Sunday Times E-Edition

Beware ANC’s ruthless kleptocrats Lindiwe Mazibuko

The ruling party has shown it lacks the will or moral conviction to right the wrongs of apartheid, writes

Gasa is a researcher, writer and analyst on land, gender, political and cultural issues

Driving past the bleak shack settlements near Cape Town International Airport, the Uber driver asked: “Do you think the government has given up?” I looked around and thought of Frantz Fanon’s description of such settlements as the “gangrene ever present at the heart of colonial domination”.

Like many black families of their era, my family lived around Cape Town, first in Hope Street and then Emasakeni shack settlement in Retreat, then Langa and finally Gugulethu. Their movements were linked to the emergence of apartheid and the Group Areas Act.

When they lived in shacks, both sides of my family regarded them as “home”. There was nothing impermanent about them, just as there is nothing informal about the so-called informal settlements that snake around the cities of this continent and the Global South. For people who live in these places, some for generations, these are homes.

In Cape Town, like everywhere else, the development of urban shack settlements was both a necessity and political protest. Many of us remember the political campaigns of the 1980s that gave birth to the newer townships and shack settlements. When the apartheid government tried to forcibly move people to a new township, Khayelitsha, they protested and said “Asiyi eKhayelitsha” (we are not going to Khayelitsha), partly because Khayelitsha was far from work and had no infrastructure or amenities.

Equally important, people’s refusal was part of resistance against the apartheid state. Instead, led by activists, especially members of the United Women’s Organisation and the Western Cape Residents Association, they settled in KTC in Gugulethu.

Like urban settlements all over the world, these are highly contested spaces, especially for political influence and dominance. One need only think of the conflicts in Crossroads and KTC in the 1980s. Of course, those conflicts were largely engineered by the apartheid government and depicted as “blackon-black violence”. Also at the core of these conflicts was an intense struggle for land and resources. In the 1980s African people met every attempted forced removal by taking land and opening new areas of settlement.

Now, 28 years after the first democratic elections and 26 years after adoption of the constitution, my Uber driver asks if the government has given up. The ANC policy conference documents offer no evidence that the party is grappling with urban land questions or the rethinking of spatial design and inequality.

This is despite a vast body of work by researchers, policy specialists and various experts on the legacy of apartheid geography and spatial inequality, some paid for by the government.

This includes research by the Kgalema Motlanthe high-level panel, which made extensive recommendations on how to rectify the patterns of the past that “marginalised black people to the outskirts of the cities and the Bantustans in order to preserve key assets, economic opportunities and the wealth of the country for the white minority”.

Instead, professing a commitment to “fundamentally transforming South Africa” for the past 28 years, the ANC has reproduced the same apartheid spatial design in urban and rural South Africa.

Unfortunately, amid the noise about the “limitations of the constitution”, “land” and “expropriation”, there are few concrete proposals to show the ANC is learning from the failures of almost 28 years and incorporating these insights in new proposals for addressing land redistribution, restitution, reform and development.

I do not know whether the government has given up, but I know that the ANC is alienated from most people in this country, especially poor people, who only continue voting for the party in the hope that it will “treat us better”.

The ANC’s hostility and contempt towards the poor cannot be hidden by the “our people” rhetoric. They are expressed in violence against people who live in shack settlements and those battling tenure insecurity in the former Bantustans. They are experienced by the people of Xolobeni when the ANC, ignoring drastic environmental threats, sides with international mining conglomerates that want mining rights. People in KwaZulu-Natal confronting the Ingonyama Trust over being forced to pay leases for their ancestral lands are left to fight alone. They live with the consequences of ANC neglect and betrayal.

It is estimated that 3-million South Africans live in urban shack settlements and 17-million call the former Bantustans home; about one-third of the country’s population. In the cities, these people have no substantive land rights, and in the former homelands they have no security of tenure. The ANC has failed to come up with relevant legislation or implement sound policies.

The government has failed to meet its own targets on all aspects of section 25. Now the much touted 30% land redistribution target has been shifted to 2030. It has long been clear that the ANC government lacks the political and moral conviction to address fundamental issues, especially land. It does not

For more than two decades people have been building emancipatory politics from the ground up ... any party that comes to power must engage with these movements

understand all the layers and intricacies of the land question, especially as they affect people in rural and peri-urban areas.

Its national conference is based on weak policy preparation and leadership candidates whose actions have been detrimental to poor people. It does not care, nor understand, how its actions affect the poor. That is why people who have been implicated in corruption are among the candidates for top positions.

Given the ANC’s disarray and that opposition parties are either hostile or silent on land in communal areas, what can be done?

First, we must learn to listen and look beyond our comfort zones and habitual lines of thought. For more than two decades people have been building emancipatory politics from the ground up and mobilising movements of landless people and shack dwellers. They have been fighting in the courts and in the streets for their rights to land, dignity and clean air in urban and rural South Africa.

Forcing the ANC and any other party that comes to power in 2024 to listen and engage with these movements is the only way to forge a better future.

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2022-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

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