Residents have vowed to continue their protest against the eviction of a poor family and against Thursday’s police brutality that has left 3 residents seriously injured. Residents will submit a petition to police today and fight for the rights and dignity of resident’s vulnerable to greedy banks and politicians.

Wednesday

As we saw all over the news, on Wednesday the 13^th, the Sheriff of the Court came to E Section with police and security guards to evict Nomachina Magodla and her 7 children because the greedy banks have no interest in helping her find a way to repay her dead husband’s loan. Community members mobilised in support of the family blockading the road, burning tyres, and trying to remove the private security guards the bank has placed inside the home.

Negotiations between the community of E Section and the police on Wednesday provided no solution to the Magodla family. The community then went to night court to find relief for the Magodla family but at night court there was still no solution.

Thursday

The following day, Thursday the 14^th of April, community members went to Bellville Magistrates Court with the Magodla family to support their efforts to get back into the house. The court did not rule in the family’s favor and would not allow any stay or reversal of the eviction.

The community of E Section were not happy with these results and it became clear to them that the law protects the rich people and the banks at the expense of the poor. While the eviction was carried out by the sheriff of the court with a legal eviction order, the legal process was unfair, unjust and was based on selective reading of the Constitution and the PIE Act. In particular, the clause asserting that an eviction cannot take place unless there is adequate alternative accommodation made available to those who are evicted. Because the court did not ensure that the Magodla family had access to another place to live, the eviction is not acceptable under South African law. The South African government should help the family pay out their loan, which they are willing to pay. However, since the poor are viewed with contempt by government, Nomachina and her family will not be allowed to get their house back.

Thursday afternoon following court the community of E Section, united with anger at the banks, the government and the judicial system, gathered once again outside the home of Nomachina and reported on the events to those who had not made it to court. The community collectively agreed that the protest should continue and they resolved that no one will be allowed inside the house including security guards, government officials or police.

The community, led by a large contingent of women from the area, protested. This time, there was no burning of tyres or road blockade. Singing freedom songs and dancing, the protest was entirely peaceful until the police arrived in numbers and immediately began shooting at the community.

Three community members were seriously injured by so-called non-lethal bullets. Nkosinathi Thafeni was shot in the leg. An old man not involved in the protest and who was just passing by was also shot in the leg when the police sprayed community members with bullets.

Asive Phatiswa Gaji was shot directly in the face from close range and she remains in hospital until this day. Her injuries will have a serious long-term affect on her life.

Friday

The following day, the police came again to the community apologising and appealing to the community that they did not mean to start shooting. However for Asive, Nkosinathi, the old man, and everyone else who was traumatised by the incident, their words rang hollow.

Sunday

During a meeting yesterday, the community resolved to write a petition and send representatives of the community of E Section to submit their grievances at Lingelethu West Police Station

The community has resolved to keep meeting everyday to find a way forward that will help the Magodla family and also help other families in the area who are under threat of eviction.

With the support of community members from all over Khayelitsha including QQ Section, TR Section, Makhaza, Mandela Park and other Abahlali baseMjondolo and Anti-Eviction Campaign communities, E Section residents have decided that they will not vote until their grievances are resolved. They have no interested in politicians who are out campaigning and lying to them. Government officials must come to them to resolve their issues at hand: evictions, lack of service delivery, electricity cut-offs, etc. If they come to the community to campaign, they will be kicked out.

Monday

There will be a mass meeting in E Section after 5pm to discuss the way forward. People are welcome to attend in solidarity.

Police and government contempt for the poor

It is clear to us now that the majority of the elite, of government officials and of police have contempt for the poor. To them we are not human beings and we deserve to be evicted, shot and made homeless. To them we are not quite civilised, we are lazy, and we have a culture of non-payment and of violence. But we are none of these things. We are force into rebellion because our jobs are taken away from us, because our homes are taken away from us, and because those from above continue to try to take away our dignity.

In the past few weeks, there have been an increase in evictions all over the Western Cape. The Magodla family is only one example. We have received reports of evictions all over Khayelitsha, Philippi, Gugulethu, etc. The Gugulethu AEC has a list of evictions they have prevented in the Gugulethu area – many of them at the insistence of the big 4 banks. In Gugulethu though, it seems that Standard Bank stands out as the most serious perpetrator of evictions of the poor. But all the banks just want the same thing in the end: money.

On Thursday (unlike Wednesday), the police were out of control. Perhaps they got the message from Zuma and Cele that police can act with impunity just as they did in Ficksburg. But then again, Ficksburg is no anomaly: there were over 1,000 deaths at the hands of SAPS in South Africa last year. The only thing Ficksburg showed us is that on rare occasion police violence might be caught on SABC for the entire country to see.

When will government take action against the banks who are destroying our communities?

When will government take police violence against protesters seriously?

Most police come from poor communities. But most police carry out the directives of the rich, the elite, and the corporations like Standard Bank. We therefore ask police to respect us in the same way that we respect them when they take to the streets in protest at their horrible working conditions, low pay, and substandard training. We ask that police who come from poor communities be in solidarity with us and not allow their managers to force them to shoot-to-kill. All they are doing is killing their own sisters and brothers.

As the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, we send out our condolences and solidarity to the family of Andries Tatane, the community of Ficksburg, and all other communities who have had their friends and neighbours shot and killed during protests since 1994.

For more information, contact these residents of E Section:

• Mrs Thafeni, Mrs Gulubela and Mrs Njengele @ 0829715840 (witnesses/victims)
• Nomachina Magodla @ 0797475592
• Also contact Mncedisi Twalo from the WC-AEC @ 0785808646

Shocking images of police brutality were broadcast to the nation on television yesterday – they showed an unarmed man being beaten to death by a mob of policemen.

Pictures of the attack on the 33-year-old man by at least six policemen simultaneously, during a service delivery protest at Setsoto, in Ficksburg, eastern Free State, were shown on all SABC news bulletins last night.
The visuals show how the armed policemen cornered Andries Tatane, striking him with their batons and kicking him in an assault that lasted for a few minutes.

Tatane, from Masaleng township, Ficksburg, is seen holding his hand against his chest after the assault. He collapsed about 20 minutes later and died before an ambulance arrived.

As well as being beaten, he had been shot twice.

Last night Tatane’s brother, Lefu Tatane, told The Times of the “shocking murder” of his elder brother.

“We are very angry. I can’t even describe it. He was no danger to the police or anyone. Why did they have to kill him?” said Lefu.

Tatane was part of a group of about 4000 protesters who marched to the Setsoto municipal offices yesterday morning demanding a response to a memorandum of demands they had sent to the mayor, Mbothoma Maduna, and the municipal manager, Bafana Mthembu.

The people of Setsoto, like many others across the country, are fed-up with the lack of services in their area and demanded that Maduna and Mthembu speed up their provision.

According to Lefu, the demonstration had been peaceful until a rock was thrown into the crowd of protesters.

Police reinforcements were called in and, according to at least two eyewitnesses, chaos erupted when police water cannon were used against the protesters.

One eyewitness said that Tatane had jumped in front of an elderly man who was being sprayed by the water cannon.

“The only thing he did was to ask that they not spray the old man and then all hell broke loose. The next minute, police were all over Tatane. He was defenceless.”

According to his brother, Tatane sustained two bullet wounds, one to the chest and one in the back.

But the police claim that they were trying to arrest Tatane. They said they did not know who shot him.

Police spokesman Captain Phumelelo Dlamini said: “They were trying to arrest him. While he was being arrested, there was a gun shot so we don’t know who shot him but we’re going to investigate.”

Police also shot at the crowd, which, after witnessing the beating of Tatane, turned violent.

A number of witnesses said it was the police that shot Tatane.

Last night, Lefu said his brother’s wife was too distraught to talk and the family was taking her for medical treatment.

Tatane is also survived by a three-year-old child.

Maduna, the mayor of Setsoto, said: “It’s really unfortunate to have a person dying as a result [of the protests]. We regret it . it was not supposed to have happened. We will contribute towards the burial and show that we care.”

Free State Premier Ace Magashule said: “We will sit down and talk and work together [with the people of Setsoto]. We are sending condolences to the family.

Lefu said officials of the Independant Complaints Directorate visited the family home at about 3pm yesterday and would return today.

The ANC last night condemned the killing and called on Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa to set up a commission of inquiry

ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu said the police responsible for the killing should be brought to book.

“We are shocked and disgusted by what we saw on television. No reason can be raised about the behaviour of the police.

“Our people have a constitutional right to protest and the action by the police is reminiscent of the apartheid police force,” Mthembu said.

David Bruce, senior a researcher at The Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, said that there had been an increase in the number of people killed by the police in recent years.

The peak year was 2008-2009.

ICD statistics show a steady increase in complaints of serious non-fatal police violence, assault with intent to commit grievous bodily harm and attempted murder.

By Toussaint Losier
Originally published in Spanish at Desinformémonos
An earlier version of this article appeared in Left Turn Magazine

At roughly 11:30pm on September 26th, a group of 30 to 40 men – survivors are still unsure about the actual numbers –surrounded the community hall in Kennedy Road shack settlement in Durban, South Africa. Brandishing sticks, machetes, and automatic weapons and echoing the language of the state-sponsored internecine political conflict that tore through South Africa during the last years of apartheid, the mob launched an attack on a meeting of the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) Youth League taking place inside the hall. In the melee that followed, over a dozen people were injured, with four people left dead and the attackers left in control of the hall.

When called to the scene, the local police only took statements from those who now held the hall and arrested eight members of the settlement’s representative governing body, the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC), regardless of whether or not they had been in the settlement the night of the attack. The next morning, the mob that had attacked the community hall returned to the settlement with police and African National Congress (ANC) officials and proceeded to destroy and loot over two dozen shacks, all of them belonging to the elected members of the KRDC.

“We are under attack,” offered a press statement jointly released by the KRDC and AbM a week later. “We have been attacked physically with all kinds of weapons – guns and knives, even a sword. We have been driven from our homes and our community. The police did nothing to stop the attacks despite our calls for help.”

The statement continued: “What happened in Kennedy Road was a coup – a violent replacement of a democratically elected community organization. The ANC have taken over everything that we built in Kennedy Road. We always allowed free political activity in Kennedy and all settlements in which AbM candidates have been elected to leadership. Now we are banned.”

Neoliberal policy

With the African continent’s largest economy and one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, South Africa is considered by most to be a model middle-income developing country. Yet, it is nation wracked by a series of interlocking crises, from the epidemics of rape and HIV/AIDS to those of landlessness and poverty. Much of this has worsened since the mid-1990s, when then President Nelson Mandela voluntarily adopted neoliberal economic policies, in contrast to the ANC’s long held goals of nationalization and socialism. While these macroeconomic policies helped to create a small black middle class, they also contributed to ever growing inequality, with the average black citizen earning an eighth of their white compatriot in 2007. Today, South Africa is considered the most unequal country in the world, ranking lower than Occupied Palestine on the UN’s Human Development Index.

At the same time, South Africa, with its rich history of political struggle and labor militancy, also has one of the world’s highest per capita protest rates. Over the past several years, the country’s largest social movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo (Zulu for “people based in shacks”) has led it fair share of these actions. Emerging in 2005 in the Kennedy Road settlement during the course of a dispute over housing with the local ANC city councilor, the shackdwellers movement has grown to include over 10,000 paid up members in more than thirty informal settlements throughout the province of KwaZulu-Natal.

For the first two years of its existence, AbM’s mobilization efforts were met with state violence and political repression. In 2005, for example, police illegally banned their permitted demonstration and then attacked residents of the Foreman Road when they took to the streets. A year later, police arrested the movement’s President and Vice President on their way to a radio interview, beating and torturing them while in custody. In 2007, police shot at their peaceful marches. Later, the Kennedy Road Six, five of whom were elected members of the KRDC, won their release from jail after their hunger strike (all charges against them were later dropped for lack of evidence). Yet, in spite of these obstacles, some of the South Africa’s poorest citizens have built a democratic and non-partisan organization, impressive as much for its grassroots accountability and internal democracy, as its success in ensuring the participation of shackdwellers in the upgrading of their settlements.

Several weeks after the attack in Kennedy Road, this success continued when the South African Constitutional Court ruled in AbM’s favor in striking down the KwaZulu-Natal Slums Act. Passed by the province in late 2007, the bill gave the provincial minister the power to compel municipalities and private landowners to evict shackdwellers from occupied land and set the time frame in which these actions would occur. If allowed to stand, the act would have served as a template across the country. While the court only found the section giving the provincial housing minister wide latitude in initiating eviction proceeding against shack settlements, the decision remains a major victory in the poor people’s struggle for land and housing. Still in hiding, AbM’s President S’bu Zikode said the court decision “had far-reaching consequences for all the poor people in the country.”

State impunity

In the weeks that followed this most attack, Kennedy Road residents reported that those who carried them out had been left to patrol the settlements, intimidating them and threatening their leaders. ANC Branch Executive Committee officials replaced the KRDC with their own local governing body. Fearing further violence, key leaders of AbM fled the settlement and went into hiding. In the following months, AbM members who did not leave Kennedy Road have been intimidated and assaulted for not coming to ANC meetings. Few have been able to open cases against ANC members because of the support of the police and senior ANC officials. Several of these officials have publicly spoken of the government’s move to liberate’ the community from AbM and their willingness to “jail people to get development going.” There are now allegations that those who participated in the attack have not only received positions in settlement committee formed after the attacks, but also rewarded with cash from the ANC.

Following this logic, police would continue to target KRDC members, arresting 13 in total and charging them with murder and aggravated assault. At each of their bail hearings, the local ANC officials have mobilized busloads of their members, who physically threatening AbM’s supporters and demand that the ‘Kennedy Road 13’ not get bail. For more than two months, the ‘13’ had their bail hearing postponed for lack of evidence. It was only after, the Bishop of Rubin Phillip of the local Anglican diocese and other church leaders denounced their continued detention as a “complete travesty of justice” that all but five were released from prison on bail. It was only on May 14th, roughly eight months since the arrest, that the court gave the case docket to the defense attorney for the accused, including the five members still in prison, political prisoners awaiting a political trial. The trail is set to begin on July 12, a day after the 2010 World Cup tournament ends in South Africa.

While ANC officials have sought to criminalize their actions, AbM has consistently identified violence, assaults and harassment directed against them as politically motivated. This perspective has proved even more prescient as the ANC recent success in the April 2009 KwaZulu-Natal provincial elections have made it possible for local ANC officials to eliminate what they have long taken to be a potential political threat. With many of their leaders not prison still in hiding, AbM members can still not operate openly in Kennedy Road, but continues to organize in secret inside and meet every Sunday outside of it. AbM President S’bu Zikode, who was made homeless by the attacks on Kennedy Road, offered these thoughts during a university lecture entitled “Democracy on Brink of Collapse” given in October 2009: “To some leaders democracy means that they are the only ones who must exercise authority over others. For some government officials democracy means accepting anything that is said about ordinary men and women.”

“With the attack on Abahlali baseMjondolo in Kennedy Road,” he maintained, “we have now seen that this technocratic thinking will be supported with violence when ordinary men and women insist on their right to speak and to be heard on the matters that concern their daily lives. On the one side there is a consultant with a laptop. On the other side there is a drunk young man with a bush knife or a gun. As much as they might look very different they serve the same system – a system in which ordinary men and women must be good boys and girls and know that their place is not to think and speak for themselves.”

This need for ordinary men and women to think and speak for themselves is ever more pressing as South Africa prepares for the 2010 World Cup. Across the country, the government has spent millions constructing or refurbishing sports stadiums for the matches that will be played in June and July, while millions remain without access to adequate housing, potable water, and other basic services. Rather than fulfilling the promise of employment and equitable development, the World Cup has thus far provided a shot in the arm of city planners and real estate speculators who have sought to bar informal trading from Central Business Districts and clear ever-growing shack settlements to the peripheries of the city. Yet AbM has maintained its opposition to this version of democracy. In spite of a heavy police presence, several thousand members and their supporters marched in downtown Durban on March 22nd, calling not only for housing, but also human rights and justice. On May 14, as a delegation from the London Coalition Against Poverty delivered a message of solidarity to the South Africa High Commission, echoing AbM’s calls the outstanding charges against its members to be dropped and for an independent commission to investigate the attacks in Kennedy Road. Having already built up international solidarity through trips to Britain and the United States, AbM members traveled to Italy in late May to meet with other social movements, draw attention to the plight of African migrants workers in Italy, and to explain what the World Cup means for the poor in South Africa.

To make good on this goal, a branch of AbM in the Western Cape province (AbM WC) recently announced the launch of their ‘Right to the City’ campaign to develop a program of action for the World Cup. Already the province has a backlog of over 400,000 people in need of housing. In May 2009, members of this branch assisted backyard dwellers, those renting a shack on someone else’s property, to occupy prime government land in Cape Town. In response, the city’s Anti-Land Invasion police unit illegally evicted them from the land, confiscating their materials, and assaulted and arrested those it perceived to be leading the occupation. It was only after filing a court injunction against further evictions and launching other protests, including a road blockade, were those in need able to claim the land.

In the days leading up to the World Cup, AbM WC is once again demanding that the government provide quality houses for the poor inside the city, rather than tin shacks on the city’s outskirts, as has become the norm in the province’s capital of Cape Town. In addition to boycotting the World Cup, AbM WC has vowed to build shacks outside the city’s soccer stadium just before cup’s first match to draw the attention of the rest of country and the international community of needs of the poor. Unlike the attacks in Kennedy Road, how the government responds to the actions of South Africa’s militant poor will be on display for the world to see.

For more information, visit the websites of Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign. Together with the Rural Network and the Landless Peoples Movement, these organizations make up the Poor Peoples Alliance.

Saturday, 29 May 2010
Landless People’s Movement Press Statement

On Sunday 23 May residents of the bond houses in Protea South, Soweto, attacked the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) in the shacks in Protea South. They went around disconnecting us from electricity and beating those who had been connected to electricity. They tried to burn down Maureen Mnisi’s shack and two people were shot. One died on the scene.

Today the police attacked the LPM in eTwatwa, Ekurhuleni. At least three people were shot with live ammunition. One person has died and another is currently being operated on in hospital.

The background to the police attack on the LPM in eTwatwa is that on Tuesday 24 May we organised a march on the Councillor for Ward 65, Cllr Baleka. The different extensions each had their own demands but at the last point of the memorandum we all united on one demand which is that the Councillor must immediately step down. We indicated that we expected a response to our demands within seven days.

On Thursday 26 May the Provincial Government sent us a fax saying that they would meet us next Wednesday.

The situation in Extension 18 of eTwetwa is very bad. There is no electricity, no sewerage, no roads, not even water – there is nothing. The Councillor did start a project to build toilets but she said that only 717 of the 1 149 people would benefit as the rest of the people would be evicted to make way for a new road to be built by the provincial government. They want to move these people to transit areas. Obviously we cannot accept this. We have stayed in Extension 18 for many years.

We were expecting to attend the meeting with the Provincial Government on Wednesday next week. But yesterday, on Friday, Cllr Buleka, using the car of the Erkuleni Municipality drove around calling us to a meeting to be held today. But we had already suspended her. We no longer recognise her.

So today a meeting was held in the community and it was decided to go the councillor’s office. The councillor’s supporters provoked the protestors and in the end stones were thrown at her office. At 10:00 a.m. the police came and they used their guns. They used live ammunition. We have one of their bullets. They shot one woman dead. Another woman is in hospital right now having an operation.

After the shooting the people became even more angry. Some community members burnt a shack of one of the councillor’s supporters in retaliation to the murder of their comrade. The police attacked the people again and used teargas. Even more community members arrived and between ten and fifteen people were arrested by the police. The police are noe hunting all the LPM leaders from extension 18 and extension 10 in eTwatwa. We have all gone into hiding.

The ward councillor must step down. There are no services in eTwatwa and the councillor is oppressing the people, trying to stop us from organising and even supporting the plans to have us evicted to a transit area.

We are calling for Msholozi to come down. He must come down to the people, hear our anger and then act against the councillor and the police. If he refuses to do this then he is clearly the President of the politicians and not the president of the people.

The situation in Protea South is still tense. The police are around. On Thursday we had a meeting with Eskom. Eskom said that they can’t install electricity to the shacks as we are not proclaimed. It is true that the government has never proclaimed the area in which we have built our shacks. But the people have proclaimed it. Anyway, the RDP houses, the Masakhane houses and the bond houses are all on land that has been proclaimed. It is just the shack dwellers that are denied the right to stay in Protea South and denied the right to services. Eskom did say that they will launch a pilot project with one electricity pole for every 82 families. But the total number of shacks is around 6 400. One electricity pole for every 82 families is not a good enough response to our demand for electricity. If the government continues to deny us legal access to electricity we will continue to appropriate electricity for ourselves.

Protea South remains in darkness after the shack dwellers burned the transformer in response to the attempt by the residents of the bond houses, who are calling themselves the Homeowners Association, to violently disconnect us from electricity. Everyone has now been disconnected. If the poor are not allowed to have electricity why should we allow the owners of private houses to enjoy it?

The Homeowners Association continue to say that they don’t want shack dwellers here and that they want us to be removed.

Every time the government says that Operation Khanyisa – community organised electricity connections – are ‘criminal’ they turn poverty into a crime. It is the government’s criminalisation of poverty that has incited the homeowners to attack us.

Bheki Cele is the one that has called on the police to shoot to kill. When as the poor we are turned into criminals we are placed in the line of fire. When we organise to fight against oppressive councillors and for access to services the police are shooting us. But when the poor go to vote then the police are there making sure that we are safe. When we are killed by the police we hold Cele responsible.

Organised shack dwellers have to defend ourselves when we are attacked by the police, the rich or, as it happened in Kennedy Road in Durban, the ANC.

Self defence is no offence.

We are very worried about the World Cup. Billions are wasted on the World Cup, billions that should have gone to meet the most urgent need of the poor. The government tells us that we must ‘feel it’ but in Protea South we don’t even have electricity. Some of us are in hiding from the police. People have been shot and two people have died in recent days.

The government expects us to be silent to everything that has been done to us. We will not be silent.

For more information and comment please contact:

Ben Mofokeng (eTwatwa) 078 679 9435
Edward Leople (eTwatwa) 083 885 5009
Maureen Mnisi (Protea South) 082 337 4514

Contacts: Malibongwe at 074 639 9551 and Mncedisi at 078 580 8646

The Gugulethu police interrupted a peaceful protest by the Gugulethu Anti-Eviction Campaign this afternoon.  Without warning residents at all, they shot at us with rubber bullets injuring dozens and arresting many others.

The much of the crowd was made up of old women and there were a lot of children also present.  A 17 year old lady was shot in the face by the police and is now seriously injured and at the hospital.

At the moment we are not sure how many people have been shot and arrested.  We do know, however, that today the police attempted to illegally ban the public protest which has been going on since Monday.  From Monday through Wednesday, the police behaved respectuflly and helped escort us when we marched towards the mall.  Today, they would not let us march.  So a delegation of AEC activists went today to the Civic Centre in Cape Town to get a permit but we were prevented by police from entering the Civic Centre.

Why this sudden shift today in the way the police are treating us?

What we do know is that business tycoon Mzoli Ngcawuzele and councillor Belinda Landingwe have deep political connections and close friends within the Gugulethu Police.  They have oppressed our movement in the past and shot at us before.  They have arrested members of our movement and even physically threatened them through the use of local ANC thugs.

We believe that the police banned our march and then attacked us because we to big of a thorn in Mzoli’s side.  We believe that the police attack was orchestrated by Mzoli and Belinda to prevent us from exposing the truth about the corruption and nepotism at the Gugulethu Square Mall.  We believe that the police were ordered to attack us because we refused to work with the ANC’s Gugulethu Development Forum which plays party politics with our lives.

We believe that the attack on our movement corresponds with a dangerous trend in South Africa where the police are being militarised and being given political sanction to attack outspoken critics of the goverment such as the Anti-Eviction Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo (see Kennedy Road attacks).

Contacts: Malibongwe at 074 639 9551 and Mncedisi at 078 580 8646

There are now senior ANC leaders in the Kennedy Road Community Hall. In their presence the homes of the elected Kennedy Road leadership continue to be demolished and burnt by the same small group of well armed people who have been carrying out attacks with impunity for 23 straight hours. None of the people that launched the surprise,  unprovoked and heavily armed attack on the KRDC last night have been arrested and yet most of the KRDC is locked up in the Sydenham Police station (including those who were publicly performing the imfene dance in Claremont at the time of the attack).

The police are currently on the scene and are doing nothing to stop the destruction. These are the same police who have, over the years, attacked a number of peaceful and legal marches with swift, shocking (and very effective) brutality. They are very well equipped and armed. They can get the riot police to support them in just a few minutes. They can get water cannons and helicopters in a few minutes. They can call in the army if they need to. It would be supremely easy for them to stop these attacks if they wished too. The police complicity in these attacks is now entirely beyond question. It is a matter of clear and obvious and undeniable fact.

We have just heard that S’bu Zikode’s house has been demolished and his goods have been stolen. He personally requested support from the police but received none. Should we be surprised given that these are the same police that tortured him in 2007 for the crime of trying to attend a radio interview?

There is no democracy for the poor in South Africa. Abahlali have been saying this for years. Now it must be obvious to everyone. It is time that we all stopped pretending that everything is ok in our country.

Strong-armed police officers are to blame for service delivery protests that turn violent, researchers from the University of Johannesburg said on Wednesday.
While in some cases residents resorted to violence to voice their frustrations, the manner in which police responded to some situations resulted in violent clashes between them and residents, the researchers said in a study released on Wednesday.

“The cases in Balfour [Mpumalanga] and Thokoza [Gauteng] suggest that the brutal response by the police contributed to the violence whereas in other areas it was the community. Police exacerbated the problem by violent intervention,” the study revealed.

Residents from Thokoza told researcher Owen Manda that police had randomly opened fire at protesters “without any provocation” during the July protest in which they called for the immediate resignation of Ekurhuleni mayor Ntombi Mekgwe.

Residents said Mekgwe was incompetent and that she had failed to heed to the concerns of the community.

“Local council offices are not far from the hostel and the informal settlement so residents said on their way there [to hand over their memorandum of demands], they were met by police who just opened fire randomly despite residents telling them that it was a peaceful protest,” said Manda.

The research team had, however, not spoken to police about the incident.

The same had happened in Balfour where police had fired rubber bullets randomly at residents, whether they were involved in the protests or not.

“Clashes between the police and the community were first reported after police fired rubber bullets and teargas to disperse the crowd that had assembled for the meeting on July 19.

CONTINUES BELOW

“Armoured police vehicles began to patrol the township from the early hours of July 20, after a ward office had been set on fire.

“Furthermore, a youth leader told researchers that from 6am of the same day, rubber bullets were fired at random on groups of four or more people, regardless of whether or not they were involved in the protests,” the study found.

It also found that the violent protests in all these areas had not been fuelled by xenophobic tendencies.

“We feel the xenophobia issue has been exaggerated by politicians to divert attention from the main issue of service delivery.

“We didn’t find any evidence that xenophobia was the prime motivator behind the service delivery protests. While xenophobic attitudes are widespread, these protests have been primarily directed at issues pertaining to local government service delivery,” said Professor Peter Alexandra, a director at the university’s centre for sociological research.

Pakistani shop owners had attested to this, saying although their shops were looted and vandalised, they did not feel they had been targeted for being outsiders.

“The general feeling was that the protests were a result of bad governance and a lack of accountability rather than xenophobia,” junior researcher Comfort Phokela said.

The study found that residents were frustrated with their ward councillors and other local government representatives they felt were incompetent and unresponsive to their needs.

“Perceived failure at the level of local government is a significant motivating factor behind the protests that are being carried out under the rubric of service delivery and disgruntled residents are likely to continue to take to the streets until their demands for a ‘better life for all’ are met,” it said.

The protests were likely to intensify in the lead up to the 2011 local government elections. — Sapa