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The spectacular images on our TV screens of jubilant South Africans at the FIFA Confederations football Cup in June (a precursor to the FIFA World Cup to be held in South Africa next summer) were quickly replaced by those of South Africans burning tyres and building barricades in townships as another wave of protests and strikes swept the country in July and August.In scenes reminiscent of apartheid, police clashed with the unemployed township protestors and striking workers firing tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition.
This wave of township protests and strikes came just months after the April re-election of the African National Congress (ANC) and the new President Jacob Zuma. He was seen by many, particularly his supporters in the giant trade union federation the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), as representing a new start for the ANC government after 12 years of neoliberal polices imposed by former President Thabo Mbeki.
The protests and strikes caught many people by surprise with some commentators expressing disbelief at the level of political anger at a government elected just three months before with 66 per cent of the vote. As one commentator said about South Africa 'They just don't vote they throw bricks as well'.
One protest which captures the depth and nature of the anger at the broken promises of housing and improved service delivery of water and electricity, mass unemployment and grinding poverty was in the Siyathemba township in Balfour, a small mining and farming town in Mpumalanga province.
When local ANC mayor Lefty Tsotetsi arrived in an armoured police car to address local residents, he was advised it was too dangerous for him to get out of the car. Protestors carrying clubs add pipes accused him of living a life of luxury and giving out jobs to his friends and family. Despite promising to improve services in the future, the new house that he was building for himself was set alight, with protestors saying 'he will die like a dog' if he addresses the crowd.
In an attempt to deflect the anger for the surge of 'service delivery' protests, the government blamed 'municipal incapacity' and pleaded for people to give them more time to clean out inefficient and corrupt councillors. They even threatened to use a Municipal Act that would allow the government to take control of so-called 'failing municipalities'. However, protesters blame the failure of service delivery on ANC appointees into local jobs and corrupt ANC politicians.
With reports of protestors attacking African immigrants and migrant workers, some mainstream commentators have sought to project the protests as simply a repeat of the terrible outbreak of xenophobic attacks that rocked South Africa in May 2008, when 150 people were left dead, hundreds injured and 30,000 people (mainly foreign nationals) were internally displaced.
Yet as the dust settled in some townships, in reports by people speaking with protest leaders a different picture emerged. The violence in Siyathemba was sparked when people leaving a community meeting on July 19 were attacked by police firing rubber bullets, teargas and, according to some residents, live ammunition. Protesters set fire to two buildings: A small municipal office and a partially ruined school store. On the Monday, in the course of the rioting, foreign-owned shops were looted and the press quickly reported this as another outbreak of xenophobia.
Whilst there may have been some anti-foreigner sentiment, this was limited and condemned by local protest leaders. As one recent report argued, while xenophobia has been exaggerated little attention has been paid to the police brutality, including a fifteen-year-old boy who had been shot with rubber bullets and a young mother who was dragged from under a bed and had her stomach ripped apart by a rubber bullet.
The township protests coincided with an outbreak of national strikes. These latest strikes followed the month long strike in June 2007 that was the longest and largest public-sector strike in the history of South Africa and included over 700,000 workers on strike and another 300,000, for whom it was illegal to strike, taking part in militant marches, pickets and other forms of protest.
In August 2008 another general strike brought the economy to a standstill when COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) called its two million members out on a one-day strike in protest of rising prices of food and fuel. This strike followed an announcement that electricity prices would increase by 27.5 percent. Since the start of 2009 there have been 24 officially recorded major protests across the country and government officials believe that the rate of protests this year will exceed those for 2007 and 2008.
ECONOMIC GROWTH FOR SOME, POVERTY FOR MANY
Although South Africa is Africa's most successful economy (it contributes a third of all sub-Saharan Africa's 48 countries), not everyone has benefitted equally. Since the late 1990s South Africa's economy has grown at 6 percent each year and inflation has been reduced to around 6 per cent, on a par with other similar economies.
Yet this has been done through introducing neoliberal policies (what some in the trade union and social movements have called 'home-grown structural adjustment') with tight control over public spending and service delivery, that has hit the poorest hardest as money has been diverted from public spending into tax cuts for the rich and middle class.
Increases in government budget allocations have come not through some fundamental shift in macroeconomic policy but through emphasising fiscal efficiency. Such 'efficiency savings', argue COSATU and others, are at the expense of social spending for the working class.
Yet the ANC government has found the money to line the pockets of big business through billions of pounds of tax cuts as they have reduced corporation tax from 50 percent in the early 1990s to less than 30 percent today. The growth in the economy in the last few years is linked to the growth in global demand, particularly from China, for South African manufacturing and primary commodities. As elsewhere in the world this coincided with a financial and speculative boom resulting in property prices rocketing by 400 per cent - higher than the rise in property prices in the USA and Ireland.
Whilst there has been investment in infrastructure, this has been money based on Private Finance Initiatives similar those in the UK, with money ploughed into tourist projects such as the football stadiums for the 2010 World Cup, the controversial World Bank backed Lesoto Highlands Water Project and an elitist fast rail service (that avoids Soweto) between Johannesburg and Pretoria that will largely service rich and middle class commuters.
Although the proportion of people living below the poverty line dropped from 58 percent in 2000 to 48 percent in 2005 and many families have access to social grants and other poverty alleviation programmes, many households and communities remain trapped in poverty. Some 75 percent of African children lived in income poverty in 2007, compared to 43 percent of 'coloured' children, 14 percent of Indian children and 5 percent of white children.
Little wonder that South Africa is a country in turmoil as the anger and bitterness of shattered dreams of liberation eats away at the very fabric of society. It is an anger that is also expressed in the average of 50 people a day murdered and high levels of child abuse and rape. Although crime figures have fallen over the past several years, they are still high by international standards
The government claims to have built over two million new houses but there are still 2000 informal settlements across South Africa, in which people live without sanitation and electricity in shacks made of corrugated iron and waste materials. On average there are 10 shack fires a day killing several hundred people a year.
These disasters devastate the lives of all concerned, putting young children, the old and disabled people particularly at risk and making the poor and vulnerable destitute. Life in the shacks is one of permanent drudgery as one shackdweller Funake Mkhwambi told how 'My shack gets flooded every year. I have to move every winter to stay with my cousins elsewhere. We are a family of 8, including 5 children who often get sick because of the cold and dirty water.'
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