Homeless and hungry at UWC

Some students at the University of the Western Cape live in makeshift conditions and go to bed on empty stomachs

By Ashleigh Furlong
19 May 2017

Students are sleeping in the ResLife building at the University of the Western Cape because of a shortage of residences. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks

Since February, about 35 students without accommodation have been living in the ResLife building on campus. Sleeping on couches and in abandoned offices, the students have attempted to create some semblance of normality.

Offices in the building, which was partially burnt out during student protests, have been converted into makeshift dormitories complete with timetables and piles of textbooks. But without a kitchen, students struggle to cook, a struggle that is exacerbated by them not having received their full National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) food stipend.

Xolani Zekani from the Central Housing Committee, a student run committee that addresses students’ concerns about residences, said that students on NSFAS had only received R1,000 of their food allowance for the year and that they had received it only in early April.

The grant comes in the form of either supermarket vouchers or a grant for the dining hall.
Another student staying in ResLife said that the lack of food was “very difficult” and that even though there are people trying to provide them with food, it was not enough.

“We are crowded, so we argue a lot,” said a second year student from Knysna. “Management haven’t come to speak to us; we are always going to them. They said that there is nothing they can do because spaces are limited, apparently.”

Luthando Tyhalibongo, UWC spokesperson, said that the university had organised a meeting with representatives of the students occupying the building. “The University is concerned about the health and well-being of the students occupying the ResLife building,” he said.

He added that the university has “identified and vetted private accommodation space” that “can accommodate 92 students, and meets the requirements set by the Department of Higher Education and Training Norms and Standards for Student Housing in Public Universities”.

The Gender Equity Unit has a long-standing food programme for students at the university and the School of Public Health has recently implemented a breakfast drive twice a week. While these programmes provide some relief for students, neither provides three meals a day.

Tyhalibongo said that there are several projects that assist students in need of food support, including the Residential Services Department that runs the Student Resource and Exchange Programme “where students who offer academic tutorship are incentivised by providing them with the basic requirements, depending on each individual situation”. “The University has also partnered with Tiger Brands, and a food pantry will distribute food to students in need,” he said.

In a statement on 6 April, Uta Lehmann, the director of the School of Public Health, said the breakfast drive had been implemented as a “response to reports of acute hunger and a huge accommodation crisis on UWC campus.”

Lehmann told GroundUp that those without residence accommodation are at the core of the breakfast initiative and that many of these students were from outside the province. Some parents had told their children to return home because of the poor conditions.

“So many of these students have fought long and hard to get a matric and get accepted at university. But when they are arrive at university, they are arriving to lots of barriers and hurdles.”

Annual delays in food allocation from NSFAS

Zekani said that ideally a student should get their NSFAS grant for food immediately, but that this year they haven’t even received the full grant for the first semester.

Lehmann told GroundUp that they’ve known for many years that at the beginning of the year students go hungry. “It is an annually occurring problem,” she said, explaining that NSFAS grant money is usually delayed.

Lehmann said that they knew that students were going to class without food in their stomachs, adding that some students won’t even eat a meal the entire day.

The food voucher system also isn’t ideal for a university such as UWC which is isolated in an industrial area. Students with Pick ’n Pay vouchers need to travel by taxi to spend these vouchers – an expense that Lehmann said is “not insignificant”.

Lehmann said that “the other big issue” is the stigma that surrounds saying that you are hungry. “Many students are very reluctant to say they are hungry.”

Tyhalibongo said that about 5,300 students qualified for the NSFAS food allocation in 2017. “Of those, more than 4,000 have received their food allocation (vouchers or dining hall allowance). The final group of approximately 500 students have been invited to collect their allowances.”
“The University has written to NSFAS officials in an attempt to expedite the allocation of funds to students,” he said.

Kagisho Mamabolo, NSFAS spokesperson, said that NSFAS funding is “released as soon as the university can confirm the total number of registered students and the total cost for study”. He said that they also disbursed R1.3 billion to universities in January to cover the cost of registration and for allowances, while awaiting confirmation of registration data from the institutions.

“Without registration data, NSFAS will have no confirmation of the student and their cost of study, thereby paying the institution for unknown students,” he said.

Mamabolo said that NSFAS are only able to disburse funding for students who have signed their agreement forms.

“Since 2 May, NSFAS has campaigned to encourage students to sign their agreement forms and thus far over 20,000 students have signed online nationally.”

He said that NSFAS has “already disbursed funding to cover the cost of allowances to all UWC NSFAS funded students”. “It is up to the institution to directly process payment to students accordingly”.

Security concerns in private accommodation

A number of students told GroundUp of their experiences living in private, university approved accommodation situated in areas with high levels of crime and with landlords rumoured to be connected to gangs.

Brian Tebele, a first year student from Pretoria, has been staying in the ResLife building for a few months. At the beginning of the year, he was told that the university couldn’t accommodate him and had put him on the waiting list. So Tebele moved into private accommodation in Belhar, where despite being on NSFAS, he had to pay additional costs every month. He said that there was no wifi nor a place to study. The final straw for Tebele was when a woman came into the house asking for the owner, who Tebele said was a “well known drug lord in Belhar”. When the woman left, Tebele was told by onlookers that the women and her companions were armed.

Another student, who didn’t want to be named, said that she had stayed in private accommodation last year in Stikland. She alleges that there were electricity problems, the shuttles to university were late or didn’t come at all, and their landlord was a “well-known gangster”.

In a statement last week, the SRC expressed “disappointment and dismay towards the entire UWC management on its failure to resolve the issue of residential accommodation”.

Tyhalibongo said that students on NSFAS had their upfront registration payments waived and are permitted to be allocated space at residence. “If the University runs out of space for accommodating students, students may approach private accommodation approved by NSFAS.”

He said that the university inspects the venues to check that they comply.

Rudi Cupido, also from the Central Housing Committee, said that the university is “just turning a blind eye to what is happening”.

Cupido alleged that sometimes multiple rooms are allocated to one student. When the student arrives, they take up one of the rooms and the other spaces are left open. “That’s where some fraudulent activity takes place, because automatically someone that can offer something gets placed in that position,” he said.

Tyhalibongo said that they had not received any complaints with regards to bribery and that the university “strongly condemns any form of corruption or bribery”. He said that those who had direct knowledge of these bribes should report the matter.

Future plans to increase accommodation for students

Tyhalibongo said in the next three years, the university plans to accommodate more than 2,000 additional students in residences.

He said that UWC had acquired land and buildings in the surrounding areas, but that the cost was still unclear and that a process of preparing public tenders had begun. By January 2020, students should be able to move into the accommodation.

UWC has also received a donation of a block of flats that needs to be revamped. He added that UWC has been selected to be one of six universities to participate in a Department run study that looks at opportunities to increase affordable student accommodation.

---

Published originally on GroundUp .

---

Why protests become violent

And how to prevent that from happening

By Luke Jordan and Vinayak Bhardwaj
19 May 2017

<a href="/article/protests-spread-across-southern-johannesburg/">Protest in southern Johannesburg earlier this month</a>. Photo: Ihsaan Haffejee

South Africa’s protests are often taken to signify the collapse of the social compact. They aren’t. Our (modest) experience has shown that protests are often a frustrated plea for an extension of the social compact - not its invalidation.

As protests in Kliptown early this month spread to Freedom Park, engulfed Ennerdale, and quickly almost any area flanking the N12 Highway, a familiar response unfolded in South Africa’s public sphere.

Accounts of protest were catapulted from nuisances recorded in traffic reports to lead stories of news bulletins. Protest leaders became the centre of television, radio and print news stories. Elsewhere the usual script was dusted off. Politicians used the protests as a canvas to project their own programs, further entrenching patronage by offering loan schemes here, housing schemes there, while also mobilising a brutal response that turned neighborhoods into war zones, and children into target practice.

That fundamental change is necessary has become a cliche. The question that rages from Kliptown to Ennerdale is how. The demands of Vuwani, Bekkersdaal, Mototlung, OR Tambo, and so many others remind us that we cannot delay how we respond any longer.

The first step must be to recognize the growing depth and breadth of organisation in our poorest communities. Leaders of these communities have marshalled hundreds to march on Luthuli House and delay an NEC meeting, made sophisticated use of their history as sites of struggle, formed their own cooperatives, built their own sanitation or water systems, and picketed the media. They adopt new technology rapidly — many use Grassroot, an app built by one of us to enable such organizing, and which now reaches over 30,000 people — and they regularly initiate official and legal proceedings.

Several leaders from such communities, engaged on multiple fronts in crucial struggles, felt the need to consolidate their experiences and wanted a space to share them with each other in a series of seminars we agreed to host. Community leaders from Freedom Park, Kliptown and Motsoaledi pored over the text of the constitution, intricate municipal laws and power maps of municipal structures. While no clear answers emerged, the diminished power of the solutions we have been relying on for the last 23 years is inescapable.

“Courts are not for us comrades”

Reading aloud Section 26 of the Constitution, which promotes the right to housing, a community leader from Motsoaledi recounted how her shack was burnt to the ground by landlords working with local ANC and SANCO councillors (backyard dwellers in her area are overwhelmingly pro-EFF). Her life for the last year has involved squatting on uninhabitable land as she waited for deliverance through a court judgment. Elsewhere, community leaders in Freedom Park bear the wrath of stun grenades, rubber bullets and repeated evictions from land they occupy. They have won some successes - as Abahlali base Freedom Park - but find courts an increasingly limited avenue.

Courts are clogged and human rights’ lawyers are inundated. Proceedings are drawn out and deliver too little or too late to very few people. Dispirited community leaders feel unable to “sell” legal solutions to their members. As Peter Monete, a leader from Freedom Park put it, “Courts are not for us comrade - we need something else.” Yet the “something else” Peter speaks of is not an abandonment of the Constitution altogether - but a more urgent mechanism to realise its promise.

Collective decision-making

It must by now be clear what that mechanism is not. Houses are better than no houses, but yet another promise of yet another limited in scale, top-down program will only leave us back here in a few years. In Kliptown, at the peak of the protests, hundreds gathered to meet the MEC of housing, at 4pm, to hear about his responses to the petitions they had sent to his office for a year—and he claimed to have never seen. By 5pm, when he had still not arrived, as anger mounted about such casual disrespect, and as violence flared a few blocks away in Eldorado Park, groups of young men broke off and began looting. When the MEC finally arrived at 6pm, he promised a housing program—for 1,200 families, a fraction of those in the area. There would be little involvement by the community itself, all would be just farmed off into a turnkey project.

Such experiences were repeated across the protests, with the most common response a form of, “keep quiet, here are some promises, wait for us to deliver”. At the same time, communities that had spent years in protracted discussions, debates and entreaties to the vast bureaucracy presiding over them were told to risk their own safety preventing violence, when the violence was the sole and only reason they were being engaged in true discussion or being reported on at all. Months before these protests, one community picketed media houses trying to get attention, to be ignored. Another phoned in to radio stations, to be cut off after ten seconds. As one leader put it, “we know they will ignore us, and we know what will make them come”. Then the same media, and the same officials, deplore the violence that their own apathy makes inevitable.

Community structures are not without their own challenges of course. They are preyed upon by political opportunists, who pick off leaders and sow divisions by offering inducements and piecemeal remedies that benefit a few while leaving the structural problems unchanged. “The crisis of leadership is real,” one leader himself said. But in our experience these communities and their leaders are open and honest about their limitations, far more so than elite institutions. They thirst for knowledge about how to address their challenges and the opportunity to use what they know.

The “sit down and wait for us to deliver” response is not always cynical, but does nothing to bring a vast segment of the population into the core of decision-making or into mainstream media. And so the gulf between corridors of power and those most affected by it remains ever widening.

So how to move forward?

We need to accept once and for all that merely delivering more goods and services to community members who have had little input in deciding what is rightfully theirs or how it is to be allocated will not address the alienation of vulnerable groups in South African society. Fundamentally this will only change when communities are actively involved in shaping their own destiny.

As Sandile, a community leader from Kliptown said, “we know not everything can happen now-now. But come and talk to us.” As long as poor people are seen as mere subjects and not citizens, receptacles of government largesse and not empowered decision-makers of their society, our democracy will continue to resemble the “two states” described by Thabo Mbeki. That change in perspective must take place not only by officials, but by journalists and commentators and the public sphere more generally.

Learning from Brazil

In Brazil, in many cities the capital budgets for wards are allocated through a process of direct citizen participation and voting. The city specifies the envelope of funds, and provides some alternative projects. Over several months, citizens debate among themselves what to fund, leading up to final decision-making. In some cities, this process is complimented by monitoring or advisory boards, again drawn from citizens themselves.

The process is not simple, and in some places it has failed, but it has now been running for over twenty years. In the last few years it has spread to many other countries. It was, in fact, considered for South Africa post-1994, before being jettisoned in favour of bureaucratic centralization. Even today, some cities and officials discuss adopting it, and technology (including Grassroot) would smooth the way. Yet too often, on first encounter with the messy difficulty and challenge of running such a process, officials go running back to consultants and Powerpoints — and the next set of protests starts to build.

Conclusion

As once South Africa had the daring to try what few others had ever done, so we may need to again. We must do so because it is the right thing to do, but also because, beyond momentary political scandal, our response to our communities will determine what kind of country we become in the long run.

Of course, an empty fiscus means nothing will be done. But if all that results from recent protests in southern Johannesburg is yet another top-down, unresponsive program, a promise to provide but not to empower, we will be back here soon. If the media do not want to listen and government does not want to change how it works because doing so is the right thing to do, both might want to do so from a sense of self-preservation.

Jordan is the founder and director of Grassroot, a mobile application helping grassroots’ communities organise more effectively. Bhardwaj is a public health student at Johns Hopkins University who is also active within the Right2Know Campaign.

Views expressed are not necessarily GroundUp’s.

---

Published originally on GroundUp .

---

Cape Town’s bursting trains

Commuters complain of overcrowded and delays

By Mandla Mnyakama

Commuters climbing on a Khayelitsha-bound train. Photo: Mandla Mnyakama

According to the TomTom traffic index Cape Town is the most congested city in the country and 48th in the world, ahead of cities such as New York. For rail commuters, the situation isn’t much better, with trains overcrowded to the point of bursting and long delays. GroundUp found people clinging from the outside to coaches and even locomotives. Some trains were only six coaches long.

Daphne Kayster, Western Cape PRASA (Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa) Acting Marketing and Communication Manager said the equivalent of 11 train sets were destroyed by arson between October 2015 and April 2017.

“The main reason for the dramatic decrease in train performance is directly related to pressure on the fleet due to losses from train fires as well as vandalism to the infrastructure as a result of arson and community protests,” she said.

“The demand for services far exceeds the available train supply as a result of decades of disinvestment in rail and unprecedented growth of informal settlements.

“The continuous theft or vandalism of assets, mainly cables and other metal bearing components has led to a situation where services have generally been unreliable and therefore not meeting customer expectations,” said Kayster.

Commuters, however, blame Metrorail for the increasingly poor service, and reports of corruption and mismanagement in PRASA lend weight to their view.

GroundUp spoke to a number of commuters. They said they arrived late for work and with winter arriving they returned home after dark making them vulnerable to criminals.

Commuters wait for a Khayelitsha-bound train. Photo: Mandla Mnyakama

Mzwandile Cuba of Langa, 60 and a father of five, said it was often impossible for him to make it on time to work. “I usually caught a 7:17am Cape Town-bound-via-Pinelands train and changed at Maitland for my work at Elsies River.”

 

But that train is now so overcrowded he has to wait for the next one. He says his employers do not understand his difficulty and have issued him with harsh warnings. He tried getting the earlier 7:20am train, but it was very often delayed.

Lucy Somtsewu, 41 of Gugulethu and a mother of two, travelled every weekday on a Cape Town-bound train for Mutual. She says the situation is now so bad that instead of her monthly R150 train ticket for Nyanga to Mutual Station she has to spend R32 a day on a taxi to get to work (R19 to Mutual and R13 for a return to Gugulethu).

Mavis Bhelesi, 58 and a mother of two, said it was usually only one day in a week that the trains were on time on her route of Nonkqubela Station (Site B, Khayelitsha) to Bellville.

“I was normally supposed to catch a 6am train and start work at 8:30am, but I am compelled to catch an earlier train because of the serious delays,” she said. “I have used trains for more than 30 years … but the issue appears too appalling nowadays … much worse since PRASA took over in the past few years.”

“The company’s personnel tell us to move to another transport mode every time we lodge complaints with them,” she said.

Commuters climbing on a Khayelitsha-bound train. Photo: Mandla Mnyakama

---

Published originally on GroundUp .

---

The Truth About White Supremacy, Sexism, And Mind Control In America Nominated For A Global E-book Award

Astonishing Discoveries, Unearthed Secrets, and How to Heal

  MCKINNEY, TX, May 18, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- A. L. Bryant's book, The Truth About White Supremacy, Sexism, and Mind Control in America is nominated for a Global e-book Award.

America is a wounded nation! It is suffering because of the social injustices that have been perpetuated by white supremacists and sexists throughout history. Though some think we have left the past behind, this is simply not true. There are constant reminders that we have not progressed far from past discriminations, as evidenced by the social injustices in recent media stories. Nearly one in five women are sexually assaulted, yet the justice system doesn't seem to care. In addition, many people simply do not vote for women, regardless of their qualifications. When you have a society dominated by one group of people who think alike, often they do not consider the rights of others. America's wounds are not just issues for those who are discriminated against; they are issues for the entire country.

The Truth About White Supremacy, Sexism, and Mind Control in America takes you on a journey through the history of America to unearth the truths behind white supremacy and sexism in society. Delve into the deepest and most fascinating secrets behind racism and sexism--the secrets they do not want you to know and may not realize.

Examine the origins and progression of racism, sexism, relationships in America, and the science and psychology behind what is real and what is an illusion. For example, many in society suffer from the Stockholm Syndrome, yet are completely unaware of this disorder. Discover how mind control is the weapon of choice to keep certain groups in power and others in the dark and oppressed. This book gives different perspectives from the physical to the metaphysical.

Finally, the book explores astonishing revelations about why we are here, who we are, and how to heal and evolve to a higher spiritual level. If those who discriminate accept the truth, they will rethink their very existence. Explore proven facts that will challenge the way one views people, life, and the universe.

About the Global E-book Awards

The Global E-book Awards honor and bring attention to the future of book publishing - e-books. Now in its seventh year, the Awards are in over 100 specific categories. They are open to all publishers so that a winner is the best in its category, not just the best of small or regionally-published e-books. Most e-books are also available as printed books as well.

Ordering Information

The Truth About White Supremacy, Sexism, and Mind Control in America is currently available for $4.99 on several websites, including Barnes and Nobles, Amazon, and BookBaby.com.

Contact:
A. L. Bryant
bry.rev@att.net

The CEO of South Africa's power utility is back. Why the move can't be justified

Eskom CEO Brian Molefe addressing the media.
Alon Skuy/The Times

The return of Brian Molefe as CEO of South Africa’s largest state owned enterprise, the power utility Eskom, has caused outrage due to the circumstances under which he resigned in December last year.

Molefe left the power utility after a Public Protector’s inquiry alleged that he may have been involved in nefarious activities. The State of Capture report by the then Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, showed extensive and irregular communication between Molefe and the Guptas, a family with close ties to President Jacob Zuma.

At the time Molefe’s backers – including board chairperson Ben Ngubane – glorified him. They attributed a turnaround in Eskom’s fortunes as a function of the CEO’s 18-month tenure. His supporters branded him as a messiah whose departure would have negative consequences for the power utility.

Similar sentiments were expressed more recently by Ngubane and Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown. She told a press conference that she supported his return as CEO as he was responsible for the fact that load shedding (organised power cuts) had stopped and the power utility was on sound financial footing.

But was Molefe’s performance as great as his supporters say it was? I suggest not.

It’s true that under Molefe’s reign power cuts across the country were brought to an end. In addition, Eskom reported better financial results last year.

But neither of these two developments had much to do with Molefe’s capabilities as a CEO. The power cuts ended primarily due to a decline in electricity demand – partly the consequence of a weakening economy – and new generation capacity that had been in the pipeline for years. And the improvement in a number of Eskom’s financial ratios was due in large part to massive financial support provided by the government in 2015.

Did Molefe end the power cuts?

Prior to Molefe’s arrival as CEO in March 2015 the power utility’s finances had been worsening and it was struggling to meet electricity demand. These challenges were largely due to a delay in investment by the government as well as slow increases in tariffs.

The delay in investment was due to government’s indecisiveness over a protracted period of time. And the slow increase in tariffs was the result of a desire to shield consumers from sharp increases and a mistrust of Eskom’s claimed needs.

South Africans lived through a period of extensive power cuts in 2007. Electricity generation capacity was unable to keep up with demand. The situation was largely saved by slowing economic growth combined with greater energy efficiency. These factors meant that electricity demand was already well below forecasts prior to Molefe’s appointment and continued this trajectory during his tenure as CEO.

Falling demand created a virtuous cycle in operations: lower demand put an end to the need to impose power cuts. It also opened up the opportunity to do maintenance on infrastructure, leading to greater availability of capacity and an even lower probability of power cuts.

To be sure, Molefe still had to ensure that Eskom continued to get the basics right. There’s little evidence that he did more than that. Instead, it seems that his predecessor, Tshediso Matona, was excessively negative in his outlook. This set up Molefe to appear as though he had pulled-off a dramatic success.

Molefe’s bailouts

What of the improvements in Eskom’s financial situation?

The view that Molefe was behind Eskom’s short-term financial turnaround was used to award him a R2.5 million performance bonus for the year ended 31 March 2016. (Molefe appears to have secured a R30 million retirement package when he tendered his resignation. Under the terms of his return to the job this will now no longer be paid.)

But a closer look suggests that Eskom’s financial improvement can’t be attributed to Molefe. In many respects it was the result of extraordinary support afforded to the power utility by the government in 2015.

This support, facilitated by two special appropriation bills passed by Parliament, had two main components. The first was an equity injection through which the National Treasury under which Eskom received R23 billion in exchange for shares. Since government is the sole Eskom shareholder, this translated into a straight cash gift.

The second component was even more significant. This involved government writing-off a R60 billion loan which had been approved in 2008 and disbursed in multiple tranches between 2008 and 2010.

If we treat Eskom as a genuinely independent entity, the full cost to national government and therefore the taxpayer of writing off the loan had two parts:

• the remaining principal amount (around R30 billion), and
• an additional R86 billion, the estimated cost of the state foregoing interest payments on the loan. According to the loan conditions, Eskom would have been required to pay this interest in the event that its financial situation improved.

Whether this financial support was desirable depends on your view of Eskom’s recent history. Many analysts agree that additional government support was overdue. But in relation to Molefe it raises a simpler question: if many of the improvements in Eskom’s financial ratios were due to massive transfers of cash and assets from taxpayers, did it make sense to pay its CEO a bonus that effectively also came from taxpayers?

Either way, closer analysis of Molefe’s supposed successes reveal that they are not what they have been made out to be. Combined with the failures of corporate governance with which he has been associated, the case for reappointing him as Eskom CEO appears to be paper thin.

Seán Mfundza Muller, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Johannesburg

This article was originally published on The Conversation.