Power lines, and the struggle for democracy in Bayview : IMC-SA

Like neoliberal governments around the world, the African National Congress isn’t fond of democracy - it's too difficult, dangerous, and unguaranteed. Governments prefer to have a tamed version of dissent, a civil society it can control, a snivel society that bows and scrapes, but never raises its voice. Here's a story from Durban, involving the Bayview Flats Residents’ Association - one of the organisations celebrated in Ashwin Desai's brilliant 2002 book, "We Are The Poors". Three years on, the ANC is still criminalizing the poors, and targeting the community leaders whom they elect.

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Last Thursday, the 17th March, the Ethekwini (formerly Durban) municipal council came to Bayview, one of the city’s poorest areas. They came with guns and electricians. The electricians disconnected the electricity to four blocks of flats, cutting off 14 families. The security detail from the council provided cover as the electricians worked – neoliberal policies never work without force.

Removing the meters was an admission by the municipality that, as one Durban activist put it, “people can't, and are not ever expected to be able, to pay for electricity.” But poverty isn’t grounds for the denial of rights, and Bayview, like any other community, has the right to basic services.

The people of Bayview weren’t going to take this lying down. They are organized, and since 1999, many have been involved in the Bayview Flats Residents Association. The BFRA, fostered by the Concerns Citizens Forum but now a fully independent and resident-run organisation, has had considerable success in protecting its members from the excesses of neoliberalism. They’ve won in the courts against the municipality, with an interdict that prevents residents’ water from being cut off. They were central to the success of a municipal-wide campaign to guarantee 6 kilolitres of water for every household. And, in the celebrated Battle of Bayview, they’ve protected poor families from being evicted by the council. There’s plenty of democratic experience within its ranks and so, on the night of last week’s electricity disconnections, the BFRA held a street meeting.

At that meeting, they developed two clear positions. The first was that it was unacceptable for the council to deny light and heat to residents in their community. The resolution didn’t just sit on paper: that night, they illegally reconnected the electricity to the affected homes. The second resolution sat on the shoulders of the first: if the municipality returned, as they were rumoured to do the next day, Bayview would mobilize. Plans were developed to protect the electricity reconnection points, and the streets, from the council and its goons.

The council didn’t return the next morning, and for the moment, the fourteen families have electricity. But the battle has other fronts, ones away from the power lines, but along lines of power in the same streets.

For years, Bayview’s unwillingness to lie down and take the neoliberal pounding meted out by the municipality has been a constant bother to them. The ward councillor, Democratic Alliance representative Rocky Naidoo, had long been trying to set up some sort of ersatz community organisation to delegitimise the BFRA. Last year, with the floor crossings, the ANC became interested in doing the same, and word started to circulate about the formation of something called “The Concerned Flatdwellers of Bayview”. Just in time to contest the ward elections this year, the CFB started trying to recruit members, persuading them also to pay R12 to join the ANC.

The ward committee elections were held on February 19th, when the ANC bussed in people from outside the ward to stuff ballot boxes. The elections were roundly denounced as unfree and unfair, both by the BFRA, and by the Democratic Alliance, who had the resources to take the ANC to court, and win. The elections have since been declared null and void, and will have to be reheld, at the expense of the public purse, because of the ruling party’s gerrymandering.

In the meantime, though, the guerrilla subversion of the BFRA has continued. The ANC has spread rumours that the organisation operates without mandate or representation, charges that seem more accurately levelled at its own shopfront. The BFRA has, nonetheless, addressed these allegations head on. On Sunday, an open meeting was held in Bayview, and over three hundred people attended. At this meeting, two questions were posed. Should Brandon Pillay, the president of the association, continue to be the president?, and should the association continue to exist? To both questions, the answer was a unanimous yes. This may seem a little pro forma - of course the people who turn up to a meeting like this are going to approve of the organisation. But that’s the point. The ANC cannot, without paying people, achieve the same result.

Although they’re trying heavily to recruit, Sunday’s meeting was an opportunity to remind the residents that if they join the CFB, and through them the ANC, they will forgo the right to criticise the ruling party in public. And that’s a right few in Bayview want to cede.

The ANC has reacted badly. For the past week, municipal security guards have been posted outside Brandon Pillay’s house. When first asked why they were there, they said they didn’t know, but they’d been sent there by ANC councillor Theresa Mthembu. Mthembu denied all knowledge of the guards when she was called that night. The next night, the guards said that they were there to protect the building from nameless ‘threats’. They remain outside Pillay’s home, a hint from the Council that he lives at their pleasure.

Not without reason does Pillay feel that he has been targeted. There have been rumours that he will be assaulted, or worse, in the coming weeks. But “I can’t, and won’t be intimidated,” he said. “I am protected by the community. These people [from the CFB] are individuals who are not working in our community, and represent only themselves. They are threatened by activists, by the community and, ultimately, by democracy. We’ll carry on our work here.”

There is much work to be done. Bayview remains one of Durban’s poorest areas, and the ANCs continues to try to enforce its privatisation programme on the poor, criminalising and suppressing them as it goes.

Further notes
1. The Bayview Flats Residents Association can be reached on b.f.r.a [at] webmail.co.za
2. An overview of politics in and around Bayview can be found in Ashwin Desai’s “We are the Poors”, and in Peter Dwyer’s
The Contentious Politics of the Concerned Citizens Forum (CCF) http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/files/DWYER%20CCF%20RESEARCH%20REPORT.PDF
3. In addition to being an acronym of Concerned Flatdwellers of Bayview, CFB is coincidentally an acronym for Complete Fucking Bullshit.