Once Again the Name of Our Movement is Being Abused by the NGOs

On Tuesday this week we were shocked to read an article in The Sowetan by Patrick Magebhula in which Magebhula claimed that Abahlali baseMjondolo is part of the Informal Settlement Network (ISN) which falls under the control of the global NGO Shack Dwellers International (SDI). Benjamin Bradlow from SDI later sent the article to the press.

Last year, after our movement was attacked, we were invited to a meeting, in Durban, of all shack dwellers’ organisations. We discussed the invitation and decided to elect two representatives from our movement to attend that meeting. At that meeting solidarity was expressed with us and a promise was made, by Mzwanele Zulu of the Joe Slovo Task Team (which has now joined SDI), to organise marches in support of us in Johannesburg and Cape Town. We accepted this offer of solidarity. In a time when a shack dwellers organisation is suffering violent state backed attacks it makes good sense for different organisations, with different politics, to unite around a shared opposition to these attacks and a shared commitment to the right of shack dwellers to organise themselves as they chose to. However at that meeting we never agreed to join the ISN. After the meeting we heard nothing further about the promises of solidarity that were made to us.

Our movement is organised on a completely different basis to the Federation of the Urban Poor (FedUp), which falls under SDI, and we have developed a completely different politics to SDI. Our movement falls under no one other than its members. We do not believe that progress will come by friendship and loyalty to an oppressive government. It is clear to us that the government gives so many millions to SDI because they believe that SDI will help them to control the poor. We believe that we have a duty to resist oppression. We believe that it is essential for the poor to organise and to build our own power against the rich, against the politicians and against that part of civil society that think that it has a natural right to represent the poor.


However we are a democratic organisation and we respect the right of everyone to choose their own politics. We work with shack dwellers’ organisations that have chosen to affiliate themselves to SDI when they have good intentions and when we have areas of common concern. For example we are always happy to work with “General” Alfred Moyo in Makause in Johannesburg. The people in Makause have had to confront evictions and violence from the state as well as xenophobia. They understand very well the challenges that any shack dweller’s organisation must face in South Africa.

But the fact is that we did not join the ISN, we have never joined the ISN and we are not even aware of their programmes and projects. It is simply untrue for Patrick Magebhula to claim that we, along with the Federation of the Urban Poor (FedUP) and the South African National Civics Organisation (SANCO) fall under the ISN. And it is simply untrue for Benjamin Bradlow to imply that, because we are claimed to fall under the ISN, we therefore fall under SDI.

We have seen no living solidarity from SDI or their ISN while we have been under attack. SDI did issue one statement after the attack but after that all we have seen is statements from SDI praising the government – the same government that evicts us, disconnects us, arrests us, beats us and supports a violent attack against us. All we see is that the notorious Lindiwe Sisulu who abandoned Breaking New Ground and the Constitution to try and ‘eradicate’ us from the cities is chair of the board of SDI. In our view it is a disgrace that an organisation that claims to be working in the interests of shack dwellers can have someone like Sisulu as the chair of its board.

We have paid a very high price to keep our autonomy from NGOs. We will never give up that autonomy. We will always be directed by no one other than our members and the discussions that we organise in our meetings. We are willing to work on areas of common concern with organisations that respect our autonomy but the fact is that there are very, very few NGOs that are willing to respect the autonomy of a poor people’s movement. We, along with other movements, have had long experience of NGOs claiming that they represent us when they do not, claiming to be working with us when they are not, offering money and expesnive presents to individuals to try and buy our support and so on. The NGOs on the left and on the right often behave in exactly the same way. We have also had long and bitter experience with NGOs that respond to us in exactly the same way as the state when we reject their money and their authority. Some NGOs have the same ‘rule it or ruin it’ strategy as the state.

Our advice to Patrick Magebhula is to be honest with himself, with his organisations, with the media and with us. You cannot claim to represent an organisation just because you once attended a meeting together. You cannot claim to represent people that you never consult with. We would like to caution him to always remember that what ever nice things that SDI says about the government and what ever nice things that the government says about SDI people are still living and dying in the shacks. People are still being burnt and evicted and beaten and arrested. We continue to recommend that a politics that is of the poor, by the poor and for the poor must start from this reality and not from the nice things that the government and a government funded NGO are saying about each other.

We are not part of the ISN and we have never been part of the ISN. But we are part of an alliance and that alliance is the Poor People’s Alliance (PPA). The PPA consists of Abahlali baseMjondolo (in Durban and in Cape Town), the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign (in Cape Town), the Rural Network (in KwaZulu-Natal) and the Landless People’s Movement (in Johannesburg). We started that alliance when we rejected the authority of the left NGOs and, without once cent of donor money, started an alliance by the poor, for the poor and under the complete control of the organisations of the poor. Our alliance was carefully discussed and endorsed in all our movements. It unites poor people in shacks, flats, township houses and on farms. It is based on a refusal of party politics and a commitment to people’s politics. In this alliance we always aim to build a living solidarity between our organisations as we resist oppression and work to build the power of the poor. No one makes any decisions for the alliance except a meeting of representatives from all the organisations that make up our alliance. Sometimes this makes it hard for us to make decisions or to issue statements quickly. But when we say something it carries the real weight of all of our movements. This is our politics.

We do hope that both Patrick Magebhula and Benjamin Bradlow will issue a formal apology for misrepresenting our movement in this way. We have sent a letter to The Sowetan and asked them to publish a correction.

For more information or comment please contact the Abahlali baseMjondolo Office on 031 304 6420..


Uyishayile!

To view the short video by Umhlanga Rocks on the September 2009 attack on
Abahlali baseMjondolo in the Kennedy Road settlement click here

To see a collection of films on AbM click this:

Abahlali baseMjondolo, together with with Landless People's Movement (Gauteng), the Rural Network (KwaZulu-Natal) and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, is part of the Poor People's Alliance - a national network of democratic membership based poor people's movements.

- Abahlali baseMjondolo

Eradicating the slums; 16 yrs after the Millennium development goals post

MINISTER of Human Settlements Tokyo Sexwale demonstrated a promising tone of seriousness and innovation regarding the challenge of human settlements in his budget speech to Parliament last month.

He warmed the hearts of the poor when he said the challenge of slums must receive at least the same political attention as that currently being given to the World Cup.

The energy the minister hopes to unleash towards a “human settlements 2030” is on his doorstep. The poor communities are best placed to work with government to develop and implement such policy.

The press has a fascination with what are often referred to as “service delivery protests”. The fires and looting make good copy for editors desperate for any kind of violence or scandal.

But there is a much bigger story developing across our biggest cities. The poor are organising, informal settlement by informal settlement, to work with all levels of government and other stakeholders to address their most pressing needs.

We can recall the street and issue-based people’s development committees so effective in the civics movement that organised communities to improve their own lives and bring down apartheid. The Informal Settlement Network (ISN) is the first major attempt in the post-apartheid era to bring South Africa’s settlement-level and national-level organisations of the urban poor under one umbrella, this time to work with government in finding solutions to slum poverty.

In just one and a half years, groups in over 600 informal settlements have come together in the ISN in the country’s five biggest metropolitan municipalities: Jo burg, eThekwini (Durban), Cape Town, Ekurhuleni, and Nelson Mandela Bay (Port Elizabeth), as well as in the smaller Sol Plaatje municipality (Kimberly).

The ISN includes settlements linked to the largest poor people’s organisations in the country: Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Federation of the Urban Poor , and Sanco.

Groups in informal settlements in these cities are working together to fully understand and address the problems facing residents of each informal settlement. We call these activities city-wide “informal settlement profiling”.

Armed with this knowledge the poor now have the capacity to inform and work with the government.

For example, poor people from Slovo Park in Johannesburg are visiting Joe Slovo on the Cape Flats to learn how they can conceive and implement projects in partnership with local authorities around basic services such as water, sanitation, waste removal, and energy. They are bringing these lessons home with them.

I am so pleased that the minister has called for a shift in policy towards incremental upgrading strategies. This has always been our strategy.

We know, as the minister said last month, that the poor cannot just wait years for a house, without doing anything themselves to improve their living conditions.

We also know that the greatest obstacle to incremental strategies for upgrading informal settlements is the lack of security of tenure.

Let us seize on the minister’s call for innovation by thinking creatively about land tenure issues as they relate to informal settlements.

President Jacob Zuma’s promise to provide land to poor urban dwellers can be coupled with the minister’s strategy to develop new ideas on tenure arrangements.

Sexwale lived much of his life in a shack. Informal settlement life is no mystery to him.

Organised communities of the poor are ready to work with him to make a better life for all.

# The writer is national chairperson of the ISN and president of the Federation of the Urban Poor

- Sowetan

Rio - Cape Town - Tokyo

TMG Sexwale Minister of Human Settlements, Pretoria, South Africa. A charismatic leader, he was imprisoned on Robben Island for his anti-apartheid activities, alongside figures such as Nelson Mandela. After the 1994 general election—the first universal franchise election in South Africa—Sexwale became the Premier of Gauteng Province. On 10 May 2009, South Africa's new President Jacob Zuma appointed the veteran Sexwale as Minister of Human Settlements.

I wonder if Tokyo will spend the night in a Brazilian shack just to see if it's anything like Diepsloot shacks... naaaa COMEON it's going to be a 5-STAR HOTEL!!!!

World Urban Forum 5: The Right to the City-Bridging the Urban Divide

In the space of a few short years, the World Urban Forum has turned into the world's premier conference on cities. The Forum was established by the United Nations to examine one of the most pressing problems facing the world today: rapid urbanization and its impact on communities, cities, economies, climate change and policies.

Since the first meeting in Nairobi, Kenya in 2002, the Forum has grown in size and stature as it travelled to Barcelona in 2004, Vancouver 2006, and Nanjing in 2008.

With half of humanity already living in towns and cities, it is projected that in the next 50 years, two-thirds of us will be living in towns and cities. A major challenge is to minimize burgeoning poverty in cities, improve access of the urban poor to basic facilities such as shelter, clean water and sanitation and to achieve environmentally friendly, sustainable urban growth and development.

UN-HABITAT and the Government of Brazil have started preparations for the fifth session scheduled in Rio de Janeiro 22 - 26 March 2010. The Forum is one of the most open and inclusive gatherings of its kind on the international stage. It brings together government leaders, ministers, mayors, diplomats, members of national, regional and international associations of local governments, non-governmental and community organizations, professionals, academics, grassroots women's organizations, youth and slum dwellers groups as partners working for better cities. The fifth session in Rio builds on the lessons and successes of the previous four events.

"Brazil, like other countries in the world, became essentially urban during the twentieth century. Today, in Brazil, but also throughout the world, we need to rethink and renegotiate the fundamental bases of the city we want," said Marcos Caramuru de Paiva, the Brazilian Consul General in Shanghai. Speaking to delegates in Nanjing, he added: "Our home planet is only one, we change addresses but consume the same globalized products, we travel the same way, we use the same natural resources and we develop together."

The theme for Rio 2010, The right to the City - “ bridging the urban divide is in harmony with UN-HABITAT's flagship report, State of the World's Cities 2010-2011.

Beware of the NGOs that come with money to silence the poor

Shackdwellers International (SDI) is USAID funded NGO created to set up and support shackdweller organisations around the world. In other words shut them up. The South African branch of the SDI works closely with the local and national government and we all know how supportive they have been of the shackdweller movement in Durban, Cape Town, Johannesburg and the rural areas. Enter the Gates Foundation with a $10million handout to help the South African government put an end to the shackdwellers movement.

Abahlali base Mjondolo have responded to SDI, the Bill Gates Foundation and the latest scheme to silence and kill off the poor.

We have a clear analysis on what the money that our government and the Gates Foundation have given SDI is for. It is true that some of it will go to build houses. But it is important to remember that there are two kinds of houses. Some houses are built in human dumping grounds outside of the cities and people are forced to go to these houses against their will. In these houses people sometimes just rot. These houses are often worse for people than shacks. They are a kind of oppression just like forced removal to townships outside the cities was a kind of oppression under apartheid. Other houses are planed with people and are built where people need them. In these houses people can grow.

If Gate’s $10 millions builds some of the right kind of houses we will welcome them as fruits of the long struggles of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, the Landless People’s Movement and all the communities that have been blockading roads and organising protests around the country for the last few years. These protests have created such a crisis that the government here, and its supporters outside, recognise that something has to be done. Therefore the houses built will be fruits of struggle even though they will not be given to the people who have struggled. They will be a reward for obedience. This is how things work. We therefore see the risk that these fruits of struggle will be used to try and persuade people in movements and organisations that struggle to give up their autonomy and to cease struggling which means to stop thinking and to stop demanding the right of ordinary people to also be able to plan thefuture of our cities.

It is clear to us that everyone wants to speak and act in the name of the poor but that very, very few organisations are willing to speak to the poor. At first the government wanted the councillors to speak for us. Most times this failed completely. Most times the councillors spoke for the rich in their wards. If the ratepayer’s association wanted shack dwellers chased out of a ward and the shack dwellers wanted houses built in that ward the councillor would work with the ratepayers’ association to chase the shack dwellers out. This is why we buried out councillors in 2005. This is why people have been protesting against their councillors all over the country. The councillors have failed the poor and they continue to fail the poor – right now in MotalaHeights both the Ward Councillor (Dimba) and the PR Councillor (Naranjee) are working with the gangster businessman Ricky Govender to chase the poor out of MotalaHeights. - African Path - Black Looks

Shack Dwellers Reject Bill Gates $10 Million for Embedded Organisations...

Bill Gates has given $10 Million to the World Bank approved international NGO SDI

In South Africa various popular massed based organisations, some that are very much anarchist in their orientation (although they don't describe themselves in this way), have militantly put the housing crisis on the agenda.

But now the state and the Bill Gates Foundation are uniting to invest millions of dollars to try and replace popular organisations with a World Bank approved and USAid supported international NGO that pretends to be a genuine popular organisations. Genuine mass based organisations are facing severe police repression while the national and global elite are investing in fake embedded movements.

Thursday, 22 November 2007
Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Release
12:02

Neither the March nor the Money are Ours

The phones of the Abahlali spokespeople have been ringing all day with calls from journalists wanting to know about the shack dweller's march that was meant to happen today and the 10 Million dollars from the Gates Foundation for Housing. We thank all the journalists for their interest. We always appreciate it. But we need to explain some things. The march is not ours and the money is not for us.

In eThekwini alone there are more than 500 shack settlements and the people living in these settlements are represented by many organisations. We speak only for our members in 34 settlements. We work with all organisations with which we can find or build some common ground but we don't speak for anyone else. The many other organisations all speak for themselves. This is how it should be. The march that was scheduled for today was organised by the South African Shack Dwellers' Organisation (SASDO) and not by Abahlali baseMjondolo. Like Abahlali the roots of their struggle are in a 2005 road blockade (Cato Manor) and they have faced state repression with members spending time at the University of Westville Prison. But unlike Abahlali they have chosen the route of party politics. That is their choice but Abahlali is not SASDO. We are finished with putting people above us and trusting them to speak for us only to be betrayed. We speak for ourselves. Today SADSO intended to march on the City with shack dwellers from 5 wards including people from Cato Manor, Chatsworth and Chesterville. At the time of writing this press release we are informed that SADSO were persuaded to abandon the march by the National Intelligence Agency on the grounds that it would embarrass the country at the 2010 draw. They were promised a top level meeting instead. They accepted it but are still standing outside the City Hall, waiting.

There is also a big confusion between Shack Dwellers' International (SDI) and Abahlali baseMjondolo. Many journalists are phoning us and asking us how we are celebrating the $10 million received by SDI from the Gates Foundation.

There is something that we need to explain. Late last year we finally got a meeting with the provincial Housing Department. We had high hopes for that meeting. It came after a huge march on Mike Mabuyakulu that was first (illegally) banned by Michael Sutcliffe and then unbanned by the court. We thought that we would be heard at last and that this meeting would mark the beginning of some progress. But when we got there they started by accusing us of working with an agent of a foreign intelligence agency paid to destabilize the country and threatening us with arrest. We were then told that if we wanted to be able to meet with the government regularly and to be able to get houses we must join SDI. The instruction was clear: stay on our own and keep thinking and speaking for ourselves and be arrested, or join SDI and be obedient and be rewarded. We refused to join SDI. We announced this on the radio. Within days the arrests and beatings started and they have not stopped since even though we are currently suing the Minister of Safety & Security and even though we have marched on the Sydenham Police. The money for SDI is not money for us Abahlali baseMjondolo ... ANARKISMO.net

Gates Foundation Gives U.S.$10 Million

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will provide U.S.$10 million to the nongovernmental organisation Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) to support the urban poor in Africa, Asia and Latin America to take action to improve their housing, water and sanitation.

It is the first time a major U.S. foundation has made a significant investment to address urban poverty in these regions. The grant is also unusual in that it will go direct to grassroots groups that gather under the umbrella of SDI, enabling them to improve their living conditions and their capacity to negotiate with governments to secure rights to land.

In addition to acting as the intermediary for funding, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) will provide academic support for the national programmes.

Sheela Patel, chair of SDI's board says: "This grant is to build the capacity of poor communities to demonstrate to their municipalities, governments and international development agencies that self-organised communities of the poor are partners in addressing urban poverty. This assistance will help to build local dialogue and locally sustainable solutions."

To date, these grassroots groups have built or upgraded more than 200,000 homes (see table below). Worldwide, however, about a billion people live in slums or shacks, most of which lack safe water and toilets.

This work urgently needs to be scaled up. The urban poor are tired of waiting for governments to meet their needs. They are ready and willing to improve their living conditions but need financial support to do so.

"It is the poor who will change the city's living conditions," says Jockin Arputham, president of SDI and founder of the National Slum Dwellers Federation in India. "This grant to SDI from the Gates Foundation has enormous potential to show how cities can work for the poor as well as for the rich."

The grant will be channelled over three years into The International Urban Poor Fund, which SDI manages in association which the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

Funds from this grant will be used to support the activities of federations of informal savings groups formed by slum or shack dwellers to collectively save money and improve their neighbourhoods by securing tenure, installing toilets, improving water supplies and in some cases building houses.

Improving the physical infrastructure is half the battle. The urban poor need the security that comes with knowing they have the right to live where they do. It is easier to negotiate with governments to gain these rights if

officials can see the improvements the federations have made, especially as they are usually cheaper and of better quality than anything local contractors can build. "This fund is a breakthrough for slum dwellers to achieve their dreams and the opportunity to do things themselves," says Rose Molokoane, chair of the South African Federation of the Urban Poor and an SDI board member.

National and local governments in countries such as Brazil, Malawi, Namibia, the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand and Zambia have recognised the role of the federations and have worked with them as partners in urban development. But more often than not, governments see the urban poor as problems rather than part of the solution.

"Most governments and aid agencies still pay little attention to urban poverty," says Diana Mitlin of IIED's Human Settlements Group. "And when they do, it is to finance professionally designed programmes that struggle to address this problem at an appropriate scale."

"With this funding, the Gates Foundation is sending a much-needed signal to such agencies to rethink their approach. This funding will greatly increase the scale at which the national federations can operate and will support the growth of new federations."

The foundation's grant to SDI is part of the Special Initiatives portfolio of its Global Development Program, which works with motivated partners on focused strategies to increase opportunities for people in the developing world to lift themselves out of hunger and poverty.

Special Initiatives grants allow the foundation to fund compelling, specific opportunities to advance development and to learn about new approaches that can inform and improve the strategies and grant-making of the Global Development Program.

The foundation will also share results and lessons learned with a wide variety of institutions-including municipalities and national governments responsible for urban poor communities-in order to showcase how the poor can become active partners rather than beneficiaries of aid.

"We are pleased to support Slum/Shack Dwellers International and the Urban Poor Fund," said Charles Lyons, director of special initiatives at the Gates Foundation's Global Development Program.

"This grant will allow SDI to expand on its proven track record and demand-driven model and develop new, innovative ways to give the urban poor effective voices in their communities and nations." - Accra Mail

Bill Gates donates $10 million to SAfrica human habitat

Cape Town: Software tycoon Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have donated $10-million for the improvement of the living conditions of the urban poor in South Africa.

The South African Federation of the Urban Poor on Thursday disclosed this in statement saying the money was donated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The money would be directed through the Slum/Shack Dwellers International, which is based in South Africa.

"The money will go directly to grassroots groups who are members of the Federation and SDI," said the Federation.

"The Federation has constructed more than 13,000 housing units and provided tenure security to an additional 20,000 families since 1995. The fund is a breakthrough for slum dwellers to achieve their dreams and improve their housing, water and sanitation."

It said the Federation and the SDI had signed a memorandum of understanding in 2006 with South Africa's national housing department in which the department pledged $40-million worth of subsidies to the federation.

"We believe the fund will also help to build local dialogue and sustainable solutions," the statement said.

Since 1994, all the cities and towns in South Africa have become burdened by the emergence of huge shack or informal settlements. In Durban alone, more than two million people are reported to be living in informal settlements in and around the city.

The Government and the local municipalities built thousands of low cost housing complexes to cater for the slum dwellers but are unable to meet the expectations of all the shack dwellers. - DNA

Gates pledges millions for poor and homeless

Johannesburg - The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will provide $10-million to Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) to help the urban poor improve their housing, water and sanitation.

The grant would go directly to grassroots groups that gather under the umbrella of SDI, enabling them to improve their living conditions and their capacity to negotiate with governments to secure rights to land, the foundations said in a statement.

The SDI's affiliate, the Federation of the Urban Poor (FEDUP), has constructed over 13,000 housing units since 1995 and provided tenure security to an additional 20 000 families, the foundation said.

SDI and FEDUP signed a memorandum of understanding with the department of housing in South Africa in May last year.

In terms of this agreement, the department has pledged R280-million worth of subsidies to the federation.

Sheela Patel, chair of SDI's board, said the grant would help to build local dialogue and locally sustainable solutions.

Worldwide about a billion people live in slums or shacks, most of which lack safe water and toilets.

"This fund is a breakthrough for slum dwellers to achieve their dreams and the opportunity to do things themselves," said Rose Molokoane, chair of the South African Federation of the Urban Poor and an SDI board member.

The foundation will share results and lessons learned with a wide variety of institutions - including municipalities and national governments responsible for urban poor communities in order to showcase how the poor can become active partners rather than beneficiaries of aid.

SDI, based in South Africa, has affiliates in 33 countries, including 17 countries in Africa. - Sapa