Kei Road Location school and clinic closed and taps run dry
By Mbulelo Sisulu
19 May 2017 Protesters blocked entry to Kei Road location. Photo: Mbulelo Sisulu
Residents of Kei Road Location near King William’s Town,
Eastern Cape, are without water and the local clinic and the school have
been closed since protests started in the early hours of Monday 15 May.
Protesters blocked the entrance road to the location and also
switched off the generator that pumps drinking water for Kei Road and 18
villages. Taps have run dry and people are fetching water from a river
and a nearby dam.
The protest action arose because residents say they registered for
houses in 1996 and are still waiting, while people in surrounding
informal settlements, some established only a few years ago, are
receiving RDP houses and basic services. Kei Road is home to about 1,600
residents.
Houses were built at Southdown informal settlement in 2015, and water
and sanitation was provided. Preparations are currently underway to
start construction in June on houses for informal settlements Haddon
Farm and Ndakana Village.
A Kei Road community leader and resident said: “Our location was
established around 1940, but has not been developed by our government.”
He wished to stay anonymous because he said he was being targeted by
police as a troublemaker. He said police had come looking for him at his
house. “As a married man, you cannot have dignity when you still live
at home with grandparents, parents and your wife,” he said.
Peter Ntisani, 43, said that on Tuesday when returning home from his
job at Amathole District Municipality in Stutterheim, “I met police who
shot me with rubber bullets.” He says he had to be booked off work for
five days by his doctor.
Police spokesperson Captain Siphokazi Mawisa said a public violence
case was opened when about 30 community members protested. “They closed
the R63 and threw stones at the police who fired rubber bullets to
disperse them. No one reported any injury to the police,” she said.
Eastern Cape Education spokesperson Mali Mtima said the department is
aware of the situation. “Our district department is busy discussing the
way forward to help this school. We urge our community members to allow
teachers and kids to go to school.”
Eastern Cape Health spokesperson Sizwe Kupelo said there is
absolutely nothing they can do as a department when residents close the
roads.
“We are very sorry for the people of that area,” he said.
Councillor Xola Nqatha said that a delegate from Cooperative
Government and Traditional Affairs took down the grievances of residents
on Tuesday 16 May and would respond in 14 days.
Residents say they are not going to stop their protest until their demands are met.
Published originally on
GroundUp
.
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
.
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.
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.
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
.
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.
