The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
SACSIS endorses the right of the poor to decent housing. We also support solutions aimed at transforming the unequal balance in land ownership, which currently concentrates much of South Africa's land in a few hands.
Glenn Ashton -
Owning property in the form of a home is the basis for family and community stability. Homes are usually an individual’s single most valuable economic asset and ownership is a traditional entry point into the formal economy. Homeowners are also able to leverage social security by accessing formal, stable community structures.
A primary demand of the Freedom Charter was for “houses, security and comfort.” This call was realised through the government’s...
Richard Pithouse -
Bheki Cele recently justified his new R4 million house in Pretoria on the grounds that “If the head of Interpol visits me I don't want him to find me living in a shack.” He’s not the only one of us who would prefer not to be living in a shack irrespective of who's likely to be popping around for a cup of coffee. But the money spent on his house could have paid for houses for hundreds of shack dwellers and neither the incredible inequalities in our society, nor...
Jane Duncan -
Last November, Grahamstown-based media activist Xola Mali produced a documentary about the plight of residents in the Vukani settlement, Grahamstown East. Previously an informal settlement, Vukani now consists mostly of Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses, which were completed in 2003. Mali interviewed a resident and activist, Nomiki Ncamiso, who sustained injuries after the wall of her RDP house collapsed on her and injured her leg when a mini-tornado struck the...
Glenn Ashton -
South African agricultural policy is obsessed with market driven agricultural models while disproportionately high numbers of our people remain hungry. This is a hangover from our historical legacy, which continues in the form of internal and external neo-liberal pressures on government to conform to the tyranny of the market.
Sure, lip service has been paid to evolving small farmers and pursuing food security. In 1992 a policy called the Integrated Food Security Strategy was...
Richard Pithouse -
After Cape Town Mayor Dan Plato was slapped in Blikkiesdorp, the police have warned politicians not to enter the area without police backup.
Blikkiesdorp is a government built shack settlement on the barren sands of Delft, outside of Cape Town. With rows of tin shacks, razor wire fencing, invasive lighting and armoured vehicles at the gated entrance, it looks like a concentration camp. To his credit the local police chief describes Blikkiesdorp as a 'housing time-bomb' close to...
Democracy Now -
Thousands of South Africans are being displaced in preparation for the 2010 World Cup. While Durban completes the finishing touches on its new stadium, thousands of the city’s poor who live in sprawling informal settlements are threatened with eviction. On Saturday, an armed gang of some forty men attacked an informal settlement on Durban’s Kennedy Road, killing at least two people and destroying thirty shacks.
Democracy Now speaks to two South African activists who are...
