It is hard not to notice the degree to which Cape Town Mayor Dan Plato reduces the complexities of the Hangberg impasse into a zero-sum conflict between good and evil (Cape Argus 30 Sept 2010; Sunday Times 03 Oct 2010).

On the one hand, a ‘criminal element' - vicious, anarchic and violent - has attacked and delayed the implementation of an impending, and idealistically described upgrade to an informal settlement.

On the other, there is the City - the arbiter of a constitutionally enshrined democratic rule of law - which has tried "every avenue" to work with the community at large in order to provide water and sanitation, electricity and even it is claimed, "green open spaces" at the foot of the Sentinel.

The destructive thread running through Plato's interpretation of Hangberg is the tendency to lay the blame of poverty on the poor, and subject communities to collective punishment. Indeed beyond Hangberg, it speaks to the broader approach that Plato as Mayor, and Helen Zille as Premier, have come to represent.

Although Plato insists that engagement with the community has been continuous and thorough, it seems that his criteria for measuring successful engagement generally is the degree to which the people come over to his point of view, not the degree to which people's voices are heard and respected. The question that seems to emerge is whether the many people who have resisted the City's plans over time were the criminals and druglords that Plato and Zille have blamed the crisis on, or if it was just easier to label them as such.

But does this not just divert attention from the more important issues at hand? Whether or not criminals were involved in this particular violent clash is a separate (and less important) question than the actual long-term crisis of poverty and settlement upgrade faced in Hangberg and elsewhere.

The continued focus on the "criminal element" that is apparently to blame for nothing less than the continued existence of Hangberg itself is simply to maintain an excuse to hold the entire community to ransom - the latter situation incidentally Plato conceded as reality in his Sunday Times response.

This is a wholly inadequate approach. The Makhaza toilet saga earlier in the year comes to mind, where likewise the City removed not only all toilet shelters, but even standpipes as a show of force against the community in much the same method of collective punishment.

Blaming communities in this way goes even further than this diversionary tactic, towards a kind of pejorative labelling that is destructive as it is unfounded. Zille recently argued that we needed to begin talking about the ‘unmentionable' causes of poverty (SA Today 27 August 2010).

These apparently include, teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, and HIV/AIDS contracted through unprotected sex. She paints the picture of the poor as an unethical, unrestrained collection of brutes, who are incapable of self-respect and adherence to a democratic rule of law.

Accordingly, one can only deduce that for Zille, if people just stopped sleeping around and drinking, they would miraculously be able to escape poverty. Notwithstanding the way that this approach flies in the face of the history of poverty in this country (not to mention the idea of causation in social science), it is also undeniably devious to attempt to lay the ‘burden of proof' on the most marginalised people in our country. Are the poor therefore condemned to be responsible for the fact of their very own marginalisation?

In moving forward from this situation in which we find ourselves, Plato claims that the rule of law has been under attack in Hangberg and must now be protected. He is correct in this. It is just that the attack is much bigger and more complex than that which he describes. A democratic rule of law can never be measured simply by the extent to which citizens adhere to institutions of the state.

A democratic rule of law is only present to the extent that civil liberties and civil rights are respected and ensured - by citizens and more importantly by the state - in a just, accountable and fair manner. This then forms the basis for a legitimate and democratic rule of law. Hangberg, like many other informal settlements in Cape Town, has existed for decades and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future.

Dealing with the immense task of informal settlement upgrading will require this government to reconceptualise its approach into a meaningfully consultative one that does not rely on collective punishment or pejorative labelling of the poor, but rather is based on the respect of people's rights to dignity and participation in democratic processes, including development.

The real threat then to the rule of law in Hangberg lies not in the ‘vicious druglords' of Plato's Republic of Hout Bay. Rather, it is found in the continued marginalisation of those most vulnerable in our society and their inability to exercise their constitutionally enshrined rights to dignified lives, by having been made helpless by the very institutions meant to ensure those rights.

Dustin Kramer is the Treasurer of the Social Justice Coalition. This article first appeared in the Cape Argus.

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