Press Reminder: N2 Gateway Communities march Thursday morning

23 07 2008
Anti-Eviction Campaign Press Statement
Wednesday, 23 July, 2008
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Event: March for community control over the housing process
Time: 10am
Date: Thursday July 24th, 2008
Location: Assemble in Keizergragt Street (march to Provincial Department of Local Government and Housing)
Transport: Free Metrorail trains for march from 9am-3pm
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Cape Town — All three communities affected by the N2 Gateway fiasco - the pet national housing project of Lindiwe Sisulu - will be marching tomorrow morning to claim that they are not stupid, that they can think, that they must be at the centre and in control of any housing policy that effects them.  Communities are tired of the government’s authoritarian way of governing.  This is not a protest about lack of service delivery, but a protest about the undemocratic structure of government.

Communities are calling on government to end the privatisation of services to private companies like Thubelisha Homes and Trafalgar Properties.  Communities are marching to Provincial Department of Local Government and Housing to claim service delivery as their own and to mandate government to carry out the wishes of the people in the manner the people decide.

  1. Housing is not an excuse to evict shackdwellers.
  2. Sustainability is not an excuse to raise rents on shoddily constructed flats.
  3. Order is not an excuse to violently evict families who have nowhere else to go.

We are marching to claim our right to dignity! We are marching to claim our right to humanity! We will assert our right to express ourselves despite government’s attempts to silence us and prevent us from being heard!

Phansi Forced Removal! Phansi High Rent! Phansi Privatisation!

For more information:

Ashraf Cassiem
Mncedisi Twalo
Gary Hartzenberg

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Politics at stake: a note on stakeholder analysis

23 07 2008
July 2008
Mark Butler and David Ntseng

People in government, business, and political and civil society organisations routinely talk about ’stakeholders’. They do exercises in stakeholder analysis to inform their ’strategic planning’. Invariably they use the stakeholder language to advertise claims about the inclusivity of their thinking, their processes, and their practice. The organisation we work with was asked recently to prepare an input for a ’stakeholder analysis’ for a collegial NGO and this forced us to reflect on why we were so uncomfortable with the very idea. We presented some of our thinking as the basis for discussions at the NGO meeting. It was good that there was a mix of people there including grassroots militants as well as civil society employees. The note below includes some thoughts we had prepared, as well as things we learned from people at the meeting. It outlines why we conclude that the stakeholder discourse, and the practices that go along with it, are in fact part of an order that functions to exclude and silence. For those at the meeting who came from grassroots formations, it was clear that this approach fitted very much with their analysis and experience. Summarising their key points, it was said that the stakeholder approaches exclude, enslave, silence and demobilise. The combined effect is to try and reduce their struggles to what can be managed within the terms set by the rich and powerful.

Stakeholders = those who count. Emancipatory Politics = made by the uncounted.

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