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Volume 13, No. 7, 20 February 2014 |
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Red Alert The anatomy of community protests in a post-apartheid South Africa: A theoretical perspective on emerging "development activism" |
By Lerumo Tauyatswala
This year marks the 20th anniversary since the dawn of freedom and democracy. Surely, we are bound to reflect on the journey we have travelled so far and the road ahead as anniversaries are moments to pause and ponder.
Understandably, the public discourse on the appraisal of the first two decades of democracy is a highly contentious one. From the standpoint of the ANC-led democratic forces, we proceed from the premise that although we still have a long journey towards realising the vision of our forebears, the South Africa of today is qualitatively different from the one we inherited from the apartheid system twenty years ago. However, our strategic opponents in both the right and far left of the political spectrum would want the world to believe that life has gotten worse under the ANC-led democratic government. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Our rightwing and leftwing critics have entered the current public discourse on "service delivery protests" with the same simplistic attitude that protests are caused by the failures of the ANC-led government. The discourse on protest is distinctive in its paucity of analysis. It masks rather than illuminates the forces and factors behind a new politics of development that is unfolding in the context of freedom and democracy over the past two decades.
Consequently, the real issues behind community protests get lost in the haste to blame the ANC-led government for every protest that takes place in our communities. As a result, the focus is deliberately being shifted away from decisively tackling and breaking the mould of the stubborn and persistent legacy of economic apartheid in our conception and implementation of development interventions.
The neo-liberal paradigm has sought to appropriate community protests as part of their strategy to wage a "low intensity" counter-revolution. Consistent with the neo-liberal, market-reliant, anti-state and anti-mass philosophical conception of development, communities are reduced to or turned into passive recipients of so-called delivery by the type of state which has no meaningful role in driving social and economic change. We have to frontally tackle this underlying neo-liberal philosophical bias if we are to correctly dissect the anatomy of community protests in post-apartheid South Africa.
Obviously, it is also important to give a historical context to the culture of mass protests and the type of disciplined revolutionary violence that gave birth to South Africa's democracy. The current governing ANC-led Alliance has been the key architect and leader of anti-apartheid mass mobilisation and community protests of yesteryear. What is the main difference between those protests and the current ones and what are the continuities between the two?
Community mobilisation and mass protests during the anti-apartheid struggle
Organising protest action and mobilising people around "bread and butter issues" are some of the indispensable skills required and acquired by activists during the struggle against apartheid. "Organise or starve" became the clarion call in the people's organisations - labour, women, youth, student and civic movements, etc.
Accordingly, community leaders and grassroots organisers became the decisive factor and driving force that sustained popular community uprisings that increasingly rendered apartheid unworkable and apartheid South Africa ungovernable. The articulation of "bread and butter" community grievances into the core narrative of "a national grievance" brought millions of local protesters into the mainstream of the anti-apartheid struggle that was being waged at a national, continental and global level.
Under apartheid, protests were critically important forms of democratic expression in a country where the overwhelming majority were denied the right to participate in processes and institutions of democratic governance. Although many of the protests were peaceful, the apartheid security apparatus spared no effort in unleashing its vitriol and violence against any protest action directed at the illegitimate apartheid institutions. It is this systemic violence of the apartheid state that forced the liberation movement to adopt the strategy of revolutionary violence - armed struggle - at the end of the 50s and beginning of the 60s.
Even after the adoption of armed struggle in 1961, the Congress movement sought to protect the "legal" space occupied by the mass organisations of our people that operated inside the country. Communities and various sectors would be mobilised to participate in militant but peaceful protest action that highlight the grievances of the people within the limited framework of "apartheid legality". Reckless militancy earned the perpetrator the ire and attention of the leadership of the movement. Violent protests were harshly admonished by leaders as adventurous actions by agent provocateurs who sought put the masses at great risk.
Of course, there are occasions when the youth crossed the line and burnt down symbols of the apartheid state such as municipal beer halls, offices, police vehicles and people. The leadership emphasised that armed struggle was the only legitimate and disciplined form of revolutionary violence that was organised and carried out by trained units of the people's army. This included the creation of self-defence units which protected our people in the face of apartheid sponsored "third force" violence.
The pre-1994 community protests and revolutionary violence were profoundly anti-state and distinctly anti-apartheid in character and content. They were openly directed at the illegitimate state and racist regime that implemented apartheid which was declared a crime against humanity. The underlying purpose and forces behind the community protests were essentially the same: they were an integral part of the struggle for freedom and democracy.
Although the issues varied from area to area, the racist character and undemocratic nature of the apartheid system was at the centre of the community protests. At times, they were spontaneous while most of the time they were organised and planned as part and parcel of a conscious effort to build alterative organs of people's power.
What is the anatomy of community protests in the post-apartheid South Africa? What are the underlying issues, forces and purposes of these protests? How helpful is the characterisation of these community upsurges as "service delivery" protests? How have the authorities responded to the community protests? What should be the developmental and transformative response to community protests in a democratic society that seeks to deepen the national democratic revolution?
Competing notions of "development" and "service delivery"
Surely, the pre-1994 protests took place in a vastly different political context of opposition to apartheid. Currently, protests are taking place in the context of the massive rollout of state-led infrastructure projects in communities that were previously excluded from the mainstream of the apartheid economy and society - townships, informal settlements, peri-urban and rural areas.
The ANC-led Alliance's perspective on development is that it must be people-centred and people-driven. People-centred means it must first and foremost address the needs of the people. In order to meet the requirement of being people-driven, the people must directly participate in shaping the development process and its outcomes. This conception of development derives from the notion that the people must be their own liberators instead of passive recipients of government delivery. Self-empowerment is at the centre of our conception of development. The experience from the collapse of socialist projects in Eastern European countries is that government delivery without being people-driven is alone not enough. If the people are not actively involved, they will feel alienated and they will rise.
Contrary to our view, there is another perspective that places emphasis on a top-down, technocratic and expert-driven approach to development. The "service delivery protests" narrative is premised on the idea that the people's role is to passively wait for "service delivery". According to this approach, if people are not satisfied with the "quality" and efficiency" with which government delivers, they simply have to change the government in favour of a government that will deliver while they wait. To protest and still vote for the same party is counter-intuitive if not downright stupid, according to neo-liberalism.
At the end of the first decade into our democracy, community protests emerged in the political and development process of post-apartheid South Africa. As we enter the second decade, protests have become a prominent feature of the political and development landscape of our country - depending on how you define development-related protests there are hundreds or even thousands of protests every year. Communities have defied the logic of neo-liberalism - they continue to combine peaceful protest as street power with representative democracy to ensure that they set the agenda of development. Of course, many peaceful and transformative community protests that enhance accountability and shape development outcomes positively don't get the same public attention as violent ones.
The ANC's development track record in communities
There has been an unprecedented level of delivery of social infrastructure in communities over the past two decades - houses, hospitals and clinics, schools, libraries, community halls, roads, sanitation, water and electricity. These infrastructure investments have transformed ghettoes and informal settlements into liveable communities for the overwhelming majority of black people. The infrastructure rollout has been coupled with major anti-poverty measures such as the social security grants to sixteen million people and assistance to children from poor families to access education.
There have been major improvements in the performance of public schools especially those located in the townships. HIV/AIDS pandemic that was ravaging communities across the country has been brought significantly under control and the life expectancy of South Africans has begun to show positive recovery from the devastating decline of the first decade of democracy.
The ANC's impeccable and impressive "delivery" track record has been acknowledged by independent and credible research institutions and public policy experts such as the Municipal IQ, SA Institute of Race Relations, Human Sciences Research Council, etc. It is only the most cynical among the opposition parties that would ignore the factsheet of the progress South Africa has made since 1994.
The mystery, however, is that community "service delivery" protests and, worst of all, in which violence has become a norm rather than an exception are on the increase even in the face of the evidence of the massive improvements in the quality of life.
In the rush to deliver and in response to rising expectations from those who want the delivery van of government to reach them quicker, have we lost the balance between the people-centred and people-driven character of development? How does the current narrative on "service delivery protests" enable or disable us to restore to reframe the issues and hear the outcry of communities?
Six theses about post-apartheid community protests: a counter-narrative
In this article, we have drawn from our activist experience born out of direct interaction with communities and protesters in different areas of Gauteng and neighbouring provinces to put forward a theoretical perspective that challenges policy interventions and development practices reproduce structural poverty and inequalities in our communities and lock our people into a permanent cycle of conflict among and against themselves.
Our perspective is underpinned by six theses that provide a counter-narrative to the dominant simplistic narrative that the current community protests are an expression of frustration with the ANC's failure to deliver on its promises. These six theses constitute the main argument that, beyond the destructive violence and dramatic media headlines, we need a deeper analysis of the different community struggles in order to appreciate their transformative and democratic potential in the context of a new type of activism. What are the underlying factors, forces and purposes of the recent community protests?
Thesis 1: Struggles over the control of the benefits of development brought about the democratic state
What has loosely been characterised by the media as "service delivery protests" are often the struggles over control of development on the part of local elites. More often than not, it is the advent of development rather than its absence that gives rise to protests as most protests take place in areas where government has invested huge public resources and there are development projects that respond to community needs. Such development projects create new conflicts over who must benefit from the development, thus creating new winners and losers - who are the beneficiaries to be allocated the new houses already built or being built, who is to be employed in the construction, which local contractor to get a stake in the tender.
Protests are organised in the battle for control over such development projects by competing local elites trying to outmanoeuvre one another. This is one of the common factors and forces behind the protests. Due to levels of poverty and unemployment, local leaders of the Tripartite Alliance, councillors and other political and community organisations are prominently involved in the battles.
To call such struggles service delivery protests is intellectual laziness of the worst kind. However, these are struggles about the survival of the fittest. By its nature, development breeds conflict especially in the face of extreme poverty. Conflict management must be a critical component of development interventions in order to safeguard community interests.
Thesis 2: Struggles to deepen democratic participation and community involvement in the development process
These protests are far more transformative in their intention than the concept of "service delivery protests" would suggest. Proceeding from the notion that development and democracy are intertwined, the struggle for community participation is very important for revolutionary transformation of society. Most protests are also linked to a grievance by members of the community who appreciate new infrastructure development in their area but complain severely about the fact that the views of the community are not adequately taken into account when the government finally "delivers".
In some instances, this gives rise to "poor quality of delivery or alienation of communities" from that which has been delivered - the reason communities fail to defend their assets when they are vandalised or destroyed during violent protests?
We need to take extra measures to deepen popular democratic involvement in the development process. This includes getting communities to commit to bring in "local resources" of whatever kind in every new state-led development in a community. Such resources range from financial, human and social capital so that communities take full ownership of the infrastructure in their areas.
People will not complain of quality if they have participated fully, through development forums, in the process of setting standards and helping to monitor adherence to the standards. They will also not allow anyone to burn down public property if they have invested their own time, energy and other resources in creating liveable and thriving communities.
Thesis 3: struggles for meaningful economic participation and decent livelihoods
Economic struggles have lazily been bundled into the bandwagon - "service delivery protests". The dominant narrative of "service delivery protests" always presents government failure as the cause of the protests. In our experience, things are more complex. The underlying factor behind most protests is that government "delivers" infrastructure such as housing, roads and basic services such as water and electricity which can only be enjoyed sustainably by those who have stable and decent income.
People in new settlements are quite happy to be in new houses built by government but they increasingly feel they won't sustain living in such houses if they don't get decent employment - water, electricity and the new lifestyle become unaffordable. The cost of living - food, energy and transport costs - is also a major factor behind protests. This is one of the reasons people rent or sell the "RDP houses" and return to shacks.
Accordingly, those who have tasted "government delivery" but can't move to the next level of decent and sustainable livelihoods through employment join the "service delivery protests" in the area. Frustration with the continuing lack of fundamental economic transformation and inequality is also an important factor in protests. The unemployed youth are the force behind most of the protests, including the violence. Youth in townships and informal settlements are very resentful of inequality and hunger in the midst of plenty and ostentatious display of wealth.
Actual or perceived corruption in many huge projects levelled against our councillors or government officials also creates a sense of an unfair economic advantage.
Again, due high levels of unemployment and poverty, some ANC and Alliance local leaders are compromised by seeing the projects as their only opportunity to escape from grinding poverty, thus getting caught up in a conflict of interest - they become community leaders who act in their own interest.
These economic factors drive the protests more significantly in Gauteng's communities. We need to ensure that every major development intervention leads to substantial local economic development and collective economic empowerment. For instance, it cannot be right to invest R600m in a community infrastructure project and leave the economic fortunes of the locality unchanged. During the second phase of our transition to a national democratic society, we need to fundamentally tackle the revival of local economies.
The dominant "service delivery" narrative simply puts the blame on government while placing no responsibility on communities and other private sector players who benefit hugely from local development projects.
Thesis 4: Struggles to enhance government accountability and the responsiveness of the state machinery
Having identified different factors behind community protests, it is important to point out that there are cases where poor service delivery and lack of accountability by government are the main causes of community outrage and upsurges. There are indeed the type of protests that would correctly fit the characterisation of "service delivery protests" even though the concept still reduce citizens to passive recipients of "government delivery". This type of protests arise from complete failure by government to deliver on the commitments made in various elections and those caused by incomplete projects.
While all the other issues we have raised in the second and third theses are legitimate community issues, we estimate that only 33% protests are related to what can correctly be referred to as poor service delivery failure on government commitments. We have been to communities where the conditions of living are appalling - roads, housing and access to basic services. Often communities would have tried many times to engage government on their issues of concern without success. Bureaucratic inertia is often the main problem.
Two decades after coming to power, political leaders still listen too much to explanations from bureaucrats on why straight forward and acute development backlogs cannot be addressed with urgency - sewer spillage running pass people's houses and children immersing themselves in it; road need grading; closing a pothole that causes accidents;
We need to jerk up the capacity of the democratic developmental state that we are constructing in responding to development needs of communities. In some cases often government takes too long to address well-known and well-articulated community grievances and this leads to protest which at times involves violence - wrong as this is.
Our approach is that government needs to communicate speedily when there are delays in implementing projects. Where there resource constraints or other difficulties, communities need to be taken into confidence so that together we can find alternative solutions to longstanding community needs. To use arrogance or run away from the protesting community will create resentment which is often the basis for the wrongful violent protests at times.
In our experience, the political interventions of the ANC and Alliance structures in protests have been overwhelmingly welcomed by communities. Communities and their representatives have appreciated the political intervention to unlock government bureaucracy. There is no evidence of anti-ANC community protests for example in Gauteng. ANC and Alliance political intervention in this case is meant to bring government to the table to unlock development.
In many instances, protesters state clearly that they have confidence in the ANC and the Alliance and would want us to bring government to the party so that matters are resolved amicably. Counter-intuitively, this goes against the narrative that protests are a rebellion or revolt against the ANC.
Thesis 5: The prime movers behind most community protests are the local leaders and activists of the ANC-led Alliance
Anyone who entertains the notion that community protests are instigated by political players is in most instances right. However, to think that most protests are caused by outsiders who move from community to community organising protests is far from the truth.
In Gauteng province for example, there are protests that are also probably triggered by local competing factions or individuals in the structures of the ANC-led Alliance. This is a far-reaching conclusion that is not easy to arrive at because it is an indictment. However, it is an indisputable fact about the forces behind protests in the particular instances.
Opposition parties in the instances are often very weak on the ground to mobilise communities to blockade roads and prevent children from attending school. Where individuals from other parties are involved, they are always outnumbered by disgruntled members of the ANC, SACP or SANCO in the concerned groups. Usually, the main leaders and brains behind protests are members of our own formations who have fallen out during one list process or Branch Biennial General Meeting or another. The factional battles in branches create winners and losers.
Legitimate community grievances or complaints in the circumstances get hijacked by a particular group that has lost control of the branch to mobilise communities against the current councillor and branch leadership. At stake is the question of who controls access to the benefits of projects.
We have also been informed repeatedly that some of the instigators and organisers of the most barbaric destruction of public property and burning councillors' houses are members of our formations. Disciplinary processes often collapse out of lack of evidence or in one extreme they are influenced by subjective factors, thus engendering a sense of impunity on some and hopelessness on others.
What many of us do know is that there is a small new party that has publicly declared that it takes keen interests in all the community protests. What they haven't said is that they particularly have interest in the violent nature of protests that create confrontation between the police and community protesters. They have been spotted supplying tyres in a bakkie (i.e. small utility vehicle) to an area that has been on fire for a while. However, to attribute the protests to them will be to give them the credit they don't deserve. The factional contests for control of development benefits among members of the ANC, SACP and SANCO remains the prime force behind community protests.
The new kid on the block may have some role in fuelling violence but not without the aid of our activists who use community concerns to outmanoeuvre one another, and, accordingly, the character of the protests and number will be different. This new kid on the block has proven to be weak organisationally to drive sustained community mobilisation. The main thing it does is to look for already organised protests and use entryism to promise people heaven on earth and commit to things that will never materialise.
Thesis 6: The unemployed youth is the main force behind the violence in community protests
We need a focused study of the question of violence in post-conflict societies that are undergoing social change in order to adequately explain the factors and sources behind escalating violence in communities, including violence during protests.
What many of us know is that the unemployed youth are a critical force in the recent protests and the violence behind them. The global problem of youth unemployment is and the racial and class character of this phenomenon in our country explains why black township youth constitute a readily available force for protests. In fact, youth unemployment has become a critical force for reactionary regime change in many countries.
In addition there is the lumpen youth. True to the character of the lumpen proletariat as analysed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto, the lumpen youth is the force to that is readily available to be recruited into lumpen and other activities flowing from winds in all directions. In other countries this section, which Marx and Engels called the social scum, is recruited in activities that seek to overthrow governments, regardless whether they are progressive.
We need multiple policy interventions to remove most young people who are out of school, unskilled and unemployed and bring them back into the mainstream of our society - massive education and training, targeted youth employment schemes and national service programmes that will enhance responsible citizenship and discipline among the youth. But most importantly, this would require an alteration in socio-economic and political discourse and conditions to absorb the youth in productive activities.
The police also need to be better trained to handle protests in a way that diffuses the potential for violence and loss of life. Preventive rather than reactive policing should be emphasised, while perpetrators of violence need to get the message that no one will be allowed to break the law and compromise the safety of other citizens willy-nilly.
Instead of a conclusion: the dominant narrative of "service delivery protests" is unsound!
For a long time, we have allowed our opponents to get away with murder in an intellectual sense. Those who characterise all community protests as service delivery protests have used this inaccurate generalisation in order to paint a picture that the ANC-led government has completely failed to meet the expectations of communities about a better life for all. This is a purely ideological posture that has no basis in fact.
The ANC has been able to do a lot in improving the quality of life in communities that have previously been excluded from the benefit of having better social and physical infrastructure and access to basic services. This is confirmed by research institutions that have no reason to praise us other than to state the facts.
The public discourse behind the community protests has been impoverished by the self-serving neo-liberal agenda to attribute the protests as the evidence of failure by the ANC government. This is part of a "low-intensity" counter-revolution that wants to use the poor and lumpen youth to dislodge the democratic forces from the position of state power.
In the main, community protests are about a range of legitimate community development issues - democratic participation, flow of development benefits, corruption, economic empowerment and employment. Government failure to communicate progress or delays in meeting commitments made to communities has led to service delivery protests.
While many protests take place peacefully in order to highlight legitimate issues affecting the livelihoods of communities, the spectre of violence undermines the current peaceful, constructive and transformative struggles of communities. This must be nipped in the bud because it is unjustifiable and counter-productive in a democracy.
Having analysed the forces behind the protests, we have found no meaningful presence of political forces outside the ANC-led Alliance. Factionalism and fighting in the Alliance over the control of the development process often triggers protests. This hits at the belly of the distributive system employed by the state when coming to the economic benefit of development opportunities. The fundamental transformation of our economy into to realise equitable, inclusive and shared growth is central to resolving community grievances.
As the movement and the Alliance, we need to strengthen the political and organisational capacity of our local structures and councillors to lead community struggles in a more constructive, developmental and transformative way. Revolutionary transformation requires the mobilisation of social forces and active participation of communities. In other words, revolution requires the self-empowerment of the masses.
We need to train our members in a new type activism - ‘transformative and development activism' - to give both transformation and development a more democratic and economic inclusive character and content. Development must be freed from capture by local and political elites and predatory corporate juggernauts who work in communities to deliver huge projects but leave those communities as poor and unsustainable as they found due to a deliberately engineered local capital flight.
Acute unemployment, grinding poverty, extreme inequality and persisting spatial economic apartheid continue to be the enduring features for example in the Gauteng City-Region. We need infrastructure development interventions, including public transport infrastructure that enable us to break with this exclusionary development trajectory that keeps the rich and poor permanently apart.
While the police must always act firmly and proactively to enforce the law and ensure that no life is lost while property is protected, we should not put too much pressure on the police when in some instances there is lack of, if no effective and anticipatory political leadership and government intervention to deal promptly with community grievances. The perpetrators of violence should receive no mercy from our communities and our structures.
Cde Lerumo Tauyatswala is an ANC and SACP activist based in Tshwane, and writes in his personal capacity.
