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Title: Collective Bargaining by Riot Author: Michael Schmidt Date: February 9, 2007 Language: en Topics: riots, Elections, South Africa Source: Retrieved on 5th August 2021 from http://anarkismo.net/article/4857 Notes: A field report on a trip transsecting South Africa’s industrial heartland and its outlying small towns on municipal election day 2006 — and an examination of who actually wields municipal power in the country — from the ZACF journal Zabalaza #7.
Seeing the police move on a single column of smoke rising from two
burning tyres over rebellious Khutsong, south-west of Johannesburg, on
March 1, local government election day, I was reminded of the Native
American warrior in Dances With Wolves remarking of the distant fire of
a frontiersman that he would not tolerate “a single line of smoke in my
own country”.
The ANC-led government in similar fashion had determined that Khutsong
would not explode on voting day; that the mockery of the vote that
occurred would be “free”, albeit an enforced peace in a township that
had driven ANC leaders out, revolting against an administrative transfer
out of Gauteng province to an uncertain future in the poverty-stricken
North-West.
So two armoured Nyalas lumbered over to the smoking tyres where
photographers were vainly trying to get a dramatic shot — but Khutsong
was virtually deserted on the morning of the vote.
The fire-gutted Gugulethu community centre was already defaced by crude
sexual, gangster — and, in what is a hopeful sign, anarchist — graffiti.
The presiding officer at the government’s Independent Electoral
Commission tent set up next to the ruin glumly told me he did not expect
a single soul to turn out to vote that day.
He proved right, with barely more than 200 out of 29,000 registered
voters exercising their hard-won right. Khutsong resident Albert Mamela
stood near the smouldering tyres and told of his dream that the people
of Khutsong — whether Zulu, Xhosa or “foreigner” — could “be like the
Bafokeng” — the tribe that owns platinum mines near Rustenburg — and
take ownership of Khutsong’s nearby gold-mines, the riches of which
seldom finds its way into local pockets.
Community ownership of the mines would render local government
irrelevant, he said: “because then we will take care of development
ourselves”. There is some healthy anti-capitalist sentiment here, but it
is also confused. The Bafokeng royal house controls the mines in
question, and exploitation carries on as before. A king makes the
economic decisions: this is not the working class ownership and control
anarchist-communists advocate .
Khutsong residents accused councillors of nepotism, the provision of
toilets that did not work and, worse in their view, not living in the
areas they supposedly represented, a common complaint. Mamela claimed
that councillors said R1,2-million had been spent on the road to the
Khutsong graveyard, whereas he knew it had only cost R800,000,
suggesting the councillors had pocketed the rest.
He suggested that Merafong mayor Des van Rooyen had, unlike previous
mayors, acquired bodyguards “because he knew what he was going to do” in
“selling” Khutsong to the North West province.
But despite the powerful emotions circulating on voting day, Khutsong
was suffering a hangover from the previous night’s celebration of the
successful boycott call and was unlikely to produce drama, so I drove on
into Gauteng, north-east to the gated suburbs of Houghton to watch
former President Nelson Mandela cast his vote.
I had far to travel, so bypassed Pimville in Soweto where the Operation
Khanyisa Movement (OKM) was contesting the elections. There was a fierce
debate in the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) over the question of
elections. Trotskyist leader, APF organiser and Soweto activist Trevor
Ngwane jumped the gun, forming the OKM as a party and political vehicle
for his career and his politics without an APF mandate. In stark
contrast to the social movements in areas such as Motsoaledi, Orange
Farm and Sebokeng stood firmly by a “no services — no vote” position
[although in Motsoaledi, this was later reversed following an internal
struggle].
Ngwane’s movement won a paid position as a councillor, based on 4,305
votes.
Ngwane did not take the seat as expected, but the OKM councillor who did
will have her lone left-wing voice drowned out by the 75 ANC and 31 DA
councillors. Working class power lies in the community and in the
workplace, not in the forums of the ruling class. Ngwane was ousted a
month later at the Anti-Privatisation Forum annual general meeting as
APF chair by Brickes Mokolo of the Orange Farm Crisis Committee — a key
figure in the anti-electoral faction of the APF. This is a hopeful sign,
for Mokolo has helped build a viable, anti-electoral strategy in that
poor settlement.
Houghton is old, genteel Joburg, replete with bowling greens, high walls
and lanes of poplar trees and oaks, gated with booms and security
guards. The old and new elites, with their black maids in tow, were
smartly lined up to cast their ballots: no burning tyres here; only the
worship of Mandela — the architect of post-apartheid neo-liberalism — as
some sort of living saint of the wealthy.
From Houghton, I drove north-east to the small diamond-mine and prison
town of Cullinan to the east of Pretoria. There, the local Freedom Front
Plus branch — Afrikaner seperatists — was hoping to oust the incumbent
Democratic Alliance neo-liberals from the Nokeng tsa Taemane
Municipality. The ANC won, but the only real excitement on the day was
when Afrikaner singer Valiant Swart happened to pass through town.
From Cullinan, I drove out to Siyabuswa in Mpumalanga, the former
capital of the apartheid-era homeland of kwaNdebele, because here, the
Ministry of Provincial and Local Government had promised me, was an
example of a municipality that, while not wealthy, was exceptionally
well run.
Siyabuswa means “we are governed”, but I found that the way that
governance works sadly conforms to the patterns of endemic corruption so
well established in apartheid days.
Residents such as Amos and Elisabeth Msiza and their friend Petros
Mhlangu — all in their fifties — complained that their water-supply
(charged at a rate guessed by the council because their meters didn’t
work) was intermittent and that they lost their pre-paid electrical
power whenever it rained.
“If you have money, this government helps you — but not those who
struggle,” Mhlangu said.
The three residents blamed unelected municipal manager George Mthimunye
for Siyabuswa’s shoddy service delivery.
Their view was supported by ex-ANC independent candidates such as July
Msiza who told me that Mthimunye faced not only criminal charges of
having sexually harassed his secretary, but was also accused of having
stolen council funds to pay for two friends of his to be trained as
traffic officers (one of whom allegedly crashed a council vehicle she
was illegally using for her own purposes, in far-off White River). So
much for well-governed Siyabuswa!
Fast-forward to April 27, “Freedom Day”, twelve years down the line from
what Archbishop Desmond Tutu memorably called the “Rainbow Nation”
waiting to make their mark in the first post-apartheid ballot.
And what a mark it has been: from the heart-rending wail of Fort
Callata’s mother at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings to
the ascendancy of the Black Economic Enrichment phalanx into positions
of capitalist and state power; from the collapse of the neo-fascist AWB
to the rise of Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka as a possible future president
thanks to the axing of Jacob Zuma.
Trevor Manual is the darling of this elite and its middle-class
praise-singers, for whom fiscal discipline is a golden calf and equality
a sin. This mutual admiration society has decreed a perpetual round of
expensive parties to praise the near-feudal conditions on which their
empires are built, a perpetual celebration so to speak (I’m reminded of
Jello Biafra’s phrase “the happiness you have demanded is now
mandatory!”).
But millions look set to be unemployed for life and HIV/Aids,
tuberculosis, malaria and ailments of malnutrition such as kwashiorkor
and marasmus — usually associated in the popular imagination with famine
in Sudan or the Horn of Africa — stalk the population.
Last May, at the second annual National Security Conference, two
analysts from very different sectors had a dire warning for the country:
COSATU chief economist Dr Neva Makgetla and Standard Bank credit policy
and governance director Desmond Golding agreed that a highly educated
but permanently unemployed “underclass” constituted the country’s
biggest security threat. The working class is retreating, but not
defeated, and it haunts the imagination of those who rule this country.
Further rioting and arson in Khutsong attended the elevation of
councillors to office on the basis of a 2% poll — an election that Human
Sciences Research Council society culture and identity specialist Dr
Mncedisi Ndletyana rightly described during a TV interview as
“illegitimate”.
The official celebration was declared an “unFreedom Day” by the poor in
Durban who decried the evaporation of the dream of equality the 1994
elections had promised, but which the elites had betrayed. They demanded
an end to evictions, cut-offs and forced relocations, saying they were
fighting for unconditional access to the resources fenced off by the
rich.
Local government specialist Greg Ruiters of Rhodes University told me
that the yawning chasm between the developmental promises of
neo-liberalism and the grinding poverty of South Africa’s sprawling
shackland (three out of every four South Africans now lives in urban
areas) would increasingly see people take to direct action.
“The key problem for all parties contesting the local government
elections,” Ruiters said, “is that citizens have discovered another,
more direct, channel for giving voice to their needs: ‘collective
bargaining by riot’ may become more common than waiting to vote.”
The key problem for all the poor, however, is that electoral,
representative politics is so limited and disempowering. As Sheila
Meintjies of Wits University’s political studies department put it,
“there is a growing sense that the councillors don’t necessarily hold
all the power, that the officials are really, if anything, to blame for
a lack of service delivery.”
These unelected municipal officials, she said, were directly lobbied by
very powerful big-business interests that short-circuited the country’s
bourgeois-democratic process and skewed development in favour of the
rich.
A grim example of this powerful bureaucratic class is eThekwini (Durban)
municipal manager Mike Sutcliffe, an ANC strategist and die-hard
opponent of the Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack-dwellers’ Movement), whose
protest marches he illegally tried to ban.
In March, Sutcliffe and his ideological cohorts suffered two key court
defeats — by the Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Soweto Concerned
Residents — which confirmed the absolute right of people to gather and
to demonstrate without requiring police permission. This is a big
victory for the social movements that they should fully exploit.
We anarchist communists would go further than Meintjies, underlining
that it is simply impossible for the country’s 400 Members of Parliament
to truly represent the interests of 46.9-million people. It is even less
likely that 37 very wealthy party-political Cabinet Ministers, tainted
by the elitist idea of “democratic centralism” will bend over backwards
for the working class and poor. Both our Westminster-style parliamentary
democracy and the ANC’s “democratic centralism” are anything but
democratic.
The elections of 1994 were a huge victory inasmuch as apartheid’s doom
was sealed. But there were not enough, and could never be enough, and
their achievement is increasingly overshadowed by the grim neo-liberal
class war being waged by the ruling elite . Capitalism, with its class
system, will always benefit the few at the expense of the many.
Activists in Swaziland and Zimbabwe should take heed. Real popular
empowerment and real economic and social equality can only be achieved
by well-organised, mass-based, directly-democratic, community-controlled
action against the parasite class. “Collective bargaining by riot” is a
good start, but we must build working class power until we can move onto
the offensive, and remake the world.