Steve O’Brien, Durban

_“It is less risky and more realistic to face police bullets than it is to sit at home and do nothing without electricity_”, a young settlement activist comment on the opening panel at a July 21-22 workshop on the World Social Forum (WSF).

Shanty-towns ring South African cities like Durban where poor people, with no other options, build homes out of whatever comes to hand.

Often without water or electricity, or the means to pay for privatised utilities, people are organising themselves into community associations that fight for their right to basic services.

This is not exactly the image South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) government likes to show the world, Trevor Ngwane, a Soweto activist and leader of the radical Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), told Green Left Weekly.

According to Ngwane, despite its image, South Africa is actually a _“perpetrator and conniver in strengthening and spreading neoliberalism on the African continent_”.

_“The so-called Tripartite Alliance with the unions and the Communist Party has also allowed the ANC to exercise strong control over social movements and to get away with neoliberal policies such as privatising water and electricity._”

Interestingly, South Africa doesn’t have a cohesive Social Forum movement, yet in Zimbabwe, where the government employs different forms of social control, a vibrant and decentralising Social Forum movement does exist.

For those, such as the APF, who go onto the streets to call on the ANC to live up to its post-apartheid promises, there is always the police.

The risks of not having electricity, as opposed to facing police bullets, came home to me on the last afternoon of the seminar.

A delegation of settlement residents appealed to participants for assistance after a fire, started from a candle, had burnt down 15 shacks and left more than 100 people without a roof or belongings. Fortunately this time, unlike a few weeks before when a baby was burned to death, no-one lost their lives.

Now I understood why in South Africa it could be _“less risky and more realistic to face police bullets than it is to sit at home and do nothing without electricity_”.

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