(Can I advertise my book on this topic of the new "ultra-left" - we jokingly call each other, "Hey, m'ooltra' to make it sound sexy - which came out this week from University of Cape Town Press? "Against Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance"... details available if you email me at bond.p at pdm.wits.ac.za)
There's no Workers' Party on the way (not for the next 5 years, I'd bet). Instead, we're seeing a multiple, interlocking set of challenges to the ruling regime on a variety of fronts. There is great paranoia amongst the ANC neoliberal clique, because not only are Cosatu comrades very annoyed about privatisation - and hundreds of thousands took off two-days' pay in late August for a general strike -but in addition people on the ground are flexing muscles.
Details around one example, electricity, are revealing. In a couple of hours I'm off to Soweto to party at the Orlando East Communal Hall with the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, and to see the premiere of the new 1/2 hour video doccie, "People's Power: Sparks Fly in Soweto" (soon to be available more generally, in prep for Rio+10 here in Jo'burg next September). Anyhow, inspired in part by PEN-Ler Gene Coyle's excellent arguements about discriminatory pricing in electricity market, the Soweto comrades and their academic friends (http://www.queensu.ca/msp - see recent documents) argued for free lifeline services (1 kWh/person/day free), and against the pricing strategy of Eskom which has led to thousands of disconnections... and in turn to massive urban rioting... and late last week, to the following victory:
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People's Power in Soweto!
An End to Eskom's Electricity Cuts--
but Related Struggles to Intensify
Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 10AM, 18 OCTOBER
CONTACTS: Trevor Ngwane, chairperson, 083-293-7691 and 011-339-4121 Dudu Mphenyeke, media officer, 082-953-9003 Virginia Setshedi, deputy chairperson, 072-152-4220
The Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee warmly welcomes the suspension of cut-offs by Eskom. This is a victory for humanity, for development and for the expansion of our constitutional rights to lead lives of dignity.
The news comes on the eve of our launching major civil protests and legal action against Eskom and municipalities which persist in denying constitutional rights to low-income citizens. We will not rest, but will intensify the struggle of poor and working-class Sowetans in related socio-economic grievances. The Johannesburg Metro's iGoli 2002 plan, and Johannesburg Water Company's plan to cut off water supplies and impose pit latrines on poor people are now targets in our sights. But we will expand our work into a variety of other socio-economic rights, including water, healthcare, housing, the environment, employment and access to food.
And in doing so, we will join people across Gauteng in our Anti-Privatisation Forum. In six weeks' time, we will host similar groups across South Africa in the National Exploratory Workshop. That workshop will spread the lessons of how people's power can overwhelm unaccountable, heartless officials from Eskom, other parastatal agencies, national and provincial government departments, and municipalities. As we approach the Rio+10 World Summit on Sustainable Development, the lesson will go out to the whole world: only struggle by the masses for social justice can reverse the tide of free-market economics and big-business interests that are corrupting our hard-fought South African liberation.
Eskom's incompetence when billing Sowetans is one of its most important apartheid-era legacies. After 1994, the incompetence worsened, and was accompanied in recent months by the most cruel and unusual measures to cut peoples' supplies.
In claiming victory, the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee salutes the many people who have been shot--at least two dead in the Vaal--by Eskom security officials and outsourced mercenary companies, and the dozens of people killed in electrocutions caused by inadequate Eskom and municipal services.
We believe that the drive to privatise--by milking more from the poor--seemed to instill in Eskom the most anti-social, anti-environmental strategies. We also believe that the tide has turned, internationally, against privatisation. "Renationalisation" is now a popular sentiment.
We also believe that People's Power is responsible for Eskom's U-turn. We mobilised tens of thousands of Sowetans in active protests over the past year. We established professional and intellectual credibility for our critique of Eskom, even collaborating on a major Wits University study. We demonstrated at the houses of the mayor, Amos Masondo, and local councillors, and in the spirit of non-violent civil disobedience, we went so far as to disconnect the electricity supplies of the mayor and councillors to give them a taste of their own medicine.
On Saturday, 14 October, Councilor Kunene's supply was cut by non-violent protesters. On Monday at 4AM, the police raided two homes of SECC comrades, but failed to arrest them. On Tuesday, five hundred Sowetans presented themselves for mass arrest at Moroka Police Station, but the police were overwhelmed by our unity.
Yesterday, the councilors met Eskom, and we can guess what they had to say about the company's terribly unpopular policies, and how those policies are ruining the reputation of the ruling party and the government as a whole. Finally, someone is knocking sense into Eskom's senior management.
For us, the price has been high. But further battles remain, and we will intensify our struggle with renewed confidence and momentum. Eskom is still running its business
We have won a temporary victory over Eskom, but our other demands remain outstanding:
. commitment to halting and reversing privatisation and commercialisation, the scrapping of arrears,
. the implementation of free electricity promised to us in municipal elections a year ago,
. ending the skewed rates which do not sufficiently subsidise low-income black people,
. additional special provisions for vulnerable groups--disabled people, pensioners, people who are HIV+--and
. expansion of electrification to all, especially impoverished people in urban slums and rural villages, the vast majority of whom do not have the power that we in Soweto celebrate.
We thank for their support, all the comrades in Soweto, all the media who have covered our story and many which have editorialised against Eskom, trade unionists who have vigorously fought privatisation, Wits University Municipal Services Project and Wits Centre for Applied Legal Studies