Immigrants make Johannesburg a vibrant city, says rights organisation

Mayor Herman Mashaba’s attitude described as “very scary”

By Julia Chaskalson
1 September 2017

Protest against xenophobia in March 2017. Photo: Ihsaan Haffejee

Johannesburg Mayor, Herman Mashaba, has been criticised for his plan to use “shock and awe” to remove undocumented immigrants from the Johannesburg city centre. Throughout Mashaba’s term in office, he has been accused of fuelling xenophobia by making unconstitutional statements about foreign nationals living in the city.

The Africa Diaspora Forum (ADF) says these statements are “reckless” and “fire kindling”. In a statement released earlier this month, the ADF said that it worried these remarks “may incite more xenophobic violence”. Mashaba has been quoted widely saying that “foreigners, whether legal or illegal, are not the responsibility of the city” and that “[the city of Johannesburg] will only provide accommodation exclusively to South Africans.”

Mashaba plans to clean up the city centre to invigorate economic growth. To do so, Mashaba aims to “expropriate” run-down buildings in the city centre to sell them to private investors, evicting residents “by force” if necessary.

Attempts to contact Mashaba about whether the investors will be commercial or residential developers were unsuccessful.

Mashaba has also been quoted calling on foreign aid organisations like the UN to step in and “assist” with what he calls a “crisis” of foreign nationals living in the city. “He must be precise about what he wants to do with migrants,” ADF Chairperson Marc Gbaffou said to GroundUp. He said Mashaba’s attitude is “very scary.”

ADF spokesperson Johnson Emeka also spoke to GroundUp. “We have been vilified unfairly by [Mashaba],” Emeka said. “Mashaba’s tactics and style is embedded in DA strategy to spur embers of hate against foreign migrants.”

Gbaffou mirrored this sentiment. “[Mashaba] keeps repeating himself and making xenophobic comments and nothing is happening to him. We think this is the DA’s strategy, like Trump did in the US, using a populist strategy to get to power.”

Indeed, in Mashaba’s Ten Point Plan for Johannesburg’s economic growth in September last year, he was quoted as saying he intends to “make Joburg great again” by making the city “business friendly”. In a statement released last week, Mashaba said his administration was “committed to ensuring [they] stop the rot” of undocumented migrants living in the city, and the next day on Twitter, Mashaba said that by conducting raids on inner city buildings, he is “reclaiming the city from criminals.”

Gbaffou criticized these allegations. “The houses were abandoned by the city,” he explained. “People are struggling to come from Soweto to town to run a small business, and they’re not necessarily migrants. There are also South African citizens who are living in these abandoned houses. So the mayor twisted it by saying it’s hijacked houses.” Mashaba claims that 80% of people living in “hijacked” buildings are undocumented immigrants.

The Socio Economic Rights Institute (SERI) has questioned these figures, claiming that far more South African citizens are living in abandoned buildings in the inner city than foreign nationals. SERI has called plans to forcibly evict people from these buildings “unconstitutional” and “inhumane”.
The ADF opened a case with the South African Human Rights Commission in February this year.

“We told them that these types of statements might lead to violence and they’re investigating those claims,” Gbaffou told GroundUp. “We saw some attitudes from South African citizens even to the word ‘migrant’ which are very scary. We fear for the lives of migrants and our members.” (GroundUp has been unable to get hold of the Human Rights Commission to find out the status of this investigation.)

Gbaffou, an Ivorian immigrant who has been living in Johannesburg for over 20 years, feels “very concerned” by Mashaba’s plans to evict foreigners from the city. “[I have seen] in the previous years that whenever an authority of that calibre makes a comment like this, then you have some attacks on migrants,” he told GroundUp. “In 2015 we saw it when King Goodwill Zwelithini made the comment in KwaZulu Natal. Migrants were attacked. Many people were killed and injured.”

In February this year, Groundup reported on a march against migrants hosted by the Mamelodi Concerned Residents group. Many claimed that xenophobic comments by Mashaba spurred on the protestors. “The Mamelodi Residents who … marched against migrants after those comments… Everyone wants to take out their anger on migrants,” Gbaffou said to GroundUp. “We have tried to speak with [Mashaba] but he doesn’t want to engage about it.”

Gbbafou says that by pushing migrants out of the city, Johannesburg’s character will change. “In a cosmopolitan city like Johannesburg, you cannot say ‘let us expel all migrants!’” he said. “You go to big cities around the world and they’re made of all different types of people, coming from everywhere, to make a vibrant city. Johannesburg is a cosmopolitan city.”

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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NPA and Hawks under fire for failing to control illegal flow of money

Derek Hanekom asks Hawks if they were under political pressure to drop cases

By Moira Levy
31 August 2017

Informal miners search for diamonds. Parliamentarians blamed Zama-Zama, such as these men, for money illicitly leaving the country, but a lawyer GroundUp spoke to expressed scepticism. Archive photo: Shaun Swingler

The amount of money illegally leaving the country and draining the fiscus was described as “staggering” at a joint parliamentary committee meeting yesterday and Committee Chair Yunus Carrim begged the crime-fighting authorities reporting back to the meeting to tell the committees what they could do to help.

South Africa could not afford the loss of foreign exchange reserves, reduced tax collection, and the stifling of investment and trade resulting from these illegal outflows, he said, especially given the poor performance of the economy and projected low rate of growth.

It is not possible to estimate the amounts that are being lost to the economy through Illicit Financial Flows (IFF), but they run into hundreds of billions of rands of lost tax revenue. The last estimate in 2012 was set at more than $120-billion that had been illegally drained out of the economy.

This problem is not new and four parliamentary committees came together in 2015 to investigate what amendments and regulations were needed to clamp down on illegal financial transactions.

The Standing Committee on Finance and three National Assembly’s Portfolio Committees - Trade and Industry, Mineral Resources, and Police - were left more frustrated than ever after yesterday’s reportback.

The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and the Hawks came under fire for “abysmal” rates of prosecution.

The Hawks reported that of the 121 transactions referred by the South African Reserve Bank, only 54 cases were treated as IFFs, and so far three had been finalised in court. Twenty -five cases were still under investigation.

The ANC’s Derek Hanekom asked outright if the Hawks were under political pressure to drop certain cases. This was denied, but the DA’s David Maynier pushed on, asking what the Hawks were doing about the funds allegedly diverted from the Estina dairy farm project in the Free state to fund the controversial Gupta wedding held at Sun City.

“We need to do more,” Carrim said, “There are staggering amounts of money leaving the country illegally and there’s a desperate need to raise more revenue, especially with a projected 0.5% growth rate. So it’s just not acceptable that there are so few cases in the court.”

A multi-agency structure was set up in March to bring together all statutory bodies dealing with IFFs and Basic Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) but to date no prosecutions have been reported, which was described by Carrim as “a consummate lack of progress”.

However, the UDM pointed to a breakdown in communication between the various agencies that are supposed to be working together, saying they continue to work in silos. Nqabayomzi Kwankwa (UDM) said, “The right hand does not seem to know what the left hand is doing.”

The multi-agency task team to track down and prosecute IFFs and BEPs includes the South African Revenue Service, the Financial Intelligence Centre, the South African Reserve Bank and National Treasury. The four parliamentary Committees will meet at least four times a year to monitor progress and will come together every six months to pool their information and receive reportbacks from the task team.

All parties in the hearing agreed that the Hawks’ report left more questions than answers, and that the reported prosecutions and convictions were laughable in the face of the actual amounts being drained from the economy.

Acting Hawks head Yolisa Matakata conceded that the Hawks lacked forensic skills, which had to be outsourced, but said on the whole they had the necessary capacity.

The MPs suggested that illegal mining was a major source of illegal financial outflows. They said the Zama Zamas were the first step in a chain of cross-border deals that were growing in scale, functioning openly with large-scale machinery and illegal vehicles, often in cahoots with mine security. Trade in the products of illegal mining reached through a network of dealers throughout the country and beyond its borders. The DA’s James Lorimer estimated that R20 billion left the country from illegal mining. When asked by GroundUp to substantiate the figure he said it could be anywhere between R6 billion and R20 billion (he did not specify over what period or how he came to this estimate).

But Johan Lorenzen, a lawyer assisting artisanal miners to decriminalise their trade, was sceptical when he spoke to GroundUp: “It conflates Zama-Zama with big companies extracting wealth on a large scale. But even so I doubt R20 billion is a plausible number.” Lorenzen said that if artisanal mining was legalised it would significantly contribute to the tax base and help earn foreign revenue.

CORRECTION: The headline was changed after publication, and Lorimer’s comment to GroundUp was added.

Produced for GroundUp by Notes from the House.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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Parliament hears how PRASA is going off the rails

“The more trains that are burnt and vandalised, the less we can operate.”

By Sune Payne
31 August 2017

A train at Cape Town station burns earlier this year. Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks

Parliament’s Standing Committee on Appropriations was briefed by PRASA on Wednesday about the extent of vandalism and violence on public trains and how this affects its service. Members heard that during the 2016-17 financial year 322 carriages were set alight and 3,591 crime incidents were reported on Metrorail. During this period 77% of trains ran on time, the committee was told.

PRASA says it has a total of 88 trains that it could put to use in the Western Cape but currently only 61 are in use due to vandalism and arson attacks.

The Acting Chief Executive Officer, Lindikhaya Zide, warned: “The more trains that are burnt and vandalised, the less we can operate.”

“We are experiencing a high rate of vandalism of our assets,” said Zide. He reported that Metrorail had refurbished 461 coaches nationally in the 2016-17 financial year.

MP Shaik Emam was concerned to know what PRASA was doing about passenger safety. Zide said PRASA was consulting the SA Police Service. On cable theft, he said PRASA was looking at how Eskom and Transnet were dealing with problems related to cable theft and trying to emulate that.
Speaking to GroundUp, Emam said he had doubts that PRASA could manage safety concerns as it only spends 6% on protection services. “We want to see how they manage to do this, when they spend so little on protection.”

The Chairperson of the Committee, Yvonne Phosa, said PRASA and the Department of Transport must ensure that “taxpayers’ money is well spent and not wasted”.

Produced for GroundUp by Notes from the House.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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You Can Still Be Transgender If You Don’t Feel Physical Dysphoria – Here’s Why

Has anyone ever implied that you’re “faking” being transgender because you don’t feel like you’re “born in the wrong body?”

The narrative of feeling like a person of one gender “trapped” in another gender’s body is true for some, but it doesn’t apply to all trans people. If you don’t experience physical dysphoria, that doesn’t mean you’re “not trans enough.”

But it hurts to be excluded based on this narrative, so here’s a comic to help you get through it. This explains the origins of the myth that trans people must experience physical dysphoria – and exactly what this misconception gets wrong.

With Love,
The Editors at Everyday Feminism

Teacher caught on video beating student

Same teacher accused of sexual harassment

By Ashleigh Furlong
29 August 2017

Thandokhulu students protest on Monday against an alleged sexual assault by one of their teachers. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks

A video has emerged of a teacher at Thandokhulu Secondary School in Mowbray hitting a learner. The same teacher has been accused of sexual assault by learners at the school.

In the video a man can be seen using his belt and smacking it in the direction of a learner, while the learner raises an arm for protection.

Video by unknown. GroundUp has blurred the face of the student in the forefront of the video.

Yesterday GroundUp reported on a protest held by learners at the school, where they called for the teacher to be suspended. The learners told GroundUp that in May one of the learners was sexually assaulted by the teacher when a group of choir members slept over at the school because of choir practice.

However, the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) has found the teacher not guilty, telling GroundUp that: “The matter was referred to Labour Relations by the school principal. Labour Relations have confirmed that the educator was found not guilty of the allegations and the charges withdrawn.”

Kealeboga Mase Ramaru, the deputy head of Equal Education’s Western Cape Office, told GroundUp that they had a meeting with the principal of Thandokhulu on Tuesday to discuss the teacher’s conduct. She said that the principal told them that when he requested reasons from the Department for the not guilty finding, he was told that there wasn’t a policy to release this information.
Ramaru added that a criminal case had also been opened against the teacher and that he is due to appear again in court on Thursday. She said that he had already appeared once in court but the magistrate apparently didn’t stipulate that he should be suspended from his position, pending the outcome of the case.

Ramaru said that the principal was set to call an emergency meeting today with the learners to discuss the matter.

As for the corporal punishment charge, Ramaru said that they were in the process of preparing evidence that would be presented to the principal.

GroundUp has seen a statement written by the learners where they say they “feel threatened by a teacher’s presence … after his sexual harassment case”.

“We feel that both the school and WCED has failed us as students because the teacher is still teaching at the school and the victim attends his classes,” the statement says. “We now feel vulnerable and that the school should take action and assure us and other students that we are safe.”

Corporal punishment in schools have been banned since 1997 but still remains a problem. According to the 2016 General Household Survey, about 10% of learners reportedly experienced corporal punishment in 2016. These rates were highest in the Eastern Cape where it sits at nearly 18% and lowest in the Western Cape and Gauteng where about 2% of learners said they had experienced corporal punishment.

In Equal Education’s 2016 social audit of schools in the Western Cape, they found that learners were beaten at 83% of the schools sampled and that this was a daily occurrence at 37% of the schools. “At more than 90% of schools with corporal punishment, teachers use some type of weapon,” stated the survey.

“Principals and teachers are the main individuals to whom learners are meant to report violent events. The reporting systems and structures that the WCED has in place are severely undermined by a situation in which learners in such a high proportion of schools can expect to be beaten by the same individuals entrusted with their safety,” said Equal Education.
GroundUp is continuing to investigate this story.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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