A month after service delivery protests erupted in violent clashes in Phaphamani Township, Grocott's Mail reporter Thabo Jijana and photographer Timothy Gabb revisited the township.
A month after service delivery protests erupted in violent clashes in Phaphamani Township, Grocott's Mail reporter Thabo Jijana and photographer Timothy Gabb revisited the township.
I only met Anethemba once. On any other day, he's an ordinary, school-going 10-year-old boy, who just happens to live in one of the many townships on the outskirts of every town or city in South Africa. Yet, on the morning I met him last month, he was nowhere near a school desk.
Instead, he was standing among adults – including his father and an older brother – on a tar road that runs through Phaphamani Township. Both these adults were part of a group of Phaphamani residents preparing to set alight a car tyre in the middle of the road, during their second day of protest against poor service delivery.
"Do you know what's happening here?" we asked Anethemba. "No," he answered. Both his father and brother, it emerged later, are unemployed — a fact residents said was common in many Phaphamani households.
During and after the protests on February 9 and 10, this was (and still is) the rallying cry of most Grahamstown residents and organisations such as the Unemployed People's Movement (UPM): There are too many people still unemployed in Grahamstown; despite rampant joblessness, the available jobs in the municipality — one of the few local institutions to which local residents look for jobs — "are allocated on the basis of party political loyalty".
Last Friday, Grocott's Mail had little trouble finding sentiments along such lines in the townships of Phaphamani and Zolani. The two townships are so close and similar in so many ways, that it's often overlooked that the same tar road vandalised last month separates the two.
For one thing, most residents were home and not at work. Remnants of vandalism are still visible in Phaphamani: stones litter the roadside or lie collected in small heaps alongside the tar road running through the township, and the sandy earth underneath the tar is still exposed, in parts where residents dug shallow trenches. Motorists brave enough to use the road have to navigate through all of this.
Xola Mali, the Unemployed People's Movement spokesperson, has said previously in a media statement: "People never wanted the tar roads. They wanted houses, electricity, toilets, water and jobs. The tar road is for the officials to be able to drive in comfort. This is an indication that when services are delivered they are not delivered in the interests of the people."
A Phaphamani resident, who aksed that her name not be used, said, "My complaint is that we seem to be side-stepped when it comes to service delivery. There are people in other areas who have not lived in Grahamstown for that long, and they have received RDP houses already. But I've been living in my [mud]house for many years and I still don't have a proper house."
Nonzoboyi Kibi, who lives with six other people in her one-room zinc-sheeting shack, said, "I have nothing to my name. My blankets keep getting wet and wet all the time because the zinc roof is leaking. Rainy days are the worst because we have no choice but to sleep in damp blankets, otherwise we'll die with the cold."
Mali (in the media statement) said: "We are not struggling for service delivery. We are struggling for justice and dignity. We are struggling for land, jobs, decent schools and homes, safe streets, equality between men and women and a democracy that includes the poor and allows poor people to plan their own communities and their own future."
Unemployed People's Movement chairperson, Ayanda Kota, speaking in Phaphamani last week, emphasised that all the struggles in Phaphamani were experienced in other parts of Grahamstown, too. Views by at least three residents who participated in the sit-in on February 9 at the City Hall testify to this. "The last time I had a permanent job was in the 1990s," said Sivuyile Mancapha, a Joza resident.
"I've been surviving on 'piece jobs' since then," he said. "Now what I see are strangers showing up in my area [Ext 8] without notice and they begin working. Where are we when jobs are handed out by the municipality? Why are we not informed by the municipality?"
Matshawandile Faku, another Joza resident, said, "In 1994 we all voted in unison. But with time, now it seems there are some people who are left behind. We were all in the struggle together, but now those who have reached the top are throwing rocks at those still at the bottom. "That is why we sing a song that says 'These black boers are giving us worries' when we protest."
