Fatima Meer: Reminded of society’s unfulfilled desires

‘Impoverished people, people who haven’t got food on their plates. Now you are going to take away the roof from their heads. And where do you expect these people to go? You are just compounding their indigency. Then you move in with these security guards and dogs and guns. Now if this is not fascist brutality, what is fascist brutality?’

The scene could have been an apartheid-era forced removal, with a brave black activist haranguing the white regime. But this question was asked of the new government by Fatima Meer exactly a decade ago, at the peak of the Chatsworth housing battle, on the SABC show ‘Special Assignment’.

The unity of poor black African and Indian people fighting city government impressed Meer. She had come to Chatsworth a year earlier as part of the Concerned Citizens Group of mainly Indian struggle veterans, campaigning for a vote for the African National Congress at a time minority parties were gaining ground.

Always nimble, Meer did a quick U-turn. On a Sunday shortly before the 1999 national election, the Jankipersadh family faced the threat of eviction from a Chatsworth shack. Shocked by the living conditions she encountered, Meer stayed to fight, cajoling and threatening city officials to halt the Jankiperasdh removal. Clearly intimidated, KwaZulu-Natal premiere Zweli Mkhize recalled this very incident at her state funeral on Saturday at the Durban International Convention Centre.

Within a year, Meer would be sucking in the smell of post-apartheid teargas that became so familiar in Chatsworth, her eyes streaming tears of anger, her throat coughing up disgust at the local ANC rulers whom she had helped put into power with unmatched courage during the bad years when she was beaten and banned.

A decade ago, the ruling party was not quite so corruption-ridden as now, although state prosecutors’ documentation of Jacob Zuma’s alleged bribery via Schabir Shaik made Durban deal-making at the time seem even sleazier than now, if that’s possible.

But the tendency of Durban officials to crush poor people’s aspirations was just as pronounced. On the week of Meer’s death, it may be Mike Sutcliffe denying local civics the right to march; back then, it was deputy mayor Trevor Bonhomme, bringing in the cops while accusing Meer and other organisers of harbouring shebeens, drug lords and brothels.

Within two years, Meer had not only helped organise the community to successfully resist. She managed to bring together all the fractious campaigning groups within Durban’s poor communities against the World Conference Against Racism. One day at the end of August 2001, the Concerned Citizens Forum of grassroots civics allied with Muslim pro-Palestinians, her beloved Jubilee 2000 anti-debt movement, and other human rights groups from across South Africa and the world.

Rightly, they were infuriated that US secretary of state Colin Powell, UN secretary general Kofi Annan and South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki had agreed to remove from the conference agenda two critical issues: Racist Israeli Zionism, and reparations for slavery, colonialism and apartheid. Meer and her dear comrade Dennis Brutus led more than 10,000 people in a march against the UN conference that day, and suddenly the idea of South African civil society taking on malgovernance was a reality.

That force was perhaps unique in the country’s history, able to think and act locally, nationally and globally. Writing her obituary in City Press, Meer’s co-conspirator Ashwin Desai now laments that the new urban social movements which emerged on that 1999 Sunday in Chatsworth are a ‘spent force’, but many others in Meer’s circuit will disagree.

For example, from her South Durban birthplace of Wentworth, Desmond D’Sa last month helped launch a new local-global campaign – now more than 200 organisations strong – to halt the World Bank’s financing of Eskom. The activists’ ability to derail a R29 billion loan has apparently worried one of the funeral attendees, minister of public enterprises Barbara Hogan.

Aside from the police squad carrying her casket on Saturday (we imagined her voice inside cajoling them for ongoing ‘fascist brutality’), one reason Meer’s funeral seemed uncomfortable was because civil society was given no opportunity to celebrate the non-ANC causes she lent her prestige to.

She opposed a loan that Hogan – who oversees Eskom – insists we need to fund a new coal-fired plant (the world’s fourth largest) and partial energy generation privatisation, to be paid for by huge increases in tariffs for poor and working people.

Environmentalists, labour and community opponents of the World Bank and Eskom join Meer’s longstanding concern that the Bank must first repay black South Africans reparations, for supporting apartheid-era white power when from 1951-67, Washington financiers lent US$100 million to Eskom but zero African people received electricity.

Meer would have publicly ridiculed the statement by Hogan at a press conference on Friday, just as the great activist passed away: ‘If we do not have that power in our system, then we can say goodbye to our economy and to our country.’

‘Rubbish!’ Meer would have shouted, impatiently explaining that by switching supply away to the common person, away from the over-consumers who get the world’s cheapest electricity, for example, BHP Billiton, we would meet many economic and social objectives, while avoiding construction of new climate-destroying coal plants.

She would have added, we believe, that if no bank loan means the ruling party’s Chancellor House investment in Hitachi does not yield the ZAR1 billion in easy profits anticipated from Eskom’s new coal-fired plants (a business relationship Hogan herself recently implied is unethical), well, too bad for the corrupt ANC!

At the same press conference last Friday where Hogan expressed paranoia, energy minister Dipuo Peters expressed myopia: ‘Wide coverage has been given to those who are opposed to the application by Eskom, whilst we are of the view that the silent majority does indeed support our... acquisition of the World Bank loan.’

So where does Peters get that phrase? According to Wikipedia, ‘the ‘silent majority’ was popularised by US President Richard Nixon in a 3 November 1969 speech, where it referred to those Americans who did not join in the large demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the time… [and has also] been used in the political elections of Ronald Reagan, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg’ – all hostile to poor people and the environment. In this country it was used last by opposition party Congress of the People (COPE) a month before the 2009 election: ‘The people of South Africa, the silent majority are going to deliver a lethal blow to Zuma’s dome-shaped soft belly.’

Meer would have cringed at the irony. Most myopic of all, perhaps, was her old friend Pravin Gordhan, who in London recently made the startling claim that this would be South Africa’s ‘first World Bank loan’ – when in fact there were several others since 1994 (‘Industrial Competitiveness and Job Creation’, ‘Municipal Financial Management Technical Assistance Project’ and destructive Lesotho dams) as well as Bank investments in a failed Domino’s Pizza franchise and similarly well-conceived poverty-reduction strategies.

Meer’s dismay at ANC graft, bling and the youth league leader’s right-wing populism was noted by her brother Farouk at the funeral, but what went missing – especially with Gordhan in attendance – was how revolting she found the Treasury’s ongoing neo liberalism and the dalliance with the World Bank, emblematised by the failed Growth, Employment and Redistribution[pdf] programme which World Bank staff coauthored.

Delivering the Harold Wolpe lecture [pdf] at the Centre for Civil Society in February 2007, Meer observed that the Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) had ‘usurped power in South Africa and the world’ because they ‘are structured to exploit us.’

Gordhan knows this, for he was the UKZN Centre for Civil Society. Naidoo helps organise Chatsworth against injustice.
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