecution. They include businessmen Saki Macozoma and Mzi Khumalo and Ngcuka’s wife, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka…
In the meeting Kebble makes it clear that he believes Ngcuka’s investigation of cases against him and his father – over two separate cases of alleged corporate fraud – were legally unfounded and politically motivated. Kebble, who emerges from the two-hour meeting as an astute and polished communicator, tells Mphego and Lalla:
“I knew from a fairly early stage – because he came to tell me – that Mzi [Khumalo] had a close relationship with Ngcuka. He came and said, ‘You know these claims you’ve got against me [Kebble’s company JCI was seeking to enforce a R30-million debt against Khumalo] … I know Bulelani very well and maybe if we can settle this thing he won’t be so hard on you …’ I then started to look very closely at who was around Ngcuka and found these guys had a pattern of operating. They would get together regularly – Mzi, Saki, Moss Ngoasheng [former president Thabo Mbeki’s former economic adviser] … and Bulelani and friends – get together and drink heavily every Friday night … and hatch their plots… The reason for this attack [on me] is that Bulelani’s office is being abused. The office is used not in pursuit of justice; it was used to settle scores, commercially and politically.”
As Mapiloko and Sole continue, Kebble took his war with the Mbeki cronies very seriously:
Kebble told the spy chiefs that he was about to go public with his allegations and added that he was “very grateful for the guidance and help you have given us”… Of significance is that the meeting took place about a month after Mphego had also secretly filmed an interview with Glenn Agliotti, in which the policeman confronted Agliotti about claims that he was using money from the Kebbles to pay off Selebi. In that interview Agliotti said he had used Selebi’s name to get money out of Kebble, but Mphego makes no mention of this in his interview with Kebble and Stratton. Instead, he approached Agliotti’s role obliquely, hinting that some of Kebble’s associations might be undermining his credibility… Kebble said: “We’ve never paid any money to anybody for any favours … I put money in to fund the ANC lavishly, I fund the ANC Youth League lavishly.”
Corrupting the youth According to the SA Revenue Service, Kebble’s estate owed a bill of R180 million, and Randgold alone demanded R290 million from the dead man’s assets. The decade of decadence left vast claims by jilted investors, not to mention the huge shareholder losses in corporate securities that Kebble had turned into loo paper. The firms responsible for winding up Kebble’s liabilities came up short, holding only R40 million in left-over personal assets listed in his will.
How would the trustees squeeze a bit more money back for Kebble’s creditors and the taxman? Even after he was effectively bankrupt, Kebble continued to dish out financial favours, for which the trustees demanded repayment. The list of 17 recipients of last-gasp Kebble largesse, and claims made against them by the estate’s trustees, is fascinating, and helps explain how the ANCYL’s investment arm had tens of millions of rands at its disposal by the mid-2000s:
• a variety of ANC branches received R4.6 million; • the ANC Youth League itself got R1.3 million; • ANCYL leader Lunga Ncwana and the family trust received more than R10 million; • ANCYL national executive committee member Songezo Mjongile received nearly R850 000; and • approximately R500 000 was owed each by ANCYL secretary general Sihle Zikalala, Thuthukile Mazibuko Skweyiya (wife of former minister Zola), and the late trade union leader and ANC member of parliament John Gomomo.
The disgraced former ANC spokesperson Carl Niehaus was charged with R100 000, and though he claimed it was for media work he did for Kebble, for whatever reason he agreed to repay the full amount. So did the estate of Gomomo (R480 000), marking yet another great labour leader’s descent into the hell of class-treason. It was also reported that ANC politician and businessman Nissen repaid R370 000 and that the Democratic Alliance repaid R250 000 it received in 2004.
But the ANC refused to repay on grounds, as we consider in the conclusion, that Kebble got value for money. Court records show that some of Kebble’s payments to the ruling party were routed through Sekunjalo CEO Dr Iqbal Surve, youth league member Lunga Ncwana, the Sandton Park Plaza and the Balalaika hotel. Kebble’s payments to the ANCYL included R400 000 for its 2004 Western Cape provincial conference, R335000 for the tombstone of Mxolisi Majombozi and an “end-of-year road show”, and R30000 for “travelling and accommodation expenses” for league officials.
Others did more venal heavy lifting for Kebble, and were paid accordingly. According to Jim Jones, “Kebble sought to burnish his public image by channelling about R30-million through journalist David Gleason when Gleason acquired nominal ownership of Finance Week. That venture folded, but Gleason continued to deliver favourable press coverage or attacks on those with whom Kebble had commercial disputes.”
Although as Kebble bragged, the ANCYL’s Lembede Investment Holdings was given lavish support – or some say was manipulated – by Kebble, recent president Julius Malema pleaded ignorance: “We don’t even know what Kebble look like.” (Malema was one of the most visible to make inroads into Crony Capitalism 3.0, but the failure of 2.0 is probably a prerequisite, one that Kebble assisted through his version of Black Economic Empowerment suicide, as noted below.)
But his predecessor, Fikile Mbalula (now sports minister), the Malema ally who is anticipated to run against incumbent Gwede Mantashe for general secretary of the ANC in December 2012, was a well-lubricated and occasionally-grateful beneficiary. Interviewed for journalist Mandy Weiner’s exhaustive book Killing Kebble, the dead man’s butler, Andrew Minaar, remarked of Mbalula: “He’d come here and in like an hour he’d finished off a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label.”
Talking to Weiner, Kebble personal assistant Laura Sham also recalled Mbalula’s posse: “They’d be fine when they arrived, but the more they drank, they’d become hooligans. I knew Fikile drank quite a bit. They behaved like absolute hooligans.”
(After the Mail&Guardian reported all this, Mbalula sued for defamation and decisively lost.)
Sham explained the ambivalent relationship Kebble had with the ANCYL: “He gave them R4-million for their conference one year. Brett’s name was in the papers a lot at the time and he wasn’t looking good. They actually said to him ‘please don’t come to the conference’ after he funded their conference … Brett came into the office and he was so downtrodden. He said to me: ‘How quickly they forget’ … It was a slap in the face.”
Denying the slight, Mbalula told the M&G’s Mandy Rossouw that he thought Kebble had been treated fairly: “He wanted political capital out of that relationship to advance his business interests and the youth league wanted to advance its business interests.”
The most corrupted of all? The highest-profile cretins within South Africa’s unauthentic bourgeoisie may well be Zuma nephew Khulubuse, Zuma lawyer Michael Hulley and Mandela grandson Zondwa, because of the economic, labour and ecological volcanoes they willingly inherited from Pamodzi Gold and amplified under the name Aurora Empowerment Systems. But the grandfather of ANC corruption via black business chicanery must be Mzi Khumalo, whom Kebble met thanks to the latter’s former legal secretary, Judy Sexwale, who is the wife of Tokyo.
The ill-fated Kebble-Khumalo relationship was sealed in a 1996 joint purchase of JCI in which Anglo American sold them more than a third of the firm for R54 per share. Although he is discredited by taking tens of millions of rands of the bankrupt Kebble’s money, Gleason’s account in a puff-piece Business Day obituary provides some background:
Responding to Anglo American’s decision to unbundle its ownership of JCI in favour of black ownership, Kebble cobbled together an empowerment consortium and twinned himself with former Robben Islander Mzi Khumalo. After an agonisingly long struggle with a group led by Cyril Ramaphosa – during which JCI’s share price climbed to levels never again seen – Khumalo and Kebble triumphed. But the price was high, not only in money terms. When Khumalo transgressed corporate governance norms inside the house, a long-simmering antagonism between the two men burst into a conflagration that cost Khumalo his chairmanship and left the relationship in permanent animus.
By 1998, after the 50 percent crash of share prices on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange caused by contagion from the world emerging market crisis, they were in trouble and asset-stripped JCI. Khumalo was accused of feeding the best gold mines back to Anglo at a deep discount (the shares were down to R37 then) and later ripping off Harmony gold mines by prematurely cashing in Simane partner shares from a black empowerment gift made by Kebble allegedly worth more than R1 billion. The case went to court in 2000.
According to a report by financial journalist Sherilee Bridge,
JCI's property assets, including its Gold Fields Properties, were unbundled into a new entity called Mzi Khumalo Enterprises with R140 million in cash, Kebble said.
“It was highly unpopular at the time but we considered it an empowerment deal and wanted him to have something to start afresh,” he said. The [court] documents allege that Khumalo never returned the shares or paid for them but that the shares were unlawfully transferred into a trust account, believed to be the Khumalo Family Trust, or sold on without permission… “What happened to Mzi was like winning the lottery,” Kebble said…
The Scorpions are investigating two former officials of the Industrial Development Corporation alleged to have accepted a bribe in the Harmony-Simane empowerment deal. The empowerment deal was plunged in controversy after the shares sold to Simane were thought to have been sold on despite a lock-in clause that prohibited this.
But by 2002, on Moneyweb’s radio show, Kebble explained how he thought a bust loan was the basis for Khumalo’s own manipulation of the state:
ALEC HOGG: You’re bringing up Mzi Khumalo, you’re bringing up a score to be settled – what proof do you have of that? BRETT KEBBLE: Mzi owes us a lot of money and he has not paid us. ALEC HOGG: What’s a lot of money? BRETT KEBBLE: Well, close on R50m. So he’s avoided paying us for many years. There’s a lot of interest on this money, so it gets to around R50m. He came and had a meeting with me one day at the time when this matter was being, as I said, plucked from the hands of the FSB. ALEC HOGG: All right, let’s go back a little. This has to do with the share price, or the allegations of share price manipulation of four years ago? BRETT KEBBLE: Correct. So we heard one day via the media that the Director of Public Prosecutions was going to investigate the matter further and would then make a pronouncement. At about the same time I got a visit from Mzi Khumalo, who told me that he was a great friend of Bulelani Ngcuka’s, that they spent a lot of time together and that he could influence certain outcomes with this individual, and that Bulelani was looking for a big, white fish to fry and that I was going to be that fish.
Whether true or not, a deal was done with Khumalo to settle for the R30 million in 2004. And yet within a few years, Khumalo was himself fried as Ngcuka was edged out of power by the Zuma Tsunami. In mid 2011, the SA Reserve Bank attempted to attach Khumalo’s assets and shares worth R1 billion as penalty for violating exchange controls in collusion with Deutsche Bank’s London office. By late 2011, Khumalo’s main SA vehicle, Metallon Corporation, was liquidated. Earlier, his hotel business – Joob Joob Investments – was shut down because he didn’t repay R27 million while building the Zimbali hotel north of Durban, in what is Africa’s most exclusive gated community.
Khumalo’s hutzpah, over-the-top scamming and utilization of friends in high places was so similar to Kebbble’s rise and demise, that one must tip a hat to the bitter teacher.
Forging art empowerment What we know of another crucial but soon soured partnership is Kebble’s love for high art. The Brett Kebble Art Award started in 2003 with R100 000 for the winner, a prize doubled in 2004 to R200 000. His personal collection – 142 pieces mostly collected during the post-2001 splurge when he was bankrupt – fetched R54 million at auction, including much-desired pieces by famous South Africans Maggie Laubscher, Irma Stern, Walter Battis, William Kentridge and Alexis Preller. It was far less than the R100 million anticipated by trustees desperate to pray creditors.
Kebble’s empowerment rhetoric notwithstanding, there was apparently only one major black artist’s works in the stable, and those two George Pemba paintings were suspected by noseweek to have been ripped off by Kebble from JCI, whose corporate collection had been reduced to “very little of value,” according to a valuer in 2006.
Aside from noseweek, a sole critical voice spoke out publicly against Kebble’s art sponsorship, and then only mildly: Sean O’Toole in the Mail&Guardian in 2004. He remarked upon Kebble’s
radically revamped, steroid-enhanced art award (double the prize money and run by a professional, reputable curator). Quite befitting the pomp that surrounds the award, the do was at Kilimanjaro, an ostentatious supper club in Johannesburg’s maximum-security Melrose Arch complex. Visual art consultant Clive van den Berg, the newly appointed curator, delivered a carefully worded and credible outline of his vision for the award, before a choreographed piece of music announced Kebble’s arrival. The polite hush became even politer. Both jovial and eloquent, Kebble expanded on his passionate interest in art, which he said offered a “soft refuge for people such as myself.”
“I can’t imagine my life without art,” he said from a lonely circle of light in an otherwise darkened room. “This award is my way of putting something back in for the enjoyment.” Power has the uncanny ability to induce awe. When Kebble finally opened the microphone to the floor, he was greeted with an odd mixture of polite kowtowing and meaningless silence…
For the young, the impecunious and the marginalised, the question of ethics has not even featured. And why should it? Only a fool or a William Blake-like mystic would say “thanks, but no thanks” to a first prize of R200 000. This is not to sidestep the crux of the dilemma, succinctly paraphrased by polemical magazine noseweek: “One would have to be extraordinarily naive to see the awards as anything but a shameless attempt to divert public attention from the... charges of fraud and share manipulation Kebble and his dad Roger are facing”…
Kebble stared me down before replying: “I usually respond with two words. The first starts with an ‘f’.” He quickly qualified this with a more reasoned argument that included references to “empowerment and transformation” and “an African partnership based co-operation.”
That word partnership can sometimes be genuine, though with Khumalo it wasn’t. Instead, like colonial-era Central African Federation leader Godfrey Huggins’ description of how Rhodesia should be run, by whites with black labour, it was akin to “the partnership of rider and horse.” Can we, to conclude, take this relationship up a level, to the partnership between crony capitalists and the ruling party?
Monetary lubrication of wretched politics Delivering the first eulogy at Kebble’s Cape Town funeral, Thabo Mbeki’s closest confidante, Minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad, warned his gathered friends that “What Brett said ... in private should remain private.” Indeed, it was good advice to the scoundrels present. Not only can we understand why, from the pages above, but this remark also sheds light on why in 2008 a Secrecy Bill was put forward by Mbeki’s government that, made yet more extreme under Zuma, signaled the need to ‘keep private’ the corruption that infects the highest levels of South Africa’s new elite.
The most corrupted victim-villain that emerged from the Kebble catastrophes is our ruling party. Not only was Kebble’s money a massively corrupting influence on the inside, it also made possible the skewering of the ANC as being bought-and-paid-for. Much worse than merely an allegation by disillusioned leftists (like myself) and the liberal opposition, this corruption is now a frank confession.
ANC Treasurer Mendi Msimang, who as husband of the notorious health minister Manto and a long-time exiled functionary, knew how power worked and in a 2010 court deposition, let the cat out of the bag. Without any attempt at disguising the role of money in politics, Msimang argued against the Kebble trustees’ attempt to retrieve R3.5 million from the ANC and R850 000 from the ANCYL, pointing out quite calmly in an affidavit that “donors receive value for the funds donated” because corporates’ “indirect benefit” was that in the South African political climate, “the gallant effort and contribution of the ANC” would keep their investments safe.
According to Msimang, Kebble was “maintaining an institution of democracy which (enabled) him to acquire his wealth, which in (turn), enabled him to operate his business in a democratic state free of racism, economic sanctions and free of all the negativity brought by (apartheid).”
Notwithstanding all the recent talk-left about the merits of mines nationalization versus a major new resources tax in the ANC’s leadership, had Kebble lived to 2012 he would have been pouring more investments into hastening the walk-right, i.e. improving the conditions required to best “operate his business,” and reaping his due returns from an ANC embedded within South Africa’s Minerals Energy Complex. The 2012 State of the Nation address and Budget Speech, after all promised more hundreds of billions of rands in subsidies directed to mining houses, reflecting an investment climate “free of all the negativity” associated with either apartheid or the masses’ contemporary demands for redistribution.
How far up did the ANC’s crony-capitalism rot spread, and how early can we find Kebble’s fingerprints? Right to the top, it seems, for the company Catalyst Props was used by Mandela’s lawyer Ismail Ayob (who subsequently fell out with Mandela over money) to buy the original Houghton house Mandela lived in during the 1990s. The 1992 purchase price was R525 000 and Kebble bought it in 2000 for R3 million, then also becoming a director of Catalyst. According to journalist Jeremy Gordin, writing in 2006,
Mandela and murdered mining magnate Brett Kebble were on first-name terms – and in 2000 Kebble bought, apparently at Mandela’s suggestion, the former president’s first home in Houghton. Kebble then allowed Mandela to continue using the house for the work of the Nelson Mandela Foundation for the next few years…
Ayob said that Mandela and Kebble, introduced to one another by then Gauteng premier Tokyo Sexwale, had been on first-name terms – “there was no Mr Mandela and Mr Kebble, it was Madiba and Brett,” said Ayob – and that they had had a very cordial relationship. “And Kebble was a man of very great largesse. You have no idea of how large or widespread his largesse was,” said Ayob… “These days, as you well know, Kebble has become the devil incarnate – and no one wants to admit the connection between him and Madiba.”
The question must, as ever, be raised: do corporations regularly buy influence within the ANC? As publicized in March 2012, did cellphone giant MTN pressure the South African state to not oppose Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, given its vast ownership stake in Iranian telecommunciations? Or did the Chinese government contribute to the ANC and receive value in the form of repeated denials of the Dalai Lama’s visa application? Did this practice start in 1997 when Nelson Mandela awarded the Cape of Good Hope prize to the corrupt Indonesian dictator Suharto, just prior to his democratic overthrow, in exchange for a $25 million donation Suharto made to the ANC? The examples are too numerous to contemplate.
In April 2005, efforts by transparency advocates to have corporate donations to political parties revealed were rejected by the Cape High Court, which judged these parties to be ‘private,’ hence not needing to disclose their funding sources.
Conclusion: ‘Kebbleism’ and ANCorruption But is there any sort of principal at play here, by which purchase of value resulted in a strengthened political current (as opposed to competing faction)? The first time I heard of a new ideology coming from the corpse of Brett Kebble was in a Daily Maverick report by cynic-journo Stephen Grootes, from a December 2009 SA Communist Party congress: “There’s another great word coming out of the conference relating to the League so far – ‘Kebbleism’.”
Within three months, the Communication Workers’ Union endorsed the Cosatu demand for “lifestyle audits of public representatives and leaders, as a ‘Kebbleism’ had taken root.” In February 2011, the KwaZulu-Natal branch of the National Union of Metalworkers of SA criticized a provincial variant of the “deep-seated and entrenched Kebbleism within the ANCYL in order to capture state machinery for self-centred economic and accumulation interests.”
In March 2010, the Friends of Jacob Zuma website carried a post by ‘Concer’ (one of many exhibiting both irrational loyalty and deep wisdom) which reflects the views of so many ANC cadres that it should be quoted at length, notwithstanding the pseudonymical source:
Kebblism started to manifest itself toward the end of Thabo Mbeki’s term and I thought that when the new administration took over, it would make it its priority clamp down on this phenomenon called kebblism but instead it is in this new administration that this phenomenon has entrenched itself, and is now spiralling out of control.
As some people say, our personalities are twofold, we have a bad and good side. Today I will like to say that Mr Kebble was a very good, kind hearted man, and his benevolence was quite remarkable. But the kind of politics he introduced had far reaching implications to our society. It corrupted the soul of the national liberation and that corrupting has spread over to government, culminating in the collapse of service delivery in many parts of the country. Not only that, Kebblism has encouraged venality, produced leaders who are embarrassing the ANC, leaders who claim to be poor but live lifestyles of millionaires. Instead of taking us to their confidence they deny their opulence but we do see the posh cars they drive, we do see the expensive clothes they were and the houses they live in – these things exist and can be verified.
We can deny the truth but facts are there – kebblism is in control.
What, then, was Kebble’s underlying ideology? It has long been evident to opportunistic observers that “talk left, walk right” will take you a long way in Southern African politics, with Robert Mugabe the most extreme case but Mbeki, Zuma, Malema and many others practicing that dance. But Kebble? Here he is talking to M&G reporter O’Toole in 2004:
Some of those we’ve empowered have become part of an elite and developed amnesia. There is a self-proclaimed black royalty. Most of them couldn’t give a shit about liberation. Some people were never interested in brotherhood.
Seriously? Yes, this was the spin from Kebble in his final months, according to O’Toole’s transcript:
Either you have a view like me. You share capital and try to build it to spread wealth and develop a whole number of entrepreneurial opportunities for people where they can rise up as entrepreneurs and things flourish all over the place à la the free market in America. Or, you have a situation where you have the five white families who ran the country during the old order being replaced by five black families in the same position; a simple transfer of elites. I resent that. For me it is a great philosophical barrier that I can’t and won’t abide. That’s why I get attacked.
This country’s major problem, historically, was that the economy was run by five major groupings, and most of those were family-orientated. It stifled the economy and in many cases led to a lack of development. It enhanced and entrenched the apartheid system. That was the primary reason for the old-order attack [on me].
This, then, was South African Crony Capitalism 1.0, white-on-white state-capital coziness. The best single example, insiders say, was Anglo American’s delivery on a silver platter of Gencor to Afrikaners when, in the 1960s, the equivalent of Malema anti-mining populism was rearing its head from the boer.
Kebble continued his class analysis of South African Crony Capitalism 2.0, the construction of which he excelled at, white-on-black:
What has happened since then is that the old order has gone and co-opted a few little Uncle Toms, pasted them onto their boards and companies, promised them all kinds of power and ability to do things, given them a selective and very discreet deal-flow and also set them up as people who would attack my philosophy...
It makes me sick, quite frankly … that the biggest problem I have is this group of people getting into a huddle trying to monopolise deal-flow, not by being the best, not by getting up early every day and doing their job, not by being clever and smart and building alliances, but by sitting around and drinking huge cases of single-malt Scotch and getting pissed regularly, doing all sorts of strange things to small animals and young girls late at night.
There are no reports of the Kebble mansions in Inanda, Johannesburg and Bishopscourt, Cape Town hosting strange things of that sort, though the liquor flowed, by all accounts.
The most confusing confidante of the huckster was probably David Gleason, and you the reader may want to take some parts of his eulogizing seriously, though not the bulk:
Passionately committed to SA, Kebble long held the view that the undue enrichment of the new elitists was an extravagance it could not afford and that the only way forward was to enlist the hopes and aspirations of the ruling party’s vast grassroots support base. Neglect of this vital constituency, he believed, would bring radicalism and ruin in its wake. It was this that drove him to become something of a doyen of black empowerment advocates…
In recent years, Kebble became engrossed in the political agenda which the country is following. He made no apology for this. In his personal political philosophy, with which I frequently disagreed, there is a close nexus between business and politics (I agree with this). He was anxious, he said, to ensure the choices made by politicians would encourage rather than retard business development. And he expressed a particular anxiety about South Africa’s army of the unemployed and the vast number of poverty-struck communities. He took the view that the rise of the new elitists, many attached or close to the ruling party, would become anathema to the party’s massive grass-roots support base.
The factionalism within the ANC and the emergence of power centres concentrated on pushing the agendas of the newly rich, was a matter he viewed with profound concern. His own leanings, increasingly I thought to the left, led him to lend support to deputy president Jacob Zuma. When then national director of public prosecutions, Bulelani Ngcuka, attacked Zuma through a smear campaign rather than a proper prosecution, he smelt another example of a gross abuse of political power. His support for Zuma, now facing corruption charges, took the form of active advice…
I last saw Kebble over lunch on the day he died. He said then that he couldn’t understand why Mbeki had persisted in attacking him and over such a long period. He clearly felt this keenly. It made no sense to him that, considering all he was doing was embracing the very policies the ANC had evolved over the long years in the wilderness, he had been singled out as a pariah. The answer, of course, was his espousal of the Zuma cause. This is not exactly popular among those in power, anxious to hold onto the important levers.
It is evident that Kebbleism fails partly because it picks the losers not winners, including the opposition DA. And yet nearly exactly three years after Kebble’s murder, Zuma did eventually evict Mbeki, albeit not thanks to the tycoon’s ‘advice’ but rather to trade union and communist agitation within the ANC’s branches at a time Mbeki was blamed (correctly) for widespread AIDS suffering and economic inequality.
Still, underlying the rot in the ruling party was money of the sort Kebble dished out, and very few people – including myself or my own comrades within South Africa’s independent left, which made little or no comment and no outright attacks on Kebbleism – can claim to have adequately addressed the devil incarnate in good time. Wits journalism professor Anton Harber, appropriately asked,
I have often wondered if the Kebble case was our Enron, where journalists failed to ask obvious questions and probe beneath the company´s public relations machinery until after the company collapsed and it was too late. Barry Sargeant had taken a pot shot or two at Kebble as early as 10 years ago, but faced legal action and intimidation. He stayed with the case, and has since written a book with some startling claims about Kebble. Martin Welz of Noseweek magazine used leaked documents to show that Kebble had never paid taxes, and raised questions about why the receiver of revenue and his team had not noticed this. Welz said he had internal correspondence that showed there was one key figure in the receiver´s office who repeatedly prevented the investigation into Kebble from going anywhere, and suggested this was because of this person´s closeness to the ruling party.
The initial reaction of the country’s main media watchdog, Business Day, was pathetically self-interested, in this editorial the day after the murder:
A rich and important businessman lies dead in his bullet-ridden luxury car in the dead of night in the nation’s financial capital. Shot by drive-by assassins, the man is slumped in his seat, the car driven up onto the kerb. It is a scene reminiscent of Bogota or some banana republic, but in our case the dead man is Brett Kebble and the place is Johannesburg, the greatest city in Africa. The first and most obvious thing to say about the murder of Kebble is that the economic consequences of not solving it quickly are beyond calculation. We cannot allow our already tarnished reputation as a violent society to drift into the sphere of business being done through the barrel of a gun.
Actually, the reputation of South Africa as a banana republic will continue to grow, thanks to Business Day’s overall ask-no-questions approach to mining capital. In ecological terms, for instance, the paper’s editor Peter Bruce distinguished himself as a maniac in the Kebble tradition by celebrating the 2012 State of the Nation address by Zuma, demanding that the state help capital ‘mine more and faster and ship what we mine cheaper and faster.’
To be fair, Bruce also once confessed how South Africa really works, whether under Zuma or (in this instance in 2003) Mbeki: “The government is utterly seduced by big business, and cannot see beyond its immediate interests.”
The ANC’s corruption in Kebble’s den reminds of Fanon’s warning in Wretched of the Earth:
This native bourgeoisie, which has adopted unreservedly and with enthusiasm the ways of thinking characteristic of the mother country, which has become wonderfully detached from its own thought and has based its consciousness upon foundations which are typically foreign, will realize, with its mouth watering, that it lacks something essential to a bourgeoisie: money.
The bourgeoisie of an under-developed country is a bourgeoisie in spirit only. It is not its economic strength, nor the dynamism of its leaders, nor the breadth of its ideas that ensures its peculiar quality of bourgeoisie. Consequently it remains at the beginning and for a long time afterwards a bourgeoisie of the civil service. It is the positions that it holds in the new national administration which will give it strength and serenity.
If the government gives it enough time and opportunity, this bourgeoisie will manage to put away enough money to stiffen its domination. But it will always reveal itself as incapable of giving birth to an authentic bourgeois society with all the economic and industrial consequences which this entails.
Wrecking a few companies is one thing, but wrecking a country through these sorts of personal manipulations of the powerful is a tragedy turned farce. Because Fanon again warns of the logical result, right?:
The party is becoming a means of private advancement. There exists inside the new regime, however, an inequality in the acquisition of wealth and in monopolization. Some have a double source of income and demonstrate that they are specialized in opportunism. Privileges multiply and corruption triumphs, while morality declines. Today the vultures are too numerous and too voracious in proportion to the lean spoils of the national wealth.
The party, a true instrument of power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, reinforces the machine, and ensures that the people are hemmed in and immobilized. The party helps the government to hold the people down. It becomes more and more clearly anti-democratic, an implement of coercion. The party is objectively, sometimes subjectively, the accomplice of the merchant bourgeoisie.
If Fanon is right – and fifty years hence, he appears to be, in virtually every post-colonial but neo-colonial African country – then we might conclude, now, that Kebbleism is a fatal political disease afflicting the ANC. Indeed, to return to our opening metaphor, it’s a disease closely comparable to the description Moses offered of Sodom and Gomorrah: “a burning waste of salt and sulfur: nothing planted, nothing sprouting, no vegetation growing on it.”
Is it then the case, learning, as we do, so much from Kebble himself, that the ANC’s only cure is an assisted suicide?
The leftist spy who came in from cold Pretoria
Patrick Bond 26 March 2012
‘I don’t have the stomach or the taste to serve any more at this level,’ said the normally ebullient Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils, as he quit after fourteen years of service to the South African government. It was late September 2008, just after Thabo Mbeki was palace-couped.
Kasrils’ intelligence service was by then an international laughingstock, with spy-versus-spy intrigue spilling out wide across the political landscape. His own troops were locked in unending, ungovernable, internecine battles against each other’s factions, using hoax emails, other disinformation and extraordinary political contortions unknown in even the ugliest Stalinist traditions of the African National Congress (ANC). Recall that Mbeki’s police chief Jackie Selebi was also the head of Interpol, and to have the mafia penetrate such high levels made South African security farcical at best.
None of this was Kasrils’ fault, of course; such fights continue to this day, and leading police officers Bheki Cele and Richard Mdluli have allegedly amplified the Mbeki-era traditions of graft. But the intrigue was so murky in September 2008 that when an obscure judge made an offhanded, seemingly flippant remark about Jacob Zuma being a victim of political conspiracy, it was a catalyst for the ANC’s Zumites to unceremoniously evict Mbeki seven months before his term was due to end.
To last so long in that immoral swamp required a firm constitution, and to then extricate from the mire was a heroic task. Kasrils was (and remains) the continent’s highest-profile revolutionary from the white race, and in spite of all the muck nearby, he exudes an exceptionally powerful moral influence. Kasrils also played crucial leadership roles as minister of water, deputy minister of defense, and leadership in the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe armed wing and SA Communist Party dating back nearly five decades.
The contradictions he faced during his era in power were overwhelming. They deserve, I believe, serious consideration; in some cases, much more decisive resolutions than we’ve witnessed; and now renewal, in the dialectical spirit. Exploring and transcending both the exercise of power (thesis) and counter-power activities by progressive civil society (antithesis), in order to find a new synthesis and yet new contradictions, is my objective in the coming pages.
Contradictory Kasrils Last week Kasrils visited us at the University of KwaZulu-Natal as a Time of the Writer festival guest at the Centre for Creative Arts and speaker at the Centre for Civil Society’s seminar on authoritarianism and corruption. A student here in the early 1960s, he reminisced about his disputes during economics classes with the ‘reactionary’ Professor Owen Horwood – later an influential apartheid Finance Minister – because of Kasrils’ opposition to Bantustan policy.
He returned for this visit because in 2010, Kasrils’ beautiful biography of his late wife Eleanor, The Unlikely Secret Agent, won SA’s main book award (the Sunday Times Alan Paton non-fiction prize) and his compelling autobiography Armed and Dangerous had its third edition in 2004. His presentations last week celebrating writing, women and radical politics were thoughtful and humorous.
Like most who meet Kasrils, it took me only four discussions to depart so charmed as to confess I will now blindly follow him on any madcap adventure – albeit one in September 1992, when he marched 80 000 protesters to the ‘Ciskei’ government’s doorstep, left dozens to return home in coffins, after pro-apartheid armed forces opened fire. But dangerous as he has been, armed or not, this is the kind of mensch who would have us cracking up on our way to the gallows, more gregarious and fun-loving than any lefty I’ve ever known.
That charm in turn calls for even more critically-sympathetic reflection about how a South African nationalist-communist spy might come in from the cold. We might attempt this via the dialectic method, which respects tension and contradiction, which contextualizes so as to point the way forward to social progress, and which seeks to understand interrelations of economy, politics, society and nature.
Kasrils was quite right to finally quit the Pretoria regime, as he witnessed extreme abuses of power within his beloved ANC, and on occasion was attacked – without merit, he insists – for allegedly being a guiding force in the network of Mbeki supporters trying to halt Zuma’s presidential push.
The worst of it, he recounts, was when in early 2006 the Young Communist League leadership accused him of setting up a ‘honey trap’ for Zuma, who was accused of rape a few weeks earlier by an openly HIV+ lesbian known as Khwezi. The future president was acquitted after a trial in which misogynist patriarchy by Zuma and his supporters was on blatant display.
Kasrils had known the 30 year-old victim for a quarter of a century (as had Zuma) because her parents provided a safehouse during anti-apartheid military missions deep in Durban’s townships. He was drawn in against his will in a peripheral way, making clear that Khwezi should sort out the charge with professional aid, not old family connections to the Minister of Intelligence. But that moment was when the break with Zuma became irreparable.
Given his despondency about the ANC’s subsequent trajectory, time and time again in several conversations Kasrils reminded of what he is accused of sounding like by journalist Alistair Sparks: an end-of-apartheid verligte (Afrikaner enlightened reformer). But now Kasrils feels there is far more at stake: saving not only the liberal gains that the likes of FW de Klerk (verligte-in-chief) grudgingly surrendered two decades ago, but also reviving prospects for a broader left turn in coming years.
Given Kasrils’ larger-than-life personality, the best approach might well be to treat him as would Karl Marx, as recommended in Das Kapital: ‘Individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interest.’
You could add race/ethnic, gender and generational relations as well, since most of these divisions are also being amplified under conditions of class apartheid. Unfortunately, Kasrils is yet to pronounce on deeper-rooted economic policy corruption – i.e. the numerous neoliberal policies adopted after 1994 – aside from firmly endorsing the country’s 1996 structural adjustment policy (‘Growth, Employment and Redistribution’, GEAR), at the time, as part of the Arms Deal.
Instead, Kasrils’ current focus on corruption highlights mainly the acquisitiveness of the political-bureaucratic petit bourgeoisie, aspiring to great wealth for little effort.
The wretched of the ANC His naming as ‘WaBenzis’ several former colleagues – including the late defense minister Joe Modise and current SA Communist Party chief Blade Nzimande – certainly helps personify the problem. As Kasrils griped in our seminar, ‘South Africa is regaled by one revelation after another involving luxury limousines, lavish banquets, expensive hotel bills and other extravagant follies.’
His own ‘economic category’ might be described best as a small-c communist. Kasrils’ trajectory of race/class-suicide began on Sharpeville Day in 1960 when, as he told the Time of the Writer audience, his white colleagues at Johannesburg’s Lever Brothers film advertising division were stunned when he sided with black staff, as reports came in of the 69 murders. As for his hostility to Zionism, Kasrils (from a Jewish background) came to understand the Israeli occupation of Palestine and became the continent’s leading campaigner for Middle East justice and the ‘one-state’ solution needed to avoid making permanent the region’s bantustanization.
He sums up the rise and fall of his vision for a socialist South Africa simply and accurately: ‘Regarding national liberation, as Vladimir Lenin put it, the character of the outcome depends upon the organised strength of the working class. For quite a period of time we saw the left rising and becoming strong and then post-1990 we see the rightwing agenda becoming so strong with its alignment to capital.’
You can’t argue with that, but the depth and intensity of South Africa’s contradictions require more than a simple class correlation as explanation. Instead, with dialectical method, Lenin remarked how social development ‘proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; “breaks in continuity”,’ leaving us to link what we observe at surface level into ‘a uniform, and universal process of motion, one that follows definite laws.’
Theoretically, those laws of exploitation, it seems to me, were initially understood best by Marx in Kapital in 1867, elaborated in North-South (and capitalist-noncapitalist) terms by Rosa Luxemburg a century ago, and translated to African post-colonialism by Frantz Fanon fifty years ago. The critiques of capitalism, imperialism and nationalism by these revolutionary theorists still work well today, especially in a South Africa where migrancy, gendered roles and deep racial divisions in the division of labour, ecological degradation and capitalist crisis tendencies persist and indeed worsen.
But it is in the realm of degenerate political leadership that we see Kasrils’ next set of contradictions, as he gradually breaks from the ANC and loses all respect for the Communist Party (or so it seems), while lauding trade union and other civil society activism. He quoted from Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in his seminar last Friday, aiming these words at his former comrades who lost touch with the masses: ‘Privileges multiply and corruption triumphs, while morality declines.’
Fanon’s subsequent three sentences are yet more appropriate: ‘Today the vultures are too numerous and too voracious in proportion to the lean spoils of the national wealth. The party, a true instrument of power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, reinforces the machine, and ensures that the people are hemmed in and immobilized. The party helps the government to hold the people down.’
The arms bazaar By many accounts in critical civil society, the 1997 Arms Deal was the font of South Africa’s large-scale corruption, the source of so many contradictions that drive Kasrils’ dialectic. He had, after all, spent the late 1990s arguing the case for the deal, on grounds that it could ‘stand up to the closest scrutiny’ because the process was ‘meticulously professional and objective.’ For the two leading experts on the Arms Deal, Paul Holden and Hennie van Vuuren, ‘It almost beggars belief that this claim could be made.’
Kasrils also notified parliament of ‘Major offset or counter-trade agreements so that for every rand spent abroad, the same amount will be invested in SA. Such packages will be of enormous benefit to our GEAR strategy. A tremendous boost to our economy and Treasury.’ Latest estimates from the Sunday Independent are revealing: of R114 billion promised in Arms Deal offsets, only R4 billion was delivered.
Kasrils’ defense last Friday was that the post-apartheid armed forces desperately needed the highest-technology weapons, but this did not leave his audience convinced. Exclaimed anti-corruption campaigner Marianne Camerer, ‘How can you sleep at night?!’
Kasrils’ answer: he’s sleeping well because as far as he could tell, the Arms Deal didn’t corrupt at ministerial executive level in major transactions, though he now concedes that at secondary level, the company-to-company transactions had plenty of holes. Schabir Shaik’s facilitation of the French firm Thales’ access to Zuma – for a reported R500 000/year – was an obvious example, and as Kasrils later put it, ‘Zuma was by then willing and ready for corruption.’
It was recently revealed that Zuma spokesperson Mac Maharaj was another conduit for Thales dirty funds, via an offshore account. These were men Kasrils relied on for life-and-death missions during the armed struggle against apartheid, though in at least in one case, Mo Shaik (who is now moving from heading the SA Secret Service to a Development Bank of Southern Africa job), there was finally a reconciliation with Kasrils.
But as Kasrils told me, this wasn’t the same Zuma he’d gotten to know as commander during MK operations, ‘a simple, decent comrade.’ Kasrils’ unsatisfactory theory of corruption seems largely based upon the numbers of wives and children that the former exiles were responsible for upon returning to South Africa two decades ago.
It’s a potentially racialising theory because as he pointed out in seminar, the white middle-class radicals who returned from abroad weren’t faced with anything like the same material pressures of household reproduction. And so when Kasrils began raising the critique of Zuma’s corruption within the Communist Party, for example, he confided that he found no resonance from black comrades, only from whites and Indians.
I asked whether, like other vocal critics of South Africa’s elite transition who were purged from the Party because they were communists (the names Jara, Satgar, McKinley come immediately to mind), this fate would befall Kasrils, he smiled and confirmed he was no longer in leadership nor a member of a branch – but hadn’t been expelled. Yet.
Flirting with Zimbabwe, flunking the xenophobia test Looking more broadly at morally-exhausted nationalism, what of the so-called Zanufication of the ANC? The phrase was first used by SA Communist Party deputy leader Jeremy Cronin in 2002, and the backlash from Mbeki’s ranks was so strong that a humiliating apology was wrenched from the country’s next-highest profile white revolutionary.
True, Kasrils quickly confirmed, Zimbabwe’s Zanu(PF) ruling elite is ‘absolutely disgusting. We were their guests in exile and so we were mum over the Fifth Brigade [i.e. the Mugabe government’s mid-1980s’ massacre of 20 000 Ndebele people]. But you do that and you’re caught in a trap.’
Yet in 2005, in the midst of Mugabe’s most zany, self-destructive activity, Kasrils pronounced in a speech that his regime and South Africa’s shared a ‘common world view’ and would ‘march forward shoulder to shoulder’.
When asked about this contradiction, Kasrils replied: ‘Sometimes it’s the context. They were our guests on that occasion, and we were signing a standard Defense Accord.’ He looked deeply regretful, but tragically, there is nothing incorrect about his remark.
Kasrils did, in retrospect, warmly endorse the SA Transport and Allied Workers Union’s April 2008 refusal to trans-ship three million Chinese bullets from Durban to Zimbabwe; Mugabe had ordered them to prepare for potential electoral defeat. (According to some reports, the Zimbabwe army finally acquired these via Angola after all the other ports in the region were declared no-offload zones for the weapons by courageous dockworkers.) Ten months later, the same unionists declared they would not unload Israeli goods, which warmed the progressive world’s heart, especially that of the newly-retired Kasrils, who stepped up his exceptionally admirable Palestine advocacy.
Of course, blowback from the ANC’s pro-Mugabe policy occurred in late May 2008, when with refugees streaming across the border to escape Zanu(PF) violence, more than sixty murders and 100 000 terrified displacees resulted from a heartbreaking xenophobia outbreak. ‘We are not just seeing spontaneous xenophobic attacks,’ Kasrils told journalists at the time, ‘There are many social issues at the root of the problem, but we have reason to believe that there are many other organisations involved in sparking the attacks.’
Really? There was no grounding for such conspiracy theory within sound intelligence. As Kasrils confessed, ‘Of course we were aware something was brewing. It is one thing to know there is a social problem and another thing to know when that outburst will occur.’ Stupidly, his National Intelligence Agency director general initially blamed xenophobia on a ‘Third Force’ that was ‘deliberately unleashed ahead of next year’s general election.’
To his credit, Kasrils later admitted these were ‘misguided’ theories, and regarding official impotence, ‘there has not been the kind of intelligence that has been able to, say, pinpoint exact details. Even now, two weeks into the mayhem, there’s not that great a possibility of being able to say.’
Resolving that particular contradiction, today Kasrils is a high-profile board member of Cape Town’s most effective anti-xenophobia organization, People Against Suffering, Oppression and Poverty.
But what happens next, if there’s another stolen election in Zimbabwe like those of 2000, 2002, 2005 and 2008? Contrary to hopes within that country’s democratic movement, Kasrils does not foresee Zuma intervening to ensure a free and fair election through enforcement of Mbeki’s September 2008 Global Political Agreement. In contrast, he says, ‘I thought Mbeki was getting the better of Uncle Bob. There were some changes in the election modalities, thanks to Mbeki’s niceties.’
This isn’t how Zimbabweans see it, for in March 2008, Mbeki laid down the law just as the opposition Movement for Democratic Change felt they had clearly won the majority of votes in the presidential election’s first round, having verifiable cellphone photos of poll results in each station immediately emailed to Harare headquarters for independent counting. Mbeki was the spoiler by ordering that Morgan Tsvangirai agree to a run-off vote in June, a race from which he soon had to withdraw because hundreds of his supporters were being killed or injured.
What if this happens again? Kasrils is adamant: ‘Sanctions. Absolutely, what else is there to do.’
Given the ANC’s ongoing commitment to Zanu(PF), it would be a great service for Kasrils to help open this debate if Zimbabwean comrades request it. The precedent is, once again, the Congress of SA Trade Unions’ threatened mid-2000s blockade of the Zimbabwe-SA border at Messina.
ANC secrecy Another area of contradiction in which Cosatu’s support is vital, is the Secrecy Bill, the legislation that Kasrils originally introduced in early 2008 but that he now virulently opposes. As the Mail&Guardian reported four years ago, ‘Kasrils portrayed it as striking an enlightened balance between the need for secrecy and the constitutional imperative for open and accountable government. However, the M&G raised concerns that it would lead to a blanket of secrecy over government affairs.’
By mid-2008, Kasrils’ internal ministerial review commission – consisting of Joe Matthews, Frene Ginwala and Laurie Nathan – warned of very negative consequences of providing ‘so sweeping a basis for non-disclosure of information,’ reminiscent of ‘apartheid-era secrecy laws.’
That commission criticized Kasrils on several other grounds: ‘The enormously wide mandate initially given to NIA to gather political intelligence, that some current methods of intrusive surveillance are unconstitutional and that a policy culture persists in the spy agencies that insists they should be allowed to “bend the rules” when necessary.’
Again to his credit, Kasrils recognized many of these problems, and by late 2011 he was in the lead of the civil society campaign against the newer and even more totalitarian version of the bill. It was, he claimed at a Wits University rally, ‘turning into a Frankensteinian monster, a dog’s breakfast of toxic gruel.’
Kasrils also attacked parliamentary oversight: ‘All of those in the committee dealing with the bill, from every single party, are all woefully failing.’
These are the kinds of dialectical discussions which Kasrils invites: vast contradictions in past practices, conjoined with an ability to track degenerative trends and openly speak out today.
Privatisation and protest That reminds me of the last time I ran into Kasrils, on September 3 2002, when dozens of protesters disrupted the ‘Water Dome’ conference panel his Director General Mike Muller had arranged with European privatisers as part of the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development. Kasrils was livid, accusing me (!) of organizing the humiliating toyi-toyi (a task for which this armchair academic is quite incapable).
A decade ago, this was one of South African society’s hottest issues, along with the Mbeki government’s denial of AIDS medicines that left more than 330 000 people to die unnecessarily, according to a Harvard Public Health School study. Many of us were called ‘ultra-leftists’ during this era, because from around late 1999 in Durban’s Chatsworth township and Soweto, a new left had emerged to contest urban social services.
The argument, especially against Kasrils’ predecessor Kader Asmal, was that the 1994 water White Paper mandated full cost recovery, ignoring the implicit promise for a Free Basic Water ‘lifeline tariff’ mandated in the Reconstruction and Development Programme. Asmal, whom I briefly served as an advisor, was cross that a water-rights advocacy movement was rising, and he very decisively rejected Free Basic Water, once – to deter me raising this with his staff again – writing me the sternest letter that I’ve ever received (probably drafted by Muller).
There was great delight in February 2000 when Kasrils announced that at least 6000 liters per household per month would be provided to all residents of South Africa free. The catalyst was his meeting a Transkeian peasant who had turned away from one of Asmal’s water taps and gone to a dirty river for water, simply because the 100 percent cost recovery fetish of Asmal and Muller meant the new piped water was unaffordable.
Kasrils’ policy reversal represented to many of us the finest of the ANC’s traditions, so different from the staged imbizos that Mbeki was running around the country, none of which led to policy changes.
The problem reached tragic proportions in August 2000 when Ngwelezane officials took the 1994 White Paper seriously and cut off more than 1000 households because the R56 ($8) connection fee was too high. That same month, Kasrils drove the Free Basic Services policy into the ANC’s municipal election platform for the December 2000 vote. By 2001 the promise had become policy – yet with a catch: Muller ensured that the consultancy that was most responsible for opposing Free Basic Water during the Asmal years (Palmer Development Group) was the outfit chosen to design its municipal implementation.
The only outcome possible was sabotage of Kasrils’ intentions. Ironically it was here in Durban – the model for the 6000 liters because a drum was provided to residents that was actually cheaper for the city to fill each month than send out small bills and make collections – that the sabotage was most decisive.
From 1997-2004, according to municipal data, the real price of Durban residential water doubled, leading to a drastic contraction in consumption by an estimated million of the city’s poorest residents (by one third, from 22 000 to 15 000 liters per household per month) – even during epidemics of AIDS, cholera and diarrhea. The reason for this was that after the small tokenistic amount, the next block’s price rose so high so quickly that it was soon considered the second most inequitable (behind Pietermaritzburg) in all South Africa, and the worst of five major cities surveyed by the United Nations a few years later.
This city, regrettably, was the model for Free Basic Water, yet it should have been understood as an example of South Africa’s most venal public policy: brutal neoliberalism applied to social services but with tokenistic welfarism. In other words, the struggle for decommodification in which Kasrils had initially appeared as a top-down hero, was now twisted into a system for even deeper state surveillance and disciplining techniques, such as pre-payment meters.
The case of Veolia Was Kasrils a water privatizer? Definitely not, he repeatedly claimed. Yet his earlier commitment to ‘public-private partnerships’ (a euphemism for commodification, commercialization and as in this case, privatization) hit hard here in Durban, home to the country’s leading grassroots environmental justice campaigning group, the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (http://www.sdcea.co.za).
Kasrils arrived in mid-2001 to open an industrial waste-water recycling plant in South Durban, owned by the world’s largest water privatizer, Paris-based Vivendi, claiming, ‘Durban has not only implemented some very effective water conservation and demand management programmes, it has also managed to be extremely innovative in the ways in which to provide water to poor and indigent households.’
Actually, protesters were up in arms about those rising prices and disconnections. From Chatsworth they filed the first court injunction requested by any South African community group against municipal cut-offs, on grounds of water rights. They lost, but the anger at water commodification grew here and everywhere.
Yet at the Vivendi plant’s opening, Kasrils announced, ‘Public-private partnerships enable a synergy between the best that Government and the private sector have to offer.’
The ‘best’? This was true for Vivendi profit-taking and for two huge South Durban polluters which were its only water purchasers, the Mondi paper mill and the Sapref oil refinery owned by Shell and BP. Their price of water was cut nearly in half by Vivendi, from R5.40/kl to R2.80, because Durban municipality priced the incoming water to Vivendi so generously.
But at the same time, SDCEA activists were demanding these firms be closed, in part because they were primary causes of the world-leading asthma rate of 52 percent at the nearby Settlers Primary School.
Then there was the financial downside. South Africa would pay a steady profit stream to Vivendi’s French shareholders, in an era in which the country’s balance of payments deficit soared to amongst the world’s worst (by 2009 this left South Africa with the reputation as the riskiest of 17 peer emerging economies, according to The Economist).
Ironically, fairly sophisticated R&D capacity in the South African engineering sector for water recycling already existed, given that the Durban wastewater treatment facility utilises merely sand and carbon filters, ozone and chlorine.
Asked about these in an interview last weekend, Kasrils rebutted that at least the Durban municipality’s capital was saved for redeployment elsewhere, thanks to the French investment.
Yet implicit rates of return and profit/dividend outflows were so substantial that it would have made sense for the city to have taken on the project internally, if merely for the sake of expanded municipal capacity and ownership. It would have been a much better use of money than building a second world-class stadium – now considered a white elephant – with the city’s large reserves a few years later.
Indeed, Engineering News reported that by 2014 there will be an estimated $240 million in South African water and wastewater outsourcing revenues, so to permit foreign, for-profit suppliers into this market without developing national and local capacity was a misjudgment.
Setting aside the deal’s flawed economics, a more extreme political contradiction loomed: Vivendi wasn’t a good business partner, in contrast to Kasrils’ 2001 claim about the world’s largest water privatiser: ‘a number of French companies heeded the call to withdraw from South Africa in the interests of breaking the apartheid government through economic sanctions. I believe it was in 1985 that the French government decided to stop all new investment in South Africa, a year before the European Union made a similar ruling.
Kasrils then offered this specific praise: ‘Vivendi Water respected this decision and it was only after the release of Nelson Mandela and his inauguration as our first democratic president that Vivendi took the decision to invest locally.’
Yet simultaneously, Vivendi’s operations in other countries were rife with corruption, as the 2001 report ‘Dirty Water’ by Friends of the Earth International showed. The month after the South Durban deal was done, in the Italian city of Milan, ‘a senior manager in Vivendi’s water division was convicted for bribery and received a prison sentence’ while four years earlier, ‘junior French minister Jean-Michel Boucheron was jailed for two years’ and fined the equivalent of a million rand after a Vivendi bribe was revealed.
In another case, according to the Dirty Water report, Vivendi executives were ‘convicted of bribing the mayor of St-Denis to obtain the water concession.’ Vivendi privatization in Puerto Rico was already recognized as a world-class consumer disaster, and in England in 1998, Vivendi’s waste disposal operation ‘was listed by the Environment Agency as the second worst polluter in the UK.’ A year later, Vivendi was hit with seven prosecutions for waste management pollution. Health and safety violations were rife in Vivendi operations by the late 1990s.
Perhaps most ironically, in 2003 Vivendi changed its name to Veolia, and quickly became one of the leading targets of Palestinian activists demanding sanctions and disinvestment. By 2006, Irish campaigners started to succeed against the world’s largest water firm, as contracts were canceled due to Veolia’s participation in Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
According to campaigners, Veolia ‘is helping to build and operate a tramway linking illegal settlements in East Jerusalem with Israel. Not only do the settlements contravene article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention forbidding an occupier transferring its own civilians into the territory it occupies, but in most cases the establishment of the Israeli settlements involved war crimes too. The tramway tightens Israel’s hold on occupied East Jerusalem, ties the settlements more firmly into Israel and undermines chances of a just peace for the Palestinian people.’
The BDS fight against Veolia has included a great many victories, all of which were after Kasrils left the water ministry. To his credit, the 2001 grand opening can be revisited and Palestinian solidarity politics renewed in only one way, which he has provisionally agreed to: a ‘street closure’ of Veolia’s South Durban plant, one day soon. This would resolve several interlocking privatization contradictions created by Kasrils eleven years ago, and push forward one of the world’s most difficult dialectics of economy-society-nature.
More water wars But there were many other contradictions associated with early 21st century water politics, and this is only a partial list of civil society grievances against Kasrils recorded at a meeting he hosted at the time of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in mid-2002:
• The SA Municipal Workers Union opposed the private-sector and NGO-oriented rural water programme and the promotion of public-private partnerships in municipal water delivery;
• Some community organisations, social movements and NGOs, mainly affiliated to the National Land Committee and Rural Development Services Network, complained that most taps installed after 1994 quickly broke and that millions of South Africans remained without water, arguing that Kasrils did not take seriously the RDP promise of 50 litres per person per day of free water;
• Environmentalists in the Group for Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Monitoring Group, Earthlife and the Soweto and Alexandra civic associations complained that Kasrils championed unnecessary Lesotho dams;
• Many civic groups protested intensifying municipal water cut-offs, with fierce demonstrations in the townships of Gauteng, Durban, Cape Town and several smaller towns;
• Criticism continued against low infrastructure standards, such as mass pit latrines in urban areas.
Because of the failure to resolve any of these state-society contradictions over water commodification and ecological destruction, Kasrils grand opening to the left with Free Basic Water soon appeared as a shut door. ‘You were seen as our main enemy’, he told me last week, ‘because when we offered 25 liters you ungratefully insisted on 50,’ and yes, in retrospect, there was a degree of self-defeating, arrogant posturing by myself and many others on the independent left, especially after the empowering march of 30 000 people against the ANC government and World Summit in late August 2002.
The tensions ratcheted up, and in his April 2003 budget speech to parliament, Kasrils went after the jugular of the man who had actually surpassed him as the most notorious white revolutionary living in South Africa, John Pape, of the International Labour Research and Information Group in Cape Town. Noting that a few months earlier, Pape was extradited to the US to stand trial for his early 1970s participation in the Symbionese Liberation Army (an urban guerilla group in California best known for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patty Hearst), Kasrils attacked him as a ‘phoney revolutionary.’ (And me and a few others, too.)
Pape, according to Kasrils, ‘glorified the use of incorrect information in a paper entitled “Down With Missionaries and Objective Academics”. He encouraged his labour education colleagues not to present facts to help workers make their own decisions but rather to “lead” them to support their desired positions and courses of action. I have nothing personal against the man but misleading working people by withholding concrete facts or deliberately providing them with incorrect information is no basis for long term political success.’
Had Kasrils ever read this 1998 paper? If he had, I sense he might have agreed with Pape’s actual concerns, on the one hand, that, ‘The missionary sees union members as passive zealots who chant slogans and repeat key phrases without being able to analyse or criticize,’ and on the other hand, that ‘The objective academic sees unions as debating societies, not as organizations engaged in struggle.’
Seeking a route out of these traps, as even a Los Angeles Times reporter could recognize, Pape’s main thesis was the opposite to Kasrils’ allegation. He argued ‘that union leaders had to cultivate critical thinking among their members, not lock-step militancy.’ The newspaper cited these sentences from Pape’s article: ‘It is dishonest to pretend we don’t have opinions. But it is also destructive to use our views as a sledgehammer to hit people over the head. Sledgehammer tactics will silence differing opinions.’
Indeed at the time, that appeared to be Kasrils’ objective: sledgehammering his critics.
With Pape in prison, fellow researcher David McDonald replied to Kasrils’ charges: ‘It is morally reprehensible that Water Affairs and other government agencies have not been researching the cutoff situation themselves and sharing this information with the public. Apparently they would rather attack academics whose data does not fit their rosy picture of service delivery than do the difficult work of research themselves.’
McDonald added, ‘Sadly, the cutoff saga continues, and the new white paper on water services makes it clear that cost recovery remains at the heart of government’s water delivery strategy. Those who do not pay their bills will continue to face the wrath of budget-conscious bureaucrats.’
Kasrils’ rejoinder was that thanks to his policies, no one should be cut off entirely – because of the guaranteed free supply. Rebutted McDonald, ‘“Free services” are just part of this cost recovery continuum. Once the meager supply of free water is consumed, water flows will be restricted or cutoff if not paid for, despite the fact that millions of low-income households cannot afford to pay for the water they need. The city of Durban, the first to introduce free water, is still cutting off as many as 1000 households a day.’
Johannesburg townships witnessed the toughest battles over water, and at one point in 2004, Kasrils attacked the openly socialist Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) for destroying the pre-payment meters which Kasrils endorsed as a delivery system for at least the basic minimal free supply of 25 liters per person each day.
As he wrote in This Day newspaper in April 2004: ‘Attempts by misguided activists such as the APF to stop municipalities from managing their water systems sill probably undermine people’s water supplies and turn the hard won “right to water” into an empty tap, the right to a healthy environment into an open sewer.’
APF leader Trevor Ngwane replied: ‘Does Kasrils not know that these devices are banned in Britain, where they are considered a public health threat. Here we have AIDS, and tens of thousands of our people dying from diarrhoea, cholera and dysentery each year. So the threat of losing access to water – and hence our lives – is even more immediate.’
Ngwane continued, ‘Last May, Kasrils promised he would help by “naming and shaming” municipalities like Johannesburg which disconnect people and deny them lifeline supplies. We are still waiting for Kasrils to make good on his promise. Good riddance if, in the next cabinet, he is moved somewhere less damaging to the public health.’
Damn dams A decade ago, this was the destructive tone of the debate between the impotent left-left and those few in the ANC’s left flanks who exercised a certain kind of delimited power. The early 2000s conflict was as acute in relation to Johannesburg water as it was for access to AIDS medicines. In 2001, another French firm – Suez (whose subsidiary was implicated in corruption associated with Lesotho dam construction) – was hired to commercialise the city’s retail supply, and let the rich continue to pay a relatively lower post-apartheid price compared to poor people (even Palmer Development Group data showed), while unemployment and inequality soared in South Africa’s meanest city.
I lived in Johannesburg then, and worked at Wits University’s public policy school. It was not hard to break with Asmal over his decision to hire the same corrupt construction firms to build the second Lesotho dam in 1998, since those two dams were responsible for quintupling the price of water to consumers, as well as destroying sensitive ecologies.
In 1999, Kasrils as the new water minister inherited the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which soon became the highest-profile corruption case in the Third World. Even the World Bank began to debar some of the dozen multinational corporations convicted of bribing Lesotho officials, one of which (the giant Canadian civils firm Acres International) effectively closed due to the revelations.
In last week’s UKZN seminar, Kasrils claimed that he and Muller were the driving forces in speeding up Bank investigations, yet from our perspective in civil society, Pretoria was regularly turning a blind eye to corruption by the same firms. I have found no account of Kasrils’ own attempt to deter further SA government contracts with SA firms like Group Five, Concor, LTA, Ninham Shand, Knight Pièsold and Keeve Steyn, or others associated with the LHWP corruption, and in overseeing the second Lesotho mega-dam’s construction, the same firms were hired.
Subsequently, as Kasrils confirmed with genuine disgust during our seminar, the main Basotho official guilty of taking bribes, the head of the Lesotho Highlands Development Authority, Masupha Sole, served a few years in jail but in August 2012 was rehired as a top Authority official.
There was another problem, though: it appeared Kasrils had a Soviet-era fascination with massive dams, something that at least Asmal had tempered by chairing the World Commission on Dams from 1998-2001. After copious evidence of mega-dam destructiveness, that Commission suggested quite restrictive conditions for dam-building, and as a result was rudely rejected by the World Bank and also by Kasrils and Muller.
In May 2001 after a trip to China, Kasrils witnessed what can reasonably be called the most extreme attack by human beings on nature, the Yangtze River’s Three Gorges Dam: ‘I must state my admiration for the determination and care with which the Chinese government is promoting this vast undertaking.’
This contradiction is formidable, and last December, when I visited the upper reaches of the dam’s impoundment near Chongqing, I witnessed why the Chinese government itself confessed, a few months earlier, their struggle to address ‘urgent problems in terms of environmental protection, the prevention of geological hazards and the welfare of the relocated communities’ (there were nearly two million people displaced).
Four years earlier, Yangtze River Forum secretary general Weng Lida also admitted these ‘problems are all more serious than we expected,’ and other senior officials worried about frequent landslides, pollution, and environmental ‘catastrophe’, some in the wake of several ‘major chemical spills and algae outbreaks that have contaminated the country’s rivers and lakes, leaving millions of people without safe water for days and weeks at a time,’ according to Probe International, a Three Gorges Dam watchdog.
Even Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, a geologist, conceded pollution control was lacking at the Three Gorges dam. There is also a new awareness of how a dam in central China I visited, Zipingpu (upriver from the town of Dujiangyan), had caused the May 2008 earthquake that killed more than 80 000 people.
These eco-social antitheses to Kasrils’ hydropower thesis have not yet created a new synthesis, but last week he remarked that he’ll soon go back to central China for another look at the Three Gorges, given that he’s in the process of setting up a China-South Africa Friendship Society. Such a society, we agreed, should seek civil society linkages – after all these are the two leading countries I know of in protests per capita – and avoid some of the sleazier relations that characterize China’s interests in Africa.
Conclusion After a few days of contemplation, I am certain that the way that John le Carré’s great novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was described by Time magazine – ‘a sad, sympathetic portrait of a man who has lived by lies and subterfuge for so long, he’s forgotten how to tell the truth’ – is the polar opposite of how to understand Ronnie Kasrils’ renewed life on the left. After a chilly period as a genuine revolutionary trying to find a way forward within a blatantly corrupt version of ‘post’-colonial neoliberal nationalism, in which his own best instincts were confounded by an adverse power context and bureaucratic distortions, Kasrils should be warmly welcomed for any initiative he pursues, and I look forward to doing so, in coming months and years.
(It might be easier to accuse others around Kasrils of ongoing lies and subterfuge, including his main water policy advisor Muller, a National Planning Commissioner who, dangerously for Gauteng and Mpumalanga residents, appears to be in Mbeki-style denial about the region’s Acid Mine Drainage crisis. Another is the man who self-interestedly misinformed Kasrils about Joe Slovo’s seven months as housing minister, the World Bank’s Billy Cobbett, before Kasrils delivered the Eastern Cape’s 2010 Slovo Memorial Lecture through remarkably rose-coloured glasses.)
The method above, in which older contradictions are explored against newer wisdom and recommitments – e.g. on the Secrecy Bill, Zimbabwe, xenophobia – isn’t fool-proof, and many further debates remain about areas of nuance regarding the Arms Deal, water pricing, dam-building, wastewater privatisation and the like.
What seems profoundly different, though, is an appreciation by Kasrils that a very wide range of progressive social actors, including once-derided ultra-lefties (like myself), could perhaps be part of that renewed movement leftwards, ‘in spirals, not in a straight line’ (Lenin). We can only hope that with his exuberance and unfailing energy, Kasrils continues to spiral up and outwards, gathering more former skeptics like myself along for his ride.
But for those others facing situations in which power can be exercised as decisively as did Kasrils, likewise we might wish for further ‘catastrophes’ and ‘breaks in continuity’ – like those ‘eight days in September’ 2008 – to hasten the working of the dialectic. If we’re correct, then further contradictions regarding the fight against class apartheid require exploration, to get us to that ‘universal process of motion, one that follows definite laws.’
Along with Ashwin Desai and Trevor Ngwane, there’s a strong sense I’ve had in recent years that the ‘uneven-and-combined’ character of South Africa and its urban social resistances require much fuller treatment (http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?2,68,3,2523). As that too proceeds, I will always think back to the March 2012 conversations with Ronnie Kasrils about his own contradictions, and seek to renew these in some way in search of a better understanding of power: an understanding that he too is grappling with so courageously, given how far he has come in from the cold of Pretoria.
Debating CityPress on the SA Treasury
Patrick Bond disputes whether the Finance Ministry is a “powerhouse of big brains and safe hands”, “a template for good governance”, “a hothouse of talent filled with expensive and committed officials” under “excellent political leadership”, and “a careful place”... or instead, a neoliberal source of ecological destruction and national economic decline.
Treasure Treasury’s tree-planters CityPress editorial page 26 February 2012
A few years ago, former finance minister Trevor Manuel handed out saplings to the gathering at Parliament’s annual tabling of the budget.
The symbol was this: it was time to plant for the future, to move away from consumption spending to investment-geared fiscal planning.
This meant a tempering of the public sector wage bill; a medium-term planned decline of social grant beneficiaries and a healthy injection into infrastructure.
The future was in roads, rail, housing, hospitals, colleges and the rest of the social infrastructure that would provide a foundation for prosperity for the next generation.
Spend for tomorrow but don’t overburden the next generation with debt so large that it crowds out the hopes of the future.
With this philosophy embedded in how the Treasury does its work, it’s safe to say that this powerhouse of big brains and safe hands have become the great tree planters of South African public life.
The Treasury, along with other notable examples like the Independent Electoral Commission, the SA Revenue Service and, lately, the department of home affairs, is beginning to provide a template for good governance.
It’s worth looking at some of the Treasury’s leadership characteristics that have led it to being seen as a long-term thinker.
The first is that the Treasury is a hothouse of talent – it is filled with expensive and committed officials who work hard under excellent political leadership in the shape of Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan.
The second is that the Treasury works to a profoundly political philosophy that is repeated year after year after year.
In essence, this philosophy is of planting trees – making investments for tomorrow.
Thus, this year the infrastructure budget is the most notable feature and the education allocation is still the highest single amount of spend.
The bang for buck is a perennial downfall of education spending, but it is still investment spending, not a short-term consumption splurge.
In addition, the Treasury is a careful place – while big figures were bandied about for ¬infrastructure this week, in reality a lot of the money is already allocated and a fair proporition may not be spent at all, if the Budget Review document is to be believed.
The People’s Budget campaign says Gordhan was too tight with grant increases, but that point is moot when you consider that an estimated one in three South Africans now get a grant.
Social solidarity is thus another enduring plank of the Treasury philosophy.
When you look to Greece and Europe, and to struggling America, then it really is a truism that we should treasure our Treasury. www.citypress.co.za
Why Treasury should be transformed, not treasured Patrick Bond (City Press editorial page 'Second Take') 11 March 2012
Is the National Treasury, as a CityPress editorial claimed on 26 February, truly a “powerhouse of big brains and safe hands”, “a template for good governance”, “a hothouse of talent filled with expensive and committed officials” under “excellent political leadership”, and “a careful place”?
No. The Sunday Times asked a good question two weeks ago: “Did the Finance Minister, Pravin Gordhan, really think that a decision to spend R300 billion over the next 17 years on nuclear power stations did not merit a mention in his budget speech?”
That newspaper reminded readers of the “greed, fraud, corruption and cover-ups surrounding the R45-billion arms deal” financed by Gordhan’s predecessor, Trevor Manuel. As former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein revealed, Manuel advised, “It’s possible there was some shit in the deal. But if there was, no one will ever uncover it. They’re not that stupid. Just let it lie.”
With a similarly careless attitude, Gordhan’s pro-privatisation infrastructure budget promotes not only nuclear madness but also hundreds of billions of rands worth of coal-fired power plants, more coal exports, further water-degradation of Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces, and highway commercialization.
Yet the COP17 climate summit last December was hosted here in Gordhan’s home town of Durban. Last month, Yale and Colombia university researchers rated SA the fifth worst ‘environmental performer’ amongst the 132 countries studied due mainly to emissions.
Can we really brag about this filthy infrastructure, which will mainly export superprofits to London and Melbourne mining houses? Anglo and BHP Billiton already get the world’s cheapest electricity, paid for by imposing a 150 percent price increase on everyone else the last four years.
Vast overspending and outright corruption in energy infrastructure – as well as in white-elephant soccer stadiums, Lesotho mega-dams, the elite Gautrain, new or upgraded airports, and Coega’s industrial zone – are rife. Recall the dodgy R40 billion Eskom purchase of powerplant boilers made by Hitachi and the ANC’s Chancellor House, which will not be delivered on time, hence risking another round of load-shedding.
SA also suffers amongst the world’s highest unemployment, inequality and interest rates, a soaring foreign debt (now $120 billion, up from $25 billion in 1994), and vast outflows of capital thanks to unending exchange-control deregulation – all due to mismanagement by the Treasury and SA Reserve Bank. They fail to regulate persistent capital flight by big corporations, in 2007 amounting to a reported 20 percent of GDP.
The Treasury remains addicted to failed neoliberal policies, leaving our economy in the doldrums. It is worthy only of enthusiastic condemnation by a newspaper of CityPress’ caliber.
Diamonds are Zimbabwe’s worst friend
Will world prices collapse as Mugabe’s generals loot Marange? Khadija Sharife 13 March 2012
The news from oppressed Africa may be dominated by the self-serving You Tube video by Jacob Russell, ‘Kony 2012’, seen by 80 million viewers, aiming to raise consciousness about children involuntarily soldiering for the Lords Resistance Army in oil-rich northern Uganda. But in contrast to American saviors, there are plenty of local activists needing solidarity in their struggle against tyrants.
One of these is an institution, the Centre for Research and Development in Mutare, Zimbabwe, whose offices were mysteriously burgled last week. Mutare is the closest city to the $800 billion Marange fields, described as the largest diamond find in history.
Even before Kimberly Process (KP) certification, Zimbabwe became the world’s seventh largest producer, and the KP deal apparently occurred because Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Mines threatened that world diamond markets would be flooded if KP-certification were not provided.
In any case, Zimbabwe’s main diamond trading partners, India and China (via Dubai and Israel), hold no regard for the KP, and therefore cannot be held hostage by threats of peer exclusion. Already, 30 percent of the diamonds handled in India’s key cut and polish hub, Surat, are imported from Zimbabwe.
Africa generates over 65 percent of the world’s rough stones. Until recently, a handful of companies including DeBeers (35 percent market share by value) and Russia’s Alrosa (25 percent market share) benefited from near monopolistic control, with sales dominated by the US market thanks to the deeply entrenched impact of the De Beers ‘Diamonds are forever’ advertising campaign.
Until the 1990s, DeBeers had set the inviolable rule of the diamond industry: one buyer (Central Selling Organisation) to absorb – and vault – the bulk of surplus to prevent diamonds from losing the scarcity value, artificially created via slow release onto the market.
Andrei Polyakov, spokesperson for Russia’s Alrosa – which remains 90 percent state-owned – confirmed, “If you don’t support the price, a diamond becomes a mere piece of carbon.”
The diamond merchants now face a serious crisis: losing the battle to keep stones in the Zimbabwe soil by locking down concessions. At one point, De Beers held over 45 Exclusive Prospecting Orders, and despite discovering Marange early in the game, De Beers failed to exploit the resources.
Zero exploitation Unlike Botswana and Namibia, the generals close to Robert Mugabe who control Zimbabwe’s military refuse to play ball by controlling the supply. Intimidated by the “environment of uncertainty regarding the status and future of the concession,” De Beers opted out in 2006, when its prospecting license expired, even though DeBeers knew that at Marange, the yield was more than 1000 carats per hundred tonnes, nearly ten times higher than another large field, Rio Tinto's concession in Zimbabwe's Midland province.
According to Keiron Hodgson, a Charles Stanley Securities analyst of the diamond sector, “Zimbabwe really does have the potential to upset the applecart. Zimbabwean officials anticipate that diamond production could generate between $1 billion and $2 billion per annum to an economy that has a GDP of around $7.5 billion so I would understand the urgency to produce diamonds from Zimbabwe, but I don't think they're going to go out and produce as many as they can because they are quite price aware.”
Many others, however, fear a price collapse from an increasingly desperate Zanu(PF) ruling party which needs the revenues to fight the coming national election in Zimbabwe, and which would probably have no hesitation to loot Marange as quickly as possible in the event of a loss of state power to the Movement for Democratic Change.
The US government was previously considered the most vociferous opposition to the export of Zimbabwe’s ‘conflict’ stones, so considered because several hundred peasants were murdered by army troops in a 2007 massacre at Marange. But ever-unreliable and self-interested Washington State Department officials apparently caved to Mugabe’s wishes for KP certification, provided that African states support their bid for KP chair in 2012.
Who couped the KP? Two years ago, Farai Maguwu, head of the Centre for Research and Development and an incoming doctoral student at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society, was arrested in Mutare by Mugabe’s government for allegedly endangering ‘national security’ by possessing information about the military’s violation of human rights at Marange.
Maguwu’s arrest appeared to be contrived: he met with the KP-appointed monitor Abbey Chikane, brother of former SA Presidency director-general Frank, who had tipped off Zimbabwean State intelligence officials in spite of claiming that the meeting was confidential. Maguwu believed, and stated publicly, that he had been ‘set up’ by Chikane.
Chikane argued that he received from Maguwu state security documents drafted by the army, while Maguwu rebuts that Chikane was fishing for said documents at the meeting.
According to Human Rights Watch, which gave Maguwu its highest award for rights advocacy in Africa, “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.”
As for Chikane, the KP did not publicly reprimand him, nor did he resign. Complained Ian Smillie, known as one of the world's leading conflict diamond experts and a key architect of the KP, “We don't know where all the diamonds went that were approved by Abbey Chikane. Chikane was a mistake on several levels… He has extensive personal business interests in the Southern African diamond industry that should have disqualified him from the outset.”
Is the KP fatally corrupted? This leads to a bigger question: given Chikane’s chicanery and Washington’s grab of the KP, both at the expense of Zimbabweans being persecuted by Mugabe’s regime, should civil society chuck out the KP as a useful tool in monitoring multinational corporate activity in blood diamond zones?
After all, though some good may be claimed from KP activities in West Africa, the definition of conflict diamonds has excluded some of the world’s primary culprits: anti-democratic, corrupt and authoritarian ‘rent-seeking’ regimes, such as Namibia and Angola, who not only ‘self-regulate’ what constitutes KP-certified diamonds, but also act as partners to mining houses, therefore directly benefitting from diamond revenues.
Last week, Magawu was finally allowed to visit the Marange mines. As he then reported, “They have brought in state of the art equipment to intensify mining. I was deeply concerned with the level of mining taking place given that the money is not being accounted for. But we take this is a stepping stone, (hoping for) greater scrutiny by civil society. A meeting I held with (Finance Minister) Tendai Biti recently revealed that he had not yet received any information on the diamond auctions that were conducted in December and January respectively. If diamond revenue can't reach the treasury then we may be sitting on a time bomb.”
Khadija Sharife is a researcher at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society.
UKhadija Sharife ungumcwaningi eUKZN eCentre for Civil Society Farai Maguwu, incoming CCS doctoral student and Mutare‑based diamond watchdog
State failure, market failure and civil society failure
After last week’s COP17 autopsy, SA’s environmental justice movement also left fingerprints on the corpse Patrick Bond 28 February 2012
Critics of power abuse often dwell exclusively on state failure and market failure.
A good example is the way a lead editorialist in the Sunday Times grappled with the next round of crony-capitalist tenderpreneurship two days ago: ‘Did the Finance Minister, Pravin Gordhan, really think that a decision to spend R300 billion over the next 17 years on nuclear power stations did not merit a mention in his budget speech?’
Unearthing that figure, buried deep in the detailed budget document, the editorialist reminded Gordhan of ‘the decade-long fiasco that resulted from greed, fraud, corruption and cover-ups surrounding the R45-billion arms deal.’
Another unpleasant reminder will come when former Finance Minister Trevor Manuel’s dereliction of duty is again raised by both Zuma’s arms-deal commission (if they do even a half-baked job) and by those reviewing his fitness for a possible run, in coming weeks, at the World Bank presidency. In June the incumbent, Robert Zoellick, will be replaced after serial disasters in both government and finance stretching back a quarter century.
Former Member of Parliament Andrew Feinstein revealed that Manuel knew of bribes solicited by the late Defense Minister Joe Modise. Feinstein testified (without challenge) that in late 2000, Manuel surreptitiously advised him over lunch, ‘It’s possible there was some shit in the deal. But if there was, no one will ever uncover it. They’re not that stupid. Just let it lie.’
Apparently adopting a similar attitude, Gordhan is facilitating not only nuclear madness but also hundreds of billions of rands worth of Eskom’s coal-fired power plants, more coal exports, further water-degradation of Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces, and roads commercialization (thanks to Gauteng residents’ revolt against e-tolling).
How does this square with our hosting the COP17 climate summit, here in Gordhan’s home town?
Earlier this month, Yale and Colombia university researchers rated South Africa fifth worst ‘environmental performer’ amongst the 132 countries studied; the three categories in which we did worst were forest loss, sulfur dioxide emissions and carbon emissions.
This is mainly thanks to Pretoria finance, energy and mining officials, Johannesburg Eskom bosses, and the Melbourne and London mining and metals houses. They support vast electricity wastage for smelting (resulting in the world’s highest kWh/job rate in this capital-intensive sector), leaving our greenhouse gas emissions from energy twenty times higher than even the USA’s, measured per unit of economic output per person.
Such eco-financial insanity continues because the crony capitalist Minerals-Energy Complex remains intact: tragically, the most powerful force in forging apartheid’s migrant labour system was strengthened not weakened after 1994, even though the mining sector added nothing to the country’s GDP growth during the 2002-08 minerals boom. One reason was corporate capital flight, which in 2007 – at the boom’s peak – reached an awe-inspiring 20 percent of SA GDP, according to Wits University economists.
To that waste and resource outflow must be added banal corruption, such as the Chancellor House (an African National Congress fundraising arm) and Hitachi R40 billion deal for Eskom boilers which will apparently not be delivered on time, hence risking another round of load-shedding. In 2009, Public Protector Lawrence Mushwana found that Eskom chairperson Valli Moosa ‘acted improperly’ because he awarded that price-busting contract in blatant conflict of interest, while he sat on the ANC’s finance committee.
That fact doesn’t bother the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s carbon trading desk, which has just rewarded Moosa with membership on the ‘High-Level Panel on the Clean Development Mechanism Policy Dialogue.’ The panel will, in a September report, almost certainly attempt to justify the privatization of the air in spite of repeated episodes of emissions market fraud and corruption, benefiting only those involved in financial profiteering from greenhouse gas pollution.
For good measure, Moosa also chairs the World Wide Fund (WWF) for Nature’s South Africa chapter, which promotes the carbon trading gimmick.
Indeed, state and market failure were joined by civil society failure at the COP17. This was on display last week when 100 chastened climate activists gathered in a desultory central Durban hotel to provide each other with an autopsy of the climate summit – specifically, how the climate justice movement failed to demand accountability from the ‘1%’ negotiating elites inside the convention centre who were, to put it scientifically, plotting genocide and ecocide.
The harshest auto-critique was from Professor Ashwin Desai. He attacked the ‘big name spectacle NGOs’ Greenpeace and WWF, which ‘dominated the content and temperature of the march’ of thousands last December 3. ‘Local grassroots organizations were reduced to spectators, and were allowed only the occasional cameo appearance with most often a single line; ‘Amandla!’’
The route to the Convention Centre ‘delivered the Minister of International Relations, and COP17 president Maita Nkoana-Mashabane to the masses gathered below. She used the opportunity to say how important civil society was and promised to study a memorandum. She was gracious and generous. I could see the NGO’s on the truck preening themselves in the glow of this recognition and probably increased funding.’
But Desai would be the first to confess how few Durban communities made the effort to more decisively link climate to other burning concerns, including high electricity prices due to coal-fired powerplant construction, severe storms (one causing at least eight deaths on November 27), and the petro-chemical industry’s regular explosions, such as last October 10’s Engen refinery fire that left 100 kids from Settlers Primary School in Merebank hospitalised.
For Desai, who assisted with mobilizing in Wentworth and Merebank, ‘There's a litmus test. In 2001 there was a huge march here, with some 10 000 people in the streets, a completely different march: militant, scathing of the local ruling class, with swear words on its placards. The Durban Declaration was a visceral indictment of our ruling class as an agent of global capital and its economic policies which were deepening inequality and increasing poverty.’
The result at COP17 left him depressed: ‘Civil society as meticulously controlled spectacle, reducing people to choreographed cheerleaders, acting as an accomplice to power.’
Activists who supported the ‘C17’ committee of civil society had all manner of good (and a few bad) excuses for the weak showing last December, including erratic funders. Some huge NGOs, including WWF and Greenpeace, apparently contributed only staff time and no other resources. These and others, including faith communities at Diakonia and some trade unions, held competing events to the C17’s People’s Space at locations across town, even though they served on the C17 committee.
Though many praised the C17 for hard work, its meager impact at COP17 – reflected best in negotiators’ abject failure to cut emissions – doesn’t auger well for civil society unity in future campaigns to save the climate and economy from the Minerals-Energy Complex and finance ministers.
A sober accounting of the climate summit must also offer an autopsy of civil society counterpower at this juncture, and a diagnosis for reviving the corpse – or for rejecting contradiction-ridden unity of such breadth.
Patrick Bond directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society, where public seminars will be held tomorrow and next week on mobilizing for socio-environmental and political justice.
Global Sustainability’ Wilts In South Africa’s Political Hot Air
Patrick Bond 16 February 2012
Durban – The latest acts in this country’s intensifying political drama include a sizzling summer-long battle between young and old within the African National Congress (ANC), last week’s State of the Nation speech by president Jacob Zuma, and the release of the ANC’s ‘research’ on alternatives to mining nationalization, a demand by the ANC youth which is now one of the main wedge issues dividing the ruling party.
Amidst the chaos, stepping over the political corpse of ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema (about to be expelled for ‘throwing the ANC into disrepute’), Zuma apparently also wants to be considered a world eco-visionary. As co-chairs of the United Nations’ High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability, he and Finnish president Tarja Halonen published an article last week entitled ‘Seizing sustainable development.’ Zuma and Halonen ask, ‘How do we begin to tackle the massive challenge of retooling our global economy, preserving the environment, and providing greater opportunity and equity, including gender equality, to all?’
From the Panel’s report, Resilient People, Resilient Planet, comes answers that include neoliberal fixes – ‘Pollution, including carbon emissions, must no longer be free’ – and obvious reforms: ‘Price- and trade-distorting subsidies should be made transparent and phased out for fossil fuels by 2020.’ Plus sanctimony: ‘We need to place long-term thinking above short-term demands, both in the marketplace and at the polling place. Promoting fairness and inclusion is the right thing to do – and the smart thing to do for lasting prosperity and stability.’
Two days later, in a speech to parliament considered the finest in his blooper-filled career, Zuma declared, ‘Let me take this opportunity to congratulate the inter-ministerial committee on COP17 for making the conference a huge success. The final outcome of COP17 was historic and precedent setting, ranking with the 1997 conference where the Kyoto Protocol was adopted.’
But who won at Durban’s climate summit? The biggest polluters, it turns out, who got off scot-free on emissions cuts as well as on North-South fairness. According to the New York Times, at the recent World Economic Forum in Switzerland, a top aide to chief US State Department negotiator Todd Stern remarked that ‘the Durban platform was promising because of what it did not say.’ After all, revealed Trevor Houser, ‘There is no mention of historic responsibility or per capita emissions. There is no mention of economic development as the priority for developing countries. There is no mention of a difference between developed and developing country action.’
Zuma’s ‘huge success’ was in reality a sell-out of the UN’s tradition of differentiated responsibility between rich and poor countries. As climate chaos hits, Africa will be the worst-affected continent. (And so who can blame the African Union for its majority-vote hostility to Pretoria’s leadership candidate in a hung election last week?) The only Africans who smiled when leaving Durban were those from South Africa’s mining and electricity-guzzling industry – along with oil extractors – blessed by COP17’s failure to make binding emissions cuts.
Zuma’s State of the Nation address expanded his to-do list of climate-destroying investments. Already Pretoria is constructing the world’s fourth-largest coal-fired power plant with the World Bank’s largest-ever project loan, at Medupi in the beautiful Waterberg mountains where there is insufficient water for cooling it. Not far away, contracts are being signed for the world’s third-largest coal-fired plant, Eskom’s Kusile.
The main Eskom beneficiary is BHP Billiton, which consumes more than 10 percent of SA’s electricity and still gets the world’s cheapest power deal at Richard’s Bay, where the workforce has been shaved back by increasingly capital-intensive aluminum smelters to now fewer than 1500. The other beneficiary is the Japanese firm Hitachi, which in 2010 pretended not to know that its owners included the ANC’s Chancellor House, and whose supply of boilers – for which they are paid a mind-boggling R40+ billion – is so far behind schedule that more Eskom electricity black-outs loom.
Zuma’s speech unveiled yet more eco-destructive capital-intensive projects: ‘First, we plan to develop and integrate rail, road and water infrastructure, centered on two main areas in Limpopo: the Waterberg in the western part of the province and Steelpoort in the eastern part. These efforts are intended to unlock the enormous mineral belt of coal, platinum, palladium, chrome and other minerals, in order to facilitate increased mining as well as stepped-up beneficiation of minerals.’
There is much more: ‘Among the list of planned projects is the expansion of the iron ore export channel from 60-million tons per annum to 82-million tons per annum…, development of a new 16-million-tons-per-annum manganese export channel through the Port of Ngqura in Nelson Mandela Bay… and expansion of the iron-ore rail line between Sishen in the Northern Cape and Saldanha Bay in the Western Cape.’
Speaking to CityPress newspaper after Thursday’s speech, Zuma elaborated: ‘By 2014, I’d want to see the cranes, building, digging everything. I’d like to see people employed. We are looking at a new kind of city at Waterberg. That’s how Johannesburg began, as a mining town.’ Set aside that Johannesburg is the world’s least sustainable city, does Zuma know that there’s a vast national housing shortage and a vast surplus of unemployed people, and that building homes doesn’t require cranes, but does create far more jobs per unit of capital spent?
Did he notice that the largest platinum operation, Implats, fired 17,000 workers just a week before his speech, whom when rehired will suffer a substantial cut in their pensions? Did he read the National Planning Commission’s finding that ‘South Africa needs to move away from the unsustainable use of natural resources’?
As for non-renewable resources now being drawn from South African soil with only a pittance for communities, workers and the government fiscus, Zuma protected multinational mining capital from Malema’s populist nationalization demands by setting up a commission whose report is already drawing ridicule.
Malema, who became exceptionally wealthy in recent years allegedly by influencing Limpopo Province tenders for large payouts, was predictably hostile. As he explained last Friday, the lead researcher, Paul Jordaan, was ‘compromised’ for opposing 1955 ANC Freedom Charter nationalization promises: ‘Jordaan and the research team visited 13 countries and the only conclusion they could come up with are the opinions held by Comrade Paul Jordaan in 2010. It is possible that the research was a smokescreen to legitimise the personal opinions of Comrade Paul Jordaan and that is not how the ANC works.’
Other critics were just as harsh. Explained University of Cape Town political scientist Anthony Butler, a leading commentator, ‘The document’s intellectual quality is uneven. The research “methodology” involves lots of foreign travel and “stakeholder workshops”. The study team also makes unacknowledged use of “less scholarly” resources, such as Wikipedia and answers.com. The credibility of the report is damaged by long passages that bear a remarkable resemblance to the work of retired North American mine-tax expert Charles McPherson.’
As Butler complained, in one of many ‘unfathomable coincidences of word selection and arrangement (such borrowings are far too extensive to set out fully here) both [the ANC and McPherson] call for “the explicit recognition in budgets and planning documents of the financial and fiscal costs and risks associated with state participation”. Did McPherson help draw up the ANC’s report? If so, was the ANC’s national executive committee aware that a former oil-industry executive, who only recently ended his career in the fiscal affairs department of the International Monetary Fund, was commissioned to contribute to its study?’
Butler worries that the report still supports elements of Malema’s ‘phoney nationalisation drive’, such as transferring mineworker pension funds ‘into special purpose vehicles in the service of developmental objectives. In reality, such instruments would be abused to fund corporate welfare for the politically connected.’
Indeed under conditions of neoliberal nationalism, the outcome of most public policy in South Africa is inevitably crony capitalism rife with corruption. A major ANC-initiated forensic audit into corruption in the second-largest city, Durban, last week revealed massive illegalities especially in $400 million worth of privatized housing construction contracts under the 2002-11 leadership of city manager Mike Sutcliffe, who claims he will soon rebut the charges.
The overall problem is not housing, though, which remains an area of vast underinvestment. It is the incessant construction of white elephants and prestige projects. These were what the former trade union leader Ebrahim Patel – now Minister of Economic Development – was reduced to celebrating, in justifying the vast infrastructure investments. In his parliamentary response to Zuma, Patel remarked, ‘We took account of the lessons of the 2010 World Cup infrastructure and the growing experience in the build programmes for the Gautrain, the Medupi and Kusile power stations, the Freeway improvement programme and the major airport revamps.’
But to continue along this track is suicide. The World Cup stadia are nearly all losing money on operations and maintenance. The Gautrain’s speedy lifts from the Johannesburg airport to the financial district and government buildings in Pretoria are too expensive for the masses. The power stations have already raised the price of electricity by more than 150 percent, with another 25 percent increase scheduled in April. The public-private highway tolling partnership with an Austrian firm is so unpopular that on March 9 the trade union movement is threatening a national strike. The utterly unnecessary airport revamps are, again, for elites only.
Zuma’s pandering to mining houses is especially galling. As if to celebrate the state’s renewed orientation to big business interests, the ‘Mining Indaba’ – Africa’s biggest trade fair – in Cape Town last week was capped with a keynote speech by an extremist climate-change denialist, David Evans. The ‘performance’ was ‘well received by an audience of miners, who come from an industry that often feels the pinch of climate control in the regulation of their industries,’ reported the Mail&Guardian.
Zuma’s crucial challenge, under such influences, is to continue opposing the rhetoric of his Global Sustainability Panel, insofar as nearly everything he and the big corporates are doing here place short-term demands above long-term thinking, both in the marketplace and at the polling place, promoting unfairness and exclusion, and thus preventing lasting prosperity and stability. It’s from such accumulation dynamics that South Africa has come to specialize in ‘talk left, walk right’ politics. Whether it is the ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ fronting scams, such as Hitachi and Chancellor House, or the greedy corporations’ influence, the ruling party appears addicted to unsustainable underdevelopment hyped by big-business cheerleading.
From Zuma’s main political base, for instance, Toyota South Africa CEO Johan van Zyl last week argued, ‘Durban as a brand is not strong enough to simply say “come and invest in Durban”. What it needs to attract investors are big projects.’ At a seminar of the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science and Business Day newspaper, van Zyl insisted, ‘Durban needs to keep ahead of the competition. China is building ports they don’t even know when they will use. If return on investment is the line of thinking we may never see the infrastructure.’
In other words, please supply more public subsidies to the high-carbon fat cats. In that very spirit, Durban’s new city manager S’bu Sithole inherited a secretive $32 billion ‘Back-of-Port’ plan to expand what is already Africa’s largest harbour, in the process demolishing the 150-year old neighbourhood of Clairwood and expanding the deadly petro-chemical industry.
Also at that seminar was former Durban mayor Obed Mlaba, criticized in the forensic audit for illegally hijacking a $400 million waste-energy infrastructure tender at the Bisasar Road landfill, site of a high-profile carbon-trading pilot project. Complained Mlaba, ‘Big projects or even creating clusters around them are hampered by small-town mentality.’
Typical of a big-town mentality was this banal command to Zuma by Business Day editor Peter Bruce on Monday: ‘mine more and faster and ship what we mine cheaper and faster.’
Bond authored Politics of Climate Justice (UKZN Press), edited Durban’s Climate Gamble (Unisa Press), and directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za
Zim police stop KZN academic’s lecture
Leanne Jansen (The Mercury) 10 February 2012
Durban activist and academic Patrick Bond has been barred from delivering an address as part of a series of lectures in Harare.
Bond, who returns to SA on Friday, described on Thursday how riot police chased people away from the event, organised by the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), on Wednesday.
Bond would have spoken on the “global financial crisis, the discrediting of the neo-liberal ideology, and the failure of global climate governance at the COP17 (climate change conference in Durban last year)”, he said.
He said the New Zimbabwe lecture series also faced bans in 2011 and was only saved when the MDC threatened to withdraw from the unity government.
Bond was to deliver the first lecture of the 2012 series.
“It is a sickening feeling to have simple rights of expression so blatantly repressed, but my experience is trivial when compared to the majority of Zimbabweans’ suffering. It is heartening that sufficient interest in the global financial meltdown and ecological crises exists to risk attempting the lecture again, hopefully next week. Another request for permission was supplied to the police,” Bond said.
Charles Mangongera, the MDC’s director of policy and research, said he was “embarrassed” that Bond had travelled from Durban “only for him to be denied an opportunity to share his ideas”.
According to Mangongera, the lecture series was a platform for critical thinking and debate on issues Zimbabweans were faced with daily.
Mangongera said the police had been told of the seminar “more than a week ago” to satisfy the Public Order and Security Act.
“Ideally we were not even supposed to notify them, as the act only refers to political gatherings and, clearly, an event of this nature is not a political gathering.”
Mangongera said members of the organising team were called to the Harare Central police station on Wednesday and told that permission to hold the event had been denied because a “false address” had been provided.
The Mercury phoned the police station on Thursday and spoke to a man who identified himself only as the station commander.
When the incident, as told by Bond and Mangongera, was relayed to him, he responded: “Yes, so what do you want?”
The free flow of ideas is the hallmark of a proressive society Charles Mangongera (Zimbabwe Weekend Post) 10 February 2012
The New Zimbabwe Lecture Series is a critical thinking and debating forum for ideas exchange and debate. The idea behind the series is to offer a platform for public debate on issues that confront Zimbabweans every day. The hope is that Zimbabweans can also learn from the experiences of other coutries and from time time eminent scholars and personalities are invited from abroad to share their thoughts and experiences. On Wednesday the 8th of February the series was to host a public lecture under the theme, ‘The Global Financial Crisis and its implications for the Third World: The case of Zimbabwe’. Billed to speak were renowned Zimbabwean academic, author and publisher, Dr. Ibbo Mandaza and well-known South African academic and author, Professor Patrick Bond.
As the convenors of the New Zimbabwe Lecture Series we sent out invitations and flighted advertisements in the local press for the event. Here is the full text of the invitation that we sent out to the Zimbabwean public; “There is a saying that goes, “When Europe and America sneeze, the whole world catches a cold”. As the the United States and Europe grapple with the effects of economic recession and growth stagnation, the rest of the world including Africa have not been spared. Given the current state of globalisation and the integration of economies, the financial crisis has resulted in recession not only in the European Union and United States but across the whole globe. Markets in Asia and Africa have been adversely affected and economic growth is stuttering. Given these conditions, what are the policy options for Africa and Zimbabwe in particular? What are the policy implications and how feasible is the “Look East Policy” in the context of the emergence of China as a ‘superpower’? What lessons can Zimbabwe draw from the financial crisis and how can it safeguard itself from the economic shock? How will the financial crisis impact on internal political dynamics in Zimbabwe? For these and more questions, the public is hereby invited to this lecture”.
As is required by the police under the obnoxious Public Order and Security Act (POSA) we sent them notification more than a week ago that we would be convening this lecture. Ideally we were not even supposed to notify them as the Act only refers to political gatherings and clearly an event of this nature is not a political gathering. But because of our previous experiences where we have had the police barring public seminars on the pretext that they were not sanctioned, we thought it prudent to notify them. We wrote the police more than a week ago but we never heard from them until the day of the seminar when they called one of our team members to Harare Central Police Station. There he was told by one Superintendent Gowe that the meeting would not go ahead. Gowe handed him a letter saying ‘my office regrets to inform you that it has been confirmed that you are using a false address, and hence your public lecture is not sanctioned’. My colleague protested that the New Zimbabwe Lecture Series was a bona fide platform that had held similar events before and that the police had been furnished with the same application details but he was was told off.
An hour before the scheduled time of the event we received a call from the hotel where we had booked space for the event informing us that they had been instructed to lock up the space. They could not confirm to us whether the people who gave the instruction were police officers but could only say they were not in police uniform. We visited the venue so we could notify people that the meeting had been cancelled. By the time we got to the hotel there was a fully loaded police truck parked in the front. Officers in full anti-riot gear had been dispatched to cordon off the hotel entrance.
We asked to address the people that had come for the seminar in order to inform that the meeting had been cancelled. The leader of the police team told us that he was under strict instruction not to let anyone address the people and warned that if we did he would promptly arrest us. By that time a big group of people had already gathered in the hotel lobby. We defied the him and addressed the people informing them that the police had barred the meeting.
I took the leader of the group aside and I asked him how he genuinely felt about what the police were doing. I told him that this was an academic exercise and that the police had no right to stop such a meeting. He told me he saw nothing wrong with the seminar but was simply following instructions ‘from above’. “My friend, if I had a choice I would be at home with my family or maybe at the bar having a beer. But what can I do? I have been given orders and I cannot question them’, he told me.
Later on as I drove home I felt embarrassed that we had flown a man all the way from Durban only for him to be denied an opportunity to share his ideas. Is this the Zimbabwean society we want to build? A society that fears ideas? How can we progress as a country if we close platforms for information exchange and debate? Countries that have progressed have done so on the backdrop of robust intellectual debate, from which new ideas emerge. Is the Zimbabwean political class so paranoid that it can send a whole truckload of police officers to bar Zimbabweans from talking about issues that confront them?
The New Zimbabwe Lecture Series will be submitting another application for the same event next week. We will not rest until Zimbabweans get a genuine opportunity to search for answers to the problems that confront them every day.
Public meeting on financial and ecological crises banned Kubatana.net 9 February 2012
Police yesterday banned a public meeting in the MDC’s New Zimbabwe lecture series which was to have been addressed by South African economist Patrick Bond, the topic being “Global Financial and Ecological Crises, and Implications for Third World Countries.”
As one observer commented about the ban: “Hundreds had turned up for the meeting only to be greeted by baton wielding anti-riot police. Is this the state of the GNU we want?” The real question however is did we ever say we wanted any kind of GNU? The people of Zimbabwe didn’t vote for a compromise. The politicians decided to force one on us when none of them could get their own way.
Meanwhile, “The Principals” (Robert Mugabe, Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara), signatories to the Global Political Agreement met for 2 ½ hours yesterday to “deliberate key issues affecting the country.”
Amongst other things, they discussed elections, media reforms the land audit, and sticky issues like the Attorney General’s Act and Police Commissioner General Augustine Chihuri. The gist of the statement after the meeting? Yes, these are issues. And something should happen about them.
Somehow, I wouldn’t have thought that “something” would have involved banning a public discussion. . . www.kubatanablogs.net Kubatana.net ~ an online community of Zimbabwean activists
Khadija Sharife's new book on why Africa must change tax injustice
This book addresses issues that, in the light of the current financial and economic crisis, are urgent, timely and salient to the bigger issue of development finance. - Yash Tandon
This lucid introduction to tax justice in Africa sets out the causes and consequences of tax injustice and offers options for a fairer future. Although tax revenues are essential for establishing independent states of free citizens, taxes in Africa are often regressive, tax administration ineffective and many commodity exports from Africa are tax exempt. The influence of multilateral agencies on tax policy in Africa has, in many countries, decreased government revenues. Multinational companies exploit tax loopholes while secrecy jurisdictions enable tax evasion.
So what is the role of governments, parliaments and taxpayers? What needs to be done to achieve tax justice? The solutions suggested in this important book include raising awareness about tax issues, promoting a culture of tax compliance, increasing tax transparency and enhancing international cooperation on tax matters.
Tax Us If You Can was written by lead author Khadija Sharife, a regional correspondent for The Africa Report magazine, Africa project fellow for the World Policy Institute, and University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society (UKZN-CCS) researcher and writer.
If you're an African non-governmental organisation of limited funds, please email info@pambazukapress.org to arrange a complimentary copy of this ebook (Adobe PDF). http://fahamubooks.org
Introduction
Tax is the foundation of all civilisations. The act of tracing tax policies and practices reveals the history of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, state and citizen.
In Africa this relationship can be traced back over millennia. For instance, Egypt’s famed Rosetta Stone, created in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic era, was an agreement granting a tax exemption to priests and certain reductions to the military and other ruling classes, including traders approved by the king. It was an early example of the special privileges that continue to proliferate across the continent. Today, 80 per cent of Africa’s exports consist of primary commodities. African governments depend heavily on the resource rents from these commodities, but many are exempt from taxation. Tax holidays and other hidden subsidies granted to multinationals in secretive agreements deprive governments and their citizens of significant tax revenues.
Similar exemptions to those that once governed trade along the Anu canal in ancient Egypt continue today as foreign traders set up shop in the various free zones along Africa’s coastlines, or special economic zones and international financial centres along the trade routes that cross the continent, where little or no tax is due.
Tax injustices in Africa prevail for a number of reasons. Key among these are the world’s secrecy jurisdictions, which provide services with high levels of confidentiality in order to facilitate the hiding of taxable incomes and shelter criminal activities. It is not without irony, then, that the Rosetta Stone is housed in London, which is linked to more than a quarter of the world’s secrecy jurisdictions. (Secrecy jurisdictions are defined as places that intentionally create regulation for the primary benefit and use of those not resident in their geographical domain. That regulation is designed to undermine the legislation or regulation of another jurisdiction. See Chapter 3.)
This book aims to help readers understand the issues behind Africa’s struggle for tax justice. Chapter 1 begins by exploring the meaning of tax justice in the African context before examining some of the main channels for tax leakage from the continent and the impact of these leakages on government revenues.
Chapter 2 sets out the key systemic causes of tax injustice in Africa, explaining first how decades of selective development, or ‘maldevelopment’, in resource-rich states has left government funds depleted and many countries susceptible to conflict. The chapter goes on to examine the policies that have contributed to making taxes in Africa regressive, and ends by looking at problems around ineffective tax and customs administrations.
Chapter 3 presents a ‘who’s who’ of tax injustice in Africa. The tax avoidance industry is always keen to make a clear distinction between tax evasion, which is illegal in most countries, and tax avoidance, which usually involves exploiting legal loopholes. This chapter looks at some of the key players involved in exploiting such loopholes: accountants, lawyers, bankers, multinational companies and, crucially, secrecy jurisdictions. It also examines the role of governments, parliaments and taxpayers, and asks what all stakeholders should be doing to help achieve tax justice.
Chapter 4 discusses how multilateral agencies, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have influenced tax policy in Africa. It shows how the ‘tax consensus’ promoted by these organisations has led to a reduction in government revenues in many countries. It then looks at some of the international organisations trying to tackle various aspects of tax injustice, particularly the United Nations and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and discusses the role of a range of African organisations and the growing contribution of civil society.
Chapter 5 emphasises the importance of taxation for Africa’s future and explores a series of options to help achieve tax justice. Key among these will be: raising awareness around tax issues and promoting a culture of tax compliance; increasing tax transparency among governments and multinational companies; increasing international cooperation on tax matters; and enhancing international assistance to help African governments improve their tax affairs.
Finally, a glossary of tax terms is provided to help readers understand some of the technical terminology around taxation.
Tax revenues are necessary for any state to meet the basic needs of its citizens. In Africa, tax revenues will be essential for establishing independent states of free citizens, less reliant on foreign aid and the vagaries of external capital. We hope that many of the ideas presented here will be realised and that tax justice can help all African states achieve a greater degree of self-determination.
The IMF and Tunisia
Will Neoliberalism Make a Comeback in Africa? Patrick Bond and Khadija Sharife 3 February 2012
With International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director Christine Lagarde visiting Tunis today, the stage is set for ideological war over the progress of democratic revolutions.
Until 27 year-old fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi committed suicide by immolation in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia was packaged as an IMF success story. In 2008, dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was embraced by Lagarde’s predecessor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn: ‘Economic policy adopted here is a sound policy and is the best model for many emerging countries.’
Ben Ali’s regime was the ‘best model’ for two other Washington institutions: the State Department just a few blocks from the IMF headquarters, and the Pentagon. From within Hillary Clinton’s lair, as WikiLeaks revealed in 2010, ‘The United States and Tunisia have an active schedule of joint military exercises. US security assistance historically has played an important role in cementing relations.’ (Clinton is a leading candidate for World Bank president, to be chosen in mid-2012.)
Also in 2010, the IMF celebrated Ben Ali’s commitment ‘to reduce tax rates on businesses and to offset those reductions by increasing the standard Value Added Tax (VAT) rate,’ which hurts poor people most. The IMF advised the tyrant to ‘contain subsidies of food and fuel products.’ While squeezing the poor, the IMF diplomatically turned a blind eye to widespread corruption by Ben Ali and his wife’s notorious Trabelsi family, the two families’ extreme level of business concentration, the regime’s reliance upon murderous security forces to defend Tunisian crony capitalism, and the hedonistic lifestyle for which Ben Ali’s clan had become famous.
The informal sector is vibrant in Tunisia, about half the size of the formal Gross Domestic Product, but doesn’t contribute to the 18 percent VAT rate. So like in South Africa where the state just announced tax filings by a record four million people, the pressure is intense for authorities to bring survivalist home-production businesses into the net. Police harassment worsened, and Bouazizi killed himself after his fruit cart was overturned and goods confiscated. He had borrowed $200 the night before to buy the produce, and with the meager earnings, he supported a family of four. He died of the burn wounds last January 4.
Before long, another self-immolation occurred, politically, when the notorious sex pest Strauss-Kahn allegedly raped a 32-year old Guinean maid, Nafissatou Diallo, who fought back with a charge that, ultimately, could not be prosecuted in the criminal courts, though a civil trial looms.
But the legacies represented by both immolations continue: high-risk pro-dictatorial neoliberalism and courageous popular resistance. A month ago, Strauss-Kahn’s successor Christine Lagarde, also a former French finance minister, visited Abuja to offer neoliberal advice to Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan on fuel subsidy cuts. Lagarde was effusive about Jonathan. ‘I was extremely impressed’, she said, ‘with the energy and pace at which he wants to transform the economy.’
However, as for Nigeria’s very low fuel price, as the BBC reported, ‘The IMF has long urged Nigeria’s government to remove the subsidy, which costs a reported $8 billion a year.‘ Lagarde also emphasized this ‘reform’, and the result was nearly Tunisian in scale: a national popular struggle, Occupy Nigeria, that shook the country to the point of Jonathan’s overthrow before civilized society – the trade unions – called off protests, agreeing to a government fuel price concession.
The preceding paragraphs are based upon leftist ideological argumentation, but this is not the only narrative about Tunisia. The Third World’s most celebrated neoliberal is probably Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. He blames the series of revolutionary uprisings in North Africa on limited access to capital.
In an interview last year, de Soto told us, ‘Bouazizi immolated himself in a terrible suicide because he never got a right to the land his house was built on, which could have been used for credit to develop his business, for example, to buy a truck. He was never able to get an official right to put a stall in a public place and so, he never had a property right to it. The only way to get the police to accept it was to pay off a bribe of several dinars every day. When they take that away from him, the space, he knows he does not have much of a future anymore.’
De Soto also blames Islam’s Sharia law for the inability of Bouazizi’s mother to benefit from belated municipal recognition of his home: ‘When he died, she wasn’t able to pass the title from his name to her name, because the paper that recognises the property is hard to transfer and in the process, someone could do very dirty tricks. Should she wish to sell it, to rent it, to use it as a guarantee to get capital for credit, she’s got a problem. The kind of papers that the Municipality dishes out are not good enough for the bank. So women are not protected because of Shariah laws of the country, where property would go to the eldest son, even if the son is not able to benefit from the asset.’
But one fatal flaw in his argument, as shenanigans at Muhammed Yunus’ Grameen Bank and recent suicides by 250,000 over-indebted Andra Pradesh farmers suggest, is that microcredit can just as easily add to the woes of ordinary people, amplifying the deeper economic contradictions. Moreover, Tunisia’s system was structured to diminish the power of citizens in order to sustain a dictatorship, with an estimated 17 percent of one major Tunisian bank in the hands of Ben Ali’s son.
Thus, the poverty innate to the IMF’s best model, Tunisia, cannot be solved by paper rights aiming to integrate poor people into a rotting ‘formal’ economy locked up by political and military elites. The same is true in Egypt, where repression by the post-Mubarak military against progressive democrats has worsened. The majority of parliament represented by Islamic parties is not yet sufficiently powerful to support the democrats – if that is their wont. The re-emergence of political Islam in the Middle East and North Africa, especially Tunisia where progressives do have influence over economic policy, requires new narratives. The revolutionary alliance in several countries between political Islam and democratic civil society, against Washington-backed dictators, has not yet ended.
In a speech last December, Lagarde attempted to coopt the ideas of the Arab Spring. Speaking of Bouazizi, she asked, ‘Who could have predicted that his tragic death would herald a whole new Middle East? Who would have foreseen that this act of desperation against a violation of human dignity would ignite a flame that would eventually illuminate the entire region, toppling governments and leading to mass awakening of social consciousness?’
But for Lagarde, the awakening was dangerous: ‘This is naturally a risky and uncertain period. It is a period when hard choices must be made, when post-revolutionary euphoria must give some way to practical concerns.’
Her concern was partly about Tunisia, where yesterday she seemed to be making progress. ‘It will be important to manage this difficult transition in an orderly way. And here, I want to pay tribute especially to the people of Tunisia, who are going through a smooth and inclusive process of transition. Just as Tunisia provided the first spark of the Arab Spring, so now can it light the path forward for other countries in the region.’
Will that light include the kinds of subsidy cuts and privatization strategies her institution backed in pre-revolutionary Tunisia? After all, said Lagarde in her December speech praising the Arab Spring, ‘We are offering the best policy advice possible. We will provide financial help if requested. And with our technical assistance, we are helping countries build better institutions for a better world. Some examples: We are helping Egypt make its tax system more equitable. We are helping Libya develop a modern system of government payments. We are helping Tunisia improve its financial sector. And we are helping Jordan with fuel subsidy reform.’
Then Jordan will surely follow Nigeria in protest. But in Tunisia the pitch is insidious, for yesterday, interim prime minister Hamadi Jebali was quoted in the local press as ‘commending the IMF’s active and constructive support to Tunisia’s economy particularly after the revolution.’
But Jebali’s former advisor, and current spokesperson of the ruling Al-Nahda party, Said Ferjani, offered a more balanced view yesterday during a talk in Durban, South Africa: ‘The IMF was bad in describing Ben Ali as a model.’
Although he conceded there were no plans to cut ties to the IMF, ‘We won’t be in a situation where we will be blackmailed by anything. Across Africa they pushed for privatization of the safety net. We will never listen to such things. We will not accept anything that compromises our national interest. The poor people of Tunisia are the prime priority for us because at the end of the day those are our people and we will not bow to any pressure or any kind of policies that would exacerbate the plight of the poor people. The IMF can say what they want but we will do what is right for our people. It’s the aim of our revolution.’
If the likes of Lagarde continue their visits to African capitals – including Pretoria last month when who knows what advice she chummily proffered to South African finance minister Pravin Gordhan – then we need to hear more from Tunisians, Egyptians, Nigerians and so many others about how underlying causes of revolt, especially inequality and neoliberalism, can fuse opposition from diverse traditions. After all, no country exemplifies neoliberalism, inequality and multifaceted protest – and resulting political confusion – as acutely as South Africa. >www.counterpunch.org
Patrick Bond and Khadija Sharife are researchers at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society.
South Africa & Carbon Trading
Should Africa walk away from carbon market failure before we destroy the planet? Michael Dorsey and Patrick Bond, Original version appeared in >Business Day, 24 January 2011
Last winter, when carbon prices fell 15 percent in one week, industry analysts termed it “carnage”. Then in the fortnight before last month’s Durban climate summit, carbon prices fell more than 30 percent, with front-year European Union Allowance permits dropping below $11/tonne. And they have crashed even further since.
During the Durban talks Deutsche Bank confessed, “We do not expect the pricing outlook to improve materially in the foreseeable future.” A leading UBS analyst predicted a €3/tonne price in coming months, because the EU Emissions Trading Scheme “isn't working” and carbon prices are “already too low to have any significant environmental impact.”
PointCarbon, Reuters’ climate trade news service, concluded, “Carbon markets are still on life support after the COP17 put off some big decisions until next year and failed to deliver any hope for a needed boost in carbon permit demand.”
The French bank Societe Generale projects, “European carbon permits may fall close to zero should regulators fail to set tight enough limits in the market after 2020” – and without much prospect of that, the bank lowered its 2012 forecasts by 28 percent. A 54 percent crash for December 2012 carbon futures sent the price to a record low, just under €6.4/tonne. Making matters worse, an additional oversupply of 879 million tons was anticipated through 2020, partly as a result of a huge inflow of United Nations offsets: an estimated 1.75 billion tonnes.
Those UN carbon credits include Clean Development Mechanism projects which are notoriously bogus. The UN estimates that 40-70% of the projects are fraudulent or “non-additional”—which in lay terms means they do not mitigate climate change. South Africa’s leading pilot in Durban, the Bisasar Road waste-to-energy site is a case in point. The project is bound up in a corruption controversy surrounding former mayor Obed Mlaba and an official’s false claims to the UN that without foreign funding the project would not have gone ahead.
Many analysts openly admit carbon prices are far too low and may never rise high enough to catalyse the transformative innovations – most costing in excess of €50/tonne (the EU peak was just over €30/tonne five years ago) – necessary in energy, transport, production, agriculture and disposal to achieve a solid post-carbon foothold. By all scientific accounts, by 2020 it is vital to wean the industrialised world economy from dependence upon more than half the currently-consumed fossil fuels, so as to avert catastrophic climate change.
Africa hasn’t really received this bad news, mainly because even the continent’s finest daily paper, Business Day, doesn’t report the carbon markets with a fraction of the critical vigour given to interrogating ANC Youth League grandstanding over the word ‘nationalisation’, for example. Indeed after Durban, BD uncritically cited National Business Initiative CEO Joanne Yawitch’s remark that “the most important” of Durban’s outcomes is securing Kyoto’s “second commitment period and the carbon market.”
The lack of awareness of the carbon market’s crash is a travesty because far too often these past two centuries, the continent has been looted by faraway financiers selling snake-oil.
This week at the Sandton Sun, a conference aims to “make Africa a major focus for climate finance into the post-Kyoto era” with keynote speakers from Morgan Stanley, Standard Bank, Nedbank, Carbon Check, CDM Africa Climate Solutions, SouthSouthNorth, similar emissions traders, the Johannesburg and Cape Town municipalities and the national Department of Energy.
Caveat emptor to carbon buyers, sellers and speculators. Climate gamblers have been led astray since 1997 when the Kyoto Protocol was amended – at US vice president Al Gore’s request – to let corporations buy the right to pollute in exchange for endorsing the treaty. Predictably, Washington has refused to honour this ever since, even though it represents a world-historic broken promise, followed logically by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s 2009 pledge to raise $100 billion per year for the Green Climate Fund, also worthless.
Pulling at straws, that Fund’s design cochair Trevor Manuel has suggested getting half the revenues from carbon markets. It might have been feasible if the emissions trade reached the anticipated $3 trillion mark by 2020. In reality, after a decade, the market seems to have peaked at $140 billion in annual carbon trades.
These trades are mostly in the EU where the Emissions Trading Scheme was meant to generate a cap on emissions and a steady 1.74 percent annual reduction. Unfortunately, the speculative character of carbon markets not only encouraged rampant fraud, Value Added Tax scams, and computer hacking which shut the Scheme for two weeks last year.
The EU’s carbon trading also included perverse incentives to stockpile credits when large corporations as well as Eastern European states – with ‘hot air’ excess emissions capacity subsequent to their 1990s manufacturing collapse – gambled the price would increase.
With the market now collapsing, the current perverse incentive is to flood supply so as to at least achieve some return rather than none at all when eventually the markets are decommissioned, as happened in 2010 to the Chicago climate exchange. Powerful equity backers of the Chicago market – once the lead US carbon exchange – recently sued the high-profile founder, Richard Sandor, for misrepresenting the value of their assets. If they win perhaps other investors can follow suit and squeeze back the vast losses from the investment banks now selling the declining credits.
Africa can and must do better than invest faith and state resources in yet another Ponzi scheme: the ‘privatisation of the air’. The North’s ‘climate debt’ to Africa should be paid not through such gambling, but in genuine income transfers that reach ordinary people who are taking the brunt of worsening climate chaos. >www.businessday.co.za
Dorsey and Bond are development and environment professors at Dartmouth College and UKZN respectively. Last year, Bond authored Politics of Climate Justice (UKZN Press) and edited Durban's Climate Gamble (Unisa Press).
Trouble in Cato Crest
Faith Manzi 19 January 2012
These are photos from a visit to Cato Crest - just below UKZN - in the wake of a contested demolition of shacks, which are to be replaced by small formal housing units. Across from the bulldozed shacks are temporary, haphazardly built ones until people can move in to their houses.
One woman is using her house to shelter a family of two women and their babies whose structure was destroyed by the heavy rains just before Christmas. She informed us of corruption in housing allocation: there are people who occupy similar houses nearby by buying them through the committees in charge of allocating local people with houses once they are finished (she spoke in anonymity).
Upon arrival at the tin shackland we were greeted by a sickening stench, since the toilets are right inside in the one person alley between the shacks. These tin structures are connected to each other with no breathing space or privacy. So there is serious overcrowding and hardly any space for movement. However, the water supply is also right alongside the tins.
The place is full of stolen electricity wires lying across the road some with uninsulated cables - a danger to anyone (especially the kids who run around barefoot) since there is water in the road due to the building taking place. Some children are not attending schools and are manning small spaza shops.
These are conditions in which protests logically occur. Will civil society find a voice, or will it be suffocated by contending political parties?
Cato Crest demolitions halted Bongani Hans 19 January 2012
The controversy around the flattening of shacks to build low-cost houses in the Cato Crest informal settlement in Durban has been amicably resolved, with eThekwini mayor James Nxumalo announcing that the demolitions are to be suspended.
Addressing hundreds of residents in Cato Crest on Wednesday, Nxumalo said the demolitions would continue once his municipality found alternative accommodation for those whose houses were to be razed. He said residents would find out about accommodation arrangements on February 5.
It is estimated that more than 2 000 residents would have to abandon their shacks.
Nxumalo said the municipality had allocated more than R34 million to build more than 1 500 houses in the area.
There are also many tenants of shack owners who will be left without accommodation when the shacks are demolished. Nxumalo said these tenants would be given temporary accommodation and in future would be given houses.
“The problem of informal settlements will never be solved if new people move into the area once they hear about this low-cost housing project. So please do not invite your relatives and friends from other areas to come here,” he said.
Residents had been asked to find temporary alternative accommodation and to wait for their homes to be completed. This sparked a war of words between DA members and ANC ward councillor Mzi Ngiba.
The DA pressed the municipality to stop the process and to make it eThekwini’s responsibility to find alternative accommodation. The party also demanded that the municipality give assurances that tenants would also get low-cost houses.
Fifty shacks have been demolished, some without their owners’ consent.
DA MP Dianne Kohler Barnard said:
“The owners of the 50 demolished shacks should not worry because their houses will be built soon.” - The Mercury www.iol.co.za
‘Illegal’ evictions from shacks challenged Bongani Hans (The Mercury) 16 January 2012
VIOLENCE erupted at the Cato Crest informal settlement in Durban early yesterday after residents were ordered to vacate their homes to make way for new low-cost housing.
The DA says the evictions are illegal and are being challenged. The party has opened cases of illegal eviction at the Cato manor police station.
DA proportional representational councillor Hlanganani Gumbi and party leaders, including MP Dianne Kohler Barnard, visited the area yesterday.
Gumbi said his party had told residents that the eviction notice was issued by the ANC instead of the municipality. He said the eviction was illegal because it had not been authorised by a court.
Residents said they had been told to remove their goods because tractors would demolish the shacks today.
Police spokesman Captain Thulani Zwane said a case of illegal eviction had been opened at the Cato Manor police station by the DA.
Gumbi said he had to intervene when residents toyi-toyied and blocked roads after midnight. Irate residents also barricaded roads with burning tyres.
However, many residents were seen removing belongings and demolishing their shacks. They believed that the eviction was a temporary measure and was for their own benefit.
Others, who admitted to being supporters and members of the DA, refused to comply and said the eviction was illegal and they would not move until they were given alternative accommodation.
The DA chairwoman in the area, Mpume Dlamini, told residents that if they agreed to move they would never be allowed to return and their houses would be sold to other people.
“We have previously seen people’s houses being sold. This happened in the newly built low-cost houses three times last year and police refused to open cases against people who were selling the houses,” said Dlamini.
Welcome Mpungose, who is a member of the ANC and also a member of the local community development committee, said they were working with local ward councillor Mzi Ngiba to clear the area to make way for about 2 000 new houses.
“We are not doing this under the name of the ANC, but we are the development committee. We want better houses to be built for people in this area. The houses cannot be built if there is no vacant land.
“I will also demolish my seven-room shack,” he said.
Ngiba confirmed that excavators would be used to demolish the shacks today. He said local residents had agreed to comply by removing their shacks.
“The DA is angry to see that we are delivering services. They hate the fact that we are working hard to get rid of shacks,” he said. www.iol.co.za
What role for African civil society in economic disputes?
The reality behind the alleged recovery of Africa from the 2008/09 global financial meltdown, which has been well advertised by multilateral financial agencies, needs investigation, partly because the institutions’ political agenda appears to be to further integrate the continent into a highly volatile world economy, as well as cement Washington Consensus economic policies.
The reality of economic recovery is so contradictory that African elites in countries praised recently for their pro- Washington stance by the Bretton Woods Institutions (such as Tunisia, Libya and Egypt), are now being challenged by popular movements demanding both democracy and socio-economic justice. From North Africa these are moving to sites such as Senegal, Uganda, Kenya, Swaziland, Botswana and South Africa, and social protests at other sites of exploitation across the continent. More
Urban Social Movements in South Africa
Confronting uneven and combined development theory Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai and Trevor Ngwane 17 January 2012
Introduction The political dynamics of contemporary South Africa are rife with contradiction. On one hand, it is among the most consistently contentious places on earth, with insurgent communities capable of mounting disruptive protest on a nearly constant basis, rooted in the poor areas of the half-dozen major cities as well as neglected and multiply-oppressed black residential areas of declining towns. On the other hand, even the best-known contemporary South African social movements, for all their sound, lack a certain measure of fury.
In the face of the government’s embrace of neoliberal social policies since shortly after the fall of Apartheid, what are often called ‘service delivery protests’ occurring many thousands of times a year according to police statistics,[1]are at once the site of poor people’s demands for greater responsiveness to human needs in general, but are also intensely localized and self-limited in their politics. The upsurge of protest since the late 1990s invariably invokes images of the anti-Apartheid struggle and thus focuses analysis on continuities and breaks between the old anti-Apartheid mass action and the new mass action in post-apartheid society.[2] And yet, the majority of community protesters operate in close interconnection with parts of the Tripartite Alliance, composed of the African National Congress (ANC), the trade union movement represented by the Congress of South African Trades Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), and so the line between insurgencies and governing organizations is not always clear. Yet their geographic and political isolation from each other have contributed to their having little leverage over the Alliance, which notwithstanding some resistance by unions and communists, embraced neoliberal policies in the transition from anti-apartheid resistance to class-apartheid government in 1994.
But beyond the community protests, in many respects, the problems that have faced more traditional radical social movements in South Africa are familiar to students of social movements elsewhere: of moving from movement to governing; of cooptation and shifting roles vis-à-vis the state; of the limits of localism; and of the joining of community- and workplace-based organizing to forge a strong working-class politics. These are all the subject of considerable scholarship, both within and outside of the Marxist tradition, and within and outside of South Africa.[3] We argue here, however, that in the South African context, these can be more clearly seen as symptomatic questions of a larger problematic, what we term, following Trotsky, the problem of ‘uneven and combined Marxism.’
For Trotsky, ‘uneven and combined development’ was a fundamentally dialectical framework through which he sought first to theorize the relations among Russia’s nascent industrial base (and hence, too, Russia’s urban proletariat), and its backward, semi-feudal rural relations, and second, following this, the revolutionary potentials for Russia at the time of the Revolution. For Trotsky, this implied understanding the relationship among forms of capital both within Russia and across borders. Uneven development means that extremely different relations of production coexist within and across territory, while combined development suggests not that the ‘less developed’ are archaic and simply bound, at some point to ‘catch up’ with the more advanced, perhaps going through the same ‘stages’ of development. (The South African modernization narrative since the early 2000s, shared by former president Thabo Mbeki and current president Jacob Zuma, is that the ‘two economies’ are ‘structurally disconnected’.)[4]
Instead, it means that in order to understand the revolutionary possibilities of a given moment, it is important to understand how more and less advanced relations of production are related, how they often reinforce each other, and how their contradictions may lead to revolutionary advances in developmentally ‘less-advanced’ contexts. ‘Uneven and combined Marxism’ implies a way of considering the difficulties of constructing independent left politics in the conjuncture of a long-term capitalist stagnation in a 21st century South Africa in which some sectors of the economy – construction, finance and commerce – have been booming while many other former labour-intensive sectors of manufacturing were deindustrialised (or shifted from general production for a local mass market to niche production for a global upper-class market, such as luxury autos and garments), and in which large sections of society are still peripheral – aside from serving as a reserve army of unneeded surplus labour = to the interests of capital, domestic and global. The unevenness is also geographical, with small areas of South Africa operating within a circuit of luxury consumption and new technologies, but others such as ex-Bantustan rural areas continuing their decline. The unevenness of sector and space is no surprise, of course, since capital has always flowed to sites of higher profitability not to establish equilibrating trends, but on the contrary to exacerbate differentials and enhance inequalities. The word ‘combined’ is important in South Africa because of the ways capital interacts with the non-capitalist sectors and spaces, including women’s reproductive sites and mutual aid systems, spaces of community commons, state services, and nature.
Unevenness is obvious across the cities and townships (and towns and dorpies or villages) where battles rage, among the sectors of capital, and across scales of struggle. The ‘combined’ part of anti-capitalism is an area we are yet to see fully invoked (in the spirit of, for example the Latin American mobilizations which foreground indigenous movements’ struggles), because of the complexities of organizing the unorganized – especially women –in shack settlements and rural areas where the act of daily survival in the interstices of capitalist/non-capitalist articulations generates far more collisions of political self-interest than standard Marxist urban theory so far elucidates.
To speak of uneven and combined Marxism, therefore, is to invoke a political project on the South African left that cannot but begin with the contradictory totality of the country’s social relations, both internal and external, at multiple geographic scales and at vastly different levels of development. And yet, the beginning cannot also be the end; the challenge for South African left politics is to create a hegemonic formation from this unevenness that is capable of moving toward fulfilling the global left’s hopes in the anti-Apartheid struggle, which was, at the same time, in many respects, an anti-capitalist struggle as well. But to articulate a left politics on this uneven ground is also to enrich the typically imported Marxist analysis, in the sense that the South African experience heightens and encapsulates several otherwise familiar tensions – – urban/rural; worker/poor; local/national/global; society/nature; gender; etc. – – and can therefore show, perhaps more clearly than can other contexts, the essential relations among them.
In what follows, we begin by describing the contemporary contours of protest in South Africa, and then return to the problem of the hegemony of the Tripartite Alliance and its embrace of neoliberal policies, even if this has itself been somewhat uneven and the source of some tension among Alliance members. We then discuss the development of a strategic impasse among South African social movements, and present and critique several theoretically informed alternative routes out of or around the apparent cul-de-sac. We conclude by rearticulating more precisely the stakes in proposing an uneven and combined Marxism; and rather than proposing solutions, we draw upon it to pose the strategic questions for an agency-centred South African left more sharply.
Contemporary South African Protest Writing five years after the end of Apartheid, Andrew Nash observed: The struggle against Apartheid became at times a focus of the hopes of the revolutionary left around the world. It represents a missed opportunity for the left not only in the more obvious sense that it did not result in a real challenge to the power of global capitalism. It was also an opportunity to transform the historical relationship of Marxist theory and working class politics, and overcome the division which allows a dialectical Marxism to flourish in the universities and journals, while working class politics are dominated by the managerialism of Soviet Marxism or social-democracy.[5]
This sense of a lost opportunity persists in South African politics today. It is found in the widespread discontent in townships and shack-dweller communities on the urban periphery over the rising cost of living and of previously state-provided services such as water and electricity; it is found in the militant protests among the poor for redistricting so that poor areas and rich areas are not administratively separated, thereby hampering the poor’s ability to gain access to resources and public services (as in the towns of Khutsong and Balfour); it is seen in the divisions within the ANC, SACP and COSATU; and it is seen in the Treatment Action Campaign’s successful and well-known battle against Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS denialism and against Big Pharma’s price-gouging of antiretroviral medicines. And yet, in many of the successful instances of protest – e.g., the reconnection of water and electricity, the rolling-back of privatization schemes, and the reduction in the price of antiretrovirals from $15,000 per person to zero – revolutionary Marxists played important leadership roles, suggesting, perhaps, that Nash bends the stick a bit too far.
Nevertheless, the question of how far to bend the stick remains. There is no question that anti-racial Apartheid also had within it the seeds of anti-class Apartheid. This can be seen in the Treatment Action Campaign’s successful attack, not just on price-gouging by Big Pharma, but also on intellectual property rights, which were curtailed by the 2001 Doha exemption for medical emergencies. It can be seen in the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee’s work since 2000 not only to fight against the electricity company’s privatization, rate changes, and electricity cut-offs, but also to teach people how to illegally reconnect themselves to the grid. These are only part of what Peter Alexander calls a ‘rebellion of the poor’. In the wake of the introduction of the ‘Growth, Employment and Redistribution’ strategy or ‘GEAR’ that marked the Alliance’s definitive turn toward neoliberal macroeconomic policy, the most militant communities that took to the streets in protest and which formed the new urban social movements were relatively privileged. They already had houses, but were now fighting a defensive battle just to stay on in the urban ghettoes. Those who clung on to spaces in the city in shacks appeared to be more patient. The Alliance’s promises to the poor included gaining access to the formal ghetto, while at the same time, its municipal officials were evicting others for non-payment as employment became increasingly precarious and unemployment increased to more than forty percent of the workforce. For a while, the enormous legitimacy of the ANC explained this patience.
But from the late 1990s, ongoing waves of protests broke across the country’s formal townships and shack settlements and the ‘new urban social movements’ formed in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town from 1999. Though the first waves ebbed after a national protest at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, more surges were noticed from mid-2004 in Zevenfontein north of Johannesburg and in Harrismith in the Free State (where repression was marked by shooting and death), and in Durban’s Kennedy Road beginning in early 2005, shack-dweller protest coalesced into the Abahlali baseMjondolo (shack-dweller’s movement).
Yet, in many cases what started out as insurgencies outside the control of the Alliance were siphoned off into calls for participation, legal challenges, and ‘voice’. Furthermore, one of the striking elements of South African protest is its failure to ‘scale up,’ or join together either geographically or politically. With some few exceptions, the recent upsuge of service-delivery protests have taken the form of ‘popcorn protests’, that is, movements that fly high, move according to where the wind blows – even in xenophobic directions at times – and then fall to rest quite quickly.[6] There have been several attempts at coordination in the mid-2000s: Johannesburg’s Anti-Privatization Forum brought together service-delivery protest groups, students, left political activists (including, at first, some in the municipal workers’ union and the SACP), and independent-left trade unions; the Social Movements Indaba[7] which from 2002-08 combined community struggles; and since 2011, the Democratic Left Front has taken a similar initiative. Despite these efforts, and in part because of continual splintering of independent left forces and a failure to make common cause with the left of the labour movement, there have developed no common programmes and no bridging organizational strategies that can challenge neoliberalism on a national level. Three elements of this failure – reflecting the uneven and combined nature of anti-capitalism in South Africa today – are worth noting here: the importance of access, localism, and leadership.
Access Social movements often organize around sets of demands on the state that are, at least in principle, winnable. Service-delivery protests targeting the privatization of water supply or high charges for water use by the local water authority, the regressive kilowatt-per-hour charge on electricity, or the eviction of shack-dwellers from squatted land all imply the possibility of success. In Durban’s rebellious Chatsworth community,[8] for example, in order to achieve de facto recognition and therefore the delivery of services that would keep the movement constituency close to its leadership, movement activists increasingly joined with the city council in various committees to administer and monitor the movement’s success. A decade after the initial 1999 uprising, political work mainly involved technical issues and oversight over upgrading, liaison with welfare departments and a range of other interventions which pressed less for radical policy change but focused instead on merely getting existing policy implemented.[9] This also inevitably brought the movement into close working relationships with ANC local councilors and limited the autonomy of the movement, and ultimately led to enormous disappointments in Chatsworth when official promises were broken and municipal contractors engaged in fraud.
Likewise, in Durban’s shack-lands, in order to get recognition from the local council, shack-dweller activists had to ensure that no more shacks were built. Activists had to also ward off competitors. This was especially so if an organization defined its role as ensuring delivery. It was paradoxical but increasingly common that movements took political positions sharply critical of neoliberal policies on the one hand, while negotiating for better delivery within those policy frameworks on the other.
Of course, this is a common feature of social movements, and of poor people’s movements beyond the South African context. There is a recurring question of how to consolidate a movement’s ‘victories’ without demobilizing it, and how to move beyond the initial ‘winnable’ demands to more radical ones that cannot be so easily administered. In the South African context, however, this problem is deepened by the sheer weight and presence of the ANC. Though there is a significant variety of political positions taken by local ANC branches and officials, larger matters of policy and financing are settled at the centre, while implementation – and enforcement – depend greatly on the local level. Reaching the centre, therefore, is fundamentally difficult given the fact that the service-delivery protests tend to limit their demands to locally constituted authorities, with the possible exception of Eskom, the utility providing ninety-five percent of South Africa’s electricity (Eskom sells energy both to municipalities as well as to four million individual households – mainly in black townships and rural areas – who were retail customers dating to the apartheid era). Access problems therefore imply a need for protesters to ‘jump scale’ from local to national, and sometimes also to global, for the World Bank has been known to give ‘instrumental’ advice on matters such as water pricing.[10]
Localism and the Geographic Scales of Protest Organization Marxist urban theorists, following the geographer Henri Lefebvre, speak of social relations unfolding on multiple geographic scales. Scales combine aspects of people’s own construction of the extent of their social relations, and boundaries of the arenas in which they exist. They thus, depend, too on historically accreted understandings of the spatial limitations exerted on these relations, and on the physical properties that may inscribe them. As Marston writes, they ‘are the outcome of, both everyday life and macro-level social structures.’[11] Finally, the framings of scale – framings that can have both rhetorical and material consequences –are often contradictory and contested and are not necessarily enduring. To say, therefore, that contemporary South African protest – with several exceptions such as the Treatment Action Campaign and for a time, the Jubilee SA network, as well as some of the more innovative community groups in the major cities – is characteristically local in orientation is to make an observation about the scale of the protests.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the localist orientation of protest. To the extent that participants stop evictions that affect them; to the extent that they force local authorities to increase the free allowance of electricity and water and lower fees for anything above the survival allowance; to the extent that a ‘residue’ of protest emerges as some local institutional safeguards against further abuse; to this extent, they are better off for having protested. From a Marxist perspective, however, limiting protest to the local scale both narrows the immediate transformative potential of social movements and in the longer term, disadvantages both the movements and the people who compose them. The same can be said about sectoral-narrowness, in which the ‘water sector’, economic reform advocacy, gender, energy justice, climate activism, access to education, healthcare advocacy, and myriad more specific struggles fail to connect the dots between each other, both in South Africa and across the world (notwithstanding a World Social Forum movement meant – but apparently unable – to solve this problem).[12]
What does going beyond localism mean? To ask the question begs, first of all, a more precise definition of what constitutes the ‘local’ in the present case. Here, we propose that ‘local’ in South African protest denotes a focus on administrative and jurisdictional boundaries on one hand, and on the site of social reproduction, on the other. The extremely vigorous protest movements in the country focus most of their attention on the failings of local councils and governments which are themselves both the local enforcers of ANC policies formulated on the national scale – often influenced by the demands of global brokers of capital (the SA Treasury places great stock in its international credit ratings) – and often, political machines in which allegiance to the ANC line at the time is paramount for gaining access to decision-making processes. They are also focused on the circumstances of life in communities in which many people share abysmal living conditions.
As people active in these struggles, we can confirm that these were not originally meant to be narrow and localized. We initially shared the hope that struggles at the community level – at what provisionally could be called the point of reproduction – would have a quality and depth to them that would enable radical social antagonisms to flourish in ways that were unthinkable in the world of regular wage-work, at the ‘point of production’. As an idea, it makes sense. People live in communities 24 hours a day. With a huge mass of unemployed people stuck in these ghettos, many with experience in previous struggles, including that against Apartheid, it would be easy for demands made from these sites to be backed up with the force of mass organizations. All that was needed was a focus on bread-and-butter township or shack issues and then an ideological extrapolation to broader political questions. Or so our thinking went, along with that of various segments of the independent – non-ANC, non-SACP – left.
Focusing on the site of reproduction made sense in another way. In fact, the townships, shack-dweller communities, flat-dweller communities, and dorpies of South Africa contain a vast amount of economic activity, and the unemployed are as often as not also the marginally employed, the unofficially employed, and the precariously employed, which means, as well, that they play no role in the preeminent labour organization in the country, COSATU, which has its base in the country’s heavy and extractive industries and public sector. Only the narrowest view of the working class would ignore this group.
And yet, the local community as a site of post-Apartheid resistance to neoliberalism has been much more difficult to sustain. Partly it is because of an assumption, seldom made by those actually living in townships, that there exists substantial ground for unity flowing from merely living under the same conditions. One version of this assumption, as articulated in Latin American cities by James Petras and Morris Morley, is that: The power of these new social movements comes from the fact that they draw on the vast heterogeneous labour force that populates the main thoroughfares and the alleyways; the marketplaces and street corners; the interstices of the economy and the nerve centres of production; the exchange and finance centres; the university plazas, railway stations and the wharves – all are brought together in complex localized structures which feed into tumultuous homogenizing national movements.[13]
But in the South African context, while localism produced militancy, it did not necessarily produce solidarity with any regularity. Indeed, shack-dwellers often face the ire of those with a tighter, but still tenuous, hold on stable tenure in the townships. Township residents can be mobilized for violence against shack-dwellers and immigrants as much as they can be mobilized for solidarity.
Another source of optimism for the fusing of proletarian and precariat identities is alluded to by John Saul, recalling arguments made nearly four decades ago:
In a capitalism in crisis the ‘classic strengths of the urban working class’ could become ‘more evident,’ with the ‘the upper stratum of the workers [then] most likely to identify downward [to become] a leading force within a revolutionary alliance of exploited elements in the society.’[14]
In the South African context, therefore, the mobilization of communities could, in theory, join up with the existing organization of workers through COSATU, provided the latter could peel itself away from allegiance to the ANC and the Alliance’s embrace of neoliberalism, especially in the light of clearly deteriorating conditions.
But beyond the disappointments generated by a COSATU much changed by its entry into the Alliance and the decline of the shop-steward leadership that had provided much of its strength during the anti-Apartheid struggle, local communities were themselves difficult to coalesce around consistent analyses of the problems that led to their oppression, and abstraction from the local to multiple scales proved difficult once the problem of evictions, electricity, sewerage, and potable water were addressed.
Finally, it must be said that from a strategic point of view, there is some value in being able to organize at a scale commensurate with that of one’s adversary’s organization. The ANC is organized at the national level and it staffs its organization by positioning cadre in local areas. This means that it centralizes power and is able to exert significant – though far from total – control over local cadre. Thus, although some local councilors, for example, are more ‘trigger happy’ when it comes to repressing service-delivery and shack-dweller protests (and there have been more than a dozen deaths of protesters at the hands of police and non-official enforcers), the ANC’s centralized organization, which is extremely averse to criticism, has set a policy of repression while also trying to channel protest into the least threatening, least direct forms, such as marches, as opposed to land occupations. The ANC’s factional violence against its own cadres is notorious, such as in Durban where in mid-2011 the party’s leader was assassinated. But by December 2011 the ANC city manager and political elites were sufficiently united to unleash thugs on Democratic Left Front activists who staged a march of more than 5000 against the United Nations climate summit and who put up signs a few days later in City Hall during a visit by Zuma.
Leadership Another set of problems that arises from contemporary South African protest is also familiar to students of social movements and revolutionary politics, namely, the problem of leadership, and particularly, the role of intellectuals in the movement. Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of intellectuals is apposite here. Gramsci argues, in essence, that intellectuals are those who give shape, through mental labour, to specific sets and sites of social relations. Those he calls ‘traditional’ intellectuals are those whose roles as intellectuals were formed in earlier periods, and thus appear as separate from, and above, contemporary class relations and antagonisms, such as clergy and the professional scholars and teachers. ‘Organic’ intellectuals, by contrast, are those whose intellectual labours shape the projects of entire groups of people, such as industrialists and union militants. Traditional intellectuals can, by virtue of their social position, make claims about universals, whereas organic intellectuals allegedly articulate particularities. But as Gramsci makes clear, traditional intellectuals are just as moored to class as are organic ones, and that in fact newly dominant groups work not only through their own organic intellectuals, such as managers and consultants, but also through traditional intellectuals.[15] In South Africa, many organic intellectuals arose out of the anti-Apartheid struggle. Many were linked to the trade union movement, others to the ANC, still others to the SACP, and others to the Trotskyist and other independent left wing formations. Even since the Apartheid period, the boundary between organizations of traditional intellectuals – e.g., the universities and NGOs – and the organizations that produced and were produced by organic intellectuals in and of social movements has been porous. Student militants were enormously important to the anti-Apartheid struggle, and post-Apartheid South African universities have been home to some academics who have aligned themselves closely with, and worked within, the social movements. The question this has raised within social movements, however, is that of vanguardism.
In some social movement efforts, significant participation by university-based and foundation-funded scholar-activists and NGOs seemed to other participants to reproduce inequalities. Accusations of ‘ventriloquism’ and ‘substitutionism’ by academics within movements have been traded.[16] Some university-based intellectuals have argued that since ‘the poor are the embodiment of the truth’, that the role of traditional intellectuals is to reflect their positions to the world and simply act in concert with the poor.[17] This kind of analysis sometimes results in the romanticization of urban social movements, and also denies the complex articulations of movements and the education of their leaders. There is no doubt about the dangers of vanguardism. The question is whether a populism that homogenizes ‘the poor’ is capable of building the necessary coalitions to bring protest up to a regularly coordinated non-local scale.
The question of leadership has led, as well, to the involution of protest, especially divisions within social movements and their networks including the Anti-Privatisation Forum, Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, Western Cape Anti-Evictions Campaign, Landless People’s Movement, Jubilee South Africa and Social Movements Indaba. These divisions are, however, more a symptom than a cause of the strategic impasse faced by South African urban movements today. Scholars of movements have noted that internal tensions often come to the fore when the there is no clear way forward for externally oriented action.[18]
Together, the contradictory tendencies of access, localism, and leadership have produced a movement sector that is at once extraordinarily militant in its actions and profoundly moderate in its politics. The increasing turn away from electoral politics in poor areas in favor of protest politics signals a strong disenchantment with the apparatus of representative government and with the actual governance of the (mostly) ANC officers. On the other hand, in spite of this disenchantment, South African movements are nowhere close to articulating alternatives, and doing so would require movement leaders to engage in the sustained dialogue necessary to abstract from local concerns to national, and even international ones. The potential is there: the Treatment Action Campaign’s successful demand for decommodified and locally-made (generic) AIDS medicines, and the Campaign against Water Privatization’s fight against Johannesburg Water’s management outsourcing to Suez, took activism in these sectors out of tired social policy or NGO-delivery debates, and set them at the cutting edge of the world’s anti-neoliberal backlash.
The Tripartite Alliance’s Hegemony Another inescapable feature of South Africa’s contemporary politics is the continued – though increasingly fragile – hegemony of the ANC. The ANC enjoys an enormous amount of legitimacy and ongoing prestige, in spite of the fact that nearly twenty years of ANC rule has resulted in deepening poverty and inequality, and in spite of the visible divisions within the ANC, as for example, in the clashes between President Jacob Zuma and his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, and between Zuma and the ANC Youth League leader, Julius Malema. The ANC was the main organization of the international anti-Apartheid struggle, and even though it was banned within South Africa from 1963 to 1990, quickly reasserted itself as the largest, best-organized group capable of taking the reins of power during the early 1990s transition. In establishing its hegemony at the local level, it supplanted already-existing organizations with its own (e.g., women’s organizations, youth groups), and has dominated electoral politics since the first post-Apartheid elections in 1994.
The Tripartite Alliance is dominated by the ANC, which, under Mandela, began to separate the ideological strands that had undergirded the most militant elements of the anti-Apartheid movement, both in South Africa and abroad. Capital flight increased after the democratic elections of 1994, and in reaction, in early 1995 the ANC government relaxed exchange controls to prove its new loyalty to the Washington Consensus. By the mid-1990s, indeed, ANC leaders had distanced the party from the interventionist currents in the movement. In his first interview after winning the presidency in 1994, Mandela stated: ‘In our economic policies…there is not a single reference to nationalization, and this is not accidental. There is not a single slogan that will connect us with any Marxist ideology.’ Although he inexplicably missed the nationalization mandate he was given in the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme (page 80), Mandela’s specific reference to Marxist ideology in many senses reflects the strong strand of anti-capitalist thinking that linked into resurgent struggles against Apartheid from the early 1970s. Through its policy and slogan of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), moreover, the ANC deracialised capitalism – albeit for a very few billionaires – and separated the profitability dynamic of South African capitalism from racial domination. The latter has remained strong, of course, but more notable is the rise of class apartheid techniques.
Mandela’s avowed anti-Marxism did not, however, so alienate the SACP and COSATU that they abandoned the coalition. To the contrary, the initial redistributive promises in the ANC platform – eclipsed by GEAR in 1996 as well as by numerous White Papers starting in mid-1994 – gave the SACP and COSATU power in administering what might, in other circumstances, have been the development of a managerialist, social-democratic welfare state. The SACP chairman, after all, was Joe Slovo (prior to his death in early 1995), and his 1994 U-turn towards a fully neoliberal housing policy[19], as the World Bank explicitly recommended, was the main signal that the Reconstruction and Development Programme was finished before it had even begun. Slovo reversed nearly every major mandate he was provided.
Though centralized, corporatist bargaining was not part even of the initial coalition deal, COSATU had a prominent place at the table to represent the concerns of the organized working class. It did so with enough friction with the ANC that it could boast of putting up a fight, even while lauding the not-really-corporatist arrangements of the Alliance as corporatist, suggesting that it in fact had codetermination powers (in sites like the National Economic Development and Labour Council), and that the working class was more institutionally powerful than it patently was. After all, in the post-apartheid era the share of profits to wages shifted to the favour of capital by nine percentage points. And the SACP gained some power over the state’s redistributionist functions, with the Mandela era witnessing central committee members in positions that included the ministers or deputy ministers of trade and industry, public works, housing, transport, public services and even defense. At once, this meant that the SACP had something to lose from challenging the ANC within the coalition too strongly, and it was consistent with the party’s longstanding line that racial democracy had to precede the larger economic project of socialism. It also meant that the party would be at the front lines of managing a rapidly changing urban landscape as the lifting of residency laws under Apartheid resulted in the vast growth of shack communities both on the urban periphery and in already urbanized township areas. That the party endorsed GEAR and the neoliberal Africa strategy (the New Partnership for Africa’s Development) and supported a platform that put private investment at the center of its housing strategy – in a period characterized by capital flight – suggests that it was a comfortable member of the publicly anti-Marxist ANC-led Coalition, and that its constant support for the Coalition’s neoliberal macroeconomic initiatives at multiple scales in 1996, 2001 and 2010 should not surprise.[20]
Nevertheless, the Alliance’s cohesion and hegemony has not been rock-solid. There have, from the start, been tensions both between COSATU and the ANC and within COSATU about the ANC and the union federation’s role in the Alliance and what it gets out of it. These tensions extend backwards in time to before COSATU’s founding in 1985 and speak both to the shop-floor militancy of 1970s unionism in South Africa and to the tensions around the integration of the union movement into the nationalist project. But these tensions were raised with GEAR’s introduction by the ruling party’s neoliberal bloc, and ultimately resulted in COSATU’s support for Jacob Zuma’s successful bid for ANC leadership against Thabo Mbeki in the 2007 ANC National Conference, and Mbeki’s humiliating firing by the ANC as president in September 2008.
And yet Zuma’s government has done little better than Mbeki’s, and has not changed the country’s neoliberal macroeconomic course. A three-week strike of public-sector workers in 2010, most of whom were members of COSATU, and which both imposed real hardship and threatened to spread to other sectors of the economy signaled the ripening of the contradictions of COSATU’s continued alliance with the ANC. COSATU’s membership has become older and more skilled as neoliberalism has resulted in segmented labour markets and the proliferation of informal work, and a growing proportion of its members are employees of the state. For this – and for the access to a different lifestyle for leaders who move into government positions – COSATU depends on the ANC-dominated state. On the other hand, continued austerity and attempts to squeeze public workers – visible from Johannesburg to Wisconsin, from Durban to Athens – in the face of already desperately inadequate services and a massive and visible gap between rich and poor (even among Africans), has led at least one COSATU leader to criticize Zuma’s government as becoming a ‘predator state.’[21]
The fraying hegemony of the ANC with respect to its Alliance partners, and the simple refusal of many township and shack-dweller communities to engage any more in the formal political process, signify South Africa’s deep crisis. Nevertheless, the protests raise the questions of whether dissent is solely about the delivery of services, or whether it signifies a bigger dissatisfaction with the social order as such? Do protesters see continuity between the anti-Apartheid struggle and the struggle today? Even in extreme cases of struggle (such as the disputes over district boundaries in Khutsong), the lead activists retained connections to the Alliance that through its legitimacy from the anti-Apartheid struggle and its patronage networks, were more durable than the centrifugal pressure to disconnect. And if a crisis consists in the fact that ‘the old is dying, but the new cannot yet be born’[22], it begs the question of what ‘the new’ is and what its birthing process could look like.
Theorizing the Strategic Impasse The question of how to move out of the crisis to a renewed revolutionary politics that separates the nationalist project from the politics of neoliberal development has garnered several answers. Each is partial, and each, as we will argue, is inadequate to the task. In this section of the chapter, we will examine three that have particular currency: the expansion of rights through litigation; the claim for ‘the right to the city’, which is distinct from juridical rights-talk; and the creation of spaces for ‘participation’. In the following section, we will revisit the question of the impasse with reference to a reformulated Marxist account of uneven and combined development.
Rights Community-based social movements have repeatedly gone to court to enforce their rights. And actual ‘victory’ in court is beyond our quibbling, and indeed some offensive victories (nevirapine to halt HIV transmission during birth) and defensive successes (halting evictions) are occasionally recorded. Nevertheless, we consider insidious the constitutionalist discourse that envelops individual cases in an overall strategy: the idea that ‘the turn to law’ is a good or beneficial thing to do with the energies, affinities, possibilities and power of a movement.
The ‘turn to law’ discourse bears the unmistakable scent of reform without a strategic sense of how to make more fundamental demands that bring into question barriers as large as property relations. The result is the kind of ‘reformist-reform’ (as Gorz put it)[23] that entrenches the status quo. (In contrast, nonreformist reforms work against the internal logic of the dominant system, and strengthen rather than coopt the counterhegemonic challengers.) In this sense, the illegal occupation of land is far more powerful than a court’s ultimate granting of tenure to the occupiers. The turn to constitutionalism also has consequences for movement leadership; it is based on the conception that a certain professional legal caste among us can secure in the constitutional court meaningful precedents (and consequent compliance by the executive) that advance the struggle of the poor in a fundamental way..
To be clear, we are not opposed to going to court. This may be useful from time to time. But as a strategy – rather than as a tactic – it is limited, and unable to compensate for weaknesses in protest organization and militancy. For example, the Treatment Action Campaign’s victory against Mbeki in late 2003 was spurred, to some extent, by a mid-2001 Constitutional ruling that compelled his government to provide nevirapine to HIV+ pregnant women to prevent mother-to-child transmission. In general, it is fair to say that the rights narrative was important to reducing stigmatization and providing ‘dignity’ to those claiming their health rights. Also successful in the Constitutional Court was Durban’s Abahlali baseMjondolo shack-dwellers movement, which in 2009 won a major victory against a provincial housing ordinance justifying forced removals. Such removals continue unhindered, unfortunately, and at nearly the same moment that Abahlali baseMjondolo won the court victory they were violently uprooted from their base in Kennedy Road.
Thus, as Rosenberg indicates, writing in the critical legal studies tradition, rights depend on their enforcement, and courts cannot compel this.[24] Further, court judgments can be reversed: a crucial rights narrative test came in the struggle to expand water provision to low-income Sowetans. A victory had been claimed by the Anti-Privatisation Forum in 2006 because after community struggles, water in Johannesburg is now produced and distributed by public agencies (the multinational firm with Soweto’s water contract Suez was sent back to Paris after its controversial 2001-06 protest-ridden management of municipal water). In April 2008, a major constitutional lawsuit in the High Court resulted in a doubling of free water to 50 litres per person per day and the prohibition of pre-payment water meters. But the Constitutional Court reversed this decision in October 2009 on grounds that judges should not make such detailed policy, and that the prevailing amounts of water and the self-disconnection delivery system were perfectly reasonable within the ambit of the South African Bill of Rights. Once again, this meant that activists were thrown back to understanding the limits of constitutionalism: they recommitted to illegal reconnections if required.[25]
We therefore object simply to the subordination of a political discourse to a legal discourse – even if superficially an empowering one, in terms of ‘rights’ narratives – and therefore to the subordination of a radical discourse to a liberal one. As Alan Hunt and Gary Wickham argue, discourse ‘structures the possibility of what gets included and excluded and what gets done and what remains undone. Discourses authorize some to speak, some views to be taken seriously, while others are marginalized, derided, excluded and even prohibited.’[26] By flirting with legalism and the rights discourse, movements have seen their demands watered down into court pleadings. Heartfelt pleas are offered but for the observance of the purely procedural: consult us before you evict us. Demands for housing that could be generalized and spread, become demands for ‘in situ upgrading’ and ‘reasonable government action’ and hence feed the politics of local solutions to the exclusion of demands that can be ‘scaled up’.
Right to the City An alternative formulation of ‘rights’ is given by Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey’s ‘right to the city’ argument. Harvey is clear that the ‘right to the city’ is a collective right, rather than a liberal-individualist one, and is based on the idea that ‘the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is…the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.’ Because Harvey links urbanization, and therefore, the way of life of an increasing majority of humanity, to the absorption of capitalist surplus, the ‘right to the city’ implies empowering the mass of people to take the power from capitalists to produce their way of life and learn to wield it themselves. The current crisis of global capital has led to some of the uneven developments to which we have already referred in South Africa. The explosive price of real estate (nearly 400 percent from 1997 through to a 2007 peak) was facilitated by not only local overaccumulation but by the inflows of surplus global capital, thus contributing to the boom-bust dynamic in the construction trades even as the rest of the economy stagnates or worse. ‘The results,’ Harvey writes, ‘are indelibly etched on the spatial forms of our cities, which increasingly consist of fortified fragments, gated communities, and privatized public spaces kept under constant surveillance.’ He continues, quoting Marcello Balbo: [The city] is splitting into different separated parts, with the apparent formation of many ‘microstates’. Wealthy neighbourhoods provided with all kinds of services, such as exclusive schools, golf courses, tennis courts and private police patrolling the area around the clock intertwine with illegal settlements where water is available only at public fountains, no sanitation system exists, electricity is pirated by a privileged few, the roads become mud streams whenever it rains, and where house-sharing is the norm…
Harvey sees the ‘right to the city’ as a ‘both a working slogan and political ideal’ to democratize the ‘necessary connection between urbanization and surplus production and use.’[27] However, in the South African context, the slogan has been taken up both by proponents of legalistic means of struggle and by the more autonomist-oriented shack-dweller campaigns, and so the ‘right to the city’ can be seen as a kind of ambiguous hinge that joins quite different political orientations. For example, Marie Huchzermeyer argues that the South African Constitution mandates ‘‘an equal right to the city,’’ and that this requires movements to pursue marginal gains through the courts: ‘Urban Reform in this sense is a pragmatic commitment to gradual but radical change towards grassroots autonomy as a basis for equal rights.’ After all, she argues, ‘three components of the right to the city – equal participation in decision-making, equal access to and use of the city and equal access to basic services – have all been brought before the Constitutional Court through a coalition between grassroots social movements and a sympathetic middle class network’. Nevertheless, she also argues that human-rights ‘language is fast being usurped by the mainstream within the UN, UN-Habitat, NGOs, think tanks, consultants etc., in something of an empty buzz word, where the concept of grassroots autonomy and meaningful convergence is completely forgotten’.[28]
Unfortunately, given the power imbalances, Huchzermeyer and others who make the ‘right to the city’ claim run the risk of merely extending a slogan, rather than a strategic vision, to the question of the current impasse in South African social movements. The danger here is particularly felt in the ways in which ‘the city’ can be taken to mean ‘particular cities’ (which, on one level, they must) and therefore to privilege local politics and local solutions, without a larger-scale analysis that could provide a kind of standard by which locally generated choices and strategies could be subjected to criticism. One result is that like groups often accept each other’s political stances while discounting the possibilities of coalition across types of community: hence, for example, ‘Abahlalism’ – ‘shack-dwellerism’ – arises as a kind of autonomistic-populist practice in which the deep suspicion of non-shack-dwellers, even if sometimes merited, finds its mirror image in the idea that political ideas are invalidated or validated simply by virtue of their issuing from ‘the poor.’[29]
‘Participation’ A clause in the Constitution as well as various laws compel municipalities to involve residents in ‘community participation’ processes to enable people to directly influence decisions that affect them.[30] John Williams, reporting on research in the Western Cape finds that ‘Most community participation exercises in post-Apartheid South Africa are largely spectator politics, where ordinary people have mostly become endorsees of pre-designed planning programmes, [and] are often the objects of administrative manipulation.’ As a result, formal municipal governance processes are ‘a limited form of democracy [that] give[s] rise to an administered society rather than a democratic society’ since there is no real debate of policy or of social programmes by the working class electorate and government officials.[31] In Durban, a study of community participation in local economic development processes by Richard Ballard and his colleagues reveals that such processes allow ordinary people ‘to demand accountability’ from ‘elected representatives and sometimes quite senior officials.’ However, they are ‘consultative rather than participatory’ and ‘invariably become conspicuous for the issues they leave out, and for the voices they did not hear.’[32]
This was particularly apparent in the way that the Durban ‘Citizen’s Voice’ process was handled by the city and the main water NGO (Mvula Trust), invoking participation by what might be termed ‘civilised society’ as a way of encouraging poor communities to consume less water just after the municipal prices had doubled in real terms over a period of six years.[33] The ward committee system as a mechanism to involve people in local government participatory democracy has similar shortcomings, according to John Mavuso.[34]
In a different vein, David Hemson concludes that ‘community participation in South Africa is informed by the memory of community struggle – a radical form of participation – against the racist Apartheid State’ and that this must be harnessed. ‘It is precisely this repertoire of radical strategies that can and should be revisited and adapted, to advance the interests of the materially marginalized communities at the local level.’[35] Luke Sinwell applies a theoretical approach first developed in the South African context by Faranak Miraftab,[36] based on a distinction between ‘invited’ versus ‘invented’ spaces of popular participation. The ward committees, imbizos (government-initiated public forums) and integrated development plans of invited participation contrast with invented spaces through ‘self-activity’ such as community self-organization, direct action and other non-official mechanisms of exerting pressure. Based on extensive research conducted in Alexandra, one of the country’s oldest and poorest black working class townships, he concludes that progressive change is more likely to emanate from the use of invented rather than invited spaces. However, Sinwell laments that community activism in the invented spaces also fails to question power relations and social structures in a fundamental way. Community organisations tend to work within budgetary constraints set by the state and as a result community groups end up competing among themselves for limited resources rather than questioning the neoliberal framework and its ideological underpinnings.[37]
Combined and Uneven Development, Combined and Uneven Marxism The importance of Marxist criticism is to uncover, in particular situations, what is ‘systematic’ and what is ‘conjunctural’, as Gramsci put it.[38] This, in turn, helps to distinguish – and therefore, to both facilitate and structure discussion about – short- and longer-term demands. The ‘pure militancy’ of an immediate politics of the poor does not do this easily. It is rather through dialogue, not just among ‘the poor’ but among the several sectors of society caught at various points in the contradictions of neoliberalism that a larger political formation capable of a sustained revolt against capital, and the creation of a new order, can be built.
Here, Trotsky’s understanding of ‘combined and uneven development’ is useful. Though it can be read somewhat more broadly, most interpretations of Trotsky understand him to have meant ‘combined’ development to refer to the relations among different levels of development within a given nation.[39] In South Africa, the logical corollary is to ‘articulations of modes of production,’ a concept promoted by Harold Wolpe to explain race-class politics linking sites of surplus value extraction to bantustans (where impoverished women provided cheap-labour’s reproduction at a vast distance), but which is even more relevant in post-apartheid South Africa given enhanced migrancy, xenophobia and adverse gender power relations.[40] Geographers such as David Harvey and Neil Smith have emphasized that even within nations, the combined unevenness of development is given spatial expression. Apartheid was, in its nature, both a racial order and a spatial one, and it enforced uneven and combined development in almost caricatured forms. The systematic separation of racial groups, the profound underdevelopment of black areas, and the racial segmentation of labour markets suggested to many on the left (including us) as we noted earlier, that the fight against Apartheid was coterminous with the fight against capitalism. Though we were correct that capitalism and racism were mutually reinforcing during the 20th century, the conventional mistake by radicals was in thinking that the defeat of one durable but ultimately conjunctural manifestation of racism, Apartheid, would bring the capitalist system to its knees.
Accordingly, we found that Apartheid was conjunctural, but uneven and combined development is systematic. The particular spatial manifestations of uneven and combined development are also conjunctural, though, again, they can be extremely durable. Hence, fights against eviction or for clean and affordable water, even while encountering the severe power of state coercion, and sometimes taking years to resolve, do little to change the systematic dynamics of uneven and combined development that are deepened in new ways in neoliberal South Africa.
Trotsky also marshaled the theory of uneven and combined development to argue against ‘stageism’ or the idea that revolutionary politics depended on a given country’s going through the specific, drawn-out processes of capitalist development found in other countries. What this meant, however, was that coalitions among workers across space and across situations in the process of capital accumulation (e.g., industrial workers, peasants) were central to revolutionary potentials, but that these potentials were realizable, even if with difficulty. The contemporary conjuncture in South Africa, beset by entrenched neoliberalism imposed by a weakening-but-still-present ruling Alliance dominated by the ANC, has seen the accumulation of protests by township residents over services, shack-dwellers over evictions and services, and the relatively ‘privileged’ public-sector workers over pay and the quality of services they provide. Though the public workers’ strike was suspended without winning the union’s key demands, it came close to bringing out private-sector workers – all in the formal sector – as well.
The question for an ‘uneven, combined Marxism’ is how to take advantage of the unevenness and particular conjunctural combinations of social relations in South Africa and beyond. The present period in South Africa exemplifies the dynamics of uneven and combined development and its spatial and social consequences. Within South Africa, it is important to think about how, for example, shack-dwellers’ struggles and public workers’ struggles could be linked up, even as the latter’s relative privilege and operation in the formal labour market may make them wary of such an alliance, and as the former’s distrust of cooptation creates an equal hesitancy. The Durban climate summit –the Conference of the Parties 17 – illustrated how very difficult it is to conjoin labour, community and environmental considerations, especially in the context of a set-piece ‘Global Day of Action’ march (3 December 2012) when distances between constituencies, political traditions and issue areas remain debilitating.[41]
How could a joined-up movement respond to the conjunctural pressures upon it, such as the apparent advantages to the unemployed of labour-market flexibilization schemes or to the quality of life of township residents of evicting shack-dweller settlements? What kind of ways can – or should – Marxists talk about taking on the systemic problems of uneven and combined development with people who are located in different, and even sometimes opposed, areas of this combination? What organizational forms might be applied to start this conversation and yet keep it focused on the systematic elements of the present? How do we move beyond the concern for access, the localism, the constitutionalism, and the anti-political populism of contemporary protest – even as these sometimes yield concrete results – while also moving beyond the ambiguity of a simple slogan? To us, the protests represent a profound critique of neoliberalism by working class communities. But are protesters aware of the greater significance of their protests? And to what extent do protesters’ demands require solutions that challenge neoliberal policy and even entail a challenge to the capitalist mode of production? Or is it the case that the overarching neoliberal economic framework constrains the realization of not only the people’s aspirations, but their ability to think beyond capitalism?
We agree with Andrew Nash[42] that the answers to these questions will not come through the elaboration of a new, ‘proper’ Marxist line by mainly university-based, white intellectuals, and that the great task of a renewal of South African Marxism will depend on the elaboration of a new stratum of organic intellectuals from the movements (though not necessarily bypassing the universities) who can, perhaps, move among them in ways that enable them to abstract from the local without abandoning the reality of it. Being able to do this partly depends on the ability of South African movements to look beyond themselves, to a world increasingly resistant to neoliberalism and to contribute to, and take from, a growing global movement. The successes of the Treatment Action Campaign were one such contribution, although this movement also teaches the dangers of self-liquidation into state-conjoined service-delivery and narrow sectoral politics as well as a seeming over reliance on foreign funding.
In encountering similar-but-different movements and contexts, movement intellectuals gain new perspectives on the possibilities of coalitions and on the similar-but-different permutations of combined and uneven development elsewhere; these can enhance their capacity to reinterpret local conditions by denaturalizing existing political categories and divisions. Indeed, in calling for a ‘combined and uneven Marxism’, we intend to suggest that the way forward cannot lie in the search for the pure revolutionary subject, whether the worker, the township ‘poors’, the shack-dweller, the organic feminist, the red-green social environmentalist, or anyone else; and it cannot lie in the search for the perfect location, whether the household, community, farm, benefits office, oil refinery or factory. Combined and uneven development makes clear that if the Marxist view that people are a ‘nexus of social relations’ holds, a combined and uneven Marxism must draw on the interdependence of locations in these relations in order to reinforce our interdependence rather than accept the capitalist combination of unevenness and mutual social antagonisms among those from whom capital is extracted. Of course this is to state a problem rather than to proclaim a new strategy. However, consistent with the argument above that it is the development of organic intellectuals from within the movements, and their discussions and alliances with one another as well as with ‘traditional’ Marxist intellectuals, it is only here that a way forward will be found.
Looting Durban: Can Durban Recover From City-scale Neoliberal Nationalism?
Can Durban Recover From City-scale Neoliberal Nationalism? Patrick Bond 2 January 2012
This is the South African city of Durban’s first week since 2002 without City Manager Michael Sutcliffe. He became well known across the world as a target of community and environmental activism, for catalyzing a $400 million stadium for the soccer World Cup in 2010, and for hosting the COP17 climate summit last month, in a city of 3.5 million of whom a third are dirt-poor and another third struggle as underpaid workers.
Why did they put up with Sutcliffe’s mainly malevolent rule? Alongside constituencies of fisherfolk, streetchildren and informal traders, many grassroots groups like the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, the Chatsworth Westcliff Flatdwellers, Abahlali base Mjondolo shackdwellers and Clairwood Ratepayers and Residents Association have long condemned race- and class-biased municipal policy and Sutcliffe’s viciousness. But the prestige of the African National Congress (ANC) liberation movement means the ruling party has been comfortably re-elected since the days of Mandela (1994-99). Until the leading trade unions break their alliance with the ANC, that won’t change, and ruthless men like Sutcliffe will stay at the top of government.
With ambitions of urban restructuring akin to Haussmann of Paris and Moses of New York, Sutcliffe was a most divisive leader. Raised in Durban and granted a PhD in geography from Ohio State University, he was a very rare white technocrat who wielded enormous political power through skilled manipulation of factions within the ruling party. To the surprise of many, he amplified his power by making a quick loyalty shift in 2007 from former president Thabo Mbeki to local favourite Jacob Zuma.
Sutcliffe’s one-man reign terrorized many poor and working people, and also irritated the white petit-bourgeoisie who saw him as a rabid Stalinist, especially when without consultation, he changed more than a hundred colonial-era street names (such as Moore Rd to Che Guevara Rd). But shifts in appearance matter little, when with Sutcliffe’s facilitation, the city’s apartheid structures also evolved into even more discriminatory and exclusionary zones, like the new edge city of Umhlanga – with the southern hemisphere’s largest shopping mall – and nearby ‘gated communities’ such as Mount Edgecombe.
Sutcliffe’s departure interview with the Financial Mail last week was revealing: “As far as the decisions go, there are no regrets; we did what was necessary and had to be done.”
No regrets? Wikipedia’s entry on Sutcliffe lists his legacy as “street renamings, the loss of the city’s Blue Flag beach status, illegally banning protests, banning posters, serious human rights abuses in the city’s housing program, the failed privatization of the city’s bus system, allegations of spin-doctoring, the failed uShaka Marine World, threats to withdraw advertising from newspapers employing journalists critical of the municipality, lack of action against environmental destruction, favouritism toward ANC-aligned individuals and businesses, unlawful and at times violent violations of the basic rights of street traders and shack dwellers and corruption.”
Speaking to Durban’s Daily News (the largest English newspaper) last week, Sutcliffe was adamant: “I have never been and will never be involved in fraud and corruption.” Yet even the provincial ANC requested a forensic investigation after the national auditor-general’s 2009-10 report on the city identified “irregular expenditure” of $65 million that year and “irregular housing contracts” of more than $400 million during Sutcliffe’s reign. Three other municipal officials were also implicated.
For example, contracts for building more than 3000 houses (at more than $25 million) involved Durban’s notoriously ostentatious Mpisane family, which faces multiple prosecutions for tax fraud and corruption. In 2010, Sutcliffe told The Daily News, “The reports that these houses were built to sub-standard levels are absolute nonsense and part of media frenzy. I challenge anyone to visit every single one of those houses and they will see that the houses are not falling apart.”
The National Home Builders’ Registration Council then found defects in more than 1000 Mpisane-built houses, with more than a third requiring structural rehabilitation.
The closest to a confession by Sutcliffe was last week in The Daily News: “We have not followed every single supply chain mechanism in the book because we needed to ensure service delivery took place efficiently. We have been able to build more than 22,000 houses in one year because we fast-tracked procedures.”
But many thousands more houses should have been built, much more quickly and with much better quality and less cronyism. By the time of the World Cup, Durban’s housing backlog stood at 234,000, yet as the Academy for Science in South Africa determined last May, the annual addition to the city’s low-income housing stock had dropped from 16,000 to 9,500 by 2009, and “given the current budget the backlog will only be cleared by 2040.”
In mid-2008, Sutcliffe had told the Mail&Guardian newspaper, “We can address the housing backlog in the city within seven or eight years”.
One reason for a worsening housing crisis was that Sutcliffe diverted city reserves into building the Moses Mabhida Stadium in 2008-10, notwithstanding a next-door world-class rugby stadium (Kings Park) available for upgrading. Cost overruns skyrocketed the prestige project’s price from $240 to $400 million, with the usual tiny set of ANC-supporting tycoons winning construction contracts.
The combination of incompetence and arrogance proved hugely expensive, for as opposition city councilor Dean Macpherson complained a year ago, Sutcliffe “didn’t see fit to consult with the [popular rugby-playing] Sharks before Mabhida was built and now we have a stadium that the Sharks won’t move to, basically stands empty and will cost the ratepayers of Durban billions to fund in the future.” Sutcliffe’s hope for justifying Mabhida Stadium by hosting the 2020 Olympics was dashed in mid-2011 by rare national budgetary common sense.
Last year featured many such allegations against Sutcliffe, as an open feud with former city mayor Obed Mlaba left blood dripping from knives in both their backs. Last January, Sutcliffe publicly announced that he wanted another five-year contract. But he had made too many mistakes and enemies, and his ally leading the provincial ANC, John Mchunu, had died the year before.
Other complaints mounted: Sutcliffe’s supersized salary and bonuses (higher than Zuma’s); brutality against street children removed prior to major events and against fisherfolk trying to use beach piers; the celebrated 2010 beachfront rehab’s still-empty storefronts and dead palm trees; and the unprocedural street renaming, culminating in November with a Supreme Court decision against Sutcliffe on the first nine changes.
Sutcliffe’s last month on the job must have been even more frustrating, beginning on December 2 with yet another defeat in court against activists demanding the right to march in central Durban. Opposed to the COP17 UN climate summit, their desired route passed the US Consulate, City Hall and the International Convention Centre. This was approved by a local judge who made Sutcliffe pay court costs.
Then came revenge. “Obviously smarting from his failure to impose his will on our right to assembly and protest, he hired 150-200 ‘Host City Volunteers’,” explained Rehad Desai of the Democratic Left Front. “Paid R180 for their services,” these “Green Bomber goons” – as Desai called them to remind of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe paramilitary – wore distinctive green tracksuits with Durban and COP17 logos.
After seeing critical posters at the December 3 march of around 8000 people, Sutcliffe’s volunteers began “singing pro-Zuma and pro-COP17 slogans. Their presence on a climate justice demonstration remains a mystery. [Climate activists were] denied water, beaten with fists and had their banners torn down. The rural women, representing countries from all over Africa, were taunted by certain Green Bombers with crude sexist abuse.”
Five days later at City Hall, Desai and two other activists from Greenpeace and ActionAid were attacked by the Green Bombers, simply for holding up posters: “Zuma stand with the poor not the corporations.” Remarked Sutcliffe in The Witness newspaper the next day, “They deserved that reaction from people. People were outraged, especially after what happened at the weekend. Why vent when they had the opportunity when the president had come to listen? Surely that’s not right.”
To ‘vent’ by silently holding up a poster in City Hall deserves a beating?
Critical academics label this thuggish ideology ‘neoliberal nationalism’: a vindictive, anti-poor deployment of state power and resources, combined with revolutionary-sounding bombast, reviving Mbeki’s ‘talk-left, walk-right’ moves. We saw this most vividly in Sutcliffe’s 2009 attempt to evict low-income informal traders from the century-old Warwick Early Morning Fruit/Vegetable Market on behalf of a crony’s shopping mall project, which only mass community protests reversed following a late-night police attack.
But ironically, the year before, the American Association of Geographers (AAG) awarded Sutcliffe the Gilbert F. White Distinguished Public Service Honors and the James R. Anderson Medal of Honor in Applied Geography. Sutcliffe’s sponsor for the award, Kevin Cox (a faraway Marxist who supervised Sutcliffe’s doctoral thesis), described these awards as “among the most prestigious recognitions in geography… Over a lengthy career as political activist and trusted member of the ANC government, Mike has proven himself to be an applied geographer par excellence and with a strong pro-people bent.”
According to the AAG website, the Anderson Medal of Honor reflects “the most distinguished service to the profession of geography” and “A medal is so distinctive an honor that it is bestowed only if the accomplishments are truly outstanding,” while ‘Public Service’ means the awardees “gained more than usual recognition by co-workers, public officials and fellow citizens, and have clearly influenced the progress of the community.”
No doubt, Sutcliffe gained more than usual recognition and until last Friday he enjoyed huge influence. But by any reasonable measure these were of mainly negative consequence. For example, prior to managing Durban, his role leading the country’s Municipal Demarcation Board led to repeated protests by poor people against boundaries. And by generating vast geographic distances within most rural municipalities, he sharply curtailed local democracy.
While expanding Durban’s highways in a manner Engels described in 1844 Manchester – so that rich people could drive more quickly through poor areas – Sutcliffe oversaw other infrastructure disasters. Public transport declined, water systems failed and his shipping/petrochemical-centric urban industrial project threatens South Durban’s 200,000 residents with forced relocation and more pollution. And Sutcliffe’s promotion of the World Bank’s Clean Development Mechanism for Durban’s Bisasar Road landfill cemented environmental racism.
It could well be argued that Sutcliffe’s municipal version of neoliberal nationalism was structurally ordained, and that by focusing too much on his personal foibles we distract from a larger, more general problem.
That structural problem, sometimes termed ‘interurban entrepreneurialism’, bests many power-hungry officials. As City University of New York professor David Harvey noted 23 years ago in a seminal article, “To the degree that interurban competition becomes more potent, it will almost certainly operate as an ‘external coercive power’ over individual cities to bring them closer into line with the discipline and logic of capitalist development. It may even force repetitive and serial reproduction of certain patterns of development such as ‘world trade centers’ or new cultural and entertainment centers, waterfront development, postmodern shopping malls, and the like.”
Bearing that in mind, is it time for Geography (the discipline in which I also hold a PhD) to reject unequal and uncaring municipal rule? It’s opportune to ask, now, as the Occupy movement in so many cities insists on transferring power from the 1% to everyone else. Vainly, I might also hope that the AAG will rethink and revoke its two idiotic awards to Sutcliffe, perhaps as early as at the annual meetings in New York next month, so as to avoid acute embarrassment in the event the ongoing Durban corruption investigation leads to criminal charges.
Many of us here anxiously await Sutcliffe’s promised autobiographical account of his nine years in power, because the vast extent of his misrule needs book-length consideration. At the very least, the ubiquitous political potholes dug by Sutcliffe across Durban provide his successor, Sibusiso Sithole, an excellent road map of where to make ideological, policy, management and attitude U-turns. www.counterpunch.org
Izincwadi ezintsha zikaPatrick Bond iDurban’s Climate Gamble (Unisa Press)kanye nePolitics of Climate Justice (UKZN Press).
What is Radical, in Neoliberal-Nationalist South Africa?
What is Radical, in Neoliberal-Nationalist South Africa?
South Africa has rich, robust radical traditions and over the last two decades I have seen these extended, deepened, and widened. In late 2011 at the Durban world climate summit known as the Conference of the Parties 17 (COP17), they will ground a formidable anti-capitalist critique of elite market environmentalism. Some of this confidence comes from defeating racial apartheid, although what we term “class apartheid” soon set in during the presidency of Nelson Mandela.
Across a variety of sectors, this condition generated strong Polanyian double-movement reactions, I argue in this essay. South African bottom-up experiences fighting the dominant governing ideology of neoliberal nationalism confirm the need to delink global corporations from determinations of social welfare, to decommodify basic goods and services, to rebuild public sector capacities, and to ensure that the state is run by a political party with genuine accountability to its poor and working-class constituents, exhibiting the consciousness of environmental, gender, and racial justice. More Podcast On the Web
COP 17 NEWS & INFORMATION
Durban’s climate Zombie tripped by dying carbon markets Patrick Bond (Eye on Civil Society) 20 December 201
Looking back now that the dust has settled, South Africa’s COP17 presidency appears disastrous. This was confirmed not only by Durban’s delayed, diplomatically-decrepit denouement, but by plummeting carbon markets in the days immediately following the conference’s ignoble end last Sunday. More
Interview with Patrick Bond From South Africa, Professor Patrick Bond on the the environmental opposition to COP-17. the UN Summit on The Environment Download
UKZN to accommodate alternative COP17 civil society events The University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) has been identified as the site of this year’s COP17 alternative space, known as the ‘People’s Space’, where national and international civil society will come together around the global issue of climate change.
The contract to utilise UKZN was signed on November 3, 2011, between the C17, a body mandated by over 80 South African civil society groups to coordinate civil society activities around COP17, and UKZN management, with the assistance of the university’s Centre for Society and School of Development Studies.
C17 aims to provide a space in which to strengthen the climate justice movement in South Africa, while at the same time consolidating civil society actions across the world during the two weeks of negotiations.
The establishment of a parallel space at COP negotiations each year responds to the marginalisation civil society frequently experiences at these events and the lack of progress that has been made by international governments in addressing climate change.
‘The People’s Space’ will thus serve as the space in which the people of the world can make their voices heard and where civil society can work towards creating another vision for addressing climate change by building a strong movement of like-minded activists and ordinary people from around the world.
Howard College venue just 6km from the COP Situated just six kilometres from the official UNFCCC event at Durban’s International Conference Centre (ICC), UKZN’s Howard College will provide room for key civil society events for the duration of the two-week conference from November 28, to December 9, 2011. C17 will engage with eThekwini Municipality to provide transport between the ICC and UKZN.
The People’s space is expected to attract between 5 000 and 6 000 people during the course of the conference. Events include the Conference of the Youth (COY7) the weekend ahead of COP17, the international labour movement’s Pavilion of Work, as well as numerous panel debates, art exhibitions and film festivals.
In addition to access to the People’s Space, C17 is coordinating the Global Day of Action on December 3, 2011, to relay civil society’s dissatisfaction with the pace of the UNFCCC negotiations. A peaceful march through the streets of Durban attended by upwards of 20 000 people will be supported by people around the world as they take action in their home countries.
C17 will also establish a climate refugee camp at Block AK near the ICC from the December 1 to December 6, 2011, highlighting the plight of climate refugees worldwide.
About UKZN The University of KwaZulu-Natal will be the host site for the ‘People’s Space’ activities, organised by civil society, associated with the international climate change negotiations to be hosted in Durban from November 28 to December 9. These activities will include public seminars, exhibitions, films and cultural activities. Many of the world’s leading experts on climate and civil society will be on hand over the fortnight. Academics and activists will intermingle with those attending the United Nations COP17. The UKZN Centre for Civil Society and School of Development Studies will arrange local public events, web access and media relations to ensure that civil society’s views are heard and respected.
About C17 (the COP 17 Civil Society Steering Committee) The Civil Society Committee for COP17 (C17) includes representatives of various organisations including social movements, labour, environmental justice organisations, international environmental NGOs and faith-based organisations. It is a facilitatory body established to coordinate the participation of international and national movements and organisations of civil society in the common process but will not seek to represent them or to enter into negotiations with, or lobbying of, governments on their behalf. Rather, the C17 seeks to create opportunities for civil society engagement in the 2011 climate change negotiations during 2011, civil society engagement with the South African government around climate change negotiations and positions, a platform for the expression of diversity in civil society and environmental movement building in South Africa and the region.
DOCUMENTS
Interview: Patrick Bond on the Durban Conference of Polluters
Kyoto will likely pass away in 2012, except for the emissions trading schemes which capitalists can use for profit. What we do outside the Durban conference will be very important
Noted South African activist and scholar says Patrick Bond there are really two streams of environmental thought and action regarding the ongoing United Nations climate talks, known as the “Conference of the Parties” (to the Kyoto Protocol).
The first, like Climate Action Network, really hoped the industrial countries and the developing world could use climate financing and market mechanisms (like carbon trading) to work towards a lower emissions world.
The second, the Climate Justice Movement, rejects actors like The World Bank, and capitalist intervention using tools like carbon trading. They also question the REDD agreement banking carbon credits in forests, especially tropical forests – because it takes rights away from the indigenous inhabitants. download climateandcapitalism.com
The Emerging Revolutions Edited by Firoze Manji and Sokari Ekine With Chapters by Patrick Bond & Khadija Sharife
Dear 'African Awakening' authors,
The first twenty books arrived in our office this morning and they look stunning - THANK YOU all for your contributions, and CONGRATULATIONS! Now let's get the book out there.
The best publicists for a book are its authors, so the more you can help us spread the word now the better. The publication date is 1 December and we will issue a media release then.
There are many ways you can help spread news of this title:
• add the book’s details as part of your email signature (there is an email footer you can use on this email) • add links from your website, email, blog or Facebook page to the book on the Pambazuka Press website (http://fahamubooks.org/book/?GCOI=90638100375050) • include it in your author biography for articles • print and distribute flyers (attached) • let us know of anyone who would like to review the book in print, online, radio or television - we can provide review copies and promotional materials. • encourage your contacts to review the book on Amazon UK or Amazon US. • let us know of any relevant events and conferences you will be attending so we can provide you with books, flyers and posters.
As you know, we've been doing some publicity. There will be a launch in Durban on 6 December, and we might be able to do a launch in London. PLEASE LET US KNOW IF YOU COULD BE AVAILABLE IN LONDON ON FRIDAY 2 DECEMBER.
Contributors receive one free copy on request and can buy further copies at 25% discount. If you have sent us your address your copy will be on its way soon. If you haven't, you can email it to me.
Here are some selling points and a short blurb of the book:
What the mainstream media has missed – the 2011 uprisings in their African context.
Pambazuka News’s respected writers offer in-the-moment comment and analysis as well as informed reflection.
An almanac with its eyes open – Africa’s radical review of the year
The tumultuous uprisings of citizens in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have seized the attention of media analysts who have characterised these as 'Arab revolutions', a perspective given weight by popular demonstrations in Yemen, Bahrain, Syria and elsewhere. However, what have been given less attention are the concurrent uprisings in other parts of the African continent. The uprisings across Africa and in the Middle East, the book argues, are the result of common experiences of decades of declining living standards, mass unemployment, land dispossessions and impoverishment of the majority, while a few have engorged themselves with riches.
African Awakening is unique in its coverage of the protests, strikes and other actions in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gabon, Kenya, Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Uganda, Western Sahara and Zimbabwe as well as in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.
Through incisive contributions from analysts and activists across the continent, the essays in ‘African Awakening’ provide an overview of the struggle for democratisation which goes beyond calls merely for transparent electoral processes and constitutes a reawakening of the spirit of freedom and justice for the majority.
CLIMATE JUSTICE NEWS
Climate Justice Protests at the US Consulate
Climate Change Gridlock: Where Do We Go From Here? (Part 1) Patrick Bond of CCS and other analysts of Conference of the Parties gridlock critique the UN and major polluters - and propose bottom-up civ soc alternatives. Listen here
Global warming is no longer a fear for the future, it’s threatening human civilization now. But a good portion of humanity doesn’t seem that concerned. On this edition, part 1 of a special 2 part series, Brian Edwards-Tiekert takes us through the climate change that is happening, the political response that isn’t, and the people trying to break the gridlock.
This series was made possible by a grant from The Lia Fund, with additional support from The Cultural Conservancy.
Featuring: Tim Flannery, author of “The Weathermakers”; Professor Joseph Alcamo, United Nations Environment Program chief scientist; James Inhofe, US Senator from Oklahoma; Bernaditas Muller, South Centre climate change special advisor; Patrick Bond, Center for Civil Society director at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa; Enele Soapala, Tuvalu minister for foreign affairs, environment, and labor; Barack Obama, President of the United States; Stanislaus Lumumba Di-Aping, South Sudanese diplomat; Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace International executive director; Mohamed Nasheed, President of the Maldives; Terisa Turner, University of Guelph economist, Nnimo Bassey, Friends of the Earth International chair
Electricity prices and runaway trucks will embarrass Durban’s COP17
Patrick Bond (Mercury Eye on Society column) 27 September 2011
Environment minister Edna Molewa announced yesterday at the International Convention Centre provincial climate meeting, that the Durban climate summit starting in just two months will be “a conference of hope,” generating an “outcome all of us will be happy about.”
Neither is true. By all objective accounts, the COP17 won’t provide a meaningful deal to cut emissions, and climate finance is mired in promotion of for-profit schemes by the World Bank via the upcoming G20 meeting. The promise of “$100 billion grants annually by 2020” made by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in late 2009 looks sure to be broken.
The likelihood is not only that the Kyoto Protocol’s binding (not voluntary “pledge and review”) commitments for rich countries to cut emissions will be dropped. Just as dangerous, Kyoto’s promotion of fraud-ridden carbon trading instead of genuine emissions reductions will be extended.
Nor did Durban Mayor James Nxumalo’s listing of the city’s heartwarming microprojects – Buffelsdraai community treeplanting, the Green Hub building at the Blue Lagoon, and the solar geyser scheme – disguise high-carbon, climate-dumb Durban’s own rapidly-growing emissions plans, especially the R250 billion “Back of Port” expansion of shipping, trucking and petro-chemicals.
Neither leader gives confidence that they are doing anything much beyond greenwashing, in the wake of two meetings I attended last week at Austerville community hall in Wentworth. On Wednesday, 400 residents came out in the rain with their electricity bills, furious about Eskom’s price increases, passed along by a brutal municipality, resulting in a wave of household fiscal misery.
Eskom needs to squeeze poor Durban residents to build the world’s third and fourth largest power plants. It’s not hard to make the links between dirty energy (paraffin, coal and even wood) at home due to electricity price hikes or outright disconnections, and climate change, not to mention health degeneration.
Do national, provincial and municipal officials want angry community demonstrators in central Durban during the big December 3 march past the US Consulate, City Hall and ICC to the beach, highlighting these complaints?
Intensified service delivery protests are inevitable given Eskom’s apparent desire to continue providing the largest mining and metals houses (BHP Billiton and Anglo American) with the world’s cheapest electricity, around a tenth of what the Wentworth residents pay.
A meeting in the same hall on Thursday featured a classic battle: big business imposing toxics on a vulnerable neighbourhood, Clairwood. But this long-oppressed site has amazing civil society fighters, amongst Africa’s most passionate environmental justice activists.
The huge transport firm Bidvest hired an environmental impact assessment (EIA) specialist, Peter Buckland of Coex, to avoid doing a full EIA and instead submit merely a “Basic Assessment.” Bidvest proposes to increase daily truck traffic in pollution-saturated South Durban by 40 trucks, carrying flammable liquids (like pentene), combustible solids (celluose), oxidisers (ammonium nitrate), poisons (dimethyl sulphate) and corrosives (acids).
Bidvest’s hazmat storage site, Rennie’s Distribution, is across from the Jacobs Hostel, just north of the city’s famous racecourse, and situated between the working-class neighbourhoods of Woodlands and Austerville. They are all at risk if the proposal succeedes.
The South Durban Community Environmental Alliance’s Des D’Sa started the debate observing the several thousand deaths in KZN caused by truck-related accidents since 2006, and public health threats caused by South Durban Basin trucking. Bidvest was also responsible for a massive September 2007 fire in the Island View refinery area of the port, fatal to a worker and terrifying for residents of the Bluff. The South Durban emergency evacuation plan that D’Sa demanded from municipal officials was never provided.
A variety of criticisms of Bidvest and Coex followed, including Clairwood resident association leader Mervyn Reddy’s analysis of congestion on the South Coast road. Under constant truck owner pressure to speed up, the drivers move south from the port using various residential roads during the area’s constant traffic jams, in search of short-cuts away from back-of-port chaos.
The pressured drivers are often the most wicked on the road, and Reddy showed numerous slides of appalling truck crashes that have killed nine South Durban residents in recent years. And he showed a portrait of an assassinated local community leader, Ahmed Osman, who fought the truckers. Alan Murphy, the Ecopeace party’s former city councilor, pointed out the vast contradictions in Coex’s Risk Analysis, especially its failure to consider explosions during transport.
As for climate implications, it was revealing that Buckland had not read the book, “Towards a Low Carbon City”, commissioned by the city and launched last month by authors from the Academy of Science of SA. According to the report, “The transport sector is pivotal to the transition to a low carbon city.”
The report suggests that proposals like Bidvest’s should be viewed with extreme skepticism: “The top priority was identified as the need to reduce the vehicle kilometers travelled in the road freight sector as this provided the greatest opportunity to simultaneously reduce emissions of GreenHouse Gases and traditional air pollutants.”
Butland’s Basic Assessment ignored climate change and when I asked, he had nothing to say. The overwhelming critique of the proposal by the entire community audience – all raised their hands when asked if they are opposed – is a clear refutation of the KZN provincial government’s decision to allow a Basic Assessment instead of a full EIA. If the municipal and provincial officials who have authority over this matter decide in favour of increased hazmat trucking for South Durban, all hell will break loose.
It’s just one battle in a long-term war: the corporate/municipal agenda to expand high-carbon activities, versus resident health and safety. There will be many more, given how fired up this community is against the devastation caused by the hazmat trucks and against the coming back-of-port project.
The smug tone of politicians at the ICC yesterday and today will surely change when this sort of inadequate environmental regulation, excessive electricity price increases, and fury at climate change policy procrastination combine to ensure Durban and national officials suffer a very hot summer. More
Patrick Bond is author of the forthcoming book Politics of Climate Justice, from UKZN Press, and he directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society.
Climate-dumb Durban's greenwash manual
Will the host city for the November-December world climate summit, COP17, clean up its act? The August 23 launch of a major Academy of Science of South Africa (Assaf) report, Towards a Low Carbon City: Focus on Durban – offers an early chance to test whether new municipal leaders are climate greenwashers, attempting to disguise high-carbon economic policies with pleasing rhetoric, as did their predecessors.
As COP17 approaches: Dirty Durban’s manual for climate greenwashing
Durban’s infamous Bisasar Road dump: Africa’s largest “Clean Development Mechanism” is one of the world’s primary cases of carbon-trading environmental racism.
By Patrick Bond August 29, 2011 -- Will the host city for the November-December world climate summit, COP17, clean up its act? The August 23 launch of a major Academy of Science of South Africa (Assaf) report, Towards a Low Carbon City: Focus on Durban – offers an early chance to test whether new municipal leaders are climate greenwashers, attempting to disguise high-carbon economic policies with pleasing rhetoric, as did their predecessors.
Will Durban Mayor James Nxumalo and a new city manager, still to be named, instead get serious about the threat we face – and that major industries pose – as a result of runaway greenhouse gas emissions? We needn’t rehearse concerns about future rising sea levels, extreme storms, flooding that will overwhelm dirty Durban’s decrepit storm-water drainage system, landslides on our hilly terrain, droughts that draw new “climate refugees” from the region into a xenophobic populace, the disruption of food chains and other coming disasters.
However, what might be termed South Africa’s “mitigation denialism” remains a notable problem. Not only did planning minister Trevor Manuel announce last week that he expects the global North to pay South Africa up to $2 billion a year through the Green Climate Fund he co-chairs – when in reality it is South Africa that owes a vast climate debt to Africa given our world-leading rate of CO2/GDP/person – but Assaf seeks to persuade politicians that Durban can “entrench its reputation as SA’s leading city in terms of climate change actions” [sic].
Missing in analysis: Durban’s worsening carbon habit This is pure hot air, because Assaf’s 262-page study shies away from critical mention of high-carbon Durban’s unprecedented public subsidies on long-distance air transport, shipping, fossil-fuel infrastructure, highway extension and international tourism.
For example, the study tells us nothing about the $35 billion that “back of port” planners have in mind for South Durban: displacing residents of the 140-year-old Clairwood neighbourhood to allow more expansion of the vast harbour (and its ships’ dirty bunker fuel), a new highway leading to more container terminals and supertoxic petrochemical facilities (including doubling oil flows through a new pipeline to Johannesburg via black neighbourhoods), expanding the automotive industry, and digging a huge new harbor on the old airport site. Not a mention.
Assaf says nothing about the damage done by building the $1.2 billion King Shaka International Airport way too early and way too far north of the city, nor – aside from a throwaway reference in the governance chapter – about the mostly empty $430 million Moses Mabhida Stadium built for the 2010 World Cup, next door to an existing world-class rugby stadium that should have been used. Durban was nearly rewarded with a climate-destabilising 2020 Olympics bid before the South African cabinet had a rare commonsense moment in June and withdrew from the competition.
All these mega-investments certainly make Durban “SA’s leading city in terms of climate change actions” – but opposite the way Assaf claims.
In a failure of analytical nerve, the Assaf scientists appear too intimidated to discuss these expensive mistakes in polite company, much less argue for a detox-rehab of Durban’s carbon-addicted corporates. Yet it makes no sense to avoid the harsh reality of fast-rising emissions in sectors that make our city exceptionally vulnerable when carbon taxes do finally kick in, given how far Durban is located from the world’s main markets and given adverse implications for tourism.
At one point, buried in a dry table, are the names of Durban’s biggest emitters measured by consumption of municipal electricity: the Mondi paper mill, Sapref and Engen oil refineries, Toyota, Frame Textiles and the Gateway and Pavillion shopping malls. But the city’s biggest contributor to climate change via the national grid’s coal-fired power plants is a deadly manganese smelter, completely forgotten in Assaf’s study even though Assore’s most recent annual report concedes, “Electricity consumption is the major contributor to Assmang’s corporate carbon footprint and reflects energy sourced from Eskom grid supply, particularly by the Cato Ridge Works.”
Nor in Assaf’s chapter on “The national context” do we learn that South Africa is building the world’s third- and fourth-largest coal-fired power plants, Eskom’s Kusile and Medupi, with a $3.75 billion loan from the World Bank in spite of fierce opposition from civil society.
Not mentioned either are apartheid-era special pricing agreements that give BHP Billiton and Anglo American Corporation the world’s cheapest electricity ($0.02/kiloWatt hour), about 1/8th what ordinary households pay. Nor is there a word about the millions of poor South Africans disconnected from electricity, unable to absorb the 130 per cent price hike Eskom has imposed since 2008 so as to pay for the coal-fired generators.
These gaping holes are too wide for even Durban’s most skilled greenwashers – like municipal climate adaptation manager Debra Roberts – to hide, and to her credit, joking that “You want to get me fired for publicly agreeing with you”, she did just that when at the International Convention Centre launch I drew attention to these white-elephants-in-the-room.
Assaf chief executive Roseanne Diab replied that the city’s main mitigation focus should be Durban’s anarchic truck-freight transport mess, which she claimed can be tackled by air-quality regulation. That might be the case if South Africa had the USA’s Clean Air Act, which considers greenhouse gases to be pollutants – something the South African Air Quality Act doesn’t. And it might also help if the municipality had an effective air pollution monitoring unit, but in March it was stripped of most of its staff by the city manager and is now considered a joke.
And here in South Africa’s petrochemical armpit, from where I write, we South Durban residents continue to be the main victims, including Settlers Primary School with its 52 per cent asthma rate, the world’s highest. I spent an hour last Friday night (August 26) out on Clairwood’s Houghton Road, where local residents’ association secretary Mervyn Reddy led 100 people blockading Consolidated Transport for letting truck drivers race like Michael Schumacher through the neighbourhood. After 10 deaths caused by maniac truckers, who can blame this community for rising up.
Durban chases the carbon trade What Reddy knows, but Assaf doesn’t say, is that the sources of climate-threatening CO2 emissions are also responsible for much more immediate socio-ecological destruction. For example, Assaf enthusiastically promotes landfill methane gas-to-electricity conversion at Durban’s infamous Bisasar Road dump without observing (as do most academic articles) that Africa’s largest “Clean Development Mechanism” is actually one of the world’s primary cases of carbon-trading environmental racism, worthy of a front-page article in the Washington Post in 2005 on the day the Kyoto Protocol took effect.
Placed in a black neighbourhood during apartheid, Bisasar Road – Africa’s largest landfill – should have been closed when Nelson Mandela came to power, as African National Congress pamphlets in the 1994 election promised the community it would be. But thanks in part to World Bank encouragement, Bisasar became the leading pilot for carbon trading and still pollutes the area to this day, with no prospect for closure before it fills up around 2020. A sister landfill in northern Durban, La Mercy, also had a methane-electricity project funded by the World Bank, but Assaf concedes that it failed to properly extract the gas.
In its enthusiasm for such financing, the Assaf study also forgets that the COP17 will witness the demise of Kyoto, the treaty that mandates these kinds of carbon-trade investments in places like Durban. The end of the only binding multilateral climate treaty is mainly due to Washington’s intransigence, and it is heartening to those of us in Durban that hundreds of people have been arrested at the White House over the last two weeks, demanding US rejection of filthy Canadian tar sands oil. In solidarity, Durban climate justice activists will demonstrate at the US Consulate just west of City Hall on Wednesday during afternoon rush hour.
Blithely, Assaf scientists recommend “innovative market-based financing mechanisms” such as “the voluntary carbon market” – while downplaying the emissions-trading fraud, corruption, speculation and collapse now rife across the world. As even a February 2011 report by the US Government Accounting Office revealed, for such voluntary market offsets to be considered genuine requires proof of “additionality”, but this “is difficult because it involves determining what emissions would have been without the incentives provided by the offset program. Studies suggest that existing programs have awarded offsets that were not additional.”
As for measuring CO2 in the voluntary emissions markets, “it is challenging to estimate the amount of carbon stored and to manage the risk that carbon may later be released by, for example, fires or changes in land management”. And verification of offsets is a challenge because “project developers and offset buyers may have few incentives to report information accurately or to investigate offset quality”.
Climate-smart Durban? Regrettably, Assaf believes in a few other “false solutions” to the climate crisis, such as biofuels (Durban is a sugarcane centre) and co-incineration of tyres in cement kilns. Interestingly, the GAO has just released a report confirming analysis by progressive scientists in the ETC Group that the “climate engineering” technologies of choice – geo-engineering, nanotechnology, biofuels and synthetic biology – are “currently immature, many with potentially negative consequences… Climate engineering technologies do not now offer a viable response to global climate change.”
In another disturbing development, Assaf’s emphasis on residents’ behavioural change risks a blame-the-victim mentality: for example, discouraging flush toilets for poor people so as to avoid increased electricity use at the sewage works. Adds Diab, “We must encourage people to stop using their cars and start using public transport” – yet she is silent about how city officials let a crony-capitalist firm, Remant Alton, privatise and wreck our municipal bus system.
Not a total write-off, Assaf’s report at least encourages Durban to “produce local, buy local” at a time of inane currency-induced trading patterns that have little to do with rational comparative advantages between competing economies. The report condemns suburban sprawl and much post-apartheid planning, while endorsing the “polluter pays” principle, which, if ever implemented, would radically improve the city’s environment. All obvious enough, but what hope for implementation given our rulers’ pro-pollution bias?
“Climate smart”, according to Roberts, means a city’s “low-carbon, green economy provides opportunities for both climate change mitigation and adaptation and fosters a new form of urban development that ensures ecological integrity and human well being”.
Precisely. But if Diab is correct that “poor public awareness” is a major barrier to addressing the most serious crisis humanity has ever faced, Assaf scientists now contribute to that very problem with their bland, blind greenwashing of climate-dumb Durban.
Why we question COP17: Climate Justice for Durban?
The Climate Justice movement in Durban is trying to ensure the COP17, from Nov 28 to Dec 9, isn’t simply another failed, elite summit-hop. It will be that, because:
The Kyoto Protocol’s binding commitments to reduce carbon will be trashed and replaced by Washington’s ‘pledge and review’ voluntary hot-air non-commitments.
The so-called Green Climate Fund will be captured by private for-profit interests.
Carbon trading will be heavily promoted, even though it is failing in practice and
Urgent emissions cuts – 50% by 2017, as science requires – will be scoffed at.
Our expectations are terribly low because 16 years of talk by procrastinating, paralysed UN Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiators, guided by fossil-fuel-addicted big business, have left us no strategy to save the planet. Likewise, South Africa’s energy and climate policies are set by the corporate Minerals-Energy Complex. SA’s already-vast CO2 emissions will soar, with the world’s third and fourth largest coal-fired power stations now under construction. Who wins? Eskom still supplies the world’s cheapest electricity supplied to the world’s biggest mining and metals houses – BHP Billiton and Anglo American – which in turn permanently degrade our water resources and pollute the air. Opportunities for Climate Jobs and renewable energy are practically ignored. Meanwhile, power disconnections affect millions of low-income people each year as a result of a 130% electricity price increase since 2008, making it unaffordable and inaccessible to the poor, who are returning to dirty paraffin, coal and firewood. And in 2009 President Jacob Zuma was one of the five ‘leaders’ who, led by the US White House, signed the non-binding Copenhagen Accord, leaving Africa to fry. Given the adverse balance of power, an estimated 20,000 COP17 delegates will waste their time inside Durban’s International Convention Centre (ICC). The last such tragic event here was the UN World Conference Against Racism, where more than 15,000 of us demonstrated on August 31, 2001 because under Washington’s thumb, conference chair Mary Robinson refused to table civil society concerns: Israel’s racist occupation of Palestine; and reparations due for centuries of slavery, colonialism and apartheid.
A year later, at the UN’s Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, more than 30,000 marched against UN commodification of nature: ‘Bluewashing’ in the UN ‘Global Compact’ with big corporations, and UN privatization of water and even the air (known as ‘emissions trading’)
Leaving oil in the soil, from Durban’s coast to Ecuador’s Amazon
By Patrick Bond, presentation from CCS Seminar 2 August 2011
There’s no way around it: to solve the worsening climate crisis requires we must accept both that the vast majority of fossil fuels must now be left underground, and that through democratic planning, we must collectively reboot our energy, transport, agricultural, production, consumption and disposal systems so that by 2050 we experience good living with less than a quarter of our current levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s what science tells our species, and here in South Africa a punctuation mark was just provided by a near-disaster in Durban – host of the world climate summit, four months from now – during intense storms with six-meter waves last week. A decrepit 40-year old oil tanker, MT Phoenix, lost its anchor mooring on July 26 and was pushed to the rocky shoreline in Christmas Bay, 25km north of the city.
The shipwreck is in the heart of a beautiful albeit class-segregated tourist and retirement site, Durban’s North Coast, that just two weeks earlier held an Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) world competition, Mr Price Pro. That event boasted some of the best waves ever seen in ASP history, said contestants.
But cold winter swells from marine hell reemerged just when MT Phoenix was being towed into Durban harbour for confiscation, having lost its engines a few hundred miles down the coast. According to Cathleen Jacka of the maritimematters.net website, the incident confounded the South African Maritime Safety Authority (SAMSA), what “with hints at a deliberate beaching; the possibility of a mystery stowaway still hiding onboard; uncertainty as to the true identity of the owners and even that the vessel was scrapped in India last year.” A SAMSA official observed that the 15-member crew “seemed inexperienced in the basic actions required to stabilise the vessel’s position” and remarked, “It would not be the first time that an unscrupulous ship owner was prepared to sacrifice a vessel in attempt to realise the insured value.”
Except that there was apparently no insurance for the MT Phoenix, since Lloyds took it off the books late last year, and allegedly it was on its final trip, from West Africa to India’s ghastly ship breaking graveyard. The owner, Suhair Khan of Dubai, stopped taking calls, leaving South Africans to bear the risk of 400 tons of oil spilling if the ship broke on the rocks. Estimates of the heroic rescue operation’s cost to the taxpayer easily run into the millions of dollars, but thankfully the crew was saved and oil was laboriously pumped ashore.
Offshore drilling in the ‘remarkably stable’ (sic) Agulhas Current However another potential oil disaster looms in this very location, thanks to South African government energy bureaucrats. On May 5, the Petroleum Agency of SA began authorizing seismic oil surveying by a dubious Singapore-registered company, Silver Wave Energy, in water depths ranging from 30 meters to two kilometers. By comparison, BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform in the much calmer Gulf of Mexico drilled 1.5 km down to the seafloor surface.
Silver Wave Energy’s primary owner is Burmese businessman Min Min Aung, who is tight with the junta that still rules there, according to reliable reports. Exploitation of oil and gas in Burma’s Andaman Sea has long been controversial (my grandfather was deputy warden there during brutal colonial times), and when Unocal – now Chevron – built a pipeline to Thailand, it did such enormous damage to people and the environment that local villagers, supported by Earthrights International, successfully sued the firm for $30 million.
Since 2007 the Arakan islands on Burma’s Bay of Bengal coast have been the main site of intense conflict, as Jockai Khaing from Arakan Oil Watch told me last week, and again Aung is a key player. Silver Wave has also been exploring dubious extraction projects in Russia, Sudan, Guinea-Conakry, Indonesia and Iraq, but in spite of sanctions against Burma (supposedly supported by South Africa), Aung received PetroSA’s endorsement to explore 8000 square km stretching from Durban to SA’s main aluminum-smelting city, Richards Bay.
Source: PetroSA, July 2011
Silver Wave simultaneously announced a $100 million oil search in the fragile Hukaung Valley in northeastern Burma, and if the company carries out its initial plans, this will threaten local villagers as well as endangered tigers, Himalayan bears, elephants and leopards. Although the area contains the world’s largest tiger reserve, according to reporter Thomas Maung Shwe of Mizzima news service, “the Burmese regime has encouraged logging, gold mining, large scale farms and the building of factories inside.” As the scandal grew, Silver Wave denied what its own press release had announced, but conceded it would drill near the reserve.
A company this dastardly is a high risk, and to prove the point, Silver Wave’s environmental impact document includes a description of the notorious Agulhas Current, which begins at the Mozambique border: “Compared to other western boundary currents the Agulhas Current adjacent to southern Africa’s East Coast exhibits a remarkable stability.” Huh? In reality, the Natal Pulse races down the Agulhas a half-dozen times each year, pushing 20km per day. It is one reason Durban’s coastline hosts more than 50 major ship carcasses. Creating havoc further south on the Wild Coast, the Pulse contributes to the rouge waves that have sunk 1000 more vessels in what is considered one of the world’s most dangerous shipping corridors.
Susan Casey’s book The Wave pays Agulhas this respect: “Crude, diesel, jet fuel, liquefied natural gas: oil in all its forms was heartbreaking, infuriating and all-too-common sight in the ocean. Supertankers, behemoths that couldn’t make it through the Suez Canal, swung down from the Middle East, took their chances hopping a ride in the Agulhas, and met their share of disasters. Salvagers used every tool at their disposal to prevent the damaged tankers from gushing out their contents, especially in fragile near-shore environments, but sometimes the battle was lost.”
Source: Silver Wave submission to PetroSA
South Africa’s petrochem armpit If, thankfully, the beaches at Christmas Bay were saved from a spill this week, others have not been so fortunate. Just offshore South Durban’s Cuttings Beach, a few kilometers from where I’m writing, we witnessed a significant 2004 oil spill of five tons at the Single Buoy Mooring, the 50-meter deep intake pump that feeds the refineries with 80 percent of SA’s crude oil imports. Onshore, corporate pollution standards are so lax that the rust-bucket structures regularly spring disastrous leaks and explode.
Source: Southen Durban Community Enviromental Alliance photos of 2007 incidents
Daily, poisons are flared onto thousands of neighbouring residents. The Indian, coloured and African communities suffer the world’s highest-ever recorded asthma rate in a school (52 percent of kids), as Settlers Primary sits next to the country’s largest paper mill (Mondi) and between two refineries: one run by Engen, Chevron and Total; and the other, called Sapref, by BP, Shell and Thebe Investments. Sapref’s worst leak so far was 1.5 million liters into the Bluff Nature Reserve and adjoining residences in 2001.
Source: SDCEA
Together these refineries can process 300,000 barrels of oil a day, more than any other single site in Africa aside from an Algerian mega-refinery. A new 705km pipeline from the Durban refineries to Johannesburg will double the existing pumping capacity, an invitation for much more damage here. Delayed two years, the government pipeline project’s cost overrun went from $1.4 billion announced in 2005 to $3.4 bn today. Our petrochemical armpit gets smellier, as soaring financial costs add to the social and environmental calamaties.
Amazonian oil soils our forest lungs Because of flying so much, I am feeling an acute need to identify and contest the full petroleum commodity chain up to the point it not only poisons my South Durban neighbours but generates catastrophic climate change. And regrettably, this search must include Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador (and from last week Peru as well), for even South America’s most progressive governments are currently extracting and exporting as much oil and gas as they possibly can. We may even be recipients in South Africa, if government’s plans to build a massive $15 billion heavy oil refinery near Port Elizabeth come to fruition. A $300 million downpayment was announced in the last budget, and full capacity will be 400,000 barrels per day.
From where would this dirty crude come? Two weeks before he was booted from office in September 2008, disgraced SA president Thabo Mbeki signed a heavy oil deal with Hugo Chavez. It appeared a last-gasp effort by Mbeki to restore a shred of credibility with the core group to his left – the Congress of SA Trade Unions and SA Communist Party – who successfully conspired to replace him with their own candidate, Jacob Zuma, as ruling party leader nine months earlier. In those last moments of power, Mbeki fancifully claimed he wanted to pursue Bolivarian-type trade deals, and Chavez told Mbeki, “It is justice ... it will be a wonderful day when the first Venezuelan tanker stops by to leave oil for South Africa.” The harsh reality is that the preferred refinery site, Port Elizabeth’s Coega, will probably retain its nickname, the “Ghost on the Coast”, and Durban will continue to suffer the bulk of oil imports, as BP now actively campaigns against a new state refinery.
Venezuelan dirty crude is akin to Canadian tar sands, and hopefully sense will prevail in Caracas. There is a fierce battle, however, for hearts and minds in both Bolivia – where movements fighting ‘extractivism’ have held demonstrations against the first indigenous president, Evo Morales, even at the same time his former UN ambassador Pablo Solon bravely led the world climate justice fight within the hopeless arena of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations – and Ecuador where Rafael Correa regularly speaks of replacing capitalism with socialism. Both have ‘rights of Mother Earth’ in their constitutions – so far untested.
In Quito and Neuva Rocafuerte deep in the Amazon last week, I witnessed the most advanced eco-social battle for a nation’s hearts-and-minds underway anywhere, with the extraordinary NGO Accion Ecologica insisting that Correa’s grudging government leaves the oil in Yasuni National Park’s soil. Because he was trained in neoclassical economics and hasn’t quite recovered, Correa favours selling Yasuni forests on the carbon markets, which progressive ecologists reject in principle.
Accion Ecologica assembled forty members of the civil society network Oilwatch – including four others from Africa led by Friends of the Earth International chairperson Nnimmo Bassey from the Niger Delta – first to witness the mess left by Chevron after a quarter century’s operations. Six months ago, local courts found the firm responsible for $8.6 billion in damages: cultural destruction including extinction of two indigenous nations, and water and soil pollution and deforestation in the earth’s greatest lung – but Chevron’s California headquarters refuses to cough up.
Oil spots from Texaco’s operations already encroach into Yasuni – where Bassey feels at home
The really hopeful part of the visit, however, was Accion Ecologica’s proposal at Yasuni, on the Peruvian border, that $7-10 billion worth of oil in the block known as ITT not be drilled. Part of the North’s debt for overuse of the planet’s CO2 carrying capacity must be to compensate Ecuador’s people the $3.5 billion that they would otherwise earn from extracting the oil. Leaving it unexploited in the Amazon is the most reasonable way that industrial and post-industrial countries can make a downpayment on their climate debt.
If the UN’s Green Climate Fund design team, co-chaired by South African planning minister Trevor Manuel, were serious about spending its promised $100 billion a year by 2020, this project is where they would start, with an announcement on November 28 to put the Durban COP17 climate summit on the right footing.
Don’t count on it. Instead, as usual, civil society must push this argument, in the process insisting on leaving oil in the soil everywhere so that other tankers share what we pray will be the final fate of the wretched ship MT Phoenix: a graceful not rocky retirement.
Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society in Durban
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Fighting the minerals-petroleum-coal complex’s wealth and woes in Durban
Patrick Bond and Khadija Sharife 19 July 2011
When African National Congress youth leader Julius Malema recently proposed the mining industry’s partial nationalization – and last week asked, quite legitimately, ‘what is the alternative?’ to those in the SA Communist Party (SACP) and Business Leadership South Africa who threw cold water at him – a debate of enormous ideological magnitude opened in public, which workers, communities and environmentalists have already joined in their myriad struggles.
For those of us in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, awareness of mining’s foibles is vital for several reasons, including new scientific findings about overestimated coal industry reserves; SACP leader Jeremy Cronin’s recent useful suggestion to ‘phase out aluminum smelters’ at the vast Richards Bay port (and we might add, at Durban’s killer-manganese Assmang at Cato Ridge which alone chews a third of our city’s electricity); and the global climate summit that Durban hosts in November-December.
It is no secret that the COP17 will be embarrassing for South Africa, not only because Durban will host the demise of the Kyoto Protocol’s binding commitments, due largely to the destructive influence of the US, Japan and the European Union. WikiLeaks revealed Washington’s bad habits – bullying, bribery and blackmail – when promoting the non-binding 2009 Copenhagen Accord, a sham of a climate agreement. Pathetically, SA president Jacob Zuma played into the hands of the major polluters as an original signatory.
Expect more UN wreckage on December 9, closing day. But that aside, the main reason that Pretoria faces embarrassment is increasing local awareness of SA’s coal-fired electricity dirty laundry. This is a result of the way that mining houses – especially Anglo American Corporation and BHP Billiton – have managed to monopolize the world’s cheapest energy while poor people are so overcharged that they face widespread disconnection.
Fighting for electricity, water and health High-profile resistance this month alone included the burning of municipal councilors’ houses over high prices and prepayment meters in Soweto, residents’ attacks on Eskom officials engaged in power cuts in the small northern city of Tzaneen, and here in Durban’s Kennedy Road, successful protests against a municipal subcontractor chopping illegal electricity connections.
South Africa’s ‘Minerals-Energy Complex’ – a phrase coined by former Trade and Industry director-general Zav Rustomjee and British economist Ben Fine – has become a barrier to society’s balanced development and also a threat of great magnitude to the local and global environment. As last month’s diagnostic document from the new planning ministry admitted, ‘SA’s economy is highly resource intensive and we use resources inefficiently. As a result we are starting to face some critical resource constraints, e.g. water.’
Eskom is the biggest water consumer, so as to cool Mpumalanga power plants. The coal burned in the process has ruined many rivers, and so badly polluted the Kruger Park that hundreds of crocodiles have died.
The main beneficiary, whose smelters guzzle more than a tenth of SA electricity, is BHP Billiton, headquartered in Melbourne though rooted in South Africa through the Afrikaner-owned Gencor mining house. Eskom’s annual report admits BHP Billiton was given a $200 million subsidy last year thanks to apartheid-era deals, and was responsible for Eskom’s $1.4 billion loss the year before.
This is why our wealth is a ‘resource curse’. Dating back to the discovery of Kimberley diamonds in the 1860s and Witwatersrand gold in the 1880s, a handful of corporations gained power over national development policy. At one point, Anglo American and De Beers – run mainly by the Oppenheimer family dynasty – controlled almost half the country’s gold and platinum, a quarter of the coal, and virtually all the diamonds, with held critical stakes in banking, steel, auto, electronics, agriculture and many other industries.
According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the mining industry’s ‘direct involvement with the state in the formulation of oppressive policies or practices that resulted in low labour costs (or otherwise boosted profits) can be described as first-order involvement [in apartheid] … The shameful history of subhuman compound [hostel] conditions, brutal suppression of striking workers, racist practices and meager wages is central to understanding the origins and nature of apartheid.’
Apartheid-economy residues The legacy of Minerals-Energy Complex political power continues, as witnessed by the World Bank’s 2010 financing of Eskom’s new coal-fired mega power plant Medupi and other foreign finance for its successor Kusile (the world’s third and fourth largest), the energy ministry’s multi-decade integrated resource planning exercise – run by a committee dominated by electricity-guzzling corporations – and Pretoria’s contributions to global climate debates. These include the COP17, Zuma’s co-chairing of a UN sustainable development commission, and Planning Minister Trevor Manuel’s role as co-chair of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) design team, which seeks $100 billion a year in North-South flows.
Last week at a Tokyo GCF meeting, Manuel suppressed debate requested by Nicaragua about World Bank conflicts of interest, for it provides input to the huge fund as well as serving as interim trustee, against UN procedure.
Instead of paying reparations for ‘climate debt’, the GCF appears to cement existing power structures, and instead of raising funds from from polluters in the North to deter emissions, potentially half of the fund might come from carbon trading (a suggestion by Manuel), which will prolong Northern corporate climate destruction. No doubt we will learn soon of GCF funding of ‘false solutions’ to the climate crisis, such as nuclear, Carbon Capture and Storage, biofuels and whacky geoengineering schemes (sulfur in the air to shut out the sun, or iron filings in the sea to create algae blooms).
Minerals-Energy Complex ecocide extends to Johannesburg’s acid mine drainage drisis. Mine tailings dams composed of waste material measure 400 square kilometers, alongside six billion tons of iron sulphide, which, exposed to air and water, creates acid mine water which drains into the water table. The combination is devastating, especially when added to the coal mine pollution further east, on the country’s best agricultural land, not to mention hundreds of thousands of workers’ silicosis and tuberculosis, traced by Durban’s Health Systems Trust to the mines.
These legacies mean that even if Malema has won the spotlight, mining and energy firms are consistently criticized by labour, communities and environmentalists. The problem so far has been divisions of interest that prevent them from coming together effectively, a problem that needs to be urgently solved, certainly before the COP17 Conference of Polluters begins.
Satyagraha time On the positive side, it is now certain that December 3 is a global day of civil society protest action, with a march against climate change culminating at the Durban beachfront – South Africa’s leading public space with unusually mixed class and race access – for a ‘going away party’ to the receding sand. What is needed next is a strategy to ratchet up pressure as protesters pass by the International Convention Centre, Durban’s City Hall and the US Consulate, and generate consensus on the next stage of commitment.
Amongst the world’s highest profile climate activists is Greenpeace International director Kumi Naidoo, who in his Durban youth learned and practiced the highest arts of democratic advocacy within the Natal Indian Congress and anti-apartheid youth structures. Last month, Naidoo scaled a Greenland deep-sea oil platform to present 50,000 signatures against dangerous Arctic drilling. A fortnight later, his Johannesburg comrades dumped five tonnes of coal at Eskom’s headquarters in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs to protest the climate-catastrophic Kusile powerplant construction.
With extreme weather events worsening in recent months, who can doubt the imperative to get what Naidoo terms a fair, ambitious and binding (FAB) deal? Such a superhuman, genuinely multilateral effort has been tried once before, in the 1987 ‘Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer’, which banned chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions by 1996, in the nick of time.
Since then, nothing else attempted by elite global negotiators aside from AIDS-medicines access – granting an exemption to intellectual property rights at the 2001 Doha World Trade Organisation summit, driven from below by the Treatment Action Campaign – has properly addressed world-scale economic, environmental and geopolitical crises. Nothing, really.
Blame the neoliberalism of the 1990s or the neoconservatism of the 2000s or Barack Obama’s fusion of the two vicious ideologies since then, but it’s usually vested corporate interests that block progress, impose austere economic imperatives (as is even hitting home for western workers from Greece to Wisconsin) which in turn generate even more desperation for ‘growth’ at any cost, and then ignore their historic responsibility for climate-change culpability.
Top US State Department negotiator Todd Stern, who has already publicly written off the COP17 on two occasions, put it plainly at the Copenhagen COP in 2009: 'The sense of guilt or culpability or reparations – I just categorically reject that.’
That bad attitude is why Greenpeace and others in society passionate about the environment are so desperately needed, putting their bodies on the line to dramatise the threats and solutions. And why unity on strategy and messaging is vital.
Divergent NGO paths But as an Australian civil society unity initiative (‘Say Yes’) six weeks ago showed, this is not easy. Two activists at the website ‘Climate Code Red’, David Spratt and John Rice, ask tough questions about the Australian climate lobby: ‘Do the branding imperatives of large NGOs, financially reliant on e-list supporters, drive them to market themselves as separate and distinct from, and of higher standing, than other NGOs and the community groups with which they profess common purpose? Is this one reason why climate advocacy is so often chronically divided and ineffective?’
Adds Desmond D’Sa of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, ‘Greenpeace did a good action against Eskom, but where were they when we ran our community campaign against World Bank financing for Medupi last year? Why don’t they support local activism?’
These complaints join others about Greenpeace’s naïve climate policy messaging: supporting Pretoria’s negotiating stand in Copenhagen and encouraging Zuma to turn up on the last day even though, predictably, he sabotaged the Kyoto Protocol there; supporting SA tourism minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk to head the UN climate body though he was a laggard at home; and supporting carbon trading (what critics term ‘the privatization of the air’) even though at Durban’s massive Bisasar Road landfill, that strategy for financing methane-to-electricity has locked in environmental racism.
But in this time of urgency, the challenge is to find common cause amongst all the visitors to Durban. For in contrast to the hopelessness of a UN conference where procrastination, paralysis, pollution and profit will probably beat the interests of the people and the planet, it’s the indominable spirit of Greenpeace staff and those like them, willing to take huge personal risks for the sake of the planet and people, that will shine through.
One reason is the host locale, Durban, whose 20th century legacy of heroic figures willing to make great sacrifices includes Dube, Luthuli, Naicker, Meer, Biko, dockworkers, community activists, women’s groups, the Diakonia faith community, the Mxenges, Turner, Brutus and so many others. The most compelling for climate politics may well be Mahatma Gandhi, who a century ago in his Phoenix settlement in northern Durban built up a tradition that needs revival today: Satyagraha, putting bodies on the line in search of truth, to shake the system and avert its destructive course.
The same spirit of civil disobedience is being invoked in Washington against the Canada-US tar-sands/pipeline complex in late August, with a host of leading climate activists including Maude Barlow, Wendell Berry, Tom Goldtooth, Danny Glover, James Hansen, Wes Jackson, Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben (http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/23).
The desire of those promoting climate justice in Durban is to evoke that earlier round of protests at the SA embassy in Washington a quarter century ago, which conjoined international solidarity to militant activism in the townships and in turn led to sanctions and the fall of a regime. This one is bigger and will fall more slowly – but for our survival the Minerals-Energy Complex will have to take the same course as apartheid.
Patrick Bond and Khadija Sharife are at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society
Eskom and the World Bank sowing the seeds of destruction
The great billion dollar drug scam: Part 2
The great billion dollar drug scam: part two
The pharmaceutical industry uses dirty tricks to maximise profits at any cost, hurting sick people and taxpayers. Khadija Sharife 3 July 2011
Vaccines are often priced 40 ‑ 100 times more than the cost of production, and drug companies cite research expenses as the culprit [EPA]
This is the second of a two‑part series examining the methods by which multinational drug corporations inflate their expenses and justify their pricing strategies. The first part revealed how, far from costing the reported (and widely accepted) $1bn to bring a drug to market, actual costs may be less than a fifth of that, thanks to accounting tactics and corporate tax breaks.
Of course, the US government is very conscious of moves designed to avoid taxation. But little effective action has been taken to tighten the tax net. In 2005, Congress extended atax holiday to pharmaceutical corporations, allowing companies to repatriate hidden profits at just 5.2 per cent of the corporate tax rate. At the time, Pfizer had untaxed profits at $38bn; Merck $18bn; Johnson & Johnson $14.8bn ‑ at least, those were the profits they were willing to declare.
Generally, a considerable portion (upwards of 12 per cent) of big pharma's research and development (R&D) costs is Phase IV or post‑marketing trials of drugs already commercially sold to consumers, in an attempt to expand sales. The figure was estimated at 75 per cent of R&D costs by the Tufts Center, said Harvard Medical School's Marcia Angell.
Since the majority of Phase IV studies will never be submitted to the FDA, they may be totally unregulated. Few of them are published. In fact, like all industry‑sponsored trials, they are not likely to be published at all unless they show something favourable to the sponsor's drug. If they are published, it is often in marginal journals, because the quality of the research is so poor, she said.
Innovations and free‑rides Ironically, the Tufts Center study by Joe DiMasi et al, which estimated the price of bringing a new drug to market to be more than $800m, drastically skewed R&D costs by basing analysis not on the general state of approved drugs but instead on self‑originating NCEs or New Molecular Entities (NMEs) which comprise only a small portion of drugs approved annually by the FDA ‑ estimated at 35 per cent (1990‑2000) ‑ a figure that has since decreased in the past decade.
Pharmaceutical innovation is determined by two crucial factors: a) the creation of a new molecular entity(NME) ‑ which in itself may or may not be useful for treatment but which signifies the introduction of a new, distinct molecular form, and b) an NME that constitutes apriority drug: ie: a drug that offers, in the words of the FDA,a major advance in treatment or which provides treatment where no adequate therapy exists ‑ in short, a therapeutic advance for serious illnesses.
Under the 1992 Prescription Drug User Act, the FDA operates via a two‑tiered system of review: Standard Review (S) applied to drugs that offer only minor improvements over existing marketed drugs, and Priority Review (P), a fast‑track ‑ a six month process since 2003 ‑ pretty speedy for any company who wants to drive through innovation.
Though the two comprise separate categories, by blurring the definitions, pharmaceutical companies are often able to misrepresent NMEs, withinnovations justifying the high costs of patents ie: exclusive government‑approved marketing rights.
From 2006‑ 2009, just 48 drug innovations (P+ NME) were approved by the FDA, while an average of 84 per cent of research funding comes from US taxpayer sources, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Light and Warburton conclude that the net corporate investment in research to discover important new drugs is about 1.2 per cent of sales, not 17‑19 per cent.
So, while drug companies claim that the EU has suffered from a lack of innovation, trailing behind US R&D expenditure by 15 per cent in 2004, little of this figure corresponds to reality.
Easy free‑riding of the US public funds and R&D is the primary reason why drug companies have flocked to the US. Just a quarter of NMEs are estimated by specialists as being actually developed by drug companies, instead, most are licensed from government/public‑financed labs such as the NIH and universities ‑ as well as smaller companies.
Acts and licensing In 2002, then‑CEO of GSK Bob Ingram spoke to the Wall Street Journal on the subject of licensing: We're not going to put our money in‑house if there's a better investment vehicle outside. Ingram pointed out that GSK was eager to reach the levels of other companies, such as Merck, which received 35 per cent of its revenue from licensing.
The cost differential between a licensed NME and one developed in‑house is vast: a licensed NME costs just 10 per cent of actual R&D expenditure (2000) in contrast to an in‑house developed NME at 74 per cent. In 2000, just 13 per cent of approved NMEs were developed in‑house ‑ a figure that has not drastically changed.
The system of licensing came about via the Bayh‑Dole Act ‑ named after Senators Birch Bayh (D‑Ind) and Robert Dole (R‑Kans) ‑ designed to enable universities and small businesses to patent discoveries that came about from NIH‑financed research (the primary distributors of taxpayer funds for medical research) ‑ thereafter granting the patents to pharmaceutical corporations in exchange for royalties.
The Act did articulate taxpayer protection rights concerning non‑exclusive licences ‑ if the action is necessary to alleviate health or safety needs which are not reasonably satisfied, or the action is necessary to meet public uses.
But Ronald Reagan's 1983 Executive Memo changed tack, liberalising access to include coverage for large corporations. Prior to this, publicly financed discoveries were considered knowledge in the public domain. One further piece of legislation ‑ the Stevenson‑Wydler Act ‑ removed the barriers betweenpublicly funded systems (mainly the government but also universities) and the private sector.
Weighing the costs In short, depending on whether or not the NMEs were developed in‑house, estimates by Light and Warburton ‑ in addition to other specialists, such as Angell ‑ reveal the costs of R&D as more along the lines of $50m ‑ $200m.
So much for the $1bn pill ‑ but what of the costs of development for the Rotavirus vaccine?
Vaccines are often priced 40 ‑ 100 times more than the cost of production. Drug companies claim that pharmaceutical research is very expensive and that R&D costs are extremely high.
Unfortunately for GSK, the usual 5,000 or 6,000 clinical trial subjects ‑ people involved in Phase III trials ‑ drastically escalated to around 63,000 to 68,000 people ‑ in order to rule out a perceived fatal side effect (intussusception) that forced Rotashield off the market some years earlier.
Prior to the massive Phase III trial, the costs of GSK's trials ranged from $1.8 million to $2.4 million, stated Light et al. Unlike Merck, GSK conducted many trials in developing countries, drastically lowering the potential costs. But even estimating at the higher range, the total costs for GSK's Phase I ‑ Phase III trials reached between $128m and $192m ‑ for all 63,000‑plus people.
Few of the clinical trials conducted in developing nations are investigated by the FDA. A 2008 Pfizer presentation [PDF]showed just 45 of 6,485 (0.7 per cent) of foreign trials were scrutinised. In 2008, more than 76 per cent of the people used for clinical drug trials were foreign subjects ‑ some 232,532 people.
The cheapened value of poorer peoples ‑ including better value for physician must not be underestimated.
One report, dated 2000, by the inspector general of the US Department of Health and Human Services, disclosed that physicians in the US were paid $10,000 per patient enrolled for a drug trial ‑ plus a further $30,000 on enrolment of the sixth patient. Costs, no doubt, included as research and development.
Aside fromcheapness, in developing countries there exists far less regulation, oversight and awareness; and the poor are unlikely to litigate if and when damage/deaths occur as a consequence of the drug. This is particularly lethal when it comes to experimentation on children. More than 78 per cent of children‑focused clinical trials were conducted outside of the US.
Vaccines and identification The Rotarix vaccine was not developed in‑house but was licensed in: In 1988, Richard Ward PhD isolated the human rotavirus strain and developed a live, orally deliverable vaccine candidate under a licensing agreement with the Virus Research Institute, which later merged with another company, to become Avant Immunotherapeutics, a small firm that has often received grants from the NIH.
As Donald Light, a professor of comparative health policy, and economist Rebecca Warburton revealed in their paper analysing the development cost of the rotavirus vaccine, Avant funded a Phase II trial of Rotarix in 1997‑1998 which found the drug gave protection in 89 per cent of cases. Light et al go on to write that, in 1997, GlaxoWellcome (later GSK) negotiated global rights and agreed, in exchange, to finance development costs, paid Avant $5.5 million and agreed royalties of 10 per cent on net sales.
The rotavirus vaccine signified a radical turning point in the introduction of vaccines: usually, poorer nations wait out a 15 or 20 year period. GSK's rotavirus vaccination instead proceeded via regulatory approval not in the country of manufacture, but instead, the country of first intended use ‑ Mexico.
Why not Africa or Asia? Mexico proved the perfect site for introduction: since the 1990s, the government created, expanded and strengthened a national surveillance system for diarrhoeal disease, noted Walsh and Situ. Hospitals and clinics had well‑equipped laboratories to identify infectious diseases; the Ministry of Health regularly monitored and reported cases, as did the clinics and hospitals, as part of the Mexican Social Security Institute (MSSI) system.
Since 2004, the Pan‑American Health Organisation (PAHO), comprising more than forty nations of the Americas, supported ‑ along with other organisations ‑ the development of rotavirus surveillance systems in countries including Argentina, El Salvador, Guyana, Uruguay, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago and Honduras. Monitoring was engineered tocharacterise the proportion of diarrhoeal hospitalisations attributable to a rotavirus infection, serotypes of circulating rotaviruses, and the seasonality of rotavirus infections, writes Julia Walsh MD in The critical path for vaccine introduction[PDF]. This information is fed into economic analyses, a critical element in the countries' decision on whether to introduce a vaccine.
The good news, for GSK, about Mexico and Brazil, is that the percentage of population targeted to be vaccinated is more than 98 per cent. In 2006, Duncan Steele from the Initiative for Vaccine Research (WHO) stated that the Rotarix vaccine was being introduced to Brazil, Panama, Venezuela and other countries ‑ at a cost of $7 per dose for public health use. In 2004, Brazil purchased eight million doses (two doses per child), at the full $7 per dose. Ward would later say that rotavirus hospitalisations were estimated to be down by 59 per cent.
Efficient manufacturing? Presently, unless Merck makes an entry into the international marketplace, there exists no competition for GSK which already describes itself as,the main supplier of vaccines to UNICEF and GAVI. According to GSK, PAHO and other aid agencies intend to purchase enough Rotarix to ensure immunisation for 80 per cent of the world's children. Avant estimates that the global market for the drug will generate as much as $1.8bn annually. Neither GSK nor Merck have published a summary of their costs.
Light and Warburton estimate that the cost of Rotarix ‑ due to the incredibly large expense of the almost 70,000‑person trial is as high $466 million, excluding capitalised costs ‑ and that out‑of‑pocket costs could be recovered with a single year's profit. From 2008 onward, sales totalled more than $1bn.
At efficient manufacturing costs of $1.50‑$2 per dose, GSK will make a jolly profit from the full price in developed nations, and the 98 per cent successful vaccination target rate in countries such as Brazil. Once the five‑year period is up, GSK ‑ holding the global monopoly, will be embedded as part of the national health budget in 40 or more countries.
GSK's home country ‑ the UK ‑ donated the largest chunk of taxpayer funds to the AMC pot ‑ at $1.34bn, while IP king Bill Gates offered a further $1bn. Gates claimed that he felt great about the prices GAVI received but acknowledged that Indian and Chinese manufacturers could bring the price downsomewhat if they ramped up vaccine output.
No matter that drug companies like GSK actually sat on the GAVI board at the time such decisions were made.
Developed nations banging the trade‑related intellectual property drum, and intellectual property captains such as Bill Gates, will not bypass the anti‑competitive grip of patents ‑ for which there exists no free market, and where all patent value is opaquely imputed by the company in question.
This is the flipside of charity, this is a calculated attempt to sustain the status quo ‑ a world structured on inequality, where the gap between those with access to medicine, and those without, is not only undeserved and systemically unjust ‑ but also lethal.
To paraphrase brilliant comedian Chris Rock, drug companies ‑ or drug dealers, as he put it, don't want to cure you (or kill you). The money comes from making you live in need.
The great billion dollar drug scam: part two The pharmaceutical industry uses dirty tricks to maximise profits at any cost, hurting sick people and taxpayers. Khadija Sharife
Vaccines are often priced 40 - 100 times more than the cost of production, and drug companies cite research expenses as the culprit [EPA]
This is the second of a two-part series examining the methods by which multinational drug corporations inflate their expenses and justify their pricing strategies. The first part revealed how, far from costing the reported (and widely accepted) $1bn to bring a drug to market, actual costs may be less than a fifth of that, thanks to accounting tactics and corporate tax breaks.
Of course, the US government is very conscious of moves designed to avoid taxation. But little effective action has been taken to tighten the tax net. In 2005, Congress extended atax holiday to pharmaceutical corporations, allowing companies to repatriate hidden profits at just 5.2 per cent of the corporate tax rate. At the time, Pfizer had untaxed profits at $38bn; Merck $18bn; Johnson & Johnson $14.8bn - at least, those were the profits they were willing to declare.
Generally, a considerable portion (upwards of 12 per cent) of big pharma's research and development (R&D) costs is Phase IV or post-marketing trials of drugs already commercially sold to consumers, in an attempt to expand sales. The figure was estimated at 75 per cent of R&D costs by the Tufts Center, said Harvard Medical School's Marcia Angell.
Since the majority of Phase IV studies will never be submitted to the FDA, they may be totally unregulated. Few of them are published. In fact, like all industry-sponsored trials, they are not likely to be published at all unless they show something favourable to the sponsor's drug. If they are published, it is often in marginal journals, because the quality of the research is so poor, she said.
Innovations and free-rides Ironically, the Tufts Center study by Joe DiMasi et al, which estimated the price of bringing a new drug to market to be more than $800m, drastically skewed R&D costs by basing analysis not on the general state of approved drugs but instead on self-originating NCEs or New Molecular Entities (NMEs) which comprise only a small portion of drugs approved annually by the FDA - estimated at 35 per cent (1990-2000) - a figure that has since decreased in the past decade.
Pharmaceutical innovation is determined by two crucial factors: a) the creation of a new molecular entity(NME) - which in itself may or may not be useful for treatment but which signifies the introduction of a new, distinct molecular form, and b) an NME that constitutes apriority drug: ie: a drug that offers, in the words of the FDA,a major advance in treatment or which provides treatment where no adequate therapy exists - in short, a therapeutic advance for serious illnesses.
Under the 1992 Prescription Drug User Act, the FDA operates via a two-tiered system of review: Standard Review (S) applied to drugs that offer only minor improvements over existing marketed drugs, and Priority Review (P), a fast-track - a six month process since 2003 - pretty speedy for any company who wants to drive through innovation.
Though the two comprise separate categories, by blurring the definitions, pharmaceutical companies are often able to misrepresent NMEs, withinnovations justifying the high costs of patents ie: exclusive government-approved marketing rights.
From 2006- 2009, just 48 drug innovations (P+ NME) were approved by the FDA, while an average of 84 per cent of research funding comes from US taxpayer sources, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Light and Warburton conclude that the net corporate investment in research to discover important new drugs is about 1.2 per cent of sales, not 17-19 per cent.
So, while drug companies claim that the EU has suffered from a lack of innovation, trailing behind US R&D expenditure by 15 per cent in 2004, little of this figure corresponds to reality.
Easy free-riding of the US public funds and R&D is the primary reason why drug companies have flocked to the US. Just a quarter of NMEs are estimated by specialists as being actually developed by drug companies, instead, most are licensed from government/public-financed labs such as the NIH and universities - as well as smaller companies.
Acts and licensing In 2002, then-CEO of GSK Bob Ingram spoke to the Wall Street Journal on the subject of licensing: We're not going to put our money in-house if there's a better investment vehicle outside. Ingram pointed out that GSK was eager to reach the levels of other companies, such as Merck, which received 35 per cent of its revenue from licensing.
The cost differential between a licensed NME and one developed in-house is vast: a licensed NME costs just 10 per cent of actual R&D expenditure (2000) in contrast to an in-house developed NME at 74 per cent. In 2000, just 13 per cent of approved NMEs were developed in-house - a figure that has not drastically changed.
The system of licensing came about via the Bayh-Dole Act - named after Senators Birch Bayh (D-Ind) and Robert Dole (R-Kans) - designed to enable universities and small businesses to patent discoveries that came about from NIH-financed research (the primary distributors of taxpayer funds for medical research) - thereafter granting the patents to pharmaceutical corporations in exchange for royalties.
The Act did articulate taxpayer protection rights concerning non-exclusive licences - if the action is necessary to alleviate health or safety needs which are not reasonably satisfied, or the action is necessary to meet public uses.
But Ronald Reagan's 1983 Executive Memo changed tack, liberalising access to include coverage for large corporations. Prior to this, publicly financed discoveries were considered knowledge in the public domain. One further piece of legislation - the Stevenson-Wydler Act - removed the barriers betweenpublicly funded systems (mainly the government but also universities) and the private sector.
Weighing the costs In short, depending on whether or not the NMEs were developed in-house, estimates by Light and Warburton - in addition to other specialists, such as Angell - reveal the costs of R&D as more along the lines of $50m - $200m.
So much for the $1bn pill - but what of the costs of development for the Rotavirus vaccine?
Vaccines are often priced 40 - 100 times more than the cost of production. Drug companies claim that pharmaceutical research is very expensive and that R&D costs are extremely high.
Unfortunately for GSK, the usual 5,000 or 6,000 clinical trial subjects - people involved in Phase III trials - drastically escalated to around 63,000 to 68,000 people - in order to rule out a perceived fatal side effect (intussusception) that forced Rotashield off the market some years earlier.
Prior to the massive Phase III trial, the costs of GSK's trials ranged from $1.8 million to $2.4 million, stated Light et al. Unlike Merck, GSK conducted many trials in developing countries, drastically lowering the potential costs. But even estimating at the higher range, the total costs for GSK's Phase I - Phase III trials reached between $128m and $192m - for all 63,000-plus people.
Few of the clinical trials conducted in developing nations are investigated by the FDA. A 2008 Pfizer presentation [PDF]showed just 45 of 6,485 (0.7 per cent) of foreign trials were scrutinised. In 2008, more than 76 per cent of the people used for clinical drug trials were foreign subjects - some 232,532 people.
The cheapened value of poorer peoples - including better value for physician must not be underestimated.
One report, dated 2000, by the inspector general of the US Department of Health and Human Services, disclosed that physicians in the US were paid $10,000 per patient enrolled for a drug trial - plus a further $30,000 on enrolment of the sixth patient. Costs, no doubt, included as research and development.
Aside fromcheapness, in developing countries there exists far less regulation, oversight and awareness; and the poor are unlikely to litigate if and when damage/deaths occur as a consequence of the drug. This is particularly lethal when it comes to experimentation on children. More than 78 per cent of children-focused clinical trials were conducted outside of the US.
Vaccines and identification The Rotarix vaccine was not developed in-house but was licensed in: In 1988, Richard Ward PhD isolated the human rotavirus strain and developed a live, orally deliverable vaccine candidate under a licensing agreement with the Virus Research Institute, which later merged with another company, to become Avant Immunotherapeutics, a small firm that has often received grants from the NIH.
As Donald Light, a professor of comparative health policy, and economist Rebecca Warburton revealed in their paper analysing the development cost of the rotavirus vaccine, Avant funded a Phase II trial of Rotarix in 1997-1998 which found the drug gave protection in 89 per cent of cases. Light et al go on to write that, in 1997, GlaxoWellcome (later GSK) negotiated global rights and agreed, in exchange, to finance development costs, paid Avant $5.5 million and agreed royalties of 10 per cent on net sales.
The rotavirus vaccine signified a radical turning point in the introduction of vaccines: usually, poorer nations wait out a 15 or 20 year period. GSK's rotavirus vaccination instead proceeded via regulatory approval not in the country of manufacture, but instead, the country of first intended use - Mexico.
Why not Africa or Asia? Mexico proved the perfect site for introduction: since the 1990s, the government created, expanded and strengthened a national surveillance system for diarrhoeal disease, noted Walsh and Situ. Hospitals and clinics had well-equipped laboratories to identify infectious diseases; the Ministry of Health regularly monitored and reported cases, as did the clinics and hospitals, as part of the Mexican Social Security Institute (MSSI) system.
Since 2004, the Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO), comprising more than forty nations of the Americas, supported - along with other organisations - the development of rotavirus surveillance systems in countries including Argentina, El Salvador, Guyana, Uruguay, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago and Honduras. Monitoring was engineered tocharacterise the proportion of diarrhoeal hospitalisations attributable to a rotavirus infection, serotypes of circulating rotaviruses, and the seasonality of rotavirus infections, writes Julia Walsh MD in The critical path for vaccine introduction[PDF]. This information is fed into economic analyses, a critical element in the countries' decision on whether to introduce a vaccine.
The good news, for GSK, about Mexico and Brazil, is that the percentage of population targeted to be vaccinated is more than 98 per cent. In 2006, Duncan Steele from the Initiative for Vaccine Research (WHO) stated that the Rotarix vaccine was being introduced to Brazil, Panama, Venezuela and other countries - at a cost of $7 per dose for public health use. In 2004, Brazil purchased eight million doses (two doses per child), at the full $7 per dose. Ward would later say that rotavirus hospitalisations were estimated to be down by 59 per cent.
Efficient manufacturing? Presently, unless Merck makes an entry into the international marketplace, there exists no competition for GSK which already describes itself as,the main supplier of vaccines to UNICEF and GAVI. According to GSK, PAHO and other aid agencies intend to purchase enough Rotarix to ensure immunisation for 80 per cent of the world's children. Avant estimates that the global market for the drug will generate as much as $1.8bn annually. Neither GSK nor Merck have published a summary of their costs.
Light and Warburton estimate that the cost of Rotarix - due to the incredibly large expense of the almost 70,000-person trial is as high $466 million, excluding capitalised costs - and that out-of-pocket costs could be recovered with a single year's profit. From 2008 onward, sales totalled more than $1bn.
At efficient manufacturing costs of $1.50-$2 per dose, GSK will make a jolly profit from the full price in developed nations, and the 98 per cent successful vaccination target rate in countries such as Brazil. Once the five-year period is up, GSK - holding the global monopoly, will be embedded as part of the national health budget in 40 or more countries.
GSK's home country - the UK - donated the largest chunk of taxpayer funds to the AMC pot - at $1.34bn, while IP king Bill Gates offered a further $1bn. Gates claimed that he felt great about the prices GAVI received but acknowledged that Indian and Chinese manufacturers could bring the price downsomewhat if they ramped up vaccine output.
No matter that drug companies like GSK actually sat on the GAVI board at the time such decisions were made.
Developed nations banging the trade-related intellectual property drum, and intellectual property captains such as Bill Gates, will not bypass the anti-competitive grip of patents - for which there exists no free market, and where all patent value is opaquely imputed by the company in question.
This is the flipside of charity, this is a calculated attempt to sustain the status quo - a world structured on inequality, where the gap between those with access to medicine, and those without, is not only undeserved and systemically unjust - but also lethal.
To paraphrase brilliant comedian Chris Rock, drug companies - or drug dealers, as he put it, don't want to cure you (or kill you). The money comes from making you live in need. Part 1 www.pambazuka.org
Khadija Sharife is a journalist and visiting scholar at the Center for Civil Society (CCS) based in South Africa, and a contributor to the Tax Justice Network. She is the Southern Africa correspondent for The Africa Report magazine, assistant editor of the Harvard World Poverty and Human Rights journal and author of Tax Us If You Can Africa.
NEW PUBLICATION:How and why poor people help each other
The second Young Researchers Philanthropy Initiative report is based on a research project focusing on understandings of Ubuntu and local level forms of giving in Maphumulo, KwaZulu-Natal. It was carried out in 2010 by SDS Masters Student Siphamandla Chili and SDS PhD Student Anne Murenha. It is entitled ‘How and why poor people help each other: A perspective from the Maphumulo rural community in KwaZulu-Natal’. More
NEW PUBLICATION">NEW PUBLICATION: Women’s organisations and the struggle for water and sanitation services in Chatsworth and Inanda
Women’s organisations and the struggle for water and sanitation services in Chatsworth and Inanda, Durban: The Westcliff Flats Residents Association and the Didiyela Women’s Group Shauna Mottiar, Orlean Naidoo and Dudu Khumalo
Struggles for the right to basic water and sanitation in Chatsworth and Inanda, Durban, have largely been undertaken by civil society organisations lead by women and comprising mainly female membership. This Perspective, following a typology put forward by Rachel Einwohner, Jocelyn Hollander and Toska Olson (2000), examines the way in which two of these organisations namely the Westcliff Flats Residents Association and the Didiyela Women’s Group are gendered pertaining to composition, goals, tactics, identities and attributions. In terms of composition, it considers how movement issues may attract larger numbers of female as opposed to male members. In terms of goals it considers movement objectives and the level of attempts to transform gender hierarchies or differentiation. With regards to tactics the way protest is framed is examined including anything from demonstrations and picketing, to the signs and symbols employed by movement protestors.
With regards to identities it is questioned whether movement actors include cultural meanings about gender into their identities and whether they use these identities to lay claim to certain issues. A review of attributions centres on the ways that meanings are attributed to movements by those outside of the movement, including its opponents, and whether stereotypes about gender alter responses towards the movements they are attributed to. In adopting this typology for analysis, the writers attempt to add some insight into the extent that approaches and techniques employed by women’s organisations have been successful in securing the right to basic water and sanitation. More Read Publication
South Africa’s coming fight over capital flight
Patrick Bond 16 September 2011
At a time South African trade unions are under fierce attack from big business for winning above-inflation wage increases through strikes, and for opposing both informal labor outsourcing and a state-subsidized sub-minimum wage for youth, the sibling of former president Thabo Mbeki is helping restore balance.
According to businessman-intellectual Moeletsi Mbeki, speaking last week to the white-dominated opposition party, “Big companies taking their capital out of South Africa are a bigger threat to economic freedom than African National Congress Youth League president Julius Malema.” (The latter, a tycoon through crony deals, recently achieved notoriety for advocating the nationalization of mines.)
It is a ripe time for such in-your-face challenges to orthodoxy here, given the post-apartheid elites’ hostility to exchange controls.
South Africa suffers stagnation, 35 percent unemployment and the highest Gini coefficient measuring income inequality of any large country. After generalized overproduction during late apartheid followed by deindustrialization and financialization, the 2000s commodity boom – including the soaring gold price – failed to generate jobs or recirculate profits. SA’s real estate price rise was four times that of the U.S. from 1997-2008 and then collapsed by 15 percent, while once-vibrant consumer spending is hampered by overindebtedness. SA banks’ ‘impaired credit’ list now has 8.5 million victims (up from 6 million in 2007), representing nearly half of all SA borrowers. That figure includes many of the 1.3 million people who lost jobs in the 2009-10 downturn and haven’t got them back.
The overvalued currency (the Rand) and imminent arrival of import-maniacs from Walmart make matters worse. When asked about that retailing behemoth, Moeletsi Mbeki questioned the neoliberal agenda that his brother decisively implemented: “In South Africa we think we will just open the doors and everything will be hunky dory. Of course it won’t.”
The doors swung open not only to East Asian consumer imports but also the other way: to rich South Africans and the country’s largest firms, which were allowed to leave with apartheid-era loot. Mbeki complained that there was never “an explanation for why companies had been allowed to list in London. On what basis did they allow them to go, to move their primary listing? Why did they approve it? What did they get out of it?”
Tough questions, especially because the outflow of profits, dividends and interest payments to Anglo American, DeBeers, Old Mutual and Liberty Life insurance, SABMiller beer, Mondi paper, Investec bank, Didada IT and BHP Billiton mining raised the current account deficit to 7 percent in 2009, leading The Economist to rank SA most risky of 17 peer economies. Although the deficit then fell, SA’s foreign debt soared to cover payment outflows: from $25 billion inherited by Nelson Mandela from apartheid to more than $100 billion this year.
How to exit the crisis? The International Monetary Fund’s annual Article 4 Consultation was released late last month, and simply reiterated conventional banker wisdom. In meetings with SA Treasury officials, IMF “Staff recommended stronger fiscal consolidation beyond the current fiscal year than currently being considered” as well as “policies to moderate real wage growth.” The IMF praised the SA Reserve Bank’s “prudent” policies “together with a flexible exchange rate” which allegedly “helped dampen the adverse effects of those global cycles.” In reality, SA’s volatile currency crashed by 15 percent or more five times since 1994, thanks to 30 separate relaxations of exchange controls.
But if you dare suggest merely a “small tax on inflows to try to curtail inflows or at least change their composition,” IMF staff point out “significant drawbacks”: “it likely would raise the government’s financing costs. Second, even if this were to help engender nominal rand depreciation, absent wage restraint it is unlikely this would enhance competitiveness.”
The rebuttal is easy: eschew competitiveness and impose exchange controls on outflows of capital to address capital flight, and then systematically lower interest rates because amongst the world's 50 largest economies, SA’s are second highest only to Greece. In the process, manage the appropriate decline in the rand’s value. But to boost effective demand and internal linkages, assist workers return to at least the wage/profit share they had won by the end of apartheid: 54/46, compared to just 43/57 today.
Imposition of capital controls would be a first step away from perpetual economic crisis. Given IMF conservatism (after raised hopes of a conversion to exchange controls earlier this year), it is to Mbeki’s credit that he has tabled capital flight as both a moral and economic challenge, and it is now up to civil society to more forcefully demand solutions.
The Triple Crisis Blog is pleased to welcome Patrick Bond as a regular contributor. He is a political economist and Director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies in Durban. His research focuses on political ecology (climate, energy and water), economic crisis, social mobilization, public policy and geopolitics.
Palestine solidarity
Erez (Gaza border) protest on Nakba day, 15 May 2011
Hypocritical Washington raises Middle East tensions Can democracy activists undo US and IMF damage? Patrick Bond 23 May 2011
Here in Palestine, disgust expressed by civil society reformers about Barack Obama’s May 19 policy speech on the Middle East and North Africa confirms that political reconciliation between Washington and fast-rising Arab democrats is impossible. More
Critique of leading SA economics official
After publishing an article critical of Pretoria’s fetish for large-scale, highly-subsidised, capital-intensive, energy-guzzling projects, Patrick Bond was confronted by denials from one of the most eloquent SA government economic policymakers, Alan Hirsch, Deputy Director- General in the Presidency.
The correspondence below was drafted for publication on the AfricaFiles website. It consists of:
Letter of complaint from Alan Hirsch (28 January 2011, “AH”)
Rebuttal intertwined with the above letter, by Bond (“PB”, italics)
Follow-up letter by Hirsch (7 February 2011, “AH”)
Another rebuttal by Bond(“PB”, italics); and
The original article by Bond (October 2010 AfricaFiles, reprinted in the March 2011 Review of African Political Economy).
Climate finance leadership risks global bankruptcy
Patrick Bond 26 April 2011
South Africa’s most vocal neoliberal politician, Trevor Manuel, >was just named as co-chair of the Green Climate Fund. On April 28-29 in Mexico City, Manuel and other elites meet to design the world’s biggest-ever replenishing pool of aid money: a promised $100 billion of annual grants by 2020, more than the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and allied regional banks put together.
The Climate Justice lobby is furious, because as a network of 90 progressive organizations wrote to the United Nations, “The integrity and potential of a truly just and effective climate fund has already been compromised by the 2010 Cancún decisions to involve the World Bank as interim trustee.” A Friends of the Earth International study earlier this month attacked the Bank for increased coal financing, especially $3.75 billion loaned to South Africa’s Eskom a year ago.
Manuel chaired the Bank/IMF Board of Governors in 2000, as well as the Bank’s Development Committee from 2001-05. He was one of two United Nations Special Envoys to the 2002 Monterrey Financing for Development summit, a member of Tony Blair’s 2004-05 Commission for Africa, and chair of the 2007 G-20 summit.
Manuel was appointed UN Special Envoy for Development Finance in 2008, headed a 2009 IMF committee that successfully advocated a $750 billion capital increase, and served on the UN’s High Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Finance in 2010. (Within the latter, he suggested that up to half the $100 billion climate fund be sourced from controversial private-sector emissions trading, not aid budgets.)
No one from the Third World has such experience, nor has anyone in these circuits such a formidable anti-colonial political pedigree, including several 1980s police detentions as one of Cape Town’s most important anti-apartheid activists. Yet despite occasional rhetorical attacks on “Washington Consensus” economic policies (part of SA’s “talk left walk right” tradition), since the mid-1990s Manuel has been loyal to the pro-corporate cause.
Even before taking power in 1994, he was considered a World Economic Forum “Global Leader for Tomorrow”, and in 1997 and 2007 Euromoney magazine named him African Finance Minister of the Year. No wonder, as in late 1993 he had agreed to repay apartheid-era commercial bank debt against all logic, and negotiated an $850 million IMF loan that straightjacketed Nelson Mandela.
With Manuel as trade minister from 1994-96, liberalisation demolished the clothing, textile, footwear, appliance, electronics and other vulnerable manufacturing sectors, as he drove tariffs below what even the World Trade Organisation demanded. After moving to the finance ministry in 1996, Manuel imposed the “non-negotiable” Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy (co-authored by World Bank staff), which by the time of its 2001 demise had not achieved a single target aside from inflation.
Manuel also cut the primary corporate tax rate from 48 percent in 1994 to 30 percent five years later, and then allowed the country’s biggest corporations to move their financial headquarters to London, which ballooned the current account deficit. That in turn required Manuel to arrange such vast financing inflows that the foreign debt soared from the $25 billion inherited at apartheid’s close to $80 billion by early 2009.
At that stage, with the world economy teetering, The Economist magazine named South Africa the most risky of the 17 main emerging markets, and the SA government released data conceding that the country was much more economically divided than in 1994, overtaking Brazil as the world’s most unequal major country.
“We are not in recession,” Manuel quickly declared in February 2009. “Although it sometimes feels in people’s minds that the economy is in recession, as of now we are looking at positive growth.” At that very moment, it turned out, the SA economy was shrinking by a stunning 6.4 percent (annualized), and indeed had been in recession for several months prior.
More than 1.2 million jobs were lost in the subsequent year, as unemployment soared to around 40 percent (including those who gave up looking). But in October 2008, just as IMF managing director Dominque Strauss-Kahn told the rest of the world to try quick-fix state deficit spending, Manuel sent the opposite message to his impoverished constituents: “We need to disabuse people of the notion that we will have a mighty powerful developmental state capable of planning and creating all manner of employment.”
This echoed his 2001 statement to a local Sunday newspaper: “I want someone to tell me how the government is going to create jobs. It’s a terrible admission, but governments around the world are impotent when it comes to creating jobs.”
Governments under the neoliberal thumb are also impotent when it comes to service delivery, and thanks partly to his fiscal conservatism, municipal state failure characterizes all of South Africa, resulting in more protests per capita against local government in Manuel’s latter years as finance minister than nearly anywhere in the world (the police count at peak was more than 10,000/year).
Ironically, said Manuel in his miserly 2004 budget speech, “The privilege we have in a democratic South Africa is that the poor are unbelievably tolerant.” In 2008, when an opposition politician begged that food vouchers be made available, Manuel replied that there was no way to ensure “vouchers will be distributed and used for food only, and not to buy alcohol or other things.”
Disgust for poor people extended to AIDS medicines, which in December 2001 aligned Manuel with his AIDS-denialist president Thabo Mbeki in refusing access: “The little I know about anti-retrovirals is that unless you maintain a very strict regime ... they can pump you full of anti-retrovirals, sadly, all that you’re going to do, because you are erratic, is to develop a series of drug-resistant diseases inside your body.”
Instead of delivering sufficient medicines, money and post-neoliberal policy to the health system, schools and municipalities, Manuel promoted privatization, even at the Monterrey global finance summit: “Public-private partnerships are important win-win tools for governments and the private sector, as they provide an innovative way of delivering public services in a cost-effective manner.”
He not only supported privatisation in principle, as finance minister Manuel put enormous pressure (equivalent to IMF conditionality) on municipalities – especially Johannesburg in 1999 – to impose commodification on the citizenry. In one of the world’s most important early 21st century water wars, residents of Soweto rebelled and the French firm Suez was eventually evicted from managing Johannesburg’s water in 2006.
Water privatisation was Washington Consensus advice, and as Manuel once put it, “Our relationship with the World Bank is generally structured around the reservoir of knowledge in the Bank” – with South Africa a guinea pig for the late-1990s “Knowledge Bank” strategy. Virtually without exception, Bank missions and neoliberal policy support in fields such as water, land reform, housing, public works, healthcare, and macroeconomics failed to deliver.
In spite of neoliberal ideology’s disgrace, president Jacob Zuma retained Manuel and his policies in 2009. In September that year, Congress of SA Trade Unions president Sdumo Dlamini called Manuel the “shop steward of business” because of his “outrageous” plea to the World Economic Forum’s Cape Town summit that business fight harder against workers. The mineworkers union termed Manuel’s challenge “bile, totally irresponsible… To say that business crumbles too easily is to reinforce business arrogance.”
Manuel also disappointed feminists for his persistent failure to keep budgeting promises, even transparency. “How do you measure government’s commitment to gender equality if you don’t know where the money’s going?”, asked the Institute for Democracy in South Africa’s Penny Parenzee. Former ruling-party politician Pregs Govender helped developed gender-budgeting in 1994 but within a decade complained that Manuel reduced it to a “public relations exercise”.
As for a commitment to internationalism, in early 2009 when Pretoria revoked a visitor’s visa for the Dalai Lama on Beijing’s orders, Manuel defended the ban on the exiled Tibetan leader: “To say anything against the Dalai Lama is, in some quarters, equivalent to trying to shoot Bambi.”
At the same moment Manuel was sabotaging Zimbabwe’s recovery strategy, chosen by the new government of national unity, by insisting that Harare first repay $1 billion in arrears to the World Bank and IMF, otherwise “there was no way the plan could work.” Zimbabwean economist Eddie Cross complained, “In fact the IMF specifically told us to put the issue of debt management on the back burner… The South Africans on the other hand have reversed that proposal – I do not know on whose authority, but they are not being helpful at all.”
Given his biases and his miserable record, many within SA’s community, labour, environment, women’s, solidarity and AIDS-treatment movements would be happy to see the back of Manuel. His own career predilections may be decisive. Often suggested as a candidate for the top job at the Bank or IMF, Manuel recently confirmed anger at the way local politics evolved after Zuma booted Mbeki from the SA presidency.
In an open public letter last month, for example, Manuel told Zuma’s main spokesperson, Jimmy Manyi, “your behaviour is of the worst-order racist” after a (year-old) incident in which Manyi, then lead labour department official, claimed there were too many coloured workers in the Western Cape in relation to other parts of SA. Manyi had earlier offered a half-baked apology, but suffered no punishment. Once a political titan, Manuel now appears as has-been gadfly.
His disillusionment apparently began in December 2007, just prior to Mbeki’s defeat in the African National Congress (ANC) leadership election. After his finance ministry job was threatened by Zuma assistant Mo Shaik’s offhanded comments, Manuel penned another enraged open letter: “Your conduct is certainly not something in the tradition of the ANC… You have no right to turn this organisation into something that serves your ego.” In May 2009 Shaik, whose brother Schabir was convicted of corrupting Zuma during the infamous $6 billion arms deal, was made director of the SA intelligence service. Manuel was downgraded to a resource-scarce, do-little planning ministry.
It is easy to sympathize with Manuel’s frustrating struggle against ethnicism and cronyism, especially after his opponents’ apparent victories. However, former ANC member of parliament Andrew Feinstein records that the finance minister knew of arms-deal bribes solicited by the late defense minister Joe Modise. In court, Feinstein testified (without challenge) that in late 2000, Manuel surreptitiously advised him over lunch, “It’s possible there was some shit in the deal. But if there was, no one will ever uncover it. They’re not that stupid. Just let it lie.” Remarked Terry Crawford-Browne of Economists Allied for Arms Reduction, “By actively blocking thorough investigation of bribery payments, Manuel facilitated such crimes.”
Nevertheless, the myth of Manuel’s financial wizardry and integrity continues, in part thanks to a 600-page puff-piece biography, Choice not Fate (Penguin, 2008) by his former spokesperson Pippa Green (subsidized by BHP Billiton, Anglo American, Total oil and Rand Merchant Bank). And after all, recent politico-moral and economic scandals by World Bank presidents Robert Zoellick and Paul Wolfowitz (whom in 2005 Manuel welcomed to the job as “a wonderful individual . . . perfectly capable”) confirm that global elites are already scraping the bottom of the financial leadership barrel.
Yet it is still tragic that as host to 2011’s world climate summit, South Africa leads (non-petroleum countries) in carbon emissions/GDP/capita, twenty times higher than even the US. Even more tragic: Manuel’s final budget countenanced more than $100 billion for additional coal-fired and nuclear power plants in coming years.
In sum, Manuel’s leadership of the Green Climate Fund adds a new quantum of global-scale risk. His long history of collaboration with Washington-London raises prospects for “default” by the industrialized North on payment of climate debt to the impoverished South. Indeed, if Pretoria’s main man link to the Bretton Woods Institutions, Manuel, co-chairs the fund and gives the Bank more influence, then expect new forms of subprime financing and blunt neoliberal economic weapons potentially fatal to climate change mitigation and adaptation.
(Patrick Bond is with the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society in Durban
Commentary from CCS staff
South Africa Hits the Green Wall: The Conference of Polluters Hosting the Durban COP17 – let’s rename it the ‘Conference of Polluters’ – starting in late November puts quite a burden on the African National Congress government in Pretoria: to pretend to be pro-green.
Embarrassingly, last week’s US Export-Import Bank loan of $805 million to South Africa will feed huge profits to the notorious US corporation Black & Veatch so that a vast coal-fired power plant, ‘Kusile’, can be constructed, mainly on behalf of smelters run by BHP Billiton and Anglo American Corporation – whose profits soar away to Melbourne and London.
But poor people are facing an electricity price increase of more than 125% in coming years, according to the power company Eskom. Of its four million customers, already a million are disconnected. Multiply the cut-off figure many times more when municipalities are considered.
This panel is not only devoted to considering arguments about implementing the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, but also about broader problems of progressive political positioning and backlash in the academy. Although I do not deal with the April 2 case of Richard Goldstone’s unprincipled U-turn on the findings of the United Commissions commission into Israel’s 2008-09 Gaza invasion, the incident suggests the extent to which South African commentary on the oppression of Palestinians has become acutely politicized. For if Goldstone’s return to his Zionist past – recalling, too, his past as a minor apartheid-era judge (hence as a human rights ally, his zig-zag unreliability, reliability and now unreliability) – serves any purpose aside from empowering Israeli militarists, it will be to compel us to use South Africa as a base from which critical inquiry into the condition of Palestine must now be intensified.
Khadija Sharife on xenophobia
It's dangerous out there!: Struggles of Zimbabwean immigrants in South Africa by Khadija Sharife
For millions of Southern Africans who crossed into South Africa as political refugees or in search of work, the risk of robbery, rape and extortion at the border is just the beginning of their problems. Exploited and scapegoated, most simply want to feed their children.
Looking more closely, their survival is inspiring.
Interviewees claim they traverse borders either through expensive organised syndicates, or via illegal routes where robbery and rape is common. ‘On many occasions, even before reaching the border, buses are stopped by the police and everyone is asked to produce a passport. Those who do not have would have to pay the requisite bribes,’ claims the source.
With the moratorium on deportations of Zimbabweans now over, and the majority of these immigrants still without official travel documents and asylum permits, the last resort is ‘bribing Home Affairs officials and police on the way,’ according to one of my Durban sources.
The influx of Zimbabwean migrants hoping to find work as manual labourers and domestic workers has lowered the cost of labour here, but these immigrants are themselves socioeconomic refugees. Complains one former school teacher, ‘By the time I left Zimbabwe, my monthly salary could not buy two litres of cooking oil.’
South African business is pleased. Trusted workers in restaurants, farms, construction and other projects are often asked to bring their friends to prospective employers. Road hawkers sell pirated CDs. Domestics are most often women, while males work as cleaners and gardeners for a similar wage. The influx of immigrants, however, means that jobs are hard to come by and wages cannot be negotiated upward.
While many South Africans express sympathy to me about the predicament of Zimbabweans and say they abhor xenophobic pogroms, it is common to hear the insult makwerekwere (the derogatory phrase used to describe immigrants), and hostility is often blatantly expressed. ‘See that one,’ said a local South Beach vendor, pointing at a Congolese car guard. ‘He is no better than a monkey, an animal.’ However, set against the backdrop of South Africa’s political economy, in which poor and working people are materially worse off today than during apartheid, such pathological xenophobia is simply one of many desperate and ruthless reactions to socio-economic stress.
As one former government official informs me, ‘The situation in squatter camps and townships - it is like a tinderbox - anything could set it off. People are desperate.’ There remain strong memories of the 2008 and 2010 xenophobic attacks, when faceless immigrants were murdered, burnt, beaten and driven out by enraged masses. Xenophobia lurks beneath the reality of daily life, penetrating and informing every choice, claim and opportunity.
Even the civil society uprisings called ‘service delivery protests’ occasionally get hijacked when local commercial operators take the opportunity to loot and burn shops set up by immigrants.
This became such a problem that last Wednesday, residents of Ramaphosa township physically defended Somalis and Pakistanis shopkeepers against thugs from the Greater Gauteng Business Forum, testifying that immigrants’ prices are lower and they pay their South African workers more than do the local spaza shops.
Conflict is also common over housing, as most immigrants are forced to live in dangerous conditions, most often in corrugated iron shacks, roasting in summer and freezing in winter. ‘The most common form of accommodation in these areas is shacks (wood or tin) that are filthy, crowded and very uncomfortable,’ says Tyanai Masiya, a Zimbabwean based in Cape Town.
‘Since most of us are unemployed, temporarily employed and underpaid, living in small crowded shacks becomes the only option. These shacks, made up of old and rusty zinc and rotten boards picked up at the dump sites, are the worst kinds of shelter for human beings.’
Immigrants unable to meet lease requirements - such as legal status, stable employment and funding for deposits - may pay as much as R400 per room monthly for accommodation costing South African citizens R150. Where immigrants cannot pay the bills, they are allowed to sleep (sometimes in shifts) four to a shack room at R150 - R200 per head.
Such pressure on scarce housing leaves local residents angry about the lack of affordable access, since government has not made meaningful progress in cutting the backlog. Immigrants were not aware of any legal or other recourse and feel helpless as they are subject to evictions and drastic rent increases without notice. ‘I am trapped,’ says a car guard working at South Beach. ‘There is nobody I can appeal too.’
Language, dress code and physical features identify immigrants, he says. ‘When the robbers are not very certain if one is an immigrant, they get one into a dialogue, for example, through just greeting him/her. From the response they can detect if one is an immigrant. Those who are fluent in local languages sometimes get spared.’
Police are allegedly reluctant to search for the attackers. According to one interviewee, ‘I suspect that these police get bribes from the robbers. Even if you tell them (the police) that you have seen your attackers somewhere, they will not go there. Yet you have taken a risk to go and report, because some who are seen reporting to the police are attacked again for reporting.’
According to multiple sources, immigrants in the Kraaifontein area have been repeatedly robbed and stabbed. Says one, ‘These people [attackers] do not give you time to surrender what you have, they just pounce on you and begin to stab you all over. It is up to you to ask for forgiveness and pledge to give them all you have. If they feel that you want to resist they can easily stab you to death even in broad daylight. It’s dangerous out here.’
Khadija Sharife is visiting scholar at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society and southern Africa correspondent for The Africa Report. Read Paper
DURBAN SINGS REMIXES AFRICAN ORAL HISTORY
Call to participate in recording & remixing Oral History for a Global Audience!
ARTISTS, MUSICIANS, DESIGNERS, RAPTIVISTS, PHOTOGRAPHERS, FILMMAKERS! your creative donation will support the on-going work of the DURBAN SINGS collectives in Africa, a network of young cultural activists originating from the townships around Durban.
COLLECTIVES OF CULTURAL ACTIVISTS AROUND THE WORLD! your creative donations can be the start of an on-going correspondence and productive exchange with like-minded organisations in Southern Africa.
WRITERS, RESEARCHERS, POETS,SCHOLARS! donating your creative and analytical skills to the work of the young cultural activists in Durban can support them in their efforts and enlighten the awareness about cultural activism across the borders of a divided world.
When you are posting a contribution to us, please include links to the archive tracks you are remixing or responding to and, if you wish, links to your own on-line work. Thank you for your active listening!
This is an open call for listeners contributions. for your response to be included in this year’s DURBAN SINGS publication the deadline is 31 March 2010
DURBAN SINGS is a regional audio media and oral history project with a story to tell. Using street recordings and internet audio archiving to create an open platform for contributions and remixes from artists and activists around the world. DURBAN SINGS is a sound network joining hemispheres via audio correspondence between listeners; building a listening bridge between communities, artists and activist groups in KZN and the rest of the world.
suggested links to start listing if you want to learn more about this project:
THANK YOU FOR SPREADING THE WORD! you are very welcome to pass on this call by word of mouth, or duplicate and distribute it with electronic and digital means. pass the fire!
A CCS project with Durban community groups who is moving what in Durban communities?
Welcome to the CCS Portal to Community Action, which is supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. This page offers an online tool to promote information sharing among community groups and academic researchers we work with at CCS. The need for this site was identified as a crossroad meeting spot for activists and researchers from many kinds of backgrounds. The monthly Wolpe lectures are one such physical site, as several hundred attendees come to Howard College Auditorium the last Thursday of each month . We hope that more groups will find and join this portal. If you are a Durban community group and would like to participate with your organisation in this network please send your contact details to the address below, or call 031 260 3195. If you are a visiting local or international activist/ academic/ researcher and find entry points for interaction through this page, please contact us to become more involved. We hope that this way a network of interaction will grow and gain visibility.
Thank you for your visit and participation
Durban Sings DurbanSings is a CCS project which links many of the communities already, and which highlights audio and eventually video work by organic media activists.
The luminary Dennis Brutus ‑ freedom fighter, economic and environmental justice activist, professor, and poet ‑ died last year on December 26. We republish this eulogy because of the transcendent lessons Dennis’ life offers to Haiti, the U.S., and all places where people seek greater justice and humaneness.
How does one pay tribute to Dennis Brutus? To do so appropriately would take a short book or a very long poem. Someone should attempt the feat, both because Dennis deserves it and because it would help spread the power of his life, work, and words. And spread is what Dennis’ life, work, and words must continue to do, for in them lie the essentials for a more just, nurturing, equitable, and environmentally sustainable world.
The Dalai Lama is reported to have said, “Let your life be your message.” Dennis’ was, in the humility with which he carried himself, the kindness with which he treated others, and the wisdom and clarity of those words. His message, and his life, lay also in the strength of his convictions and the energy with which he worked for them, whether the cause be liberation from oppressive regimes; reparations to victims of Apartheid from corporations that made profits off the system; the dissolution of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization; or control over corporations creating climate change.
I met Dennis in the early 80’s when we were both fighting the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, during which time he was also fighting for his own political asylum from South Africa. Our collaboration deepened in the 90’s through the global boycott of the World Bank, and through our joint engagement with the Center for Economic Justice. Though reaching the Center’s board meetings in the remote city of Albuquerque required many hours of travel, and though he often had meetings or presentations in other countries on the front and back ends, and though his participation was often for no more than a day, still he came, for Dennis was faithful to whatever he committed to. The same was true of the World Bank boycott: Dennis appeared for most any workshop, presentation, or meeting we requested, raising high the flag with all his strength and brilliance.
He lobbied us all to involve ourselves, to turn out, to unite our voice and strength, to do more than we were already doing. The man was tireless and fearless, and gently urged us to be, too.
He always showed up with his most pressing passions and politically urgent campaigns.
I recall running a workshop on strategies to challenge the World Bank’s power in a church in Washington during a week of protests. Making a cameo appearance, Dennis asked for the floor and proceeded to make a long appeal for everyone to join him at another gathering on another topic in another country, many months out. As he went on about that gathering, a woman hissed at me that the speaker was off‑message and that I should cut him off. I was polite while denying her request, but what I really wanted to say was, “Do you have any idea who is speaking? You should just feel honored. Listen very carefully to what he has to say.”
The schedule he kept was remarkable for anyone of any age or state of health, but I never heard him complain or make excuses. On he plugged even after he had surpassed 80, when his health had diminished, when his itinerary exhausted him, when his memory had wandered. I ran into him at the World Social Forum in Mumbai in one of his final years when he was clearly weary of body and mind. After sharing a big hug, he said, “I must go now because I have a meeting. I can’t remember with whom, or where it is, but I know I have one.” And off he went through the throngs, tenacity and a fierce commitment to obligation trumping all personal challenges.
When we were lucky, Dennis had the time and inclination for a story. The narrative was always marked by his beautiful verbiage, exquisite oration, enlivened eyes, and ‑if a good story‑ delight, or ‑if one of injustice‑ calm. My favorite stories were of his and his comrades’ fierce fights against Apartheid. So much courage and creativity they bespoke. He found humor in unexpected places, and always understated his own suffering.
There was the tale of attempting to flee guards as he was being transported from one prison to another, jumping out of the police car at a red light and setting off in a dash. “That was when I learned what a through‑and‑through wound was,” he said of the bullet which pierced his chest and went out his back. He told of lying on the ground bleeding, “in the shadow of the Anglo American Corporation, appropriately enough,” waiting for the ambulance. When a whites‑only ambulance arrived by mistake, he was not allowed in it and had to lie on the verge of death for another long period awaiting a second ambulance, this one for so‑called coloreds.
He told of his comrades’ breaking into the hospital to free him after the shooting, as he barely survived on life support, and of his stealthily writing on his hand, “Abort mission,” sure that he would die in the attempted rescue. He told of being under house arrest with guards parked in front of his home around the clock, while he climbed out the side window to attend political meetings.
During one of his narrations in my living room, I noticed that the self‑deprecating chortle that usually punctuated his stories had vanished. Dennis was quietly crying. A tear ran down his nose and hung at the tip, where it remained throughout the rest of his tale of horror and brutality. Like Dennis’ life, the sadness and frustration behind that tear never stopped his truth‑telling.
Poems were easy to get from him, whether he read them during a public presentation or shared them in a calm moment. Whenever Dennis had a new book (he published 13), he carried copies around and freely gave them out, after adding a warm inscription in his exquisite calligraphy. Dennis was perhaps most full in his poems, which merged the personal and the political, which never denied the existence of tyranny but always brought his breath of hope that the world can be different – if we organize to make it so.
It is perhaps easiest to remember Dennis the fighter, but I was always equally impressed with Dennis the human being. No matter how ugly the political fight, Dennis’ anger remained streamlined on the unjust systems and policies, not wasted on the individuals behind them. He kept his eyes on the prize: the principles at play.
The same was true with his approach to social movements. When comrades and allies around him made errors, when internal politics divided, his response always shone like a beacon. He seemed to know better than most that we are all limited and imperfect, and that the benefit of the doubt or the possibility of change is a grace we need for humanity to continue to evolve. Or perhaps it was simpler: perhaps he believed that he was no one’s judge. Or maybe he just knew that the world was harsh enough already, as he expressed in his poem “Somehow We Survive”:
All our land is scarred with terror rendered unlovely and unlovable sundered are we and all our passionate surrender but somehow tenderness survives.
Dennis wrote his own simple obituary in 2009 as he discussed the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. “I was committed to the struggle and I would if necessary die in the cause of liberation: ‘Freedom or death.’ It was a very simple resolve.” He did indeed die in the cause of liberation, though fortunately not violently or prematurely. Every single thing that Dennis did was in the cause of liberation.
I would say I will miss Dennis, but he's not going anywhere. He’s in all of us who care profoundly for justice, humanity, and the planet.
February 27, 2011 Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The late South African anti-apartheid poet-activist Dennis Brutus occasionally used “Seattle”, the name of a city in the northwestern United States, as a verb. We should “seattle Copenhagen”, he said in late 2009, to prevent the global North from doing a climate deal in their interests, against Africa’s.
The point was to communicate his joy that in December 1999, the efforts of tens of thousands of civil society protesters outside the Seattle convention centre and a handful of patriotic African negotiators inside together scuppered the Millennium Round meeting of a stubborn ruling crew: the World Trade Organization. Their pro-corporate, free-trade agenda never recovered.
Although a decade later Brutus died, his verb-play signalling a democratic society rising against tyranny lives on if we consider the shaken ruling gangs of Libya, Iraq, Zimbabwe and Durban in South Africa, each a product of scandal-ridden crony capitalism, and each impervious to popular demands that they quit. After Tunisia and Egypt, where Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak lost power in recent weeks, a growing cohort of now fragile dictatorships are experiencing a dose of “mubaraking” by hordes of non-violent democrats.
British support for Gaddafi Libya is the ripest regime to fall, but London’s generous military aid and support from politicians like former prime minister Tony Blair, oil company BP, arms-deal facilitator Prince Andrew and London School of Economics (LSE) intellectuals seem to have emboldened Muammar Gaddafi and his family, leaving open the question of how many more hundreds – or thousands – the lunatic will kill on his way down.
Gaddafi may try to hang on, with his small band of loyalists, allegedly bolstered by sub-Saharan African mercenaries – potentially including Zimbabweans, according to the Harare media – helping Gaddafi for a $16,000 payoff each. After Gaddafi zigzagged to a pro-Western stance in 2004 by demobilising weapons of mass destruction in exchange for closure on the PanAm airline bombing and subsequent sanctions, some millions of the family’s ill-gotten wealth were showered on the academic crowd most favoured by Blair.
Blair’s “Third Way” political advisor, former London School of Economics director Lord Anthony Giddens, visited the Libyan dictator in 2007, pronouncing: “As one-party states go, Libya is not especially repressive. Gaddafi seems genuinely popular… Will real progress be possible only when Gaddafi leaves the scene? I tend to think the opposite. If he is sincere in wanting change, as I think he is, he could play a role in muting conflict that might otherwise arise as modernisation takes hold.”
To help “mute conflict”, as Giddens might have it, British weaponry is mainly being deployed against Libyans in the capital Tripoli, for Gaddafi’s army seems to have defected nearly everywhere else. Muammar’s second oldest son (and most likely successor) Saif al-Gaddafi – who has vowed to “fight to the last minute, until the last bullet” – was awarded a doctoral degree from the LSE and his foundation then gave £1.5 million to its Centre for Global Governance.
The centre’s money-blinded director, Professor David Held, remarked at the time: “It is a generous donation from an NGO committed to the promotion of civil society and the development of democracy.”
But to clear-sighted LSE students, that funding “was not obtained through legitimate enterprise but rather through 42 years of shameless exploitation and brutal oppression of the Libyan people”, as one put it, and so a sit-in ensued last week to demand that Held transfer the funding back to assist Gaddafi’s victims.
So far Held has only agreed to halt the North African reform research underway with the Gaddafi money, not return it, and last week his lame excuses for the murderous Saif sickened former admirers (myself included).
In the same spirit, several African civil society organisations and Archibishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu insisted on February 25 that the African Union (AU) act against Gaddafi, on grounds that “Article 3 of the Constitutive Act of the AU lists the promotion of peace, security and stability on the continent as one of its key objectives. Despite this, the AU and African governments have been slow to react.”
South African arms to Gaddafi Sorry, don’t expect peace promotion from the African National Congress government in South Africa. Late 2010, the chair of South Africa’s National Conventional Arms Control Committee, justice minister Jeff Radebe, approved the sale of 100 South African sniper rifles and more than 50,000 rounds of ammunition to Gaddafi. Any references to human rights in the committee’s deliberations are already considered a joke, but Radebe may now have some serious bloodstains on his reputation.
The civil society/Tutu statement continued: “The three African countries that sit on the UN Security Council – South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon – as representatives of the continent have a special responsibility to ensure that the people of Libya are protected from grave human rights violations constituting crimes against humanity.”
But all three also have substantial popular uprisings underway internally.
Iraq Looking eastward from Libya to Iraq, the US-installed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was protested by tens of thousands on February 25, in a “Day of Rage”.
According to Washington Post reporters, state security forces opened fire, killing 29 and arresting “300 prominent journalists, artists and lawyers who took part in nationwide demonstrations, in what some of them described as an operation to intimidate Baghdad intellectuals who hold sway over popular opinion”.
The Iraqis were “handcuffed, blindfolded, beaten and threatened with execution by soldiers from an army intelligence unit”.
Iraqi protester demands “ranged from more electricity and jobs, to ending corruption, reflecting a dissatisfaction with government that cuts across sectarian and class lines”, according to the Post. The day was “organized, at least in part, by middle-class, secular intellectuals” against whom Maliki’s troops “fired water cannons, sound bombs and live bullets to disperse crowds”. Shades of Saddam.
Moving south and west, other democracy protests were waged in recent days by tens of thousands of activists in Gabon, Oman, Djibouti and Sudan, where on January 30, “students held Egypt-inspired demonstrations against proposed cuts to subsidies on petroleum products and sugar”, according to a Durban journalist serving Al Jazeera News’ courageous service, Azad Essa. In Ethiopia, Essa reports, police “detained the well-known journalist Eskinder Nega for ‘attempts to incite’ Egypt-style protests”.
Zimbabwe repression Even harsher treatment was meted out by Robert Mugabe’s police to 46 Zimbabweans led by former member of parliament Munyaradzi Gwisai. The group was charged with “high treason” (punishable by death) for showing news clips of Egyptian and Tunisian protests at a February 19 meeting of the International Socialist Organization-Zimbabwe.
As 10 of the group were apparently tortured by Mugabe’s police and the dozen women arrested were transferred to the notorious Chikurubi maximum security prison, demands for their release grew louder, with South Africans chiming in at a Hillbrow, Johannesburg picket on February 26.
At home, brave Zimbabweans’ support will emerge more publicly on March 1 at noon, when democracy activists gather in Harare Gardens to demand the prisoners’ release, Mugabe’s resignation, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, press freedom, fair elections and an end to the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) regime’s political violence, which is currently resurgent in several hotspots, from Mutare in the east to Harare to Gwanda in the west.
Diamonds fund election irregularities But Mugabe wants to hasten the same kind of unfree, unfair elections he has been “winning” over the last decade, and has apparently amassed a war chest through illicit diamond sales to once again dominate the campaign. On February 22, finance minister Tendai Biti from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) confronted Mugabe over the diversion of $300 million in revenues from the Marange diamond field, site of hundreds of civilian deaths by the armed forces a few years ago.
The Kimberley Process to identify “blood diamonds” remains chaotic and corrupt, as self-interested South Africans and Israelis support diamond exports controlled by Mugabe’s generals. Reports Harare journalist Dumisani Muleya, “There are fears that the $300 million has either been stolen or was being kept secretly somewhere by Zanu-PF ministers as a war chest for anticipated elections.”
Rebutting wildly, Mugabe’s ally and chair of the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation, Godwills Masimirembwa, claimed (without proof) that Biti would not pay civil servants a promised pay rise in order to prompt an “insurrection so that we have another Egypt or Tunisia in Zimbabwe”.
Amnesty International representative Simeon Mawanza blames South African President Jacob Zuma and other regional leaders: “Their silence might be interpreted as being complicit in what we are seeing.”
Hopewell Gumbo, who contributed enormously to one of our Centre for Civil Society political economy programs in Durban, was one of the activists tortured after their arrest on February 19. He was recently quoted on the radio: “I personally work for an organisation that has started an initiative with the rural cotton farmers, in terms of pricing of their commodities, that kind of strategy goes above political differences because when ZANU-PF and MDC farmers meet they realise their problems are common and political issues can only divide them at the end of the day.”
More international solidarity for oppressed Zimbabweans is urgently needed, and from 12:30-2 pm on March 1 in Durban, refugees Shepherd Zvavanhu and Percy Nhau lead a Centre for Civil Society public discussion on the situation in the University of KwaZulu Natal’s (UKZN) Memorial Tower Building, and at 5:30 pm in Washington DC, a pro-democracy demonstration will be held at Zimbabwe’s embassy on New Hampshire Avenue near DuPont Circle.
From Durban to Wisconsin Meanwhile, back home in Durban, city manager Michael Sutcliffe’s regime appeared terminally wounded when his protector, provincial African National Congress chairperson John Mchunu, died late last year. The neoliberal-nationalist municipal order is now in much greater danger because in recent days, the figurehead mayor, Obed Mlaba, broke with Sutcliffe and his officials over a $500 million fast-track spending scandal. The ruling party seems to be backing Mlaba.
Sutcliffe has repeatedly defended corrupt municipal deals with the Mpisane family on ill-constructed black township housing and Remant Alton on the failed privatisation of municipal buses. Sutcliffe is widely disliked because of autocratic tendencies, including the repeated banning of protest marches, a factor that community and environmental activists are taking into consideration for the November-December 2011 UN world climate summit.
The “mubaraking” of Libya’s Gaddafi, Iraq’s Maliki, Zimbabwe’s Mugabe and Durban’s Sutcliffe is long overdue. But revolt is just as necessary in the country that long propped up so many dictatorships, the United States.
On February 26, all 50 US state capitals witnessed demonstrations held in solidarity with public sector workers in Wisconsin, who are under attack by a hardline conservative governor. Even in the frigid weather and snow of the Wisconsin capital, Madison, 70,000 people marched against the Republican governor’s attempt to end collective bargaining, in what is probably the most important US class struggle since the 1930s.
Revolution is still in the air and throughout the most visionary television network has been Al Jazeera. Its director general Wadah Khanfar had an easy explanation for the network’s repeated scoops: “When opinions crowd and confusion prevails, set your sight on the route taken by the masses, for that is where the future lies.” >links.org.au/node/2190
(Patrick Bond is co-editor of the new Africa World Press book Zuma’s Own Goal.)
Anti-Xenophobia Project
Seeking solutions in times of insecurity Shepherd Zvavanhu 5 August 2010
On a recent Sunday morning, I saw xenophobia as close as I ever want to: the anger of a poor community in Durban’s main hotspot, Bottlebrush. More
Baruti Amisi, Patrick Bond,Nokuthula Cele, Rebecca Hinely, Faith ka Manzi, Welcome Mwelase,Orlean Naidoo, Trevor Ngwane, Samantha Shwarer, Shepherd Zvavanhu
Durban police constable Kwesi Matenjwa confesses - on the morning of Saturday, 1 November - how the great white shark, City Manager Michael Sutcliffe, ordered his unit to evict (without alternative accommodation) 47 desperate people, mostly from the Eastern DRC. The area from which residents of Albert Park fled has witnessed four million casualties in a civil war over resources, as warlords - funded by corporations such as Anglo American (as Human Rights Watch discovered) - loot and pillage for coltan (used in our cellphones) and other minerals, making it unsafe for return. The refugees are also victims of the May 2008 Durban xenophobia and of a confrontation with Sutcliffe at City Hall in July. CCS has produced a photo exhibition by Oliver Meth and colleagues on their plight, displayed in the UKZN library. Sutcliffe accused the refugees - mainly women and children - of being involved in crime, offering no evidence. But Matenjwa explained that a political rally on 4 November and the 2010 World Cup were the real reasons police tore down plastic shelters and confiscated refugee belongings - including vital immigration papers - without warning. In the process of their attempted eviction, the refugees' human rights were drowned, Matenjwa admitted, a not uncommon occurrence for a Durban metro police force that regularly shoots to kill. The refugees vow to remain in Albert Park until they have a chance at dignity.
Transcript of Dbn cop singing about refugee eviction (Albert Park,1 November)
Due to pressure from Durban City Manager Mike Sutcliffe - who police informally call the great white shark - and the prospect of 2010, municipal police carried out an eviction of 47 refugees in Albert Park on Saturday morning, 1 November.
Constable Kwesi Matenjwa spoke to us at noon, about four hours after he followed an official instruction to evict the refugees by destroying their shelter and confiscating most of their goods (including official refugee papers). The transcription is from a 7-part recording posted here:
1) Where did this instruction come from?
Q: Mr Matenjwa, we were just wondering, where did this instruction come from?
A: Eh, professor, we have been following a chain of command. Only, we have been given instructions by the captain.
Q: Is Captain Ragavan on his way?
A: We've been waiting for him.
Q: And the superintendent, who did he get the instruction from?
A: He got the instruction from the Area Commissioner, the chief of metro police.
Q: And who did he get the instruction from, council?
A: On the fourth of November there's going to be Imbizo, which is more or less like a rally.
Q: Who's coming for that?
A: Our MEC, Mr Zweli Mkhize, to attend to the so-called informal traders. Let’s just bear in mind that the elections are around the corner. So each and every political party is canvassing.
Q: How does that explain treating these people so badly?
A: It's that 2010 (Soccer World Cup) is around the corner. Because 2010 is going to be here, so the people from the so-called other countries, when they come to this country, they must have this image that South Africa, the city of Durban is clean, that there are no vagrant people, there are no traders in the streets. So that is why people like us are detailed to deal with certain complaints.
Q: Who made the complaints?
A: No one ever made a complaint. We just received instructions from the captain who received instruction from the superintendent, all the way to our area commissioner, Mr Nzama.
Q: Who did Mr Nzama receive instructions from, was he told by the council, or the city manager?
A: Mr Nzama, with his authority, I cannot say where he got his instruction.
Q: But you told me earlier on that Mr Michael Sutcliffe gave you strict instructions to move the people.
A: Yes, he gave the instructions to our captain. Because yesterday we failed to comply with his instruction. Because yesterday we were supposed to come here and demolish this place. But because yesterday we decided not to do so because of our sympathy, because we are also human beings – we feel for these people. [speaking on two way radio in Zulu – Hello Bheki, how are you? (Bheki’s reply not heard) I’m still charging my phone by one kweri-kweri]
2) I failed to comply with instructions
A: Yesterday I was instructed by the same supervisor that we are waiting for to come here and demolish the place
Q: Is he a team leader of your police unit?
A: Yes. And yesterday at about 20 past nine I said to him “The people are asleep and they have kids and women that are expecting. How do you say to me ‘you must demolish the place’?”
Q: And what did he say?
A: He said he would get back to me, that he’s going to phone the chief, the station manager. And this morning when I came to work again he instructed me to come here because yesterday I failed to comply with instructions. That will result in him charging me for failing to obey instructions.
Q: Have you had to do this kind of thing before with any other refugees?
A: No, this is my first time.
3) Human rights drowned
Q: Did they tell you about the rights of these people? Did Captain Ragavan inform you of the people’s rights? Because, you know, if you take someone away then they have to have somewhere to go to.
A: Yes, yes. And I’ve just informed our call center that we’ve got a situation here and they must inform our so-called spokesperson because I’m not a spokesperson of Metro Police.
Q: Yes, but did they tell you about the rights of people, that if they are taken away they must have somewhere to go?
A: Yes. I’ll tell you one thing, about the technicalities of the law and the constitution of this country I am well aware of it. It’s just that, at some stage, you get thrown in a deep ocean, in a deep sea whereby you cannot even swim.
Q: And the human rights have drowned with you too, eh?
A: Yes, they have drowned in the sea. No matter how good you are in swimming, you can’t even swim because you are just a small fish in a deep ocean where only the big boys, the sharks, the so-called ‘white sharks’ exist in the environment.
Q: The white shark? Who is the great ‘white shark’?
A: (laughs) That’s what I’m saying. You know, I’m a human being and I don’t want to say things that at the end of the day, maybe they will bring fire to me.
4) Violence on violence
Q: I think we’re all in agreement that this should not be happening, am I correct?
A: Thank you, thank you. But what I am saying is that I don’t want to put my head on a neck (gestures as if putting his head on a chopping block) for something that I know personally is political. If it was a matter that (gestures as if taking something from someone) of a man being robbed and the suspects are here and I’ve apprehended the suspects… I’m sorry to say this, but that is when a policeman they use it, because a man has been robbed, his camera has been taken away, his cell phone has been taken away. I’m sorry to say this but before that person that robbed him gets into those cells, I always say that he must be taught a lesson. I’m sorry to say this.
Q: What kind of lesson?
A: As much as you can say it is unlawful, but tell me why must you be inhuman, treat another human being like an animal. So, to me you’re like an animal that belongs in the zoo.
Q: Who? The criminal?
A: Yes.
Q: So you’re trying to say violence on violence…
A: Yes, violence on violence. That is my philosophy. So, in this case I failed to implement violence because there is no violence. These people, they are just like me; maybe from another country or called by other names. It is within my powers that I can say no. I, myself, am in trouble for failing to take instructions from above, that’s why I said no, we will not go anywhere, we will sit here, we will stay here until our supervisor comes. Then he must consult with your people to see why we are told to come here and tell these people to move away.
5) Orders from above
A: I don’t disagree with what you are saying, but I am only following orders
Q: And you are fairly sure that you have to follow these because they come from the very top, is that Mike Sutcliffe?
A: Thank you, thank you.
Q: Can we not persuade Mike Sutcliffe that he’s violating rights here? We are trying to phone him up here, and he’s not answering his phone.
A: I’ll tell you one thing, the reason he is not answering his phone is because he is very aware of what is happening here.
6) What rights do these people have? (Captain Ragavan speaking) I was told that we had an operation to do because we know that Monday, the 4th there is going to be an imbizo. And we was told that the xenophobia people who are here with these tents must be cleared.
Q: But was it coming from the council or from the city manager or…?
A: Coming from the council, direct business support themselves.
Q: From whom? From business support?
A: They’re from the council, yes.
Q: That would be the deputy mayor? He’s part of business support, right?
A: It will definitely be coming from Mr. Sutcliffe himself, he will definitely know about this. I got it from my officer.
Q: Did they instruct you about the rights of the people to have accommodation somewhere else?
A: In fact, when they pitched up these tents here they were told a long time ago. This was on a temporary basis.
Q: Yeah, but what rights do the people here have? Do they have any rights? Their shelter has just been taken away.
A: They were warned about this
Q: That today, November 1 their things would be taken away? Can you tell us when the warning was made that on November 1 their shelter would be removed?
A: How are you all related to this?
Q: We are in solidarity with them.
7) Instructions from ‘the great white shark’
(Captain Ragavan cont.) I agree with whatever you’re saying, but at the end of the day, we just take instructions. These guys take instructions. I take my instructions from above.
Q: But we’re trying to figure out where these instructions came from?
A: The instructions probably come from the big man himself.
Q: Who is the big man?
A: Our boss, Michael Sutcliffe
(Constable Kwesi Matenjwa) I can’t even say a word because I feel like I’m being cornered, I feel like I’m being used.
Q: Who is using you?
A: My boss. I’m not a boss of my own, I’m given instructions. If it was Kwesi’s world, things would go my way and I’d take my own decisions according to my opinion, but in this case I can’t because I have to. It’s easy for them to squash you like this because as I’ve said to you, you are a small fish.
8) Business support Q: What is going to happen to these people and these small kids? Where are they going to go? And the pregnant women? They are already extremely distressed
A: (Captain Ragavan) Well, we got the instruction to remove these people here, to take away the tents and stuff like that from Business Support and Itemp as well. This is not something that we feel good about.
Q: You don’t feel good about getting 47 people from DRC, making them miserable. One woman is now in the hospital.
Go back home, immigrants told
By Canaan Mdletshe (The Sowetan) 6 November 2008
Kwazulu-Natal’s Centre for Civil Society yesterday called on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to step in and halt xenophobic attacks in Durban.
This after 47 refugees were evicted by Metro police from Durban’s Albert Park at the weekend.
The CCS spokesman, Oliver Meth, said as an immediate measure the UN has “to take responsibility and resolve the issue of xenophobia”.
He said eThekwini municipality should also provide “alternative emergency shelter and ensure that refugees’ basic human rights are protected”.
The refugees themselves yesterday lashed out at municipal manager Mike Sutcliffe and Metro police head Eugene Nzama.
The mainly DRC immigrants accused the two leaders of giving police the go-ahead to remove them from the park because Sutcliffe and Mayor Obed Mhlaba were due to speak at a small business Imbizo at the park on Monday.
Akili Arthur Kabila, 30, from DRC said there were about 47 people, mainly children, living in the park.
“It has been four hard months in the park. No one is helping us with anything, including food or shelter,” he said.
“ Actually, what is happening is that we are victimised and assaulted by police.”
He said on Saturday police came to the area and asked them to leave “because of the Imbizo”.
“They assaulted us, took some of our money and some of our clothes. As it is, we are left with what we are wearing,” he said.
“I personally lost my papers to be here and my education diploma.”
Sutcliffe said the issue was very simple.
“The families have a choice of either going back to their countries or to the places in the community they were living in before the July problems.
“The municipality cannot suddenly prioritise their housing needs when we already have 200000 people with housing needs in the city itself.” www.sowetan.co.za
DRC Tragedy The Mercury 5 November 2008
The civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has claimed more than two million lives, will continue unless a holistic approach is adopted to deal with the problems. In this country where people have often berated its mineral wealth as its curse, the upsurge of violence in the east is an ever-present sore that continues to fester.
The script that has been prepared for the general public sees Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda - complete with black cowboy hat and dictator stick in hand - as the villain. With the Bible in one hand and an AK-47 in the other he fits the stereotypical crazed African warlord image. Anyone looking for the hero on a white steed to arrive will be sorely disappointed.
The complexity that is the Congo sees President Joseph Kabila doing very little to improve the lives of the citizenry, instead focusing on improving his grip on power by disposing of opponents.
The UN, with the largest peacekeeping force in the world in attendance, is unable to fulfil even its Chapter Seven mandate, which is to protect itself and the local population from imminent danger. And then there is Nkunda, a man who purports to be fighting for the rights of the minority Tutsi population who undoubtedly have suffered and continue to be persecuted in eastern Congo, where the killers - known as the Interahamwe - have been waging a low-level war in the Congolese forests.
Nkunda has been instrumental in destroying these forests, not so much to go after the Tutsi killers but rather for self-enrichment. And he is but one of a class of fortuitous businessmen whose bloodied hands continue to exploit the Congo's rich natural wealth.
Kabila has shown no urgency in dealing with the Interahamwe, giving Nkunda a ready excuse to continue his activities in the east. Instead, the UN and international community continue to back Kabila's paltry army in dealing with the reaction and not the cause of the instability.
The bodies of men, women and children strewn along the wayside reflect the true cost. www.themercury.co.za
Metro police told to 'move refugees' By Nompumelelo Magwaza 3 November 2008
The metro police, assisted by Durban Solid Waste workers, have taken down tents housing refugees in Albert Park, Durban, and removed the refugees' clothing and documents.
The refugees said the police had been brutal during Saturday's operation, which the city said had been aimed at cleaning parks around Durban this weekend.
The 47 refugees, mostly from the Democratic Republic of Congo, were affected by xenophobic violence in different parts of Durban in May. The municipality arranged temporary accommodation for them in a Broad Street shelter, but later stopped paying the rent, after which the group set up tents at Albert Park.
Aziza Wilondja, a mother of six, who has been living at the park for four months, said the police and Durban Solid Waste workers forcibly took their clothes and identity documents.
The police took our things and put them in the garbage vehicle. They brought down our tents and threatened to beat us, she said.
Rebecca Hinley, of the Centre for Civil Society, which has been helping the refugees, was surprised at the brutality shown by the police. She said the police were paying a second visit to the park on Saturday morning when she arrived.
The police said they had come to take away more things, she said.
Metro police Supt Joyce Khuzwayo said officers conducted such operations twice a week in Durban.
She said she had received reports that Durban Solid Waste had been instructed to clean up the park, and the police were present to maintain the peace.
Municipal manager Mike Sutcliffe said the city had warned the Albert Park refugees that they could be evicted because the city was cleaning up its parks.
Sutcliffe said the city had given the refugees options to repatriate, to re-integrate into their former communities locally or to be transported to a refugee centre in Pretoria, but many had refused the offers.
I have instructed the metro police to remove the people from the park because the surrounding community has complained about crime, he said.
Sutcliffe said he understood that there were many groups living in the park. He said they would all be dealt with as the city continued with its programme. www.themercury.co.za
City cops out of control: Swearing, assault among flood of complaints from public Independent on Saturday Staff Reporters 18 October 2008
DURBAN police seem to be out of control. Swearing at and abusing motorists at road blocks and physically assaulting and threatening to arrest those who question them were just some of the complaints received by newspapers and the police watchdog this month over the conduct of police officers in Durban.
The increase in complaints against Metro Police and members of the South African Police Service (SAPS) has now reached the attention of the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD), which is urging residents to know their rights and not take the abuse lying down.
The Independent on Saturday has received several complaints from people of being abused by Metro officers and the SAPS.
The SAPS is also under fire for the increasing number of suspects shot dead in custody.
This week, Metro Police were criticised by members of the public for the way they treated Durban CBD business owners and motorists after towing away several vehicles in Bertha Mkhize (Victoria) and Dennis Hurley (Queen) streets.
One motorist alleged she was yanked from her moving car and others accused Metro Police officers of swearing at them.
The ICD has launched an investigation into the reported behaviour of these police officers.
In an unrelated incident, Rajan Ethwar, of the Bluff, said he was livid at how the Metro Police hurled insults at him and his 79-year-old sickly mother, Muniamah Naidoo, at Addington Hospital last Friday.
My mother had just had an eye operation the previous day and she was there for the post operation procedure. She was feeling weak and it was scorching hot,said Ethwar.
There was a car about to back out, so I was waiting for it. I was barely there for 30 seconds when the police said I should move my car, he said.
Ethwar said he tried explaining that he had to park near the entrance because he needed a wheelchair for his mother, but a policeman told me to move my car before he charged me, so I asked him when it had become a criminal offence to wait for another car to reverse.
That's when he just lost it, said Ethwar. He said another policeman then pulled his keys out of the ignition.
Ethwar said he pleaded that his mother was sick, but the officer replied, I don't care, she's not my mother.
In July, The Independent on Saturday published cellphone images of a Chatsworth scrapyard manager, Daya Pillay, 50 being throttled on the floor by Metro Police members. This week Pillay said the harassment has continued.
Dog The SAPS has also come under fire from the ICD for setting a police dog on a suspected hijacker in Umzinto about two weeks ago. The incident was recorded on a cellphone.
There have been many questions raised in recent weeks over the number of suspects who have been shot dead by police while in custody.
In almost all the cases, police have said that the suspects were attempting to grab their guns to shoot at them.
The ICD's annual report showed that 117 suspects were killed in KwaZulu-Natal during the 2007/2008 financial year with about 60% killed during the course of arrests and 11% while committing crime.
Metro Police spokeswoman Supt Joyce Khuzwayo said people often became angry when Metro Police enforced the law, and that only once both sides of the story were heard did the truth emerge.
She said if people had complaints against the police they should submit them in writing so the incidents could be investigated.
Khuzwayo said many people did not understand the laws regarding double-parking and loading zones, adding that because someone had a loading zone in front of their business, it did not entitle them to park there. Furthermore, people could not remain in their double-parked cars and expect to be allowed to stay there.
Statistics 'Not surprising': KZN police kill 117 suspects in one year Kamini Padayachee (The Mercury) 10 October 2008
KwaZulu-Natal police officers have killed more suspected criminals than their counterparts in other provinces in the past financial year.
This was revealed in the Independent Complaints Directorate's annual report, which was released last week. According to the report, 117 suspects were killed in KZN during the 2007/2008 financial year. The period also saw a 13% increase in the number of suspects' deaths nationally.
About 60% of the suspects were killed during the course of arrests and 11% were killed while they were committing crime.
Recently, KZN police came in for criticism when they killed six suspects linked to the murders of Kranskop police officer Supt Zethembe Chonco and three members of the prominent Sham family, of Durban.
In response to the deaths, community safety and liaison MEC Bheki Cele praised the police. He said at the time that the shootings showed that police were heeding his call to shoot at criminals and not die with guns in their pockets.
Cele made the call after Chonco and another officer, Supt Frans Bothma, were killed in separate incidents in August.
Yesterday, Cele said he would not comment on the report, as he had not seen it.
KZN police stations that came under scrutiny for more than five deaths at their stations included Durban Central, Empangeni, Greenwood Park, Inanda and Malvern.
The report said the suspect officers in the majority of deaths by police action nationally were lower-ranking constables, while inspectors were involved in 35% of cases.
David Bruce, senior researcher at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Rehabilitation, said people should not be overly alarmed by the statistics.
In terms of KZN, proportionally, the statistics are not that alarming.
The province has the biggest population in the country and when you look at the percentage of deaths, it is only slightly higher than the province's percentage of the country's population.
While I do not think there is a general pattern of abuse and excessive force, some police officers do probably use more force than is necessary.
I also think the statements being made by certain politicians could also be contributing to the increase.
Inexperienced Bruce said that the increase could also be owing to the fact that there were large numbers of relatively inexperienced police officers in the force.
The police have embarked on a massive recruitment drive and you generally find that in these instances, officers will not receive adequate training.
Therefore we have a lot of inexperienced officers who do not know how to react in certain situations, which could result in the deaths of suspects.
KZN violence monitor Mary de Haas said the statistics were not surprising.
This is unacceptable. The police are getting away with murder, literally. We cannot deny that police do have to defend themselves in some instances, but it is very hard for me to believe that all these 117 suspects had to be killed.
These sentiments were echoed by KZN Law Society president Thoba Poyo Dlwati yesterday. Dlwati said suspects' deaths at the hands of the police gave rise to a suspicion that there was a tendency on the part of some police to take the law into their own hands, in some instances.
Police shooting to be investigated Nathi Olifant October 17, 2008 Edition 1
THE Independent Complaints Directorate confirmed yesterday that it was investigating a case in which a 22-year-old toy-gun-wielding man had been killed by police officers in Chesterville last Friday.
The police said Nkosikhona Nzama was killed after he threatened police officers with an object resembling a gun.
Police Supt Vincent Mdunge said members of the crime prevention unit from Cato Manor had been on routine patrol in Chesterville when they had spotted a man holding a suspicious object.
Naturally, they approached him with the intention to search him, but he fled. They gave chase and he turned around and pointed an object that resembled a gun at them. Fearing for his life, a police officer fired a warning shot, but the man continued to charge towards him and he fired a shot, and the man was hit in the stomach and fell down. Police went up to him and realised he had been threatening them with a toy firearm.
Nzama was taken to King Edward VIII Hospital, where he was placed on a ventilator. He was under police guard.
Nzama died the following morning.
Mdunge said the police had opened an inquest docket.
Nzama's mother, Nompumelelo Nzama, said the family might consider legal action against the police officers responsible for killing her son.
Nzama said her son had never carried arms and lashed out at the exhortation from politicians to shoot to kill, saying it was encouraging police to terrorise innocent people.
Thabiso Ralo, provincial head of the Independent Complaints Directorate, confirmed that the unit was investigating the incident.
Two more suspects killed Fast-draw police get high praise Kamini Padayachee 17 September 2008
THE police were praised yesterday after the killing of two men suspected of involvement in the murder of a top KwaZulu-Natal officer brought the number of suspected criminals killed by police in recent weeks to five.
The killings came just two days after police arrested two suspects for the murders of three members of the prominent Sham family, of Durban. The suspects were killed when they tried to escape from police custody during pointing-out procedures.
Community safety and liaison MEC Bheki Cele praised the work of police yesterday, saying they were heeding his call to shoot to kill criminals.
The two suspects - Magojela Ndimande, 37, and Sibusiso Thokozani Tembe, 32 - were believed to have been involved in the murder of top KwaZulu-Natal policeman Zethembe Chonco.
Chonco, station commissioner at Kranskop, was ambushed and killed on August 27. Another man, Lee Buthelezi, 28, who was also suspected of involvement in Chonco's murder, was killed by police at KwaDukuza two weeks ago.
Supt Henry Budhram said Ndimande and Tembe were killed near Merrivale when they tried to flee from police.
Detectives had received information that the men would be travelling on the N3 highway and pursued them. All attempts to stop the vehicle the men were travelling in proved fruitless. The suspects shot at police, who returned fire with the intention of stopping the vehicle. When the suspects' vehicle eventually stopped, police found that both suspects were dead.
Police recovered automatic weapons and ammunition in the suspects' vehicle, said Budhram.
Cele commended the work of the police in tracking down the suspects in Chonco's murder.
Lesson The shooting of these criminals shows that police are heeding my plea to shoot at criminals and not die with guns in their pockets. I hope this will be a lesson to other criminals that police are serious about their work and will not hesitate to protect themselves and the community they serve, he said yesterday.
Cele made the call for police to shoot criminals last month when Chonco and another officer, Supt Frans Bothma, were killed in separate incidents.
Police officers must ensure that they protect themselves and put criminals behind bars or send them to the nearest mortuary, he said.
Institute of Security Studies senior researcher Johan Burger said it was difficult to say whether Cele's comments had had any impact on how police had since conducted their work.
In the incidents in the past few days, it seems as if police were within their rights to use the force they did. I don't think they need the MEC's statements to guide their actions. If they found themselves under threat, then they would have acted accordingly.
Burger said Cele's statements did not call for irresponsible action from police.
The MEC is saying that police should not wait to be shot at, but should take action if they feel they will come under fire. I agree with this as police officials are much more under threat now than in the past.
World Cup Watch
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Fahrenheit 2010: Documentary tackles SA's World Cup struggles
CCS colleagues - the late Dennis Brutus, our nominated honorary researcher Ashwin Desai, and Patrick Bond - are critics of the way the 2010 World Cup was implemented in Durban and across South Africa. For more, see the film Fahrenheit 2010. Watch Fahrenheit 2010
Documentary tackles SA's World Cup struggles 14 December 2009
Cape Town - South Africa has wasted resources on next year's soccer World Cup and will be left with stadiums that are no more than white elephants, a critical new documentary says.
Continental economic powerhouse South Africa, the first African nation to stage the sports spectacle, has spent billions of dollars to build new stadiums and refurbish existing venues in 10 cities where games will be played.
But social activists and academics say the funds would have been better spent tackling poverty, housing shortages and a health system buckling under a major HIV and Aids epidemic.
When you build enormous stadia, you (are) shifting those resources ... from building schools or hospitals and then you have these huge structures standing empty and being used to a very limited extent. They become white elephants, anti-apartheid veteran Dennis Brutus, who was jailed with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island in the 1960s, tells Fahrenheit 2010.
Lingering concerns that some stadiums will become empty shells that are a burden to taxpayers have threatened to take the shine off government plans to leave a meaningful post-tournament legacy. In September Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said the government faced a R2,3-billion shortfall for six new stadiums.
Besides funding challenges, claims of corruption and tender rigging have been linked to the new Mbombela stadium in Nelspruit, where only four of the 64 World Cup games will be played.
The location of other new stadiums, notably semi-final venues Green Point in Cape Town and in Durban, have also been criticised.
There is currently no contingency plan saying what's actually going to happen to this stadium (Mbombela) once the World Cup is gone... and at the end of the day one can only think that the stadium is going to stand redundant and empty afterwards, said Anthony Benadie, an opposition politician.
Feature documentary Fahrenheit 2010, written and directed by Australian Craig Tanner, was screened to a Cape Town audience for the first time on Sunday evening.
South Africa, emerging from its first recession in two decades, is hoping 450 000 foreign tourists will boost revenues during the month-long tournament starting June 11.
Marketing the country's attractions to a global audience estimated at one billion is also expected to lead to a long-term tourist boom and job creation.
But besides a politically connected elite, centred in the construction sector, there was little evidence so far to suggest South Africans will benefit economically.
FIFA expects to make R25-billion from its 2010 television broadcasting deals alone, more than the combined total achieved for television rights in its 2002 and 2006 tournaments.
The tragedy is that public funds have been looted for a moment in our history. People are still going to be living in shacks, the jobs are not sustainable - this is a blatant misuse of funds, said sociologist Ashwin Desai.
However, some viewed the tournament in a different light - as a vehicle for uniting a nation still battling the effects of discrimination 15 years after apartheid, and where the gap between rich and poor is the highest in the world.
Hard look at 2010 behind the scenes Colleen Dardagan (The Mercury) 29 July 2009
A HARD-hitting film questioning how South Africa is preparing for the 2010 World Cup is set to launch at the Durban International Film Festival this week.
Fahrenheit 2010, made by the Australia-based, South African-born film-maker Craig Tanner and Durbanite Michael Cross, raises some uncomfortable questions about the country's bid to meet Fifa's draconian requirements for the successful hosting of the event.
This film is not about whether South Africa should host the event but we are questioning the way in which it has been done. Money has been hijacked to build new stadiums when adequate facilities exist, said Tanner.
The recent hosting of the Confederations Cup was held successfully in existing stadiums. Newlands in Cape Town and Absa Stadium in Durban could have been renovated for fairly modest amounts of money.
It's inevitable that these two facilities will be demolished - as Durban's city manager, Michael Sutcliffe, has conceded in the film. There are no long-enduring benefits from these new stadiums.
More than 1 000 people are dying of HIV/Aids a day in this country and such obscene amounts of money have been diverted away from keeping people alive and providing them with decent shelter to host football matches. It's outrageous, said Tanner.
Unfortunately it's too late to debate whether the new stadiums should have been built, the country is already committed, but I hope anyone who sees the film will begin to ask questions and it will give them an opportunity to reflect on what this World Cup is really all about.
Tanner, who is making the journey from Sydney to Durban's Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre for the opening, said he had been shocked at what had been revealed during the making of the film, particularly in more remote areas such as Nelspruit. When I arrived in the country to start filming, I didn't have any sense of what we would find. I was told to go to Nelspruit because things were going on there. What we found there was shocking. Kids kicked out of their school to make way for a 48 000-seater stadium. They are now being housed in prefab classrooms in a spot where a road is going to be built. The land for the stadium was bought from the community for R1.
Debate rages over costs of stadium The Mercury 7 September 2009
DURBAN'S landmark new R3 billion Moses Mabhida stadium is central to its aim of creating an African capital for sports, entertainment and other events - and eventually to host the Olympic Games
These ambitions are not shared by everybody, however. The film Fahrenheit 2010 airs the views of both city management and critics.
The Sharks, who lease the Kings Park land from the eThekwini Municipality but own the Absa Stadium, had initially suggested upgrading the stadium's capacity of 55 000 to better satisfy Fifa's 70 000 requirement for a soccer semi-final. The early first estimates were around R38 million but costs escalated and Durban's vision changed.
The Moses Mabhida stadium will host seven Fifa World Cup matches (including a semi-final). These are some extracts from those interviewed in the film.
City Manager Michael Sutcliffe: Because the city was going to pick up that tab, it commissioned studies. The figure rapidly increased to R700 million (at prices of four to five years ago). As the figures rose it became more economically viable to build a new stadium. Why put over R1 billion into an old stadium that will never really serve the uses we have planned for this new stadium?
The stadium is primarily paid for by national government... we are picking up about 30 percent of the cost. This was an opportunity for windfall money that we normally would not get for the financing of infrastructure...
We need a sporting precinct. From an economic viewpoint the stadium needs to be 54 000 seats. We will increase it to 70 000 for the World Cup. We can increase this to about 85 000 to 90 000 seats when we win the Olympics... The first decision the Sharks will have to make is when they will come over... It is really an old stadium and at some point it will have to be demolished.
Activist and socialist Ashwin Desai: Durban's argument is a joke of almost Monty Python-like proportions. We can't use two stadiums at the same time... so one stadium is going to become obsolete... the huge new stadium will not be used (to capacity) again. Our local games, even derby games, might attract 30 000 people at the maximum...
Some R600 million comes from city coffers. It is my belief that a lot of this money is siphoned off from other work from basic health care, from housing.
It is mythology to suggest all the expenditure is going to benefit the broader South Africa.
We are really going to see post the World Cup, when it becomes very obvious, that these stadiums will become empty shells... that our money has been used for what really is a pyramid scheme...
Patrick Bond from the Centre for Civil Society: The difference in cost between revamping Kings Park and building a new stadium was over R1bn. The Sharks... have to avoid having their stadium torn down and being forced to move to the new stadium... they know they will never fill it and will be unable to afford the rent.
Activist Dennis Brutus: Sutcliffe is incorrect in rationalising that the million or billions spent can be used at some future time for the Olympics...
Once they realise the consequences of 2010, people will ask why they should do it a second time.
Will World Cup Stadiums Change Africa's Image? New York Times 28 December 2009
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's World Cup stadiums could change the image of Africa forever, or stand as spectacular monuments to extravagance and waste in a country still struggling to spread the fruits of majority rule.
South Africa has confounded sceptics who said the stadiums would never be finished in time for next June's soccer spectacular and is close to completing 10 top class venues that bear comparison with the world's best.
But while that controversy has passed, the debate has not diminished over whether Africa's first World Cup should have been more modest, freeing up millions of dollars to help an army of poor who live in squalor 15 years after the end of apartheid.
When Pretoria won the right to stage the 2010 tournament back in 2004, it set the budget for stadiums at around 3 billion rand (249 million pounds). After the addition of two extra arenas and some dazzling architectural overlays, that figure has now escalated to at least 13 billion rand.
Critics say the money was wasted and should have been spent on alleviating poverty -- which feeds South Africa's frightening rate of violent crime -- building millions of new houses to replace apartheid-era shanty towns and combating the world's biggest HIV caseload. They charge that many of the stadiums will quickly become unused relics after the tournament.
When you build enormous stadia, you are shifting those resources...from building schools and hospitals and then you have these huge structures standing empty...They become white elephants, the late anti-apartheid campaigner Dennis Brutus said in the recent documentary film Fahrenheit 2010.
Will it ever be possible for a (ruling) ANC party politician who claims to have the mandate of poor blacks in this country to go and stand in some of these poor areas and justify why the government saw fit to spend a billion rand or more on a stadium? It cannot be done, Frans Cronje, deputy CEO of the South African Institute of Race Relations told Reuters.
ARGUMENT But there is another side to the argument that says the World Cup gives Africa the chance finally to reverse stereotypes of famine, pestilence and war that still blight the continent. Nobel peace prize laureate and anti-apartheid hero Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said the World Cup will have as big an impact for black people as the election of U.S. President Barack Obama and will give new pride to a still divided nation.
With all the negative things that are taking place in Africa, this is a superb moment for us. If we are going to have white elephants, so be it, he said.
Economists also say World Cup construction has cushioned South Africa from the global recession and will contribute close to 56 billion rand to the economy. It has been a huge blessing for South Africa in view of the recession, said Gillian Saunders of business consultants Grant Thornton.
The World Cup cannot be detached from its context, a country still scarred by apartheid where soccer is the passion of the black majority -- who sometimes in the past had to go cap in hand to white-run rugby stadiums to stage matches.
Under the apartheid government, football facilities in disadvantaged areas were neglected and there was a complete lack of recognition for the sport, the local organising committee said this year.
The newly built stadiums certainly go beyond what is strictly necessary to stage a football match, even one watched by the world's biggest television audience.
From the soaring arch and sky train over Durban's oceanside venue to Cape Town's majestic arena between Table Mountain and the Atlantic, to the white petals shrouding Port Elizabeth's bowl and the huge, calabash-shaped Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg, the new stadiums are magnificent.
Even the smaller arenas of Nelspruit and Polokwane have their own unique architectural flourishes, although with no top rugby or soccer teams here or in Port Elizabeth it is harder to rebut charges that these stadiums will become white elephants after a few World Cup matches.
AFFIRMATION Nevertheless, the stadiums' spectacular style can perhaps be seen as going way beyond football -- the affirmation of the capabilities of a young, democratic country in the face of doubts and cynicism both at home and abroad.
For the many little boys kicking a ball in the streets of the world's townships and squatter camps, football is the stuff of dreams, said commentator Tinyiko Sam Maluleke.
I will not deny millions of boys in Africa and all over the chance to watch their idols strut their stuff on African soil. I will not deny them inspiration. 2010 is about much more than money and text-book definitions of development, he said in the Mail and Guardian newspaper.
Cronje said the World Cup would not drag South Africa out of poverty but it does something else. It puts Africa quite directly in front of the rest of the world...the impression of Africa as a continent will shift.
Nobody who is poor and lives in a shack is going to be living in different circumstances when the final whistle is blown....but it may happen in the long term that people go back to the soccer World Cup and say it was a milestone of change on the continent and in the way the continent is regarded.
One South African World Cup official, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters: Football means a lot to these people in our country. This is not a panacea but it has lifted our people's psyche, lifted their belief in themselves. www.nytimes.com (Editing by John Mehaffey)
CCS Reality Tours
When critically-minded people visit Durban and seek out a 'reality tour' typically denied by the mainstream tourist circuit, one of the stops is the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Located at the highest point in Durban (the top floors of Memorial Tower Building in Glenwood), the Centre introduces sympathetic visitors to the work of leading social activists and environmentalists. The sites that kombi-taxis arranged by CCS reach include an inner-city tense with resistance to xenophobia and gentrification, the largest petrochemical complex in a residential area in Africa, a variety of shack settlements and working-class 'African', 'Indian' and 'coloured' neighbourhoods, the hotly-contested source of Durban's water at Inanda Dam, and the university environs.
Contacts: Patrick Bond - bondp@ukzn.ac.za or Lungi Keswa (27 31 260 3195)
Sample tour (November 2009)
A Durban Reality Tour by Pamela Ngwenya, CCS Post-Doctoral Scholar, malingaproductions.com
On 4th November 2009, the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal led a tour of Durban that conveys the gritty reality faced by ordinary Durbanites. This video documents the highlights of the tour, including the 'toxic' South Durban Industrial Basin, the tented community of Crossmoor and, on a more positive note, the development of an organic community garden and biodigester in the township of Cato Manor.
Centre for Civil Society report on 2009 activities
As 2009 drew to a close, the formal resolutions we had waited a year for finally passed the university of KwaZulu-Natal Council and Senate, giving CCS permanent status within the school of Development Studies. This followed a very positive 2007-08 UKZN Review and then an inexplicable mid-2008 UKZN Administration threat to close the Centre, in turn rebuffed by the Howard College Faculty Board after local and international outcries, but not without damage to CCS’s staff complement and morale. The team limped through 2009, and only in September were we authorized to grant contracts longer than three months’ duration.
Then on December 26, we mourned the death of our politico-cultural mentor, Dennis Brutus.
Externally, matters were just as hard for those civil society forces committed to social and environmental transformation. December was also the moment it became clear our planet will suffer extreme global warming, given the outcome of the UN’s Climate Summit; CCS had contributed analysis, newspapers and inputs to a widely-viewed internet film (‘Story of Cap and Trade’). Indeed, 2009’s ongoing economic and environmental crises provided ample evidence of political gridlock on all the macro, meso and micro issues we work on. Having seen many of these processes up close, we’re more impressed by ineptitude of those with power at global/continental/national/local levels, the overweening elite self-interest (mainly on behalf of competing corporations, in the context of a dramatic downturn in profits, financial wealth and output), and states’ ongoing incapacity to pacify rising grassroots fury. Read Full report
FATIMA MEER OBITUARY
Meer’s death reminds of society’s unfulfilled desires By Patrick Bond and Orlean Naidoo
“Impoverished people, people who haven’t got food on their plates. Now you are going to take away the roof from their heads. And where do you expect these people to go? You are just compounding their indigency. Then you move in with these security guards and dogs and guns. Now if this is not fascist brutality, what is fascist brutality?”
The scene could have been an apartheid‑era forced removal, with a brave black activist haranguing the white regime. But this question was asked of the new government by Fatima Meer exactly a decade ago, at the peak of the Chatsworth housing battle, on the SABC show Special Assignment.
The unity of poor black African and Indian people fighting city government impressed Meer. She had come to Chatsworth a year earlier as part of the Concerned Citizens Group of mainly Indian struggle veterans, campaigning for a vote for the African National Congress at a time minority parties were gaining ground.
Always nimble, Meer did a quick U‑turn. On a Sunday shortly before the 1999 national election, the Jankipersadh family faced the threat of eviction from a Chatsworth shack. Shocked by the living conditions she encountered, Meer stayed to fight, cajoling and threatening city officials to halt the Jankiperasdh removal. Clearly intimidated, KwaZulu‑Natal Premiere Zweli Mkhize recalled this very incident at her state funeral on Saturday at the Durban International Convention Centre.
Within a year, Meer would be sucking in the smell of post‑apartheid teargas that became so familiar in Chatsworth, her eyes streaming tears of anger, her throat coughing up disgust at the local ANC rulers whom she had helped put into power with unmatched courage during the bad years when she was beaten and banned.
A decade ago, the ruling party was not quite so corruption‑ridden as now, although state prosecutors’ documentation of Jacob Zuma’s alleged bribery via Schabir Shaik made Durban deal‑making at the time seem even sleazier than now, if that’s possible.
But the tendency of Durban officials to crush poor people’s aspirations was just as pronounced. On the week of Meer’s death, it may be Mike Sutcliffe denying local civics the right to march; back then, it was deputy mayor Trevor Bonhomme, bringing in the cops while accusing Meer and other organisers of harbouring shebeens, drug lords and brothels.
Within two years, Meer had not only helped organize the community to successfully resist. She managed to bring together all the fractious campaigning groups within Durban’s poor communities against the World Conference Against Racism. One day at the end of August, 2001, the Concerned Citizens Forum of grassroots civics allied with Muslim pro‑Palestinians, her beloved Jubilee 2000 anti‑debt movement, and other human rights groups from across SA and the world.
Rightly, they were infuriated that US Secretary of State Colin Powell, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and SA President Thabo Mbeki had agreed to remove from the conference agenda two critical issues: racist Israeli Zionism, and reparations for slavery, colonialism and apartheid. Meer and her dear comrade Dennis Brutus led more than 10,000 people in a march against the UN conference that day, and suddenly the idea of SA civil society taking on malgovernance was a reality.
That force was perhaps unique in the country’s history, able to think and act locally, nationally and globally. Writing her obituary in City Press, Meer’s co‑conspirator Ashwin Desai now laments that the new urban social movements which emerged on that 1999 Sunday in Chatsworth are a ‘spent force’, but many others in Meer’s circuit will disagree.
For example, from her South Durban birthplace of Wentworth, Desmond D’Sa last month helped launch a new local‑global campaign – now more than 200 organisations strong – to halt World Bank financing of Eskom. The activists’ ability to derail a R29 billion loan has apparently worried one of the funeral attendees, minister of public enterprises Barbara Hogan.
Aside from the police squad carrying her casket on Saturday (we imagined her voice inside cajoling them for ongoing ‘fascist brutality’), one reason Meer’s funeral seemed uncomfortable was because civil society was given no opportunity to celebrate the non‑ANC causes she lent her prestige to.
She opposed a loan that Hogan – who oversees Eskom ‑ insists we need to fund a new coal‑fired plant (the world’s fourth largest) and partial energy generation privatization, to be paid for by huge increases in tariffs for poor and working people.
Environmentalists, labour and community opponents of the World Bank and Eskom join Meer’s longstanding concern that the Bank must first repay black South Africans reparations, for supporting apartheid‑era white power when from 1951‑67, Washington financiers lent $100 million to Eskom but zero African people received electricity.
Meer would have publicly ridiculed the statement by Hogan at a press conference on Friday, just as the great activist passed away: “If we do not have that power in our system, then we can say goodbye to our economy and to our country.”
“Rubbish!”, Meer would have shouted, impatiently explaining that by switching supply away to the common person, away from the overconsumers who get the world’s cheapest electricity – e.g. BHP Billiton – we would meet many economic and social objectives, while avoiding construction of new climate‑destroying coal plants.
She would have added, we believe, that if no Bank loan means the ruling party’s Chancellor House investment in Hitachi does not yield the R1 billion in easy profits anticipated from Eskom’s new coal‑fired plants (a business relationship Hogan herself recently implied is unethical), well, too bad for the corrupt ANC!
At the same press conference last Friday where Hogan expressed paranoia, energy minister Dipuo Peters expressed myopia: “Wide coverage has been given to those who are opposed to the application by Eskom, whilst we are of the view that the silent majority does indeed support our... acquisition of the World Bank loan.”
So where does Peters get that phrase? According to Wikipedia, “the ‘silent majority’ was popularized by US President Richard Nixon in a November 3, 1969 speech, where it referred to those Americans who did not join in the large demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the time… [and has also] been used in the political elections of Ronald Reagan, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg” – all hostile to poor people and the environment. In this country it was used last by opposition party COPE a month before the 2009 election: “The people of South Africa, the silent majority are going to deliver a lethal blow to Zuma’s dome‑shaped soft belly.”
Meer would have cringed at the irony. Most myopic of all, perhaps, was her old friend Pravin Gordhan, who in London recently made the startling claim that this would be SA’s “first World Bank loan” – when in fact there were several others since 1994 (‘Industrial Competitiveness and Job Creation’, ‘Municipal Financial Management Technical Assistance Project’ and destructive Lesotho dams) as well as Bank investments in a failed Domino’s Pizza franchise and similarly well‑conceived poverty‑reduction strategies.
Meer’s dismay at ANC graft, bling and the youth league leader’s right‑wing populism was noted by her brother Farouk at the funeral, but what went missing – especially with Gordhan in attendance – was how revolting she found the Treasury’s ongoing neoliberalism and the dalliance with the World Bank, emblematized by the failed Growth, Employment and Redistribution programme which Bank staff coauthored.
Delivering the Harold Wolpe lecture at the Centre for Civil Society in February 2007, Meer observed that the Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) had “usurped power in South Africa and the world” because they “are structured to exploit us.”
Gordhan knows this, for he was the Transitional Executive Council economics representative who in December 1993 co‑signed the $850 million IMF loan that pledged her friend Nelson Mandela’s government to painful, neoliberal policies.
On a personal level, we recall how much Meer herself suffered, not only at jail but also here at varsity. According to Eddie Webster of Wits University, “I think the big disappointment in her life is the treatment she got in the sociology department at Natal in the sixties and seventies. Her masters dissertation should have been a PhD but they did not transfer it to PhD status. It was published by Routledge – the top international academic publisher. She was treated by the establishment in a patronising and offensive way.”
So we have now lost Durban’s – and South Africa’s ‑ two most senior civil society scholar‑activists in fewer than eighty days: Brutus on December 26 and Meer last Friday, and that probably pleases many oppressors in Washington, Pretoria and Durban.
As for the rest of us, the interview Meer did for SABC’s Special Assignment in 2000 provides as clear a mandate as we will ever hear, in light of how there is “No commitment at all to the poor people. It’s a very sorry state of affairs. Those of us who can stand up and shout, regardless of how many years we have spent in this life, we must get up and shout.”
With this beautiful voice silenced, surely our responsibility now is to stand up and shout louder still.
(Patrick Bond and Orlean Naidoo work at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society, and Naidoo helps organize Chatsworth against injustice.)
Funeral tribute paid to her sacrifices on behalf of poor Lyse Comins (Daily News) 15 March 2010
Tributes have been pouring in for Professor Fatima Meer.
Many highlighted the personal sacrifices she made in the struggle against apartheid and mourned her loss as one of a generation of activists who were committed to non‑racialism.
Meer died at St Augustine's Hospital on Friday after suffering a second stroke in eight years.
Former Durban academic and social activist Professor Ashwin Desai, now an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Rhodes University, said the loss of Meer deeply impacted him personally as the loss of a strong protector, and on a political level as the loss of an icon of non‑racial politics.
Personally, I feel like I have lost that strong person in the corner who will also protect you when you are growing up, Desai said.
She is of that generation that really believes in and fostered non‑racialism and, if you look at the people she built friendships with, whether it was Alan Paton, Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, Jay Singh or Monty Naicker, she conducted politics and friendship in the most beautiful ways.
Given the discourse in the public domain right now, where racial slandering has been normalised and there are so little politicians involved in non‑racialism, she is one of a whole generation that is passing. She was one of those people who were able to reach out and have the political capital to reach out beyond racial lines, Desai said.
He recalled fondly how there was always a little bit of a girl in Meer, who had had a great sense of fun and laughter and even while battling poor health, courageously championed the rights of the poor.
I remember going with her in 1997 to a protest in Chatsworth where an elderly woman was being evicted, and her husband phoned and she lied to him and said she was at home resting and she gave me a wink, Desai said.
Torn Desai said he was torn by Winnie Madikizela‑Mandela's announcement that she would work towards having Meer's Sydenham home declared a national heritage site.
He said it would be a far better memorial if the government worked to provide services and decent housing for the people living in the area.
Clearly, it is a house of eminent historical significance because so many great people, like Mandela and Luthuli, have visited.
But I am worried because overlooking it are hundreds of shacks where people have no access to water and electricity. When you walk out of that house you are going to see how little the lives of ordinary people have changed.
Just the location makes me worry about name changes and memorials as an excuse not to do something something more tangible, Desai said.
Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille said South Africa mourned the loss of a tireless anti‑apartheid and human rights activist.
On behalf of the Democratic Alliance, I extend my deepest sympathy to the family and friends of veteran anti‑apartheid activist Fatima Meer.
Meer was an inspirational human being, a prominent academic, writer and activist who played an important role in opposing the apartheid government.
Her outspoken opposition to the ruling National Party resulted in her and her family sacrificing a great deal in the struggle for freedom and democracy in South Africa.
In recent years she has remained an outspoken activist for human rights, despite her frailty, Zille said.
Transport Minister Sibusiso Ndebele conveyed his condolences to Meer's family and relatives.
This is a great loss, but she can rest knowing she fought a good fight. Because of her intellect, she was a formidable opponent of apartheid and, when apartheid's victory was becoming assured, because everyone else was banned, through her writings and research into apartheid and its workings, she inspired a lot of other activists, Ndebele said.
She kept the fires burning in the dark days of apartheid. May her soul rest in peace, Ndebele concluded.
Taking up the cudgels to deepen democracy In this excerpt from her Harold Wolpe Memorial lecture at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society, Prof Fatima Meer calls for a South African social forum
Those who are ruling us have usurped power. They are incapable of establishing equality or democracy. Who, then, will establish this democracy?
You will find two communities in the world today, divided against each other. One is the community of governments and the capitalists of the world, which met recently in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum.
The other community is civil society. But many of us in civil society have been converted into vote banks and consumers for the other community.
Delivering his Budget speech, Trevor Manuel was ebullient as ever, and all we heard about were billions and billions of rands that we had helped to save. And then there was this pittance for those on social grants.
There was so much self-congratulation in that house of parliament.
We have hundreds of organisations throughout the country, maybe even thousands. What we lack is the co-ordination of these organisations, so that we can form a South African Social Forum to connect to the World Social Forum.
Discrimination South Africa is a microcosm of the world. Previously discrimination was based on colour, now it is based on class. The poor are blamed. There are all sorts of myths that radiate all over the place, because the media is not in our hands.
It is up to us to liberate ourselves. They are not going to give it to us. As a young girl I learnt that freedom is not presented to you on a platter.
We have to struggle for it, we have to fight for it. You know those institutions which have usurped power in South Africa and the world: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.
All these organisations are structured to exploit us and the rest of the world.
We lived throughout colonisation, a pernicious system. It transferred the resources of Africa, Latin America and Asia to Europe and North America. They transferred the populations they wanted, as slaves and indentured labourers.
Replacing colonisation is a new form of domination, ravaging and destroying the world: globalisation.
Those in charge cannot tolerate a moral order. They have broken the link in our two-dimensional humanity: body and soul, material and spirit.
They have completely destroyed the idea of the spirit or soul. It does not consume, and they cannot profit through that part of humanity. They concentrate on science and technology, which they develop to increase their exploitation of our universe.
Challenge The activism of civil society is not something that began recently. It started in the 19th century and, here in Durban, Mahatma Gandhi later developed the strategy of satyagraha, the struggle for truth.
The challenge we face is enormous, and so we must establish a South African Social Forum, along the lines of the World Social Forum, which has already held so many successful summits and meetings, roughly 18 in other African countries.
As far as the existing Social Movements Indaba network is concerned, I would hope they would partner with all our movements to form a social forum.
Community organisations founded the last bastion of the fight against apartheid, the United Democratic Front.
The Congress of the People was authored by similar organisations coming together, as was the Freedom Charter, which was the basis of our constitution.
The challenges before us are enormous. If we accept the responsibility of organising democracy in our country, we have to work out solutions collectively. We have the intellectual capacity. More important, we are motivated. We as civil society are also the repository of the moral order. Together we will overcome.
Fatima Meer's 80th Birthday 10 August 2008
Tribute to Fatima Meer Ari Sitas September 2008
1. Fatima Meer’s career at Natal University spanned four critical generational cycles: a cycle of hope when she was a young sociologist; a cycle of isolation and discrimination as the Apartheid state tightened its grip on everything; a cycle of anticipation, as her personal banning and restriction limited her contribution to rising tides of resistance; a cycle of energy when, at 54 years of age, she embarked through the Institute for Black Research on a wave of action-research activities which would have been the envy of a hyperactive teenager. Then she was retired but continued in her own way from the small bungalow below Jubilee Gardens to produce and act.
2. Fatima Meer and Ben Magubane were nurtured as sociologists by Leo Kuper, a principled liberal and a defining figure in the sociology of race, class and power. This was the period of hope on the cusp of rising resistance against Apartheid from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. It was a time of hope because in the corridors of MTB, a critical sociology was in emergence. But it was a potential that was never realized: the 1959 Universities Act enforced the teaching of black students away from Howard College in town and the principled stand of all of them was to teach Sociology downtown and not at Howard College. Kuper and Magubane went into exile only to emerge as contestants later in the Pluralism Vs Marxism debate around race, class and ethnicity in Africa. Fatima Meer, through untold political hardship remained, steering a middle-course. Fascinated by Emile Durkheim’s sociology of deviance and anomie, she penned her study of suicide and suffering in the Indian community trying to balance between the importance of race and the importance of class in South Africa.
3. The period of isolation and discrimination followed. As a black woman, marked by connections in the resistance movement, she was barely tolerated and hardly appreciated in the 1960s. We have her harrowing account of what it meant to be her during those years at the University of Natal: it will be the opening chapter to her Festschrift that SASA is planning. At least she did not lose her job and when not restricted, she taught what she had to and only felt collegiality when at the Medical School among black students and a sprinkling of black colleagues. What kept her going were her interactions and engagements with the broader community.
4. The cycle of anticipation involved the rise of the black consciousness movement and the first impulses of a worker challenge to Apartheid and capitalism. Fatima Meer had to endure another assault: a banning order because of her responses to the emerging challenge. Instead of diminishing her it increased her stature, but teaching, researching and interacting became acutely difficult. But it was also a period of intensive networking because once again, change was in the air.
5. Finally, by the early 1980s, however dangerous or repressive the times were, there was enough of a critical mass of people- black intellectuals and activists, funding partners and community organizations that facilitated the creation of the Institute for Black Research through which most of her energy was to be focused. This did not immediately signify an end to Fatima Meer’s marginalization from the University and from many of her colleagues, but it facilitated the space for a critical and public sociology to emerge, to publish and communicate on burning issues. By the time the post-Apartheid South Africa emerged, she was about to be retired. She continued with her work in IBR to this day as an associate, and a colleague- challenging, criticizing and coaxing.
6. Many of the issues that Fatima Meer stood for have been main-framed in South African society and our institutions. For example: one of the key reasons of the existence of the IBR was to create opportunities for black researchers and to groom a critical mass of them, capable of taking over scholarship. Now the entire R&D framework of the country is supposed to be doing that. How successful it has been is another question. But many of the issues that hurt her then continue to hurt her now: the appalling education of black children, the increasing disparities between the wealthy and the poor, the rising xenophobia, the Indian community’s distance from African concerns and of Africans to so-called Indian concerns, the Afro-Zulu tensions in the province and the double-standards of many of our new people in power.
7. In short, Fatima Meer has been an important public sociologist: we would like our future students to worry about whom we perceive to be deviant. They would have to read her Andrew Zondo study and try to understand how a young man could have been perceived as a selfless hero for some and a heartless killer by others. But they would have to also deal with her broader work on anomie and its relation to self-destructive acts (like suicide), criminality or sedition.
8. We would also like them to understand the social sources of defiance and what animates a pulse for freedom among oppressed communities. They might find her studies of defiance, of black protest and insurrection wrong, but they have to venture and risk better hypotheses and explanations. They should have to deal with her fine work on African Nationalism in South Africa, its flexibility and open-ness and sweat to compare it with others.
9. We would like them to consider the women’s question and the role of gender, whether as addressed in her coordinated study of Black Woman Worker or her more challenging and controversial on the women’s question in Iran and the relationship between religion and women’s rights.
10. Poverty, its causes, its race and ethnic profiles, so close to much of her work will be a vital pre-occupation too. A pre-occupation that has grown stronger with her realization of the failure of global and local poverty-alleviation programmes.
11. We would finally like our students to ponder on her enormous work (her own, orchestrated by her, or developed with others) on heritage and its construction. The Ghandhian Legacy (the Gandhi Omnibus she edited), the legacy and institutions of South African Indians, the Documents of Indentured Labour, the editions on Luthuli’s, Gokool’s, Daddoo’s and so many others’ including her Nelson Mandela biography. They have to sift through them and dig further.
12. We would like to see colleagues in the future who share a sense of challenge. It would be difficult to replicate the sense among students of the future of this one-woman vanguard, so difficult to pigeon-hole who can been at once a boundary-maker and a boundary breaker and someone who might be on occasion an Islamic and socialist/democratic bourgeois when you dared play Caliban and a fierce Caliban if you dared bourgeois pretensions in class. It would be difficult to find a replica. But we can try and keep through her presence a Public Sociology alive.
Principled To The End Opinion (The Mercury) 15 March 2010
PROFESSOR Fatima Meer passed away in Durban on Friday at the age of 81, less than three months after fellow anti-apartheid activist Professor Denis Brutus.
Both were at the forefront of the country's post-liberation social movements. Like Brutus, Meer was not afraid to speak truth to power.
As sociologist Ashwin Desai has said, she not only played an important role in the Struggle for a free South Africa: her conduct after 1994 distinguished Meer as probably the greatest champion of freedom that South Africa has known.
Meer was not prepared to toe the party line, when she saw how poor people were being betrayed by the new elite.
She eschewed the materialism and wealth of her comrades, some of whom were not embarrassed to declare publicly that they had not joined the Struggle to be poor and others who brazenly flaunted their riches as their right.
In calling for a South African social forum in 2007, Meer warned that those who are ruling us have usurped power.
It was fitting that Meer's brother, Farouk, used her funeral on Saturday to echo the widespread concerns about the state of the governing ANC, almost 16 years into democracy.
He expressed a fear that the legacy of ANC leaders like Oliver Tambo, Moses Kotane and Moses Mabhida was being eroded.
And in an appeal to Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, who was among the mourners at the funeral, Farouk Meer added to applause: We must get rid of corruption. We must bring down the salaries of our politicians. We must bring down the massive handouts that go to those who control our parastatals.
It is South Africa's tragedy that the voices of principled activists are disappearing fast and those who replace them in the political structures are not cut from the same cloth.
Motivated by self-interest and greed, they have lost the plot - unlike the true activists of old like Denis Brutus and Fatima Meer.
We'll miss her strength in our corner Ashwin Desai (The Mercury) 15 March 2010
The Exhibition Centre is a cavernous theatre situated in the heart of Durban. It was the setting for the funeral of Fatima Meer on Saturday.
They came from everywhere. Cabinet ministers, lower-level politicians, liberation veterans and the new struggle heroes in the city - those who have fought off evictions and electricity and water disconnections, the activists striving to save the Durban market and the last remnants of the noble art of subsistence fishing.
They sat uneasily together. Almost like boxers eyeing each other from different corners. Up ahead, the religious figures took centre stage, each straining to display their openness to different religions but trying hard to put their god first.
Then it was the turn of the secular gods. The politicians. When the ANC speaks these days, Julius Malema hangs like the spectres that haunted Macbeth. Their smooth handshakes seem not to matter anymore because one gets a sense that this is the hand that quivers at the feet of Malema.
Winnie Mandela was the first up on the platform. She spoke beautifully of friendship. Her sincerity and grief were deep and raw.
Farouk Meer, the brother who never really found a place in institutional politics, took the stage. His lament on corruption was met with huge applause. When he challenged Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan on the ethics of cabinet colleagues who hid behind ministerial handbooks to live the life of Riley, this drew even bigger applause.
While everybody there knew their own Fatima Meer, it was outside that one got a sense of the people who really grasped the essence of the late activist. Excluded from the official platform, they eyed contemptuously the once struggle luminaries who implemented policies that made their already hard lives even more precarious. People like working-class women from Chatsworth. They appreciated that unlike many of the struggle heroes hanging around outside, Meer was a post-apartheid fighter.
From the very large marches in the centre of Durban to the small, everyday battles in its ghettoes, she was there. One of her last battles was to try to save the market. She told us at a small meeting, let them build a shopping mall at the Royal Durban Golf Club or even at Currie's Fountain. But save the market.
I remember Meer striding into Chatsworth in 1999 to campaign for the ANC. She quickly realised that disenchantment with the former liberation movement did not stem from racism or apathy, but that people in these poor areas were under direct attack by the government, her government. Their lights and water were being cut, they were being evicted. She hurt at the callousness. Meer switched tack. She stopped campaigning for votes and started rebuilding resistance. Out of that refusal to simply toe the party line, social movements in Durban were born.
'A great friend and a mother to our children' Winnie Madikezela-Mandela (Opinion) 15 March 2010
Extract from Winnie Mandela's eulogy titled, Fatima Meer: The Friend I Chose as Family:
She was one of a very few people who could be counted on to visit while we languished in prisons. She visited me in detention and in Brandfort, despite the laws of the day. She also visited Madiba on Robben Island.
It was no surprise that she was asked by Madiba to write his biography in consultation with OR Tambo.
I arranged her communication with Lusaka and Higher than Hope was the end product.
When we needed somewhere to stay or hide, Fatima was always first to mind. Both Madiba and I visited and used the Meer home as a hideout, both in Johannesburg and in Durban.
And it was to her credit that even when there was a fallout between Madiba and I, she did not take the side of the most powerful man in the country.
She remained loyal to both of us and this is an example of true friendship that is rare to find.
As is usually the case, such bravery was accompanied by a tremendous brain.
Farewell To A Woman Of Integrity Muna Lakhani 15 March 2010
IT WAS with the deepest sorrow when one learns that someone critical to one's upbringing is no longer with us.
Aunty Fatima (if I called her anything else, I would get my ear twisted by my mom) was a lodestone, as she was a simple living proof of integrity, compassion and genuine understanding.
Not only was her mind that of one of the finest analysts in our country and beyond, but her command of appropriate language always meant that we kids understood exactly what she meant, politically or otherwise.
Given that she and my mom were like sisters, it was also l
Centre for Civil Society report on 2007 activities
In a context of dramatic increases in ‘Gatherings Act’ incidents reported by the SA police (10 000 per year in 2005-07, up from 5800 in 2004-05) and worsening inequality, our guiding CCS objective is of even more relevance: the advance of socio-economic and environmental justice through developing critical knowledge about, for and in dialogue with civil society. Our research work benefits from praxis-based production of knowledge, in which we learn how power relations are challenged by civil society organisations – in the streets, the courts, the media, negotiating fora, theatres and cultural clubs, sportsfields and other sites - thus generating new information about systems and organisational strengths and weaknesses. We then feed back research into the society through both arms-length and participatory analysis, in the forms of books and articles, films and DVDs, tours and lectures. Read Report
Banned from the U.S., Professor says He's a Victim of Ideological Exclusion
University of Johannesburg Professor Adam Habib has been able to return to the United States after being excluded since 2006. The American Civil Liberties Union sued on behalf of the American Sociological Association, the American Association of University Professors, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights to get Habib back into the country. Then in January Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lifted the exclusion against Habib's visa. Habib this weekend spoke at the American Sociological Annual Meeting in Atlanta. What changed? Why did the United States permit him to enter? Don Lemon sits down with the once-banned professor.
CCS statement on Adam Habib's unbanning from US travel
Exactly a year after Barack Obama became president, Centre for Civil Society founder Adam Habib has been freed from a Bush Administration State Department order dating to 21 October 2006, which banned Habib and his entire family from entering the US. Ending this ban was one of CCS's 2007-09 campaigns, led by the late Dennis Brutus, himself a victor in a 1981-83 US State Department deportation dispute - a time when Brutus would have been persecuted in South Africa as one of apartheid's twenty leading enemies abroad, according to the Bureau of State Security. In February 2008, Brutus led a protest at the US Consulate in Durban, prior to a US court hearing on the case.
But the full year that it took for Obama to make this tiny repair in Washington's appalling international image reflects the durability of State Department bias against those like Habib who speak clearly for democracy and justice.
We should be motivated, now, to renew solidarity with those aiming to end State Department and Pentagon oppression, from Haiti to Colombia to Africa to the Middle East and Central Asia. Moreover, Brutus and others lobbied against the ongoing incarceration of political prisoners in the US, such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier and Guantanamo Bay prisoners who had a hope (since dashed) in Obama's inaugural promise that the torture centre there would soon be closed, and that US torture would end.
Still, the victory by Habib and his lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union gives us confidence that the forces of peace, justice, freedom and democracy that Habib, Brutus and so many others have represented all these years, will prevail against Washington's paranoia, Islamaphobia and imperial arrogance.
Habib, Adam wrote: Dear Patrick I have good news, at least from my perspective. As of today, the US State department has agreed to settle the case of my deportation and visa denial by no longer applying the rationale for my exclusion. A copy of the press release of the ACLU is attached. This effectively means that I can now apply for a visa and the application will be treated as a normal one. As a result, I will hopefully before long be able to enter the US and once again engage with academic colleagues. > This outcome would not have been possible had it not been for the principled stand taken by a number of American and South African organisations, the CCS included. The CCS's committment to the principles of academic freedom and the free engagement of ideas represent not only the more progressive face of the SA and global academy, but it also provides hope in a world where civil liberties and tolerance has been eroded, and democracy is imperilled. Please communicate to all your staff my appreciation for the stand they took with regards to my exclusion. If I can reciprocate your actions or if I can assist the CCS in any way in the future, please do not hesitate to call on me. Best Adam
State Department Ends Unconstitutional Exclusion Of Blacklisted Scholars From U.S. Professors Adam Habib And Tariq Ramadan Likely To Be Readmitted To United States, Says ACLU
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 20 January 2010 CONTACT: Rachel Myers, (212) 549-2689 or 2666; media@aclu.org
WASHINGTON – In a major victory for civil liberties, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has signed orders that effectively end the exclusion of two prominent scholars who were barred from the United States by the Bush administration. The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the denial of visas to Professors Adam Habib of the University of Johannesburg and Tariq Ramadan of St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, in separate lawsuits filed on behalf of American organizations that had invited the scholars to speak to audiences inside the United States.
The orders ending the exclusion of Adam Habib and Tariq Ramadan are long overdue and tremendously important, said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. For several years, the United States government was more interested in stigmatizing and silencing its foreign critics than in engaging them. The decision to end the exclusion of Professors Habib and Ramadan is a welcome sign that the Obama administration is committed to facilitating, rather than obstructing, the exchange of ideas across international borders.”
During the Bush administration, the U.S. government denied visas to dozens of foreign artists, scholars and writers – all critics of U.S. policy overseas and many of whom are Muslim – without explanation or on vague national security grounds. In a speech in Cairo in June 2009, President Obama addressed the relationship between the United States and Muslims around the world, calling for “a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground.” The ACLU welcomed the State Department’s orders as an important step toward achieving that goal.
“Given the orders issued by Secretary Clinton, we hope and expect that Professor Habib and Professor Ramadan will soon be able to come to the United States to meet and talk with American audiences,” said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “The Obama administration should now conduct a broader review of visas denied under the Bush administration, reverse the exclusions of others who were barred because of their political beliefs and retire the practice of ideological exclusion for good.”
The orders signed by Secretary Clinton state that, in the future, Professors Habib and Ramadan will not be denied visas on the same grounds that they were denied them in 2006 and 2007. To enter the United States, however, the scholars will need to apply for visas – a process likely to take several weeks. The ACLU expects that, given Secretary Clinton’s orders, the visa applications will be granted expeditiously.
Professor Adam Habib is a respected political analyst and Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research, Innovation and Advancement at the University of Johannesburg, as well as a Muslim who has been a vocal critic of the war in Iraq and some U.S. terrorism-related policies. The ACLU and the ACLU of Massachusetts filed a lawsuit in 2007 challenging his exclusion on behalf of the American Sociological Association, the American Association of University Professors, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights.
My family and I are thrilled by Secretary Clinton’s decision, and we are thankful to the many organizations that put pressure on the Obama administration to stop excluding people from the United States on the basis of their political views,” said Habib. “This is not only a personal victory but also a victory for democracy around the world, and we hope this signals a move by the administration to begin restoring the liberties and freedoms that have been so badly eroded in recent times.
Professor Tariq Ramadan is Chair of Contemporary Islamic Studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. In 2004, he accepted a tenured position at the University of Notre Dame, but the U.S. government revoked his visa just days before he was to begin teaching there. The ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in 2006 challenging his exclusion on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and the PEN American Center.
“I am very pleased with the decision to end my exclusion from the United States after almost six years,” said Ramadan. “I want to thank all the institutions and individuals who have supported me and worked to end unconstitutional ideological exclusion over the years. I am very happy and hopeful that I will be able to visit the United States very soon and to once again engage in an open, critical and constructive dialogue with American scholars and intellectuals.”
The ACLU will be in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York this afternoon for a status conference in Ramadan’s case, Academy of Religion v. Napolitano. Attorneys in that case are Jaffer, Goodman, Judy Rabinovitz and Lucas Guttentag the national ACLU, Arthur Eisenberg of the NYCLU and New York immigration lawyer Claudia Slovinsky. At the conference, the parties will address the implications of Secretary Clinton’s order for the long-running lawsuit.
Attorneys in the Habib case, American Sociological Association v. Clinton, are Goodman, Jaffer and Rabinovitz of the national ACLU and Sarah Wunsch and John Reinstein of the ACLU of Massachusetts.
HSRC expresses its concern about the decision to deny Professor Adam Habib entry into the USA HUMAN SCIENCES RESEARCH COUNCIL MEDIA RELEASE 24 October 2006
The Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) notes with concern that Professor Adam Habib, Executive Director of the HSRC’s Democracy & Governance research programme and a respected scholar and an outspoken political commentator, had his visa revoked by the US government on his arrival in New York on Saturday 21 October 2006 and was subsequently deported back to South Africa. To date no reasons have been given for these actions.
Prof Habib was part of a HSRC delegation to the USA, led by the CEO Dr Olive Shisana, which will be meeting a number of institutions including the National Institute of Health, the Centre for Disease Control, the World Bank, Columbia University, and a number of donor agencies including the Carnegie and Gates Foundations during their visit.
Dr Temba Masilela, the acting CEO of the HSRC, said that “the HSRC has written letters of concern to both the Department of Foreign Affairs and the US Embassy in Pretoria requesting their assistance in establishing the reasons for the denial of entry. As soon as more information is made available, it will be communicated to the public.”
‘The Practice of Academic Freedom in SA’: 19 October 2006, UKZN University Forum Lecture Adam Habib (Honorary Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies and Centre for Civil Society)
This is a very opportune time for the CHE to investigate the issue of whether institutional autonomy and academic freedom is under threat in South Africa. Xolela Mangcu’s departure from the HSRC and Ashwin Desai’s troubles with UKZN has sparked a national debate on academic freedom and on government’ s involvement in academic and research institutions. This debate follows one a year or so earlier when Jonathan Jansen accused the Department of Education of undermining institution’s autonomy and academics’ freedom through the funding formulae and legislative interventions. However, for this investigation and the debate it inspires to be fruitful, it is necessary that we transcend emotional interaction and deal with the issue as dispassionately as is possible under the circumstances.
At the outset, it is important to identify who we are talking about when we engage in this debate. Who are the alleged violators of academic freedom? Clearly the debate in contemporary South Africa is not the same as that under apartheid. Neither is it the same as in some others parts of the continent and the world where academics are regularly harassed, maimed, jailed and even killed. In these cases, the repressive apparatus of the state violates academics’ freedom. Contemporary South Africa is not confronted with such a threat.
But who then are the perpetrators of this crime in contemporary SA? If you listen to Jonathan Jansen and many of the institutional managers in the historically white universities, then the alleged violator is the state. But their ire is directed not at the repressive arm of the state, but rather at the institutional bureaucrats at DOE and dare I say, CHE. For Jansen, these bureaucrats have made severe incursions into institutional autonomy through the funding formulae and the post-apartheid legislative apparatus. The result is not only a violation of university’s autonomy but also individual academic’s freedom.
But there is a second perpetrator of this crime, namely the institutional bureaucrat. This alleged violator is identified not only by Jansen, but also by Southall and Cobbing, and even by Andre du Toit. All of these academics speak and write of the corporatisation of the university, the new managerialism and how it undermines the collegiate atmosphere of the academy. This is the essence of du Toit’s critique of Jansen. He argues that Jansen is able to conflate institutional autonomy and academic freedom, following T.B. Davie’s original formulation, because he sees the threat as external. But once it is recognized as internal as du Toit does, then the conflation in fact becomes dangerous for academic freedom itself. This is because institutional autonomy could land up empowering the institutional bureaucrat rather than the individual academic.
The third alleged violator of academic freedom is seen to be the senior academics themselves. This has not often been recognized in the recent debate, but this argument was made in a provocative article published in the late 1990’s in a left wing intellectual journal entitled Debate. The article, authored by Ashwin Desai, entitled ‘Death of the Intellectual, Birth of the Salesman’ effectively tracked the writing of leading Marxist scholars in the 1980s and 1990s, and it argued that their research agenda is no longer determined by themselves, but rather by those who are prepared to buy their research and writing skills, most often either the government or the private sector. Academic freedom in this case is said to be violated by the senior academic’s propensity to sell his or her skills to the highest bidder.
I raise this issue not to contest or support any of these perspectives. After all, I think there is at least a kernel of truth in all of these analyses. My purpose in reflecting on these articles is to bring to the fore the variety of stakeholders involved in this debate. Moreover, it is also useful to demonstrate that the divide is not as neat as one may first assume and one needs to conceptualize the debate in much more nuanced terms than may have happened thus far.
It is important to identify the conundrum we confront as the South African academy, and it is the same as that confronted by the rest of the continent in the first decade or two of their own post-colonial transitions. In these societies at the dawn of their transitions, their academies were confronted with higher education institutions largely staffed by expatriates or settlers. Newly trained African intellectuals felt very much marginalized in these institutions. Confronted by this, these newly trained black intellectuals turned to the state to intervene. The settler academics and expatriates raised the banner of institutional autonomy and academic freedom but they were soon overpowered. The problem, however, was that almost as soon as the state entered these institutions, it refused to leave. The irony was that a decade or two later the very academics who had asked the state to intervene convened in Kampala, Uganda, to raise the banner of academic freedom and institutional autonomy- those same demands raised by the expatriate and settler academics of a decade or two earlier.
What are the lessons to be learnt from these experiences? The problem with the debate in South Africa thus far is that it has eerie echoes of that which took place in the continent a decade or two earlier. So Jansen raises the critique of the state ‘s intervention in the university, and the response raised by the Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor, is that intervention is necessary in order to advance the cause of democratization and transformation. In this she is supported by a number of black academics. The debate is of course polarized. On the one hand you have politicians, technocrats, and some black academics, all of who raise the flag of democratization and transformation. On the other hand, you have institutional managers, the white academy and some black academics, which are the flag bearers of institutional autonomy and academic freedom. Southall and Cobbing would be on this side of the debate, although they would see the institutional managers as the conduit of the state’s neo-liberal logic. How to get out of this binary mess, for if we do not, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes and, as a result, experience the consequences of our compatriots to the north of us?
We can begin conceptualizing a way out of this intellectual quagmire with Andre du Toit’s formulation of academic freedom. Du Toit makes a distinction between libertarian and republican conceptions of academic freedom. In the former, it is conceptualized as a negative right, whereas in the former, the definition is conceptualized in more positive terms. In this more positive conception, academic freedom is seen to be compatible with social accountability. Using this conception we can hold that academic freedom needs to be coupled with transformation if it is to retain any relevance in contemporary South Africa. This position, I believe, would be supported by even Jansen and the more far-sighted institutional bureaucrats and state technocrats.
But I do not think this break through goes far enough. This is because it suffers from the same methodological weaknesses associated with state technocrats and institutional bureaucrats. For these actors, if freedom and autonomy is conceptualized in a progressive way, and if it is codified in a regulatory framework, then somehow this will magically translate into reality. But the African experience shows that this is not the case. Even though the nationalist academics called for an intervention in the language of rights and responsibilities, events on the ground soon overtook them. This is because the contestations on the ground were determined not by abstract conceptions and a framework. Rather they were determined by how power was organized. The state prevailed because power was dispersed in its favor.
So I want to construct a solution beyond the perspective of the state technocrat and institutional bureaucrat. I want to use the lens of the political science academic or even the social activist. I want to start by recognizing that while having a republican conception of freedom is useful, we need to go beyond it. There is an urgent need to reform the higher education system and its practice to realize a dispersal of power. And, it is precisely in the contestation of empowered stakeholders - state technocrats, institutional bureaucrats, academics, students and a variety of other collectives - that institutional autonomy and academic freedom gets constructed.
So what are these reforms of the higher education system and academic practice that can lead to this dispersal of power? I have identified four such reforms, two of which facilitate institutional autonomy, which is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for academic freedom, while the remaining two speak directly to the latter right. First, a plurality of stakeholders must be represented in the higher education system. This need not only mean that the higher education system must be representative of our demographics. Of course this is necessary and a path must be charted to achieve this end. But the higher system must also reflect a plurality of ideological voices including those that are intellectual dissidents in our society. It is precisely this demographic and ideological plurality that will legitimize the higher education system, and enhance its credibility vis-à-vis state technocrats and other empowered stakeholders.
Second, the higher education system must have a diversity of income streams supporting its activities. Presently, it is almost entirely reliant on state funding and student fees. While public funding will inevitably comprise a sizable component of the university system, it is important that higher education managers open up other income streams to support their institutions’ activities. This would obviously involve accessing the resources of the private sector, individual benefactors, and domestic and foreign foundations. And, it would require transforming research from an institutional cost to an income stream. There are a number of successful cases, both international and local, where these reforms have been attempted with some success. Lessons need to be learnt from these experiences for multiple funding streams for higher education can only but enhance universities power vis-à-vis the Department of Education.
Third, institutional cultures that reward scholarship and intellectual productivity need be built in the higher education system. Currently, a relatively egalitarian tradition in the academy, reflected in fairly equitable remuneration scales within hierarchical bands, tends to undermine the incentives that may inspire research productivity and innovation. Indeed, the problem is even further aggravated by the embarrassing remuneration afforded to members of the academy especially in relation to other professions, organized in both the public and private realms in the country. The net effect is that the brightest minds tend to gravitate away from the academy with dire consequences for not only the higher education system, but also for economic development in South Africa. A system of rewards for scholarship and intellectual productivity reflected in both better remuneration for productive academics, and better financial support for research by public and private stakeholders would go a long way to reforming the system of the incentives in the universities. More significantly however, it will, in addition to attracting great minds to the academy, also enhance their power vies-a vies institutional bureaucrats who would recognize the value of productive academics because their academic stature and intellectual output would be so instrumental in enhancing resource flows to the university.
Finally, academic entrepreneurialism is something that needs to be encouraged, valued, and even actively built in the higher education system. This is because such entrepreneurialism, meaning the active marketing of the academy, is necessary for translating academic work to the benefit of a variety of stakeholders, including marginalized sections of society. This not only brings greater credibility to the higher education system, but it can also translate into increased resource flows into the university. And, it is precisely academics involvement in the generation of these benefits for the university that enhances their power vis-à-vis institutional bureaucrats.
Collectively these four reforms then can have the systemic effect of dispersing power to a variety of stakeholders in the higher education system. And, as has been argued earlier, it is in the contestation of these empowered stakeholders that academic freedom and institutional autonomy can be constructed. This recommendation is of course very different from that which seems to implicitly emerge in the existing literature. In this literature, either there is a hope for some distant institutional revolution to recreate the macroeconomic fundamentals for a better resourced or even free higher education system, or there is an incessant hand-wringing and continuous complaints about the neo-liberal character of our world. Instead, the recommendation advocated by this academic intervention is that institutional autonomy and academic freedom need to be constructed through the contestation of empowered stakeholders, which itself is a product of the messy process of higher education reform and entrepreneurial academic practice.
Banned: Why a South African is Going to Court in the U.S. Adam Habib
Sometime in November 2006, while my wife, Fatima, drove back from work in Pretoria to our home in Johannesburg, South Africa, she received a call from John Webster, an official at the American consulate in Johannesburg. John very apologetically notified Fatima that her visa had been revoked, as had the visas of my children, Irfan, 12, and Zidaan, 9. Irfan had been invited to the U.S. as part of the People to People Ambassador Program for young leaders established by President Dwight Eisenhower to promote understanding among peoples of the world. I had not made up my mind yet about whether to send Irfan. Scared that he might be harassed at U.S. airports, I was conflicted. But now that decision was already made, and by somebody else. The 'sins' of the father had been visited upon the sons.
Our saga began a month earlier when I arrived in New York on October 21, 2006. Having lived there before while earning my Ph.D. from the City University of New York, and having traveled there multiple times thereafter, I expected to be irritated, but nothing more. Even when I was sent to the Homeland Security waiting room in JFK airport, I was not overly concerned. But after five hours, I began to realize that this went beyond the normal harassment. By the time I called the South African Consulate and some U.S. and South African officials, it was too late -- the decision had already been made to revoke my visa and 'deport' me. Soon I was escorted under armed guard to a plane bound for South Africa. But I never lost my cool. Partly, I think, because it was nearing the end of Ramadan, a period in which you are not only supposed to fast, but also to control your temper when daily challenges arise.
The U.S. furnished no reason for the revocation of my visa. Despite repeated inquiries and protests by me, South African officials, and U.S. organizations, to this day the U.S. has never explained itself. There were, however, several guesses. Some suggested that it was racial profiling. But when my wife and children's visas were also revoked, this theory no longer seemed credible. Others, including some high-ranking public officials in South Africa, believe that it had to do with my involvement in anti-Iraq war demonstrations in 2003. Some suggested that photographs were taken of me addressing a rally in South Africa and downloaded into some kind of U.S. database. But there was never any confirmation of this theory from any official or department in the U.S.
Am I critic of the U.S. government? Absolutely. In addition to my active participation in anti-war demonstrations, I have been very critical both in my speeches and in my writing about American foreign policy in Africa and the Middle East. But I have also been equally critical of other governments -- including my own. Is that a rationale for excluding me? I would hope not. Can you imagine if suddenly American academics and citizens were deported from South Africa because they criticized the government's policies on HIV/AIDS? If our governments get in the habit of excluding academics, intellectuals, journalists, and citizens of other countries for ideological reasons, then we are on a slippery slope to the abrogation of all kinds of freedoms. Having lived in apartheid South Africa, I know what this means.
While I remain excluded from the U.S. without explanation, I continue to receive invitations to speak in the United States. Together with lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, I decided to re-apply for a visa. I was meant to speak at the American Sociological Association Conference in New York in August 2007, but was notified at the very last minute that my application would not be processed in time. To date I still have not heard anything about my visa application. As a result, with the help of the ACLU, U.S. organizations that have invited me to speak in the U.S. -- the American Sociological Association, the American Association of University Professors, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights -- filed a lawsuit today in federal district court to force the U.S. government to act on my visa and end its effort to block a free exchange of ideas.
Why do I fight to get into a country where its government obviously does not want me? My answer has always been threefold. First, I have said my relationship with the U.S. extends beyond its government. It is established through my relationships with American citizens. It is also constructed by my fond personal memories. My son, Irfan was conceived there. When I came to defend my dissertation at the City University of New York two years later, I remember feeding ducks in Central Park with him. I remember Irfan's love for riding the subway, which would lull him to sleep. I remember snow fights with Zidaan and Irfan in the middle of Manhattan a few years later. And all of us remember visiting Disney World in 2003. This is a country where we have memories and friends. It is part of our world and that should not be taken away by an arbitrary action of a public official.
Second, in my new job as the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research, Innovation and Advancement at the University of Johannesburg, it would obviously be inconvenient for me to be barred from the U.S. It is where we have relationships with scholars, institutions and donors. I routinely collaborate with U.S.-based scholars on academic projects. While my exclusion from the U.S. may not be debilitating, why should I be subjected to these inconveniences without any explanation from the U.S. government?
Finally, and perhaps even more importantly, this case symbolizes a broader struggle in our world. I am concerned, as many others are, at the rise of what I would call 'chauvinistic identities' across the globe. We see these identities in nations like the U.S. and South Africa, where some define being American and South African in narrow racial and cultural terms. We see it in religious communities where some interpret being Muslim as having to hate a Jew and Christian, where to be Hindu must involve hating Christian and Muslim. We see it in linguistic divides where to speak French means to oppress one who speaks Dutch, where to speak Arabic means to reject Farsi. This has also led to increasing conflict between peoples and nations. It leads to bombing, and counter-bombing, wars and counter-wars, each feeding off each other in an ever-vicious cycle. All of this has occurred at a time when structural developments like globalization require collaboration on an unprecedented scale.
And this is what tthis case represents for me. It was filed on my behalf, a South African, by the ACLU and other U.S. organizations. The lawyers are American, the plaintiffs are Americans. The cause is the right of these Americans to hear and speak with a South African. We are not all of one ideological persuasion. Many of those who have stood up on my behalf, I don't even know. What unites us is that we stand for principle.
And this is the fight of the future. The coming struggles for freedom will be played on the global plane and they would require progressives to build bridges and human solidarity across national, religious and ideological boundaries. Assisting in this struggle is what we can bequeath to our children. Fatima and I can leave Irfan and Zidaan assets, but these can always disappear. Principles will always be with them. At least when they think back in years to come, they can say that their old man and old lady stood up instead of folding, built bridges instead of dividing, stuck to principle instead of capitulating. They can say we were on the right side of their struggle for freedom. www.huffingtonpost.com
Letters to Strauss-Kahn on global financial reform (23 November)
(Now TWO letters have emerged for sign-on to the International Monetary Fund's leader, regarding next steps in the world financial crisis. Please choose. It's true that the second letter has more signatories - the first only has mine - but maybe that will change in coming hours.)
LETTER 1) Please consider signing this letter which urges the IMF Managing Director, Mr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, to boycott the Doha Review Conference on Financing for Development.
Deadline is Monday November 24, by 3 pm US Eastern time. (Please send sign-on endorsement to pbond@mail.ngo.za)
Background While initially scheduled to attend the Doha Financing for Development (FfD) Review in Doha, the IMF Managing Director Mr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn has hinted he is no longer planning to attend.
This is most fortunate, especially given the extraordinary influence that had earlier been given to the IMF in the FfD drafting process, and the counterproductive nature of the FfD process to date. By withdrawing representation at the highest level, the gesture would send a political signal that seeks to distance the IMF from the UN process, as it enters into critical matters of reform of international finance and at a very critical juncture in the negotiations addressing such issues at this moment in New York.
That distancing would give some hope that the new team at the UN - especially left and centre-left advisors to General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann (including Joseph Stiglitz, Jomo KS, Maude Barlow, Leonardo Boff, François Houtart, Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, Richard Falk and Howard Zinn) - can break through the inherited FfD nonsense and come up with a genuine alternative to the Bretton Woods 2 elite project of financial system relegitimisation begun at the G20 meeting on November 14-15 in Washington.
The letter:
Mr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn Managing Director International Monetary Fund
Dear Mr. Strauss-Kahn,
We, the undersigned, are writing to urge you to boycott the Doha Review Conference on Financing for Development.
On November 29, governments of the world will gather in Doha, Qatar, to reassert their 2002 Monterrey Consensus commitments to “eradicate poverty, achieve sustained economic growth and promote sustainable development as we advance to a fully inclusive and equitable global economic system,” and evaluate progress.
We know that then, as now, these words are fakery. We know that in reality, globalisation and more rapid trade/investment/financial integration have generated worsening inequality, exclusivity and ecological degradation. We know that military expenditures have exploded, and that in the last two years, OECD aid payments to the South are dramatically lower - and we know such payments consist overwhelmingly of 'phantom aid' in any case. We know that the IMF has also spent the period since Monterrey squeezing debt payments out of wretched countries and imposing old-fashioned structural adjustment programmes, including on your very few new borrowers like Hungary (whose civil servants you recently denied a 13th cheque this year as part of loan conditionality). We know that most middle-income countries that could afford to, began rejecting your advice and repaying IMF loans early, leaving your institution in the red, forced to privatise 15% of your economists. The fact that only a few weeks ago your institution was called the Turkish Monetary Fund - in honour of your sole major borrower - meant that you are fortunate now, to potentially be rescued as a lender by the worst financial crisis since 1929.
The Monterrey process was unique in that it represented a new and fresh type of fakery, one that sought to confuse and distract delegates from governments, global institutions with different economic responsibilities, such as the one you head, development responsibilities, civil society and the private sector. Its multi-stakeholder nature generated the banal, meaningless blather - with no accountability - that we inevitably encounter in global policy-making in a changed - and changing - world.
After all, since the 1996 Montreal protocol banning ChloroFluoroCarbons, there has not been any substantial progress made in global governance venues on any of the major issues confronting the world, including militarism, trade, United Nations governance, Bretton Woods Institution reform, the climate crisis, nuclear non-proliferation, nonrenewable resources depletion, racism, gender discrimination, and so on.
More importantly, in the collective agreement to build those bridges at the global level, Monterrey also paved the ground for talking left and walking right at the domestic levels of governments. In the South, finance ministers returned from the 2002 conference in Mexico full of self-important, inflated rhetoric, which (along with the temporary commodity boom from 2002-08) allowed them to confuse local constituencies into believing that taking more Washington Consensus medicine would lead to more generous financing terms.
In the North, aid ministers could continue going to G8 conferences - especially Gleneagles in 2005 - making empty promises they knew from experience in Monterrey would not be taken seriously except by naive journalists and NGOs. The roles of the IMF and World Bank were relegitimised, in the immediate wake of a period of deep crisis, during the late 1990s Asian fiasco, when your institution was considered the most destructive economic force in the world, not counting US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers (now a renewed threat as chief economic advisor to US President-elect Barack Obama).
In this sense, the Monterrey Consensus represented not a static, one-off event, but a dynamic one. It established an innovative process for dialogue: dynamic enough to allow for the adjustments that any learning process brings, but solid enough to ensure the continuity of a global partnership. Such a partnership continues to be premised upon coopting foolish Third World politicians and civilised society from international NGOs.
Indeed, the global partnership between elites and aspirant elites is crucial to distracting more serious initiatives - mainly by a sometimes uncivil society - for progressive social change premised not on a ridiculous harmony model, but on recognition of a logical conflict between neoliberal/neoconservative rulers and capitalists on the one side, and the mass of the world's people and our environment on the other.
By not attending the Doha FfD meeting, you will offer a chance to transcend the Monterrey partnership, so that a genuine alliance of left and centre-left forces can be built up, to battle the degradation associated with financial crisis and worsening austerity, that is now beginning to be felt around the world, especially if the Obama government attempts to revive neoliberal imperialism as might reasonably be anticipated by his senior appointments.
Though unforeseen at that time, the Doha Review Conference will take place at a time when debunking the global governance myth is more crucial than ever. A global financial crisis, the largest anyone alive has seen, is threatening to undo globalisation's destructive march, but only if common-sense steps are taken to weaken the existing Bretton Woods Institutions and all that they represent. The Conference also takes place amidst global crisis in food, energy and climate. The Monterrey follow-up offers the best hope of generating confidence in national states' abilities to reverse their vulnerability to global finance.
That will require harvesting the broad-based knowledge, ownership, and political support that a response to these exceptional times calls for, and drawing upon positive recent national experiences such as default on illegal/illegitimate debts (as did Argentina in 2002 and as Ecuador now intends), successful imposition of exchange controls (as did Malaysia in 1998 and Venezuela in 2003), and financial reregulation and bank nationalisation (as are so many countries doing now). Recognition that national governments must regain control over financial systems and in the process must delink their economies from the most destructive characteristics of global finance, is to recall what Keynes himself advised: let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national (Yale Review, 22, 4, 1933, p.769).
But developing such insights within the notoriously repressive conference venue at Doha - where in 2001 the World Trade Organisation received a temporary new lease on life - can only work if the most dogmatic, reactionary partners leave the table. In spite of the name of the political party from which you hail, the French 'Socialist Party', you qualify. Your institution's advice (in an Article IV consultation) to South Africa on 22 October, for example, was to persevere with steps to open the economy to greater international competition, just days after the most extreme outflows of finance in many months, at a time South Africa's current account deficit was so great that international agencies were lowering its credit rating. This is the kind of Old Washington perspective that should be missing from Doha, if a solid new global financial architecture, built on the existing powers of national states, is to be constructed.
It is, therefore, with the utmost concern that we write to you to urge you to boycott the Doha Financing for Development Review. We understand you are seriously considering not to attend this conference, even though you had committed at a very early stage. We believe were you to go ahead with this threat, it would send the correct signal about the seriousness with which the IMF takes the challenges that we face, and how it perceives its role as a heretofore utterly destructive force against the international community of nations and organizations. Your boycott of Doha would certainly allow for new, more effective leadership in global financial crisis response efforts.
Sign-on letter urging IMF Managing Director to boycott Doha FFD Review
Deadline is Monday November 24, by 3 pm US Eastern time.
Background
While initially scheduled to attend the Doha Financing for Development Review in Doha, the IMF Managing Director Mr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn has hinted he is no longer planning to attend.
This is very unfortunate and difficult to explain, especially given the extraordinary influence that has been given to the IMF in the drafting process (in fact, the IMF is on record making suggestions on the same footing with member states, even though only member states are supposed to formally make drafting suggestions and even though its intervention, with such representation regime, means an unfair advantage for some large developed countries in the negotiation). By withdrawing representation at the highest level, the gesture would send a political signal that seeks to undermine the strength of the UN process as it enters into critical matters of reform of international finance and at a very critical juncture in the negotiations addressing such issues at this moment in New York.
The letter:
Mr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn Managing Director International Monetary Fund
Dear Mr. Strauss-Kahn,
We, the undersigned, are writing to urge you to attend the Doha Review Conference on Financing for Development. On November 29, governments of the world will gather in Doha, Qatar, to reassert their 2002 Monterrey Consensus commitments to “eradicate poverty, achieve sustained economic growth and promote sustainable development as we advance to a fully inclusive and equitable global economic system,” and evaluate progress.
The Monterrey process was unique in that it represented a new and fresh type of multilateralism, one that sought to build bridges across governments, global institutions with different economic responsibilities, such as the one you head, development responsibilities, civil society and the private sector. Its multi-stakeholder nature generated the open, fresh approach needed for facing the challenges of global policy-making in a changed—and changing-- world. More importantly, in the collective agreement to build those bridges at the global level it also paved the ground for building those bridges at the domestic levels of governments.
In this sense, the Monterrey Consensus represented not a static, one-off event, but a dynamic one. It established an innovative process for dialogue: dynamic enough to allow for the adjustments that any learning process brings, but solid enough to ensure the continuity of a global partnership.
Though unforeseen at that time, the Doha Review Conference will take place at a time when those principles and commitments are more relevant than ever. A global financial crisis, the largest anyone alive has seen, is threatening to undo progress in poverty reduction and achievement of MDGs of several decades. The Conference also takes place amidst global crisis in food, energy and climate. The Monterrey follow-up offers the best hope of harvesting the broad-based knowledge, ownership, and political support that a response to these exceptional times call for. But it cannot work without all the partners at the table.
It is, therefore, with the utmost concern that we write to you to urge you to attend the Doha Financing for Development Review. We understand you are seriously considering not to attend this conference, even though you had committed at a very early stage. We believe were you to delegate this responsibility, it would send the wrong signal about the seriousness with which the IMF takes the challenges that we face, and how it perceives its role as a partner in solidarity with the international community of nations and organizations. It would certainly undermine its claims to leadership in global financial crisis response efforts.
Sign-on letter urging IMF Managing Director to attend Doha FFD Review
Name (country)
SAYOUTY El Hassan Savini lorenzo Sabine Mèdétadji (Benin) Jean-Pierre Dégué Social Watch Bénin Elsa Duhagon (Uruguay) David Obot (Uganda) Arjun Karki Abdulkadir Khalif Sh. Yusuf (Somalia) Verena Winkler Belgium Soeurs Unies à l'Oeuvre Thomasia Agbodjogbé Social Watch Bénin SEP Nouvelles Perspectives Afrique (Bénin) Sabine Mèdétadji Social Watch Roberto Bissio Coastal Development Partnership (CDP), Bangladesh M M Mahbub Hasan NURRU David Obot LDC Watch Arjun Karki Center of Concern Aldo Caliari VOICE/ Bangladesh Ahmed Swapan Somali Organisation for Community Development Acti EUROSTEP Belgium EEPA Belgium New Rules for Global Finance Coalition United Stat Soeurs Unies à l'Oeuvre Coastal Development Partnership (CDP) Network of Ugandan Researchers and Research Users Somali Organisation for Community Development Activ
Eskom and World Bank sowing the seeds of destruction
I’ve had 
Patrick Bond, speaking at Occupy COP17, 10th December 2011
Nature’: Web 2.0, Social Media and the Political Economy of Conservation, 25 April