Re: Forwarded from Anthony (imperialism and democracy)

["Patrick Bond" <pbond@xxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> It is also true that those people are still very, very influential at the
> World Bank, and in the IMF.
> However, their efforts to make their dream come true have run into big
> problems everywhere.
> ... Another - in the long run the most important - is that the project
raises
> the specter of democracy -  democracy not in the sense of the
institutional
> set-up of the United States (which in my humble opinion is not at all
> democratic), but in the sense of rule by the people.

Yes, the WB/IMF and neoliberalism in general took a bit of an ideological
hit in the WashPost yesterday...

>For South Africa's Poor, a New Power Struggle
>
>By Jon Jeter
>Washington Post Foreign Service
>Tuesday, November 6, 2001; Page A01
>
>SOWETO, South Africa -- When she could no longer bear the darkness or
>the cold that settles into her arthritic knees or the thought of
>sacrificing another piece of furniture for firewood, Agnes Mohapi
>cursed the powers that had cut off her electricity. Then she summoned a
>neighborhood service to illegally reconnect it.
>
>Soon, bootleg technicians from the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee
>(SECC) arrived in pairs at the intersection of Maseka and Moema streets.
>Asking for nothing in return, they used pliers, a penknife
>and a snip here and a splice there to return light to the dusty,
>treeless corner.
>
>"We shouldn't have to resort to this," Mohapi, 58, said as she stood
>cross-armed and remorseless in front of her home as the repairmen
>hot-wired her electricity. Nothing, she said, could compare to life
>under apartheid, the system of racial separation that herded blacks into
>poor townships such as Soweto. But for all its wretchedness, apartheid
>never did this: It did not lay her off from her job, jack up her
>utility bill, then disconnect her service when she inevitably could not
>pay.
>
>"Privatization did that," she said, her cadence quickening in disgust.
>"And all of this globalization garbage our new black government has
>forced upon us has done nothing but make things worse. . . . But we
>will unite and we will fight this government with the same fury that we
>fought the whites in their day."
>
>This is South Africa's new revolution. Seven years after voters of all
>races went to the polls for the first time, ending 46 years of apartheid
>and white rule, churches, labor unions, community activists and the
>poor in all-black townships are dusting off the protest machinery that
>was the engine of their liberation struggle. What most provokes South
>Africans' defiance today are what they see as injustices unleashed
>on this developing nation by the free-market economic policies of the
>popularly elected, black-led governing party, the African National
>Congress.
>
>Materially, life here has only gotten worse since 1994 as the ANC has
>pursued a course of piecemeal privatization of state industries,
>whittling of import taxes and loosening of controls on foreign exchange.
>
>The policies have expanded opportunities for foreign investors but so
>far have deepened the poverty inherited from apartheid's segregationist
>policies.
>
>With domestic industries more vulnerable to foreign competition and the
>restructuring of public enterprises, the most industrialized country in
>sub-Saharan Africa has lost nearly 500,000 jobs since 1993,
>leaving a third of the workforce unemployed. The poorest 15 million
>South Africans have had their annual incomes shrink by nearly a fifth of
>what they were before apartheid's collapse.
>
>The ANC's top officials, many of whom were initially Marxists, say their
>economic policies aim to remedy the imbalances of the past, which
>included protectionist trade policies and concentration of wealth
>in the hands of a relative few. To redistribute wealth, ANC officials
>say, they must first expand it, and they say only the global market and
>foreign cash can ultimately do that, albeit not without some growing
>pains as the economy adjusts.
>
>Increasingly, this country of 44 million people is running out of
>patience as it endures a financial crisis that statistically outstrips
>the Great Depression. At the same time, costs of such basic needs as
>housing, electricity and water are soaring.
>
>"We did not give up our lives and the lives of our children only to let
>this brazen capitalist system exploit us even more," said Shadrack
>Motau, an SECC board member.
>
>In South Africa, the most despised acronym is arguably not HIV, the AIDS
>virus that infects nearly a quarter of the adult population, but GEAR,
>the ANC's economic package -- Growth, Employment and
>Redistribution -- which opens the door to global trade.
>
>Hoping to generate revenue, streamline a bloated bureaucracy and extend
>service to blacks ignored by apartheid, the ANC announced six years ago
>that the government would sell public enterprises from the
>state-run airlines and the phone company to Eskom, the acronym for the
>public electricity commission. With encouragement from institutions such
>as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the
>government has so far auctioned off only small portions, while
>restructuring the public franchises into profit centers to showcase
>their attractiveness to potential investors.
>
>The alienation felt by many poor blacks from this march to privatization
>has bred street rallies calling for a revival of "the spirit of '76" --
>a reference to the year of the Soweto riots, which gave the
>anti-apartheid campaign its second wind.
>
>Virtually every week, thousands of demonstrators and unionized workers
>rally in the streets to denounce both GEAR and the ANC. Grass-roots
>organizations in Durban have begun moving evicted families
>back into their homes, sometimes only minutes after authorities have
>piled their household goods on the streets and bolted the doors.
>Unemployed plumbers in Cape Town reconnect their neighbors' water
>supply when it has been shut off because of nonpayment.
>
>"There's definitely been a revival of the struggle mentality," said
>Bongani Lubisi, 28, one of scores of jobless volunteers who roam Soweto
>each day reconnecting electrical service. "We thought that when we
>got rid of the old government that our black government would take care
>of us. But instead the capitalists are getting richer while the working
>people lose their jobs and can't even meet their basic needs."
>
>For all its anti-communist fervor, the apartheid government shielded
>South Africa's domestic industries from foreign competition with
>policies that included stiff controls on foreign capital, heavy state
>subsidies and tariffs on imported goods. When blacks refused to pay rent
>and utilities as part of township-wide boycotts, the apartheid
>government did not evict them or shut off their services for fear of
>sparking riots.
>
>Jacob Maroga, executive director of distribution at Eskom, said that
>Soweto's electricity problems started when the boycotts of the 1980s
>bankrupted the apartheid-controlled municipal government that
>purchased electricity and resold it to residents.
>
>When Eskom began handling the accounts directly, it spent about $75
>million in capital improvements and wrote off nearly $37.5 million in
>household debts. But in its preparations to sell the public utility,
>Eskom has focused on demonstrating its profitability to investors,
>following the World Bank's prescriptions for "cost recovery" in which
>the price for each kilowatt of electricity is set according to how much
>the utility spends to provide it.
>
>That meant increasing costs by as much as 400 percent for some residents
>in Soweto, who for years were charged a flat rate for electricity.
>
>"The idea is that we would do all [the improvements] and then the
>residents would start living up to their commitments. But we still
>recover only about 50 to 55 percent of the costs for the electricity we
>sell,"
>Maroga said.
>
>"There are clearly customers who don't have the capacity to pay," Maroga
>said. "But there is also this culture of nonpayment in Soweto where
>customers can afford to pay but they prioritize other
>consumptive spending. We need to deal with that."
>
>In a place where median household income is less than $100 a month, 90
>percent of all Soweto households with electricity are behind in their
>payments, according to a university survey. Sixty-one percent
>have had their service shut off within a 12-month period. In a community
>of nearly 1.5 million people, Eskom cuts off service to about 20,000
>delinquent customers each month.
>
>"This culture of nonpayment that people say exists in Soweto," said
>Virginia Setshedi, an SECC board member and law student, "it's only
>because people don't have money to pay."
>
>Because Eskom sells electricity at discounted bulk rates, affluent
>municipalities in mostly white suburbs buy electricity and resell it to
>customers for roughly 30 percent less than what it costs Soweto's
>consumers. For the biggest users of Eskom's electricity -- industrial
>sites such as steel plants and coal mines -- the rate for each kilowatt
>is roughly one-tenth the rate for a household in Soweto.
>
>That inequity drove a coalition of unreconstructed communists, retirees
>and college students to create the SECC nearly a year ago. Its chairman,
>Trevor Ngwane, a former ANC municipal council member,
>recruited a friend, a laid-off Eskom repairman, to train volunteers how
>to reconnect a power supply.
>
>Since then, Operation Khanyisa -- which means "to light" in the Zulu
>language commonly spoken here -- has unlawfully restored electricity to
>about 3,000 homes.
>
>"We're getting about 50 calls each day from the community," Setshedi
>said. "We don't ask why or when the people were cut off, we just switch
>them back on. Everyone should have electricity."
>
>To combat the illegal connections and the SECC's growing celebrity,
>Eskom officials have published full-page ads in the Sowetan daily
>newspaper, warning readers that 10 South Africans -- mostly children
>-- were killed last year by exposed live wires. But SECC officials say
>that none of those fatalities occurred in Soweto, where volunteer
>technicians are trained to wrap live wires in plastic bags.
>
>Patrick Bond, a business professor at the University of the Witwatersand
>and co-director of the Municipal Services Project, acknowledges that it
>is expensive to provide electricity to the poor, who use little
>electricity and are unable to buy it in bulk through their municipality,
>which results in duplicate costs for equipment, administration and
>labor.
>
>But he said Eskom could largely resolve the debt problem in Soweto by
>charging big industries a few cents more for each kilowatt of
>electricity, subsidizing a cheaper flat rate for poor customers.
>
>"Eskom has a rate structure that economically makes sense," Bond said.
>"But socially it makes no sense. Their structure is good for the
>northern suburbanites, but we'd like to see a structure that is good for
>
>everyone. That means smaller profit margins in the short term but a
>healthier society in the long term."
>
>Lubisi and another SECC repairman take Bond's argument to the street.
>They arrived one recent morning at the Maseka and Moema intersection
>flanked by two recruits.
>
>"Red and white are used as live wires and they are very dangerous,"
>Lubisi said, showing the wires to the trainees as a crowd gathered.
>
>James Buthelezi has lived in this house on Maseka Street for as long as
>he can remember, and this was the first time the electricity had been
>cut off. Twenty-eight people live in this five-room house and a
>tool shed-sized room in the back yard.
>
>No one has worked in months and the family survives on Buthelezi's
>mother's pension, less than $125 a month. Their unpaid bill is more than
>$3,000. "When they came to cut off our electricity, we begged
>them not to," said Buthelezi, 58. "We told them that we had babies and
>elderly people inside. They didn't even pause."
>
>The SECC's members have tried to talk to Johannesburg's mayor about the
>hardships endured by families like Buthelezi's, but he has repeatedly
>given them the slip. In June, more than 20 angry residents
>marched to the mayor's home but again he ducked them.
>
>Unable to cut off his electricity, they disconnected his water.
>
>
>© 2001 The Washington Post Company





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