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Home » 2001 » #438 » International News » SOUTH AFRICA: Welcome to the 'new' Johannesburg

BY PATRICK BOND 

JOHANNESBURG — If you had a choice, which city would you choose to host the 2002 “World Summit on Sustainable Development” — also known as Rio+10 — in which 60,000 delegates will jaw-jaw about the world's social and environmental problems? The site picked by the United Nations in December was Johannesburg, South Africa.

The main Rio+10 conference will take place in what passes for Johannesburg's new business district, a hedonistic edge-city called Sandton. It's about 24km north of the traditional city centre which was originally built during the 1890s gold rush — and then rebuilt many times, ultimately to become Africa's most intimidating concrete canyons.

From an investor's standpoint, democracy wasn't good for that part of town. Beginning in the late 1980s, black South Africans were allowed into the CBD without their “pass books”. Over the past decade, virtually all Johannesburg's white-run corporations fled the desegregating inner-city. Mid-1970s office blocks — such as the Carlton Centre, Africa's tallest building at 50 storeys — are now valued at 10% of their replacement cost, thanks to mass white capitalist disinvestment and “red lining” by banks.

In Sandton, the southern hemisphere's plushest suburb, a huge, faux-Italian “public” square was built and quickly surrounded by skyscrapers, banks (including a brand new Citibank tower), boutiques for the ubiquitous nouveau-riche, five-star hotels, a garish convention centre, Africa's biggest stock exchange and other architectural detritus showcasing brazen economic power.

Because of South Africa's crime hysteria, a fortress mentality prevails in Sandton. The cutting-edge high-tech surveillance systems, staffed by poverty-level black security workers, compare closely with those described in author Mike Davis' landmark work about Los Angeles, City of Quartz. As for transplanting Mediterranean themes to the African high veld, you can imagine the culture clash.

Last December there was a vibrant power struggle between South African security guards and their sweatshop-style employers. While small black-run security firms agreed to union demands for a minimum monthly wage of US$200 — hardly compensating for the life-threatening work of guarding the rich in the world's most unequal country — this was considered an “excessive” sum by the white-owned firms, many of which are run by former cops from the era of apartheid.

Alexandra

Just a few kilometres to the east lives Sandton's reserve army of labour. The impoverished township of Alexandra is home to an estimated 300,000 people crammed into about five square kilometres of mainly squalid housing.

In January, there was an outbreak of cholera spread by the murky Jukskei River which cuts through the township. Epidemiologists say the disease was brought to “Alex” by Zulu migrant workers returning to the city from the holiday break. The national epidemic, which dates from last August, has sickened more than 54,000 people, leaving at least 137 dead as of February 20, 117 in KwaZulu-Natal. Another 500 contract the killer disease every day. Deaths have been reported in four of South Africa's nine provinces.

The reason is simple: nearly seven years after the formal end of racial apartheid, most South Africans still rely upon untreated water. There has been virtually no installation of inexpensive rural pit-latrine sanitation since 1994.

At the epidemic's epicentre, in deep rural KwaZulu-Natal, the outbreak was preceded by destitute people, who could not afford the US$7 connection fee, having their piped water cut off. For the 17 years before, water had been supplied free by the apartheid regime.

The apartheid-era migrant labour system is still dominant. Rural women continue to carry many of the labour reproduction costs that a normal capitalist economy would internalise. Add to this the unserviced shack settlements which have popped up in many Johannesburg environs and you get a lethal public health bomb, being detonated again and again by poverty, unemployment, evictions of poor people from formal townships, and cut-offs of municipal services like water and electricity.

Contributing to the madness, Johannesburg's African National Congress council announced, just as the cholera bug appeared, that they would redouble the “credit control” system against people not paying for services — by cutting services to more poor residents.

Then Gauteng provincial government housing bureaucrats announced that thousands of long-time Alexandra residents living in shacks along the Jukskei would be evicted in a two-week exercise reminiscent of apartheid forced removals (not on race grounds, however, South Africa now has full-blown class apartheid now). People are being moved dozens of kilometres away to already overcrowded shantytowns.

The Gauteng provincial government is led by the high-profile former trade union federation leader (and South African Communist Party central committee member) Sam Shilowa.

Forced removals

On February 13, hundreds of residents attempted to prevent the evictions of more than 1000 families. On television screens throughout the world, there were scenes of hundreds of security men wearing red overalls (dubbed “red ants” by the residents), led by stereotypical white bosses, bulldozing houses and possessions. When residents began fighting back, the police moved in with rubber bullets, tear gas and stun grenades and quelled the dissent. At least eight people were seriously injured. A man was wounded by gunfire and taken to hospital.

The February 13 Panafrican News Agency report of the evictions provided graphic details of the shock many residents felt at the African National Congress provincial government's actions: “After a day of tension, which saw violent clashes with police and security guards, exhausted residents sat despondently on the demarcated empty pieces of land, with their furniture around them, wondering how they were going to sleep in case it rained.

“Some had bits of zinc which they managed to salvage from the roofs of their brick houses and were attempting to build shacks with them.

Joyce Mbathani who has two children, age 13 and six, sat around attempting to build some kind of shelter. `Look, I have a new fridge, a cell phone, a freezer which work with electricity. What am I going to do with them? Now we are dumped here in the veld with chemical toilets and water in tanks. What happens to my furniture? The children go to school in London Road. I don't know how they are going to get there', she said with tears in her eyes.

“David Dlamini, who remained behind in Alexandra waiting to be moved the next day said he had no idea if he was going to Diepsloot or to Extension Seven. He said he had never seen this type of treatment at the hands of the apartheid government. `We voted for this government because it is black and we thought it would look after us, but look how it is treating us like animals throwing us into the veld. They must move us into houses', he said.

“Community leader Bishop Mampe Maredi said the people, many of whom were the poorest of the poor, were being treated like dogs. `Even the previous government treated people better than this', he said.

“South African National Civic Organisation Alexandra branch chairperson Philemon Machitela also slammed the move. `The timing is wrong. These are forced removals. People don't know where they are going to. People should not be moved to Diepsloot but to land in Linbro Park, Frankenwald, Marlboro and Tsutsumani where there are empty houses', he said.”

Water apartheid

The fact that filthy water was the excuse for the apartheid-style evictions is ironic. Johannesburg's water is increasingly sourced from a massive World Bank-funded dam complex in Lesotho, several hundred kilometres to the south. In one of the world's most impressive cross-catchment projects, water shoots down from the Maluti mountains into the river systems that supply Johannesburg, through a tunnel 42km long, built at a cost of US$2.5 billion.

Community activists in Alexandra recently joined with Lesotho rural groups to demand a moratorium on further dam building. They argue that rich white Johannesburgers should pay more to water their English gardens and fill their swimming pools, and to local government to repair leaking apartheid-era pipes through which half the township's water drains before reaching the people.

Activists have regularly complained to Lesotho government officials, South Africa's former water minister Kader Asmal, who is also chair of the World Bank's World Commission on Dams, and to the World Bank itself. The World Bank's in-house “inspection panel”, which can cancel unsound projects, refused to consider — or even fully investigate — the activists' case.

South African environment minister Valli Moosa on February 19, announcing the themes for Rio+10, said that an important topic at the conference would be ... wait for it ... water management!

The glitzy Sandton Convention Centre will be the main staging point for Rio+10. South Africa's best environmentalists, union organisers and social/community activists are making preparations for protests. Alexandra will host one of the most exciting “convergence centres” of progressive activists yet established.

[This article is based on an earlier article written for http://www.zmag.org.]

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