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…The ANC’s return from exile and entrance into political negotiations with the apartheid regime marked the opening up of a new terrain in its struggle for national liberation. From this point on, the ANC chose to use the mass struggles of workers and the poor only as a means of leveraging its position at the negotiating table… …As John Saul has elucidated, South Africa experienced a “dual transition” in the early 1990s. On the one hand, a transition from racially driven, authoritarian rule to a more democratic (institutional) system of governance; on the other, a reintegration into the global capitalist economy along neoliberal lines… …the macro-policy chosen to ensure practical redress of apartheid’s ‘developmental deficit’ is informed by an ideological disposition (i.e., neoliberalism) that seeks to realise people’s fundamental socio-economic rights by relying on those existing social forces already in dominant possession of political and socio-economic power. Not surprisingly then, the macro-economic foundation for South Africa’s transition, has provided the background to more contemporary and emergent conflicts between the state and impoverished communities centred around basic socio-economic needs/services… …The ANC leadership and many academics/researchers have claimed that the turn to a negotiated settlement and the associated embrace of the neoliberal paradigm was simply representative of a pragmatic realism given the imbalances of global economic power relations and difficult objective conditions on the ground. Such an explanation is crudely structuralist for two reasons: it ignores the possibilities that radical mass struggle, centred on the core socio-economic needs of the broad working class, had already created for fundamentally altering the balance of forces; and, it creates the false impression that the actions and strategies of the ANC had nothing to do with ideological/political choices made… …With the adoption of GEAR, the role of local government shifted from a redistributive one to an ‘enabling’, or ‘facilitating’ one (McDonald, 2002a: 4). In this way, the central social responsibility of government has become one of establishing the means for increasing redress rather than delivering access directly. Under this model, real access has come to be determined by market forces, with the state becoming the facilitator of this logic… …In the first narrative the payment boycotts of the 1980s were merely a means of leveraging the position of the liberation movement in relation to the apartheid state. The persistence in non-payment in this context has been characterised as a pathology of ‘a culture of non-payment’ that requires the intervention of the state only in restoring law and order (i.e., payment). The second narrative, in contrast, treats the commons as a fundamental part of the reproductive needs of poor communities, and the social income secured therein, as one of the few protections the most vulnerable have in relation to the capitalist market. The clash of these narratives represents the conceptual basis for the contemporary conflict between the state and communities in relation to basic socio-economic services and their ‘delivery’… …By the late 1990s, the loss of formal sector jobs, mostly affecting low-skilled, black workers in both the public and private sectors, reached in the hundreds of thousands (Bond, 2000), the ‘experience’ being accompanied by all the attendant social and economic devastation to already poor families and communities. Between 1998-2001, part-time work in South Africa increased by 31%, while full-time work fell by 8% during the same period (R. Naidoo, 2001). Simultaneously, the ANC state also implemented basic needs policies that effectively turned such needs/services into market commodities, to be bought and sold on the basis of private ownership and the profit motive… …The logical result of these developments was a huge escalation in the costs of basic services and a concomitant increase in the use of cost-recovery mechanisms such as water and electricity cut-offs that necessarily hit poor communities the hardest. As an example, between 1999-2000 over 75,000 water-cut-offs occurred in the Greater Cape Town area (McDonald & Smith, 2002: 41). In Soweto, close to 20 000 houses had their electricity supplies cut off every month during 1999 in Soweto, with Brian Johnson, the manager of the Eskom parastatal, openly boasting that, "the aim is to disconnect at least 75 per cent of Soweto residents” (Mail & Guardian, 2000). By 2000-2001, millions more poor South Africans had experienced service cut-offs and evictions (McDonald & Smith, 2002), poor sanitation, cut-offs and restricted water supplies saw over 118 000 reported cases of cholera (and 265 deaths), and three million people developed diarrhoea, as the result of the ANC’s neoliberal orgy (Ruiters, 2003: 15)… …“The rise of these movements based in particular communities and evincing particular, mainly defensive demands, was not merely a natural result of poverty or marginality but a direct response to state policy. The state's inability or unwillingness to be a provider of public services and the guarantor of the conditions of collective consumption has been (the) spark …” (Desai, 2002)… …Mandela Park. It came into being during the late 1980s, when the largely bankrupt apartheid state, under serious pressure to expand an over-populated and under-resourced urban housing infrastructure, began to encourage private banks to buy land and build mortgaged bond housing for the ever-expanding urban black population. Targeting existing and newly arrived residents of Khayelitsha, most of whom were employed in Cape Town’s huge clothing and textile industry, thousands of houses were built on the outskirts of Khayelitsha. The first residents to move in (circa 1989), none of whom had had any previous dealing with private banks, were not given title deeds but were made to sign bank-initiated housing bonds and simply told that once the bond had been paid off, they would then own the house (Interview with MPAEC women)…
…Not surprisingly, large numbers of residents in the emergent community of Mandela Park soon began to boycott payment of their bank bonds as part of nationwide anti-apartheid community struggles, under the political leadership of the ANC-aligned MDM and later, SANCO. Clearly aware of the political ramifications and potential violent conflict that would result from carrying out evictions, the banks bided their time in the hope that the inevitable demise of the apartheid system would provide them with the opportunity to make the kinds of profits that had spurred them to build the houses in the first place - they were not disappointed. After the democratic victory in 1994, the new ANC government almost immediately retreated from its pre-election promises that housing provision, services and financing would be under the direct political and administrative control of the public sector and that communities themselves would be “involved at all levels of decision-making and implementation” (RDP, 1994: 22-28)… …Ironically, it was under the stewardship of a long-time communist and new Housing Minister, Joe Slovo, that the state formed an institutional partnership with private banks (SERVCON) in order to effect post-apartheid ‘delivery’ of housing. For the banks, this was a godsend because they could now, under the cloak of political and moral legitimacy provided by the new ANC state, begin a process of recovering stalled bond/mortgage payments that would necessarily include forced evictions as a means to recover accumulated ‘housing debt’. This post-apartheid legitimation of privatised cost-recovery was further buttressed by the state’s adoption of its own cost-recovery and neoliberal trade policies, under the rubric of the GEAR programme… …Within a very short period, the MPAEC was pulling sizeable numbers of community residents into their mass meetings, with particular support emanating from the large pensioner population who remained amongst the most vulnerable. This early growth and popularity of the MPAEC was something that was largely the result of the failure of the local ANC councillors to take any meaningful action over housing evictions, despite repeated promises to do so, and their dismissive attitude to any community initiatives that were not politically and organisationally under the control of the ANC and its allies. No doubt, many residents were also angry at finding out that the local SANCO structures had cut a deal with some of the banks and had subsequently become part owners in a new joint housing venture, Khayelethu Home Loans, which had now taken over many of the housing bonds in Mandela Park and was busy evicting those in arrears (Ntanyana and Goboza, 2003)… …Over the course of the next two years, the MPAEC became embroiled in what can only accurately be described as a ‘low intensity war’ with various arms of the state and the private banks. While the specifics of the conflict that raged during this period will be dealt with comprehensively in Section 3, it is appropriate to note here that the main catalyst for the intensified conflict was the complete unwillingness of the state and the banks (mainly working through SERVCON), to listen to the voices of those in the Mandela Park community who had forged a collective and independent response, through the MPAEC, to their worsening socio-economic conditions of life… |
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