We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Ashwin Desai

Author:Ashwin Desai [Desai, Ashwin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: South, Africa, Political Economy, Discrimination, Social Science, Republic of South Africa, Political Science, History, Human Rights
ISBN: 9781583670507
Google: sTUUCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 558741
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2002-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

14. Fighting Neoliberalism in Soweto and Tafelsig

We don’t ask why or when people are cut off, we just switch

them back on. Everyone should have electricity.

—VIRGINIA SETSHEDI, Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee,

November 2001

It does not matter whether the Democratic Alliance or the

ANC rules Cape Town. Both will disconnect our water and evict us

because both have a policy of privatization and neoliberalism.

—Speaker at an anti-eviction rally, Cape Town, January 2002

IT WAS NOT ONLY IN DURBAN that resistance to the new government and its policies was being bred. Struggles led by independent community-based organizations flared up all over South Africa. Those closer to the action in Soweto in Gauteng and Tafelsig in the Western Cape are better able to make sense of the dramatic developments in these areas. But in the townships of Durban, Cape Town, and Johannesburg the issues were the same: cost recovery was causing government to attack its own citizens in ways reminiscent of the apartheid days.

Trevor Ngwane, a resident and activist from Pimville in Soweto, was one of those who thought that the ANC would be able to address the concerns of the poor by dealing with high service charges, high rents, and the lack of facilities. Deeply rooted in the community, he was elected as a councilor in 1995, representing the ANC. When Walter Sisulu was released from prison and went back to Soweto, he had said, “Much of Soweto has not changed since I first came to live here in the thirties … With few exceptions the matchbox houses are very much the same. A government who is not addressing the basic issue of decent housing is not seriously committed towards political change.”1

Implicit in Sisulu’s statement was that conditions in Soweto were going to improve once the ANC assumed power. But the reality was that, for many, things were going to get worse and more difficult. The ANC-dominated Johannesburg council, elected in 1995, planned to privatize as many of the council’s services as possible. This would not only lead to retrenchment of workers but would rapidly hike the price of services and cause a clampdown of unimaginable proportions on those who were too poor to pay for the meager services they were receiving. Trevor Ngwane, newly elected to that council, knew that the logic of cost recovery would not aid his constituency in Soweto and would only serve to deepen their misery. He raised his voice in opposition. He was suspended from the ANC and then expelled.

Trevor Ngwane joined with activists like Virginia Setshedi and Dudu Mphenyeke and began to organize against these policies through an organization called the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC).

Residents of Soweto were faced with a concerted policy of electricity cutoffs after the 1999 general election was won by the ANC, who had promised the exact opposite. Some twenty thousand houses had their electricity supplies disconnected every month. (Mail and Guardian, June 8, 2001). Brian Johnson, the manager of Eskom indicated that “the aim is to disconnect at least 75 percent of Soweto residents” (Mail and Guardian, April 6, 2001).

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