This is what democracy looks like

Bayview flat dwellers resist the installation of pre-paid meters

In a heated exchange yesterday morning Bayview flat dwellers drove eThekweni Municipality contractors out of Bayview when they arrived to install pre-paid electricity meters.

Bayview flat dwellers had not been consulted about the pre-paid meters and refused their installation. As one resident stated bluntly, “We can not afford to have to pay for electricity. The meters have only R5 credit. It’s the middle of the month. When that R5 runs out what are we suppose to do for the rest of the month?”

While residents managed to avert the installation of the meters, the battle was not yet over. In an antagonistic move later that afternoon, the municipality cut power from ten blocks of flats in Bayview housing 36 families. Many of the flat dwellers who had their electricity cut were in good standing and had their electricity bills paid in full.

After waiting hours for power to be reconnected, over 200 Bayview flat dwellers descended upon the home of councilor T. Palan, demanding he emerge from his home and address the people who had voted him to power over these disconnections.

Chanting “This is what democracy looks like” flat dwellers sat in the street waiting for some admission that the councilor would live up to his promises. At a community meeting just the day before Palan had promised to take seriously the concerns of Bayview flat dwellers. By Monday, residents were shocked and outraged that plans had gone ahead to install the pre-paid meters and further, that their power had been illegally cut by the municipality.

Councilor Palan did not emerge from his house to address the crowd.

Late into the evening word finally came through that officials had reconnected electricity to the ten blocks of flats. The crowd erupted in cheers, disbursing only after delivering a memorandum which issued a vote of no-confidence to councilor Palan.


For more information about the ongoing situation in Bayview contact:
Brandon Pillay 072 283 7746
Orlean Naidoo 072 67102901

Eviction looms for residents of Crossmoor

Urgent action is planned over the next few days as members of the Crossmoor community prepare to resist eviction from the land they have been living on for the last nine months. The courts will hear the cases of 110 residents who have contested the eviction on the grounds that they have nowhere else to go. They continue to occupy the open field where their shacks once stood, under blazing sun and pouring rain. March 1st the city is slated to forcibly evict everyone left looking for shelter on this land. The community has vowed not to give up without a fight.

In mid-February, after nine months of hoping that justice would grant them even the most basic form of shelter, the residents of Crossmoor shack settlement were served with eviction notices. Only 13 shacks remained standing after protection services demolished the houses of the 380 residents who had been living there. Since August people remained on the land in whatever way they could: out in the open field, sleeping in the bush, hiding for shelter in the stairwells of nearby flats, or seeking refuge in the homes of kind neighbours in the area. "We are not animals. We cannot live out here in the bush! We are tired,” expressed community leader, Fundise.

Only one toilet stands on the site and there is no water. Local residents donate water and electricity when they can. In an area where many people don't have a lot to begin with, the strain is beginning to take its toll on the community and patience is at a breaking point.

And patience is about all the consolation Crossmoor residents have at the moment. The High Court once again postponed their case against the city for illegally demolishing their shacks. In December, they were told they would have to wait until May, nearly six months, before their case would be heard. In the meantime, 24 hour private security guards were hired by the city to keep watch over the settlement, ensuring that not a single new structure was erected. Not even a tarp for protection from the rain or the scorching sun. It was under these conditions that eviction notices were served, stating that the remaining 13 shacks would now go to, and everyone would be forcibly removed.

Surooj, who was one of the first residents of this settlement and who was lucky enough to remain in one of the 13 shacks, was evicted from her former residence when she lost her job and was unable to pay the rent. She said she was angry and depressed when she got the news that the city was going to evict her from the shack she had built in Crossmoor on March 1st.

"We are going to contest the evictions. What can we do? We are desperate. The conditions are bad, it's not healthy living for us at all – one toilet – but there is not much we can do."

February 7th, only days after the eviction notice was served, residents lined up throughout the evening to help each other sign individual letters of contestation against the eviction. They were deposited the following morning to the High Court and to the city's attorneys, each telling the story of how they have no where else to go.

But serving contestations to their eviction felt like too little for many of those left homeless and sleeping in the open air. As one community member decried, “"We are here about one year now. We tried to build our shack but they broke them down. They can't just broke our shacks down because we are the poors…Tonight we will rebuild our shacks. It's the only thing we can do.”

In desperation many of those who had been left homeless attempted to rebuild shacks. Working together from dusk till dawn a number of new, sturdy shacks were constructed for those who had no choice left but to try to find some kind of shelter. Within hours of the rising sun the police and Protection Services reacted with vengeance.

One father was setting the final touches on a rudimentary shelter for his wife and their three young children when Protection Services brutally axed apart their home. Sleepless and at the end of his rope, he gathered together a small piece of foam and bent it into an upside-down ‘V’ to protect his small infant and 2 year-old from the sweltering mid-morning sun.

“I will just have to start again. I have no roof to put over my children’s head’s tonight,” he lamented, staring at the shattered remains of the home he tried to give his family. Before coming to Crossmoor they had been living in a car.

Anxiously people tried to save their homes from destruction, including pensioners, young women and families with small children. They were met with gunfire as Protection Services and the police shot rubber bullets indiscriminately into the crowd. One man was shot in the chest and the hand.

After demolishing the last hope for shelter many of these people had in a callous show of insensitivity the 'servants of the community' returned that afternoon and set ablaze the materials that remained from the destructed shacks.

With little hope of successfully rebuilding and no where else to go things are looking very bleak in Crossmoor. But Crossmoor residents have decided that they will not leave without a fight. Many have said they will die on the land rather than be forced out.

The demands being articulated in Crossmoor are for shelter at its most minimal level: the demand for a house in this situation is a demand for the most basic ability to place even a tarpaulin over one's head. To fight for the right not just to a house, but for a shack, for a plastic sheet, for shelter from the elements. And again we see the city operate in such distasteful ways, as though the poor are expendable, beyond the law, living in a state of exception. Crossmoor reminds us of the growing number of people who are not only being denied access to water, electricity and decent homes, but who are being denied the very right to life itself.

Where does the city think these people will go? The battle will not end on March 1st. The residents of Crossmoor will not leave this land quietly. They have no choice but to resist.

sub_mare

We won't pay to discuss our own poverty!

Activist interventions into the 'open space' of the World Social Forum


"The World Social Forum is suppose to be a space for us, but we are denied entry if we can't pay the 500ksh ($7us). We shouldn't have to pay to discuss our own poverty!" decried David Odhambo Ayimo, a local activist from the Nairobi slums on day two of the World Social Forum in Nairobi. About 300 people had gathered outside the gates of the Kasarani sports complex. Comrades from South Africa and elsewhere joined Nairobi activists to demand free entry to the WSF for Kenyans.

Trevor Ngwane from the Anti-Privatization Forum spoke to the crowd. "We are very unhappy that the local people of Kenya cannot go in here, because this World Social Forum is about poor people, about the unemployed, about the working class."

Singing and chanting the group marched through the gates erupting in jubilant cheering as entry was gained. This simple, but concrete action won the spontaneous coalition's first victory. As the action died down, Orlean Naidoo from the Westcliff Residents Association in Durban told her newly found Nairobi comrades "I don't want to be inside with the NGO types, but out here with the real people who are suffering the same things we have at home in South Africa."

Later that afternoon, in the occupied offices of the Secretariat, answers were demanded from Professor Edward Oyugi about the high entrance fees, the telecommunications corporation CelTel's monopoly at the forum, volunteer mistreatment and the high prices for food and water.

"If we said all poor people could come to Kasarani for free," Oyugi explained, "I can tell you, there would be no space here to walk." The crowd erupted: "But that's what want! That is what the World Social Forum is all about! Another world is possible!"

"We learned socialism from you, and now it is the students who must teach the teacher?"

By day four, the protests had moved to the Windsor Hotel food-vending tent, which was owned by the notorious Minister of Internal Security, where exorbitant prices made food inaccessible for Kenyans and others on a limited budget.

Falsely described in some local reports as a group of "40 street children who raided the tent of a food caterer" and who prompted "anarchist chaos", the group was large and diverse. Those who spoke had a clear anti-capitalist message.

Frances O., one of the more vocal young activists, spoke directly to the WSF participants who were enjoying cappuccinos under the tents of the exclusive Windsor Hotel restaurant. "They are stealing from us! They are selling water. Next they will be selling air. This is suppose to be the World Social Forum, not the World Capitalist Forum!" The activists included many new faces from those I'd seen at the other protests, yet they were equally loud, passionate and principled in their analysis.

"Join us!" implored Frances. "This is not right". Very few WSF participants stood up from their shaded seats to stand in solidarity with the protest.

Assumptions early on that perhaps there 'weren't any Kenyan social movements' was further maintained as the protesting activists were depicted as disgruntled hooligans and 'poor people from the slums'. The activists became a sideshow, like the other cultural performers on display in Nairobi -- discussed and observed – from a distance, and preferably over a Tusker beer or a Kenyan coffee under the shade of the Windsor Hotel tent. The principle that the forum was "opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital" was understood differently indeed.


Even without the physical solidarity of the majority of WSF participants concessions were won, yet it was sad and ironic that these concessions had to be demanded from the forum itself.

I admit that I felt hopeful, at least, with these young people, and ran around with a camera trying to capture their energy and message. At the same time, hope was mixed with sadness.

These battles are not rhetorical, as was starkly clear to me as I watched a group of five men split the 'spoils' from the 'pillaged' food stalls. A single packet of sugar was shared out between them, one man studiously pouring small portions of sugar into each outstretched hand. Is this the socialism we imagined to be taking place at the WSF?



Open Space or a farce of solidarity?

Something certainly felt wanting in Nairobi. There can be little doubt that domination of the formal WSF space by church groups and large NGOs (and one felt there was more than a tinge of nepotism and patronage in these relationships) sapped out some of the more radical analysis in favor of developmentalist agendas. It may also have been the significantly fewer number of young people at this forum (only 250 in the youth camp in Nairobi compared to 30,000 in Porto Alegre) that robbed the space of creative energy and fresh insight. There was also the much discussed visible lack of Kenyans in many of the panels I attended, likely due to the high entrance fees.

Regardless of the possible reasons, the under-representation of Kenyans and African social movements was stark, especially in contrast to the domination of Northerners. I must agree with Firoze Manji's remarks that "one couldn't help feel the absence of politics" during a week in which "social movements from the South were conspicuous by their numerically small presence at the forum".

In this light, focusing on the disruption caused by Kenyan activists around the exclusion of the poor from the Nairobi WSF becomes clearer. Of course the protests created a media spectacle, appreciated by activists and journalists hungry for 'action'. But it is not just for the spectacle of their struggle that the protests emerged as an important way in which to understand the WSF in Kenya. It also made stark the contradictions, bored rhetoric, complacencies and omissions in how the space is being actualized.

The WSF's principle of creating "an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate" and "free exchange of ideas…by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism" looks good on paper, but is it possible within the current depoliticized construction of the forum? It is a negligent optimism that imagines that when you open the doors (more or less, as some fees apply) you erase the structures of capitalism that mark our interactions not only within the world but within our organizations, our lives and our relationships. (And, please, don't open the doors too widely, because we'd be swamped with the masses!)

An 'open space' is of course a space where contestations can, and should, occur. Yet it is telling that many of our comrades from Nairobi spent so much time and energy demanding entry into the forum rather than building links, exchanging ideas, discussing the issues they face, and solidifying networks. The mere struggle to access the space, to eat and to drink water became central preoccupation around the WSF for many of the poorest activists in Kenya.

Clearly, the WSF is not truly a space for those struggling to survive or to find solutions towards sustaining bare life at any immediate level. When confronted by the actual masses and the lessons, struggles, and ideas that they might bring to the table, 'we' (the elite which travels the world to attend these meetings), watch unmoved, as 'they' divide up the sugar.

If we are honest, we must either claim that there is no role for the 'poor' in this space, no means to strategize with a starving person, or that we have failed in the project, even the miniscule one, of finding adequate ways to speak to one another and build together in contexts like this one. Kenyan social movements may have had something to say about the struggle for a better world beyond poverty, but what ironically blocked them from saying it was their very poverty itself.

Within a terrain organized to include petty capitalists, exploited workers, market forces, Northern domination, academic and NGO supremacy, and the disempowered poor, we must admit the Left looked like a caricature of itself. It is a zone of bad faith. We have created a carelessly, callously, exclusionary space. And for those that do consider themselves part of the masses (such as the Orlean's and Trevor's amongst us) the battle in these moments becomes one of asking for concessions from the WSF, not from neoliberalism.

Tragically, when we have a space in which we could actualize another possible world, we fail miserably, barely even making a gesture towards creating something outside this political economy. We assume on a micro-level the structures and inequities of capital with only a minor amount of apprehension. If this is the way that world might look, I'm not sure I'm interested.

I don't know that it's not even more of an ironic tragedy that while the gleaming towers of multi-nationals remain untouched, and while Davos goes ahead without protest, the organizers of the WSF come under attack and the food vendors in Nairobi have their packets of sugar appropriated. If the WSF is not a vehicle of struggle, not part of a program of action between these players and movements, it's telling that it becomes hobbled with expectations of something better within its very interior. Petitions and grievances from the poorest among us are starting to seem best brought to the foot of the WSF and a Left who hasn't done much for them lately and is promising nothing.

Realities like these may be one indicator for why attendance of WSF has been declining. The actions of the Nairobi activists peeled away the veneer of 'commonality within difference' to show our disabilities around actualizing a creative space in which that is possible. 'Sharing' and 'coming together' is depoliticized, missing the power at work in any space and therefore replicating it. Celebrating horizontality without situating responsibility is a dangerous omission. Under the shade of the Windsor hotel, we must admit there is a farce of solidarity.

The contradictions that surfaced through the protests taught us very little about this 'other world' we are meant to be building. How can we digest the interactions and 'solidarities' that broke down, and will continue to break down within this style of engagement?

Of course there were many important achievements made at the WSF that shouldn't be overlooked. Still, it is important to not only romanticize our solidarity, but to analyze our exclusions. If another world is possible, ways of actually creating a responsible, politicized, horizontal space on a broad scale without reinforcing the 'world that exists' are questions that linger for me post-Nairobi.

*Pictures by Lenore Cairncross