South Africa: Power to the people

Mail&Guardian (South Africa), 13. May 2003

By Ferial Haffajee and Vicki Robinson

Beyond the R1,4-billion Eskom write-off of electricity arrears announced
last week is a deeper political significance. The social movements, or
"ultra-left" as they were labelled by the African National Congress last
year, are beginning to make an impact on policy.

The electricity arrears wipe-out is a huge moment - it is more than half the
arrears figure of R2,4-billion owed nationally to Eskom and is a pro-poor
measure that is of long-standing necessity. While they were not part of the
negotiation or signing of the agreement, the Soweto Electricity Crisis
Committee (SECC) and the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) were undoubtedly
part of its genesis. For two years both organisations have highlighted the
electricity crisis in the Gauteng townships in ways that have lit a spark
among the communities where they organise.

In Soweto the long-running Operation Khanyisa campaign has taught local
activists, many of them women, how to reconnect electricity disconnected by
Eskom. This is a latter-day demand for power to the people - implicit in it
is the view that services should be free for the poor. The rigours of cost
recovery mean little to struggling communities that have flocked to the
nascent civic associations. Implicit in their trek is that communities will
go where a better life comes more quickly.

In the past two years the social movements have put up a spirited challenge,
from their left flank, to ANC hegemony. The wily Minister of Public
Enterprises Jeff Radebe - also a national executive committee member of the
South African National Civics Organisation (Sanco) and the ANC policy chief
took notice and used his muscle to secure the write-off. He is Eskom's
political master and personally attended the signing last week.

Also worthy of a second look is the resurgence of Sanco after a period of
relative quiet as a services campaigner. It is a move that some read as
opportunism, but a charge that Sanco spokesperson Donovan Williams denies.
"Sanco is a social movement," he says, but one that is different to the SECC
and the APF in that it engages power to arrive at brokered solutions like
last week's deal - called the "services delivery framework".

SECC chairperson Trevor Ngwane says the committee was not invited to the
talks, but Williams claims it chose to stay out. "No movement can be in an
endgame all the time. Communities will do what needs to be done in terms of
their lives improving, not for some ideological end."

In other words, the communities that have been so ably organised by the SECC
and the APF do not share the ideology of the leaders and are, at heart,
supporters of the ANC and its allied organisations, like Sanco. This common
perception in the ANC is a moot point, but what is interesting is the way
the ANC and its allies have used the levers of state to pry what they see as
their grassroots base from interlocutors.

"Social movements are highlighting various areas where ANC policy is
contradicted, such as [electricity and water] cut-offs and the lack of
provision of basic services. Since the World Summit on Sustainable
Development, they have been forced to pay more attention to the issues
raised by the movements," says APF chairperson Dale McKinley.

A similar policy impact is seen with the work of the Landless People's
Movement (LPM), which lobbies for the informal settlements that dot Gauteng.
By marching (relentlessly) on Premier Mbhazima Shilowa's office, these
otherwise forgotten communities have forced themselves to the top of the
province's agenda. Where communities are removed to designated development
tracts, Shilowa is now taking a far closer interest in their fate. Civil
servants preoccupied with red tape and process have, in the past, forgotten
that people are people, not numbers to be moved and settled at will. The LPM
is forcing a more humanist approach.

"The movement has also influenced a larger budget vote for restitution in
Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal," says an official who does not want to be
named.

"Outside players are having an enormous influence on policymakers, which
proves that policy formulation is not only about being a part of the
process, it is also about being a protester," says Adam Habib, director of
the Centre for Civil Society.

Not every policy change can be attributed to the mushrooming social
movements, but the latest efforts to find a solution to HIV/Aids policy and
treatment issues is clearly the fruit of a politically masterful two-year
campaign by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), taken straight from the
pages of the United Democratic Front and the ANC. The TAC mobilises across
society =
97 from the professions, through the unions to the grassroots. It has the
black and white intelligentsia onside (witness the numbers of academics who
have lined up behind it) and makes shameless use of its media sass to win
the propaganda war over the government's R98-million public relations
effort.

It blends the use of power with engagement - thus, its strategic retreat
last week to allow the government the space to announce a public-sector
anti-retroviral programme. It has used a public agency, the National
Economic, Development and Labour Council, to fight for an agreement that
will bind business, labour and the government. As of last week that pact was
on again after Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang in February tried
to scotch it. "I can't imagine that the ANC's shift in policy around Aids
would've happened without the influence of the social movement," says Habib.

In an era of impotent electoral opposition where talk is ample, but ideas
thin on the ground, the social movements are proving a feisty young force.
And as much as the government may lampoon them for practising the politics
of the impossible and the irrational, it's clear they're making a mark where
it counts - on power.