CAPE TIMES THURSDAY, MAY 23,

2013

INSIGHT

11

The great freedom movements must focus on the urban poor

Ananya Roy
ADDRESSING patterns of segregation and separation in our cities, and the marginalisation of the urban majority , the urban poor, is the unfinished task of the great freedom movements of the 20th century , from anti-apartheid movements to anti-colonial movements. One of the most ambitious national urban planning endeavours is under way in India, and its target is the slum. Launched in 2005, Indias National Urban Renewal Mission is a $22 billion (R208bn) plan for the building of urban infrastructure. The national urban renewal mission is meant to create world-class cities. Asian world-class cities. Indian world-class cities. And it conceptualises such a world-class city as slum-free. Now, when I say slum-free cities, it most likely conjures images of slum demolitions and evictions. For the past decade, the building of the Indian world-class city has proceeded through what we may broadly understand as an urbanism of dispossession, a making of the Indian worldclass city through the smashing of the homes and livelihoods of the urban poor. In and around Kolkata, robust and persistent social movements have resisted the violence of the states functionaries and brought to a halt several urban development projects and special economic zones. Some of these have been spectacular protests which have toppled political parties and altered the political horizons of social struggle. Alongside the crude violence of slum evictions and land grabs for special economic zones, alongside the aesthetics of world-class urbanism, alongside the circulation of global models of urbanism, something else is on the rise in India, a new vision of slum-free cities, one that sees slums not as defective or deviant but rather as the global urban future. Indeed, one of the boldest parts of the national urban renewal mission is a policy called Slum-Free Cities. Named the Rajiv Awas Yojana, or RAY, it will target 250 Indian cities which are estimated to have more than 32 million people living in slums. Slum-Free Cities has inherent contradictions which are instructive, for they provide insight into the fraught and fragile project of inclusive growth. On the one hand, Slum-Free Cities signals what one of its authors has titled a new deal for Indias urban poor, or safety nets for the urban poor. On the other hand, the policy seeks to transform slum land into urban assets. Thus, Slum-Free Cities requires each state in the Indian federation to prepare a slumfree plan of action, one that is expected to give primacy to a public-private-partnership model that would enable it to crosssubsidise through floor space index and land-use concessions as much of the slum redevelopment as possible. In other words, the policy continues a line of reform that was established with the national urban renewal mission, notably to grant public funds to local government mainly to leverage private sector participation in urban infrastructure. Slum redevelopment is no easy task. It requires turning poverty into a governable entity . It thus requires creating a dataspace in this case the mapping, surveying, and documenting of slum lands through elaborate technologies, from satellite images to ground level spatial data to slum surveys by NGOs. Above all, it must deal with the slum not as a matter of housing but as a matter of property . Thus, this new deal for the urban poor rests on the conferring of property rights to the poor. Such security of tenure for the urban poor is crucial, especially in India where slum evictions have been commonplace. But security hinges on a new regime of private property on the conversion of the complex tenure and property arrangements of slum lands into cadastral property and finally into globally legible assets. Roy is Professor of City and Regional Planning and holds the Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. This is an extract from her Rusty Bernstein Memorial Lecture at Wits Universitys school of architecture and planning last week.

Vapourised cola in Scud missiles ups idiocy stakes in Zimbabwe

IN A STATE
Peter Wilhelm
FROM TIME to time I like to keep my readers informed about the interminable wars in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia. They spill over indefinitely and in all such conflicts the major obstacle to regime change is a dictator whose unwanted ascent has been aided by one or another dysmorphic abnormality that has assisted him in persuading the serfs of his supernatural abilities in sorcery and the use of a large club or wand to bend their knees. He also tends to immortality , often through cloning in Geneva. In the case of Robert Mugabe, close inspection of photographs reveals that in his infancy someone smote him just above his sparse eyebrows with a mallet. This doesnt mean that (like Jacob Zuma) he has two brains, one on each side, but rather that his cerebrum carries evidence of the impact. But enough of such ad hominem anklebiting. His lamentable succession of wars includes one we might have lost but for the power of our submarine fleet (once the Russian codes had been cracked) which was able to sidle up Lake Kariba and assault Mugabe's headquarters in a hollowed-out baobab tree. Now the rulers appear affrighted by the prospect of losing the next election. This is where an ominous, if not sinister, twist has been added to the civil war raging ever since the days that the place was ruled by a bigot who crashed his own plane. The gruesome possibilities have a Syrian potential particularly since two mighty international conglomerates have entered the fray , one on the side of Mugabes Zanu-PF and the other on that of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). I refer of course to Pepsi and Coke. The Pepsi-Coke war is one of those savage counter-arguments to sociologists who foolishly believe that humans are about to lay down their spears and carve them into cricket bats. Coke initiated the conflict by removing all traces of good stuff from its fizzy product first cocaine, then codeine, then caffeine and, lastly , that universal food staple, sugar. Even the sexy bottle has mutated while addicts have to drink more and more to get high. Pepsi also filtered its upbeat bubbles. Then the first shots vapourised Coke in Scud missiles were fired and in the end all global attempts at civilisation were erased. Jet bombers swooped, cyber warfare, drones, infiltration of the enemy by Cameron Diaz-styled honey traps and the destruction of the Indian land mass by hydrogen bombs (they like Pepsi there) forced the combatants to accept UNmandated armistice agreements. The world did not end in 2012 as predicted by the Mayans but the desolate ashen plains and glowing icecaps threatened electricity supplies and the stoppage of TV . Yet now from the land of Mugabe comes a hideous new accusation. According to Zanu-PF the MDC, in collusion with Coke, is engaged in wholesale brainwashing of its wretched populace. A state-controlled newspaper alleges that the new Coke can is a flagship for the opposition. Its red colour is evidence of this and Zanu-PFs deputy director of information Psychology Maziwisa says the MDC is denying an obvious connection. Coca-Cola must explain why it chose only the red cans. I presume that Psychologys parents thought long and hard to arrive at his name (it could have been Urology , Proctology , Pufferfishology or whatever). Its given him a high post in the idiocy stakes and he should examine Bobs holey grey matter once the Coke has been poured over Vic Falls. Then he might pop in here and take a closer look at JZ.

RUSTY BERNSTEINS LEGACY

Architect of our democracy

Toni Strasburg
IT IS very gratifying to me that my father is still remembered and is being honoured by the Wits architectural school. Rusty Bernsteins legacy as an architect I will deal with quickly , as he is not really remembered for this side of his work. Of his architectural career he once said, Over the years I have designed and supervised the building of a number of undistinguished Johannesburg buildings. Of which all I can say is that few of them actually offend the eye or have fatal planning defects. In later life he often said that he found he was more interested in the engineering aspects of architecture and might have preferred to have been an engineer. He believed that architecture needs to be about more than just the design and construction of buildings, it needs to enhance and enrich the lives of people who live in and use the buildings, and that it fails when it removes itself from the dignity of the people it is designed for. What he is remembered for one hopes are his political beliefs and actions in trying to change South Africa and bring about a more equitable society . His legacy is his contribution to the South African Struggle. Both my parents were people of great modesty and talents, who in other circumstances could have been outstandingly successful in conventional careers. It was their humanity that drew them into leftwing politics with no prospect of material rewards, which would ultimately demand courage and self-sacrifice. They were both politicised by the evils of fascism and Nazism in the run-up to World War II. My father came from a comfortable Johannesburg family , the third of four children. He was orphaned at 11 when both his parents died within a short space of time. He was subsequently raised by relatives, who sent him to boarding school, after which he studied architecture at Wits University . He enlisted in the army during World War II where he served mainly in Italy . He was politicised first at university and later in the army and became a life-long member of the South African Communist Party and an active member of the Struggle. He was banned, house-arrested and imprisoned for his beliefs many times during the decades from the 1940s, through the treason trial in 1956, the Emergency in the early 1960s and finally the Rivonia trial from which, owing to prosecution negligence, or as he used to joke through a grave miscarriage of justice, he was acquitted and immediately rearrested in the dock and granted bail, which he later jumped, making a dramatic escape into exile with my mother who, at the time was living underground. Once in exile they both maintained their political activities within the limits of their new circumstances. My dad was a Marxist thinker and intellectual. In Johannesburg we lived modestly in a house full of books, music, paintings where people came and went. He was a practical man, good with his hands and he loved music. But mainly he read. My most abiding memory of him is sitting in an armchair in front of the fire at our Regent Street house immersed in a book. Within the movement he was known and valued as a wonderful teacher. He wrote extensively for many journals, including Liberation, Guardian, Sechaba, the African Communist and Fighting Talk and continued to write under pseudonyms even after being banned. He was responsible for much of the propaganda issued by the liberation movement. In his book, Memory Against Forgetting, my father describes a series of seminars he gave to Umkhonto we Sizwe students in Moscow in 1987 on the history of South Africa. He describes how shocked he was at how completely the apartheid years, that depended on silence and forgetting, had robbed these bright young people of their own history and how little they knew of what had really happened in their own country . I think this is something that resonates with us today as we look at the born frees and see how little they know of the Struggle and the history that brought us to where we are. Rusty was an extremely modest man who absolutely loathed the limelight. In later life he refused offers of higher office and perhaps was somewhat overlooked as the ANC came into government. Possibly the one thing that he is most remembered for is his drafting of the Freedom Charter. His ability as a political thinker and writer enabled him to mould the submissions of the people, from all over the country , into a cohesive and moving document to be used as template for the aspirations of the liberation struggle, from its inception until its final surrender to the realities of the New South Africa. He was never a blind follower and was often critical of decisions the movement made, such as, from the beginning, the ANCs low-cost housing policy . His quiet and reasoned way of thinking was heard in meetings and through his writings. He was as independent-minded as he was intolerant of oppression, and in some instances opposed the most prominent of his colleagues, on quite grave issues such as aspects of the armed struggle. During his term at Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania he set up a political school and taught history to South African political exiles, encouraging critical thinking that occasionally challenged the ANC itself. I want to take a closer look at something he wrote that is relevant today . As the country is regaled by one revelation after another involving corrupt deals, high living and so on, our political leaders would do well to take a close look at an article written by my father in 1991, three years before South Africa became a democracy . The African Communist published what can now be described as a prophetic article under his pseudonym, Toussaint. It was entitled The Corridors to Corruption and its warnings about the pitfalls ahead for the Struggle generation, and the dangers of falling into them, are prescient and uncanny . The article asked what made political leaders who had earned a reputation for selflessness and incorruptibility during the liberation struggle change when they achieve power. Drawing from some of the factors that led to the collapse of East European socialism and the failures of many post-colonial African states, he warned the ANC and its allies that they would repeat those mistakes if they refused to learn from them. He said: Corroding corruption has not become part of our style. But the subtle process, by which the foretaste of power corrupts, seems to be creeping up on us unnoticed. We ignore the warning signals at our peril. Unless we can identify and eliminate the factors which have corrupted good, honest leaders and organisations elsewhere, we could well repeat the experience of their decline and fall. That was in 1991. It seems that now, in 2013, corroding corruption has entered virtually every part of our society . Through the agency of a fictional character he called Uncle he described the insidious process of alienation from the people and their aspirations, brought about by the requirements of the protocols and the security apparatus, left intact and fully functioning despite regime change He felt that power was inseparable from its trappings, and if the ANC hoped to avoid the mistakes that others had made before it, it needed to examine alternative modes of behaviour and conduct for the future post-apartheid government. He didnt hold the view that power must inevitably corrupt. But he argued that we must understand that since the trappings of state power serve to uphold the status quo, these trappings of privilege which surround apartheid power must be essentially hostile to our cause. They are incompatible with our aim of transforming society to ensure equal rights for all, and contradict the democratic spirit of our programme. I wonder who now remembers these aims of the ANC? He went on to say: We dare not wait until our leaders occupy the seats of power before we find alternative ways. We have the opportunity now to debate and reach consensus about alternative modes of behaviour and conduct, which would be suitable for our own leaders in high places. Sadly , in the euphoria of an imminent victory against an oppressive regime, his voice was drowned out and a great opportunity was missed. Today we are witnessing exactly what he predicted. Political figures who are supposedly steeped in that tradition of selflessness and yet see no wrong with splurging excessive amounts of money . In 1998, Rusty and Hilda were awarded honorary degrees by the then University of Natal for their role in helping to bring democracy to South Africa. This followed the publication of Rustys acclaimed personal account of the unwritten history of South African politics between 1938 and 1964, Memory Against Forgetting. He died in June 2002 at the age of 82 and was posthumously awarded the Luthuli medal in gold for his contribution to the Struggle. My father believed in humanity , he stood by his beliefs throughout his life and spoke out against injustice even when doing so threatened his life. We still need people like him in South Africa today , people who will speak out against oppression and injustice and not turn a blind eye, no matter who the perpetrators are. Strasburg is a documentary filmmaker and author . She is the eldest of Rusty and Hilda Bernsteins children. This is an edited version of her commemorative address delivered alongside Professor Ananya Roys Rusty Bernstein Memorial Lecture at the Wits School of Architecture and Planning last week.

BUILDING HISTORY: The wall on which Nelson Mandela wrote the Freedom Charter at the Palace of Justice in Pretoria. Rusty Bernstein (top, with his wife Hilda) is possibly most remembered for his drafting of the charter, says the writer.

Maladministration and moral failures outlined in hospital judgment

THE judges introductory remarks make me want to curl up in a comfy chair and read on: The facts of this matter disclose a sorry tale of mishap, maladministration and at least two failures of moral courage. Sjoe! It sounds hot, and the contents of the judgment dont disappoint. The dispute arose in the Eastern Cape, hotbed of poverty , corruption and ineptitude. The story begins years ago when Kirland Investments asked for approval to build and run two hospitals in the Eastern Cape. Such decisions are made by the superintendent-general at the time, Lawrence Boya who decided to turn down Kirland. But his decision was never communicated to Kirland thanks to a mishap. Before Boya signed the letter he was involved in a car accident. During his resulting six weeks sick leave things took a new turn

LEGAL & GENERAL

Carmel Rickard
under acting superintendent-general, Nandi Diliza: she formally approved Kirlands application in October 2007. Back from sick leave, Boya found his decision over-ridden and another application from Kirland waiting for him this time for more hospital beds. He refused the application, and some time later he wrote to Kirland saying he was withdrawing Dilizas approval for both hospitals. Kirland tried an internal appeal to the new health MEC, Pemmy Majodina, but when that failed it went to court. And at

this point the moral failures became clear. Diliza said in her affidavit that when she had to decide whether to approve Kirlands application she was put under pressure by the previous MEC, Nomsa Jajula. Jajula made it clear the provincial executive council wanted Kirland to be given the go-ahead and the Health Department was seen as withholding licences from BEE companies to establish private hospitals. Jajula told Diliza that she was under political pressure. Boyas decision to turn Kirland down had put Jajula in a bad light in the political arena and she told Diliza to approve the applications, a move leading to the judges comment of maladministration. Rather than deciding for herself, the compliant Diliza did as she was told. Moral failure number one. Then Boya returned and found out what

had happened. Instead of taking steps to ensure his original decision was implemented, he carped at Kirlands attempts to increase the number of beds. Why didnt he act? With Jajula still MEC, it was virtually impossible to do anything about her instruction to Diliza, he said. Moral failure number two. Eventually, following the poor legal advice he was given, Boya attempted to revoke Dilizas decision and told Kirland that the deal was off. That led to Kirland trying an internal appeal to the new health MEC, and when that failed, to litigation in the high court. There, the judge set aside Dilizas approval and Kirland took the matter to the Supreme Court of Appeal. It is this recent appeal decision that speaks of maladministration and moral failures.

The appeal court had a number of issues to address. What was the standing of Boyas decision, taken before his accident, to refuse Kirland? No standing at all, said the appeal court. The decision had not been activated; until it was, it could be changed. What was the standing of Dilizas decision to approve the application? Since the decision was made on Jajulas instruction, it was invalid. But it still had to be treated as valid until it was set aside on review, and Boya couldnt simply revoke it. What about the MECs internal appeal decision? Her decision was wrong, as she made a material error of law. Finally , what was the standing of the high court order setting aside Dilizas approval? It had to be reversed. The appeal judges said that in its court application Kirland had not asked for Dilizas go-ahead to

be overturned; obviously the company wanted what Diliza had decided and would never have asked the court to set it aside. This leaves Dilizas invalid decision as the current state of play until and unless it is set aside by a court decision. If the new MEC and Boya want it overturned they will have to bring a proper application. If they dont act, they are bound by Dilizas moral failure. The judgments a magisterial piece of work. All the more noteworthy because it was written by Clive Plasket, with the unanimous support of the rest of the bench. This is the same Plasket who the Judicial Service Commission decided didnt merit a permanent seat on the appeal court. Tradingplaces2night.co.za