The 2016 local election campaign has begun and many are cashing in on human misery, writes Helen Zille.
Cape Town - Snug in my sheepskin slippers under a fluffy knee-blanket, I write about the past week’s evictions, acutely aware of the situation of the people I am writing about.
They were forcibly removed last week, in two mass evictions – one in Alexandra, Gauteng, and the other in Lwandle, Western Cape. Many more people may have suffered the same fate in different parts of South Africa, but their stories did not make the news.
Both removals involved extreme human misery.
While the Alex evictions passed largely unnoticed, scores of commentators competed to be heard above the roar of condemnation that accompanied the Lwandle evictions.
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During a fact-finding visit to the site, provincial officials encountered Andile Lili and Loyiso Nkhola, the leaders of the ANC’s “ungovernability” campaign (also known as the “Poo Protesters”) in charge of the situation. On further investigation, the officials found that Ses’Khona had an office on the site: a sturdy structure that had somehow escaped demolition. According to some evictees, they had been required to pay R25 each to Ses’Khona (disguised as a membership fee) in order to obtain a plot (and a T-shirt in ANC colours). This account was confirmed by the Ses’Khona organiser on the site, Vuyiswa Swentu.
It is clear that Ses’Khona is merely continuing its “ungovernability” strategy. They have openly called for land invasions in Cape Town and are now actually facilitating them by identifying “vulnerable land”. Then, in return for a “membership fee”, they encourage people who do not meet the housing allocation criteria (because they are too young or have already benefited before) to move on to the land.
Stripped of all the rhetoric, the truth is that Ses’Khona, in the most cynical way possible, is creating human misery (that we then prioritise over “legal niceties”), to advance their “ungovernability” agenda. And legitimate beneficiaries are sidelined once more.
If Sisulu really means it when she states that “we do not tolerate, condone, nor encourage any illegal occupation of land in our country”, she would find out what role the ANC’s Ses’Khona storm-troopers are playing in facilitating these invasions and creating “human misery” for their own “ungovernability” agenda.
Does this then imply that we should welcome the committee that the minister unilaterally announced to investigate the situation surrounding the invasion and evictions on the Sanral land?
Unfortunately, this committee does not pass even the most rudimentary scrutiny.
It includes Ses’Khona’s own lawyer, Barnabas Xulu; ANC stalwart Annelize van Wyk, who pre-judged the matter from the start in a Twitter tirade blaming the city; Nonhle Dambuza, an ANC MP; and a former ANC MP, Mampe Ramotsomai, who was reportedly arrested after 15 000 Mandrax tablets were seized from her home in 2001, before the case mysteriously vanished from public view. The committee is to be chaired by Denzil Potgieter, who has previously been chastised by a judge for conducting an “improper” inquiry set up by Marius Fransman against a DA council.
If Minister Sisulu was serious about establishing the truth, she would have set up an inquiry in consultation with the mayor of Cape Town; and she would also inquire into evictions countrywide.
But that is not the purpose. The 2016 local election campaign has begun. That is the prism through which to understand the Lwandle occupations and evictions.
Abahlali baseMjondolo hit the nail on the head.
