The South African anti-privatization movement

Opposition to the apartheid regime had been raised by trade unions and neighborhood organizations, the latter of which organized entire households. The agreement between the ANC and the Nationalist Party in 1990 meant that little would change except the racial barriers, and the black middle class hurried to occupy privileged places in the world’s most unequal country. The new ANC government enthusiastically welcomed the privatization model of the Washington Consensus as a way to replace racial differences with class differences; water, electricity, healthcare and education were privatized, tariffs were raised and the underclass was shut down. At the same time, the apartheid state’s modest attempts at import substitution were discontinued, industries were shut down and unemployment rose to 50 percent. Thus, the network of the black suburbs was mobilized again in defense of the inhabitants’ standard of living, or rather survival, interpreted as the defense of the commons the government tried to make private property.

Opposition began in Chatsworth, a township outside Durban, in 1999. Important factors in the first mobilizations were that the local ANC showed solidarity with the voters instead of the party leadership, and that the majority of the inhabitants were Indians with moderate religious reverence for ANC exile politicians.

But since Chatsworth had tangibly prevented heavily armed bailiffs from evicting unemployed people who could not pay the high rents and also received a court ruling that they had the right to do so, the protests spread quickly. Not least since Chatsworth started with a new-old model of action: mass demonstrations at the due date of the electricity, water and rent bills when they jointly insisted on paying the old, ’fair’ price.

The focus of this new township movement is in addition to renting water and electricity. While city administrations and privatized electricity and water companies disconnect township residents from the grid, the district electricians and plumbers reconnect them. This is combined with demonstrations against every decoupling and, as in Soweto’s Operation Khanyisa (Enlightenment), with the decoupling of government offices. And with, for example, mass payments of the reasonable rate 10 Rand and with participation in local elections.

At the UN Conference on Racism in Durban in 2001, the various district movements met for the first time and organized mass demonstrations against the survivors of apartheid policy in practice and discussed the Washington Consensus as an expression of global apartheid with popular movements from around the world. The UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Cape Town in 2002 gave it a further push.

Reading
Ashwin Desai: We are the poor - community struggles in post-apartheid South Africa, Monthly Review Press 2002.

Webbsites
Anti-Privatisation Forum
Abahlali baseMjondolo