Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Transport appeals to commuters not to burn trains
By Natalie Pertsovsky and Lilly Wimberly
13 June 2017 One of the burntMetrorail coaches at Cape Town station. Photo: Natalie Pertsovsky
On Tuesday, the Portfolio Committee on Transport visited the Cape Town train station following the events of Monday night in which commuters, angry over extended train delays, set two trains alight.
“The Portfolio Committee is shocked and taken aback by the incident
of last night,” said Leonard Ramatlakane, the acting chairperson of the
committee.
He claimed that the power failures were a result of cable theft. “We
can see clearly that there is a criminal effort that has crept into
this,” said Ramatlakane.
After a closed meeting between committee members and PRASA (Passenger
Rail Agency of South Africa, the owner of Metrorail) officials, which
excluded the media, the portfolio committee inspected the damage.
Vodacom store manager Sagid Muhammad, whose shop was looted during
the protest, said when he heard about the destruction he returned to
work to find his store ransacked. “Police were here, but they were
standing and not doing anything,” he said.
Ramatlakane appealed to communities to help with policing what he called “this criminal element that masquerades as commuters.”
He also made an appeal to commuters: “Metrorail is the only source of
transport to move thousands and thousands of people from home to work
everyday. Burning it is not a solution. It only creates and aggravates
the problems of poor people who use this train.”
He added that a police investigation is underway to review security footage and prosecute perpetrators.
Published originally on
GroundUp
.
Power failure brings Cape Town trains to a halt across the city
By GroundUp Staff
13 June 2017 A train on Cape Town station burns on Monday evening. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks
Commuters at Cape Town’s central train station toyi-toyed,
destroyed two cell phone shops, smashed glass, stoned a bus and burnt
trains in frustration on Monday evening. In the afternoon trains across
the city stopped running.
The atmosphere was angry and tense at the station. There were
periodic flare-ups, unstoppable despite several police cars and
a private security contingent inside the station.
At about 9pm a woman we spoke to said she’d waited from about 3pm for
her train to arrive. She had children waiting for her at home.
A man walked forlornly around the station holding his child; he’d also been waiting since the afternoon.
We encountered two schoolchildren stranded on the station. One, nine
years old and in school uniform, was crying; he’d been on the
station since 3pm. He had an exam the next day, he said. He needed to
get to Khayelitsha, while the other child, a girl, needed to get to
Gugulethu. (A GroundUp reporter drove them to a nearby police station.) The Vodacom shop on the station was ransacked. So was an MTN shop. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks
Commuters were stranded with their weekly and monthly tickets, many
without sufficient cash to use alternative transport. Metrorail had
struck a deal with the Golden Arrow Bus Company that Metrorail tickets
could be used on the buses. While GroundUp reporters were there, two
buses pulled up to transport passengers, but there were long queues for
them and clearly not enough buses. Some commuters stoned one of the
buses and it left without passengers.
James Gudumede had been waiting since 5pm. He was heading to
Gugulethu. “This happens on a daily basis,” he said angrily. Because of
the late trains, “people lose their jobs. Prasa [the parastatal that
owns Metrorail] does not listen. We are being robbed. We buy Tickets.”
A GroundUp reporter who usually uses the trains, left work at 3pm,
only to arrive home at 7:30pm to her four children, after negotiating
buses instead. The mother of another GroundUp reporter was on a train
that travelled from Cape Town station to Mutual earlier in the day, then
without explanation the train turned back to Cape Town (she was trying
to get to Khayelitsha). She spent hours stranded trying to get from one
place to another. Late at night she got stuck in Site
C, Khayelitsha — unsafe after dark — while trying to get to home to Site
B (she eventually got home by taxi). Thousands more commuters across
the city no doubt had similar stories.
All this took place while it was a raining and cold in Cape Town. Firefighters attempt to put out the blaze. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks
Metrorail published a statement explaining that electrical power
feeds were responsible for the problems. The company said that it
usually has four 11kv power feeds available, but two failed today and
the remaining two became overloaded, tripping electricity and
halting trains across the network.
Metrorail’s regional manager Richard Walker apologised to commuters.
He condemned the destruction of property by irate commuters and said
that surveillance footage would be studied with the intention of filing
malicious damage to property charges.
Angry comments were posted on the Metrorail website.
For example, one anonymous person wrote: “It is late. Can’t remember
when last trains were on time. Late for work as a result. Your service
is pathetic, trains are dirty and vandalised. Why do you not protect
your assets? If you do that there will be less delays.”
At the time of writing and publishing the situation remained tense on Cape Town station, and commuters continued to be stranded. Shattered glass was strewn across the station turnstiles,
while the station filled with smoke from the burning train. Photos:
Ashraf Hendricks
Most of us do not realise the impact of the oceans on our daily lives, nor how humanity has changed vast parts of the big blue and its inhabitants. About one quarter of all species live in the sea. That’s roughly about 2.2 million, with the current estimates of all species on earth at about 8.7 million and their linkages with us are far-reaching and more pervasive than we can imagine.
Water covers about 71% of the planet’s surface. This means that it’s not only home to much of life on earth, but also closely involved in many functions that provide a stable environment for life to thrive. For example, oceans are an integral part of our weather and climate patterns. It absorbs, stores and redistributes heat through currents and they play a critical role in maintaining stable climates. They are also the largest absorbers of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the greenhouse gasses that actively contribute to global warming.
Oceans absorb about one quarter of all CO2 produced by human activities. This provides an invaluable service to life on land, especially in mitigating some of the effects of human driven climate change. In addition, microscopic plants, called phytoplankton produce between half to 70% of all oxygen. To put this into perspective, researchers have tried to calculate how much oxygen humans use just for breathing, a figure that comes to over 6 billion tonnes of oxygen per year.
The oceans also provide many other important benefits; they have been extensively used to transport goods around the globe and they are a source of renewable energy from the action of wind and waves. Marine waters are also a potential goldmine for the pharmaceutical industry with some bacteria, sponges and algae showing great promise for treatments for diseases like cancer.
It’s difficult to put a price on all of this, but researchers have tried to provide a monetary estimate of all that the oceans provide for humanity. The amount they arrived at is a conservative value of a about US$24 trillion per year. Add to that the spiritual and cultural benefits and the sheer fun of being at the beach and the list of ocean services becomes very impressive.
So why a World Oceans Day?
World Oceans Day, an international event that’s commemorated on the 8th June every year, is a chance to reflect on the importance of oceans, whether you live next to the sea or many thousands of kilometres inland.
We tend to forget about the myriad of life beneath the waves. This diversity is fantastic, from tiny microscopic plants and animals to the largest mammal that has ever existed – the blue whale. Ocean life has evolved to inhabit many different kinds of environments, from the ocean surface to the deepest known point at about 11,000m and a range from frozen seas to tropical coral reefs.
World Oceans Day celebrates this diversity and reminds us of the importance of the big blue. It also serves to highlight the plight that the oceans are facing from continued man-made, or anthropogenic, pressures.
Most people are aware that many of the fish, crustacean and shellfish stocks are overfished and that the bounty of the sea is a fraction of what it should be. With over a billion people relying on protein provided directly by the ocean, it’s easy to see how much pressure humans are putting on natural resources.
Climate change too has contributed towards changing the temperatures and chemistry of the oceans. As the levels of CO2 have been increasing in the atmosphere, so has the uptake of this gas into marine waters. The next effect has been that some parts of the ocean are getting more acidic, which is a real problem for some animals and plants that rely on calcium carbonate as part of their bodies, that are literally dissolving in these new environments.
In addition, temperatures have also been changing in the oceans, which has led to large-scale shifts in marine life. For example, in their search for cooler environments, some fish species, such as cod and anglerfish in the North Atlantic have been documented to shift their ranges towards the North Pole or into greater depths. Pollution, as effluent, agricultural run off that includes fertilisers and pesticides and plastics are also heavily contributing towards killing marine species at unprecedented rates.
As a global collective, with many of us living far from the coastline, we need to become more aware of the far-reaching consequences of our daily activities and how these play out not only on land, but also in the sea. All of us should be contributing towards the safeguarding of the big blue, because without it the chances of our own survival are very low indeed. So let’s celebrate World Oceans Day and with it our future.
South Africa’s governing party, the African National Congress, is adopting a dangerous political approach used in failing states like Algeria, Zimbabwe and Venezuela. Its aim is to deflect attention from its policy failures and from numerous scandals surrounding President Jacob Zuma, his family and the politically connected Gupta network.
The approach was allegedly crafted by Bell Pottinger, a London based public relations firm. It focuses on two concepts.
The first is the term “white monopoly capital”. The phrase broadly refers to control of the economy by apartheid beneficiary capitalist oligopolies at the expense of South Africa’s black majority.
Accompanying it is the term “radical economic transformation”. This is defined differently by various senior government officials. But is understood to mean rapidly changing the economy’s ownership, control, and production patterns in favour of the previously disadvantaged.
However, beyond damaging South Africa’s social fabric, framing the country’s current economic impasse in such a dichotomous politically charged way has negative consequences.
Firstly it distracts attention from the private sector’s real sins. This makes it more difficult to objectively hold business to account for its own nefarious activities. These include tender fraud, collusion, price fixing, fronting, illicit capital flows and tax evasion. Framing the discourse as “white monopoly capital” muddies the waters. It becomes unclear whether exposing private sector crimes is merely a politically motivated assault, or an attempt to uphold the law.
Secondly the ongoing rhetoric will further damage the chances of economic recovery. This is because it will deter long-term domestic and international investment. It will also encourage companies to move their capital elsewhere and use complex tax avoidance mechanisms.
Thirdly trumpeting vacuous slogans is also unlikely to raise the prospects of credible policies that will deal with the country’s structural challenges.
Populist slogans don’t fix structural challenges
Over the last two decades South Africa has failed to modernise its labour and education systems. This has meant limited success in rolling back poverty, inequality and unemployment. As a result the country has one of the highest unemployment rates and gini coefficients in the world.
The structural problems in the education system have resulted in poorly prepared senior school and university graduates. This is despite the number of children attending school increasing exponentially since compulsory education was introduced in 1994.
Consequently, the country is poorly positioned to take advantage of the “fourth industrial revolution”. This is broadly understood as a range of new technologies that fuse the physical, digital and biological worlds.
Making things worse is the failure to adopt industrial policies to diversify the country’s export mix away from commodities to more sophisticated beneficiation and manufacturing activities. Commodities such as gold, platinum and coal, thus continue to comprise a significant portion of the country’s export earnings.
In mid-2017 the rating agency Moody’s will review South Africa’s sovereign credit rating. This comes after two recent downgrades by global credit rating agencies S&P and Fitch.
A great deal hangs on Moody’s decision. If it downgrades the government’s rand-based bond credit rating two notches to junk status, the country will be expelled from the World Government Bond Index. This will compromise its credibility as an investment destination. It will stimulate significant capital flight as international bond funds with investment-grade mandates are forced to sell off South African sub-investment grade bonds.
The rand will then depreciate and the trade deficit will widen. The central bank could then be forced to hike interest rates to curb inflationary pressures. Unemployment will rise and the government’s fiscal slack will be further depleted.
A downgrade of the rand denominated bonds would spark economic instability, and potentially significantly weaken the country’s private sector. The country’s politically connected elite could respond to this crisis by seeking to consolidate political power. This could be achieved using “radical economic transformation” to decimate the vestiges of “white monopoly capital.”
In the wake of the recent downgrades, some politicians have been peddling an illusion that the country’s current woes are simply “short-term pain for long-term gain” for the majority of South Africans.
But the experiences of numerous countries have shown that there is no gain from going down the populist economic path – only state failure.
There are tentative signs that this risk is beginning to take hold among some ANC leaders. Even Zuma’s newly appointed Finance Minister began watering down the term “radical economic transformation” at the recent World Economic Forum Africa gathering. Instead he opted to use the phrase “inclusive growth”.
What needs to be made clear is that the debate around “white monopoly capital” and “radical economic transformation” is about much more than statistics and definitions. It is about the ownership and control of both public and private capital by a politically connected elite. Thus it comes with the potential risk of turning South Africa’s entire economy into a centrally controlled patronage network.
A protest in support of Raymond Suttner released from detention in 1988 by apartheid authorities. Robert Botha/Times Media Group In the liberation struggle against apartheid a small number of white people joined the battle to overthrow the South African regime. One of them, academic Raymond Suttner, was first arrested in 1975 and tortured with electric shocks because he refused to supply information to the police. He then served eight years in prison because of his underground activities for the African National Congress and South African Communist Party.
After his release in 1983 he was forced - after two years - to go underground to evade arrest, but was re-detained in 1986 under repeatedly renewed states of emergency for 27 months – 18 of these in solitary confinement.
First published in 2001, Suttner’s prison memoir “Inside Apartheid’s Prison”, has been made available again, now with a completely new introduction. The Conversation Africa’s Charles Leonard spoke to Suttner.
Why did you write the book?
I was hesitant to write it because there is a culture of modesty that is inculcated in cadres. I used to think it was “not done” to write about myself. I also thought that my experience was a “parking ticket” compared with the sentences of Nelson Mandela and others. But I came to feel that I have a story to tell.
Nevertheless I hope that resources will be found so that more stories are told, not only of prison but the many unknown people who pursued resistance in different ways in a range of relatively unknown places.
You were imprisoned and on house arrest for over 11 years. It was based on choices you made. Would you make the same choices today?
Yes. I did what I believed was right at the time and even if things are not turning out so well at the moment that does not invalidate those choices. I saw the liberation struggle as having a sacred quality and considered it an honour to be part of it.
I was very influenced by the great Afrikaner Communist Bram Fischer. He had nothing to gain personally and could have been a judge, the president of the country or anything else. Instead he chose a life of danger and later life imprisonment. I was inspired by that example, amongst others, to do what I could.
When one embarks on revolutionary activities there are no guarantees of success. I was not sure that I would come out alive. I did what I believed was right and would make the same choices again.
So those choices were worth it?
Definitely. This was not a business venture where one could answer such a question through balancing profits and losses. For me joining the struggle, as a white, gave me the opportunity to start my life afresh by joining my fortunes with those who were oppressed. It gave me the chance to link myself with the majority of South Africans.
That was a more authentic way of living my life than whatever successes I may have achieved, had I simply focused on professional success. Most importantly I see this choice – to join the liberation struggle – as giving me the opportunity to humanise myself as a white South African in apartheid South Africa.
Do you still feel the damage after all these years in prison?
Yes. I have post-traumatic stress. I am not sure that it will ever be eliminated or that I always recognise its appearance. Many of us live with scars from that period.
I have not always acknowledged or understood that I have been damaged but it is directly related to my having fibromyalgia (a disorder characterised by widespread musculoskeletal pain accompanied by fatigue, sleep, memory and mood issues), according to the specialist who diagnosed it. She cautioned me about returning to my prison experiences, in this book, fearing the possibility of it setting off physically painful symptoms. That didn’t happen as far as I am aware and returning to the scene of trauma may be part of healing, according to some.
Why did you break with the ANC over 10 years ago?
I had not been happy with many aspects of Thabo Mbeki‘s presidency but that did not mean I should align myself with his successor Jacob Zuma. Zuma’s candidacy was promoted not only by ANC people but especially the South African Communist Party (SACP) and trade union federation Cosatu’s leaderships, presenting him as having qualities that were not valid. In particular the claim that Zuma was a man of the people with sympathy for the poor and downtrodden was untrue.
It was already known that he was linked with corrupt activities before he was elected as ANC president in 2007. But what was decisive for me was Zuma’s 2006 rape trial. There was something very cruel in the way the complainant, known as “Khwezi”, was treated, in the mode of defence that Zuma chose. I found that unacceptable.
Is it not lonely outside the ANC?
Raymond Suttner in 2001, when ‘Inside Apartheid’s Prison’ was first published. Raymond Preston/Times Media Group
I miss the comradeship that I understood to bind me to people with whom I had shared dangers, joys and sorrows. When you are together in difficult times it creates a special bond. I did not conceive of that being broken.
But when you break away in a time of decadence, what is it that one misses? I cannot resume relationships on the same basis as those which I previously counted as comradeship. Our paths diverged. I went out into the cold and some with whom I used to be very close chose to link themselves with a project that has meant corruption, violence and destroying everything that was once valued in the liberation tradition.
These former comrades have all been accomplices in Nkandla (Zuma’s private rural home which was upgraded at a cost to the country of R246-million to taxpayers), the social grants scandal and many other features of this period which have seen some individuals benefit unlawfully and at the expense of the poor. I do not say that every person I know has been improperly enriched. But all those who have been in the ANC/SACP/Cosatu leadership have endorsed, indeed even provided elaborate defences of some of the worst features of the Zuma period.
In the new introduction to the book I use the word “betrayal” and I choose it to refer to these people, many of whom were once brave, who turned their backs on those from whom they came or whose cause they once adopted as their own.
Yes, it’s lonely. But that loneliness cannot be remedied by resuming bonds
with people who have taken fundamentally different paths. I now build relationships with others from whom I am learning and growing.
As a global collective, with many of us living far from the coastline, we need to become more aware of the far-reaching consequences of our daily activities and how these play out not only on land, but also in the sea. All of us should be contributing towards the safeguarding of the big blue, because without it the chances of our own survival are very low indeed. So let’s celebrate World Oceans Day and with it our future.
What needs to be made clear is that the debate around “white monopoly capital” and “radical economic transformation” is about much more than statistics and definitions. It is about the ownership and control of both public and private capital by a politically connected elite. Thus it comes with the potential risk of turning South Africa’s entire economy into a centrally controlled patronage network.
Yes, it’s lonely. But that loneliness cannot be remedied by resuming bonds