NUMSA condemns the City of Cape Town for inhumane water cuts
6 April 2020
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) is extremely dismayed and angered by the inhumane, and frankly disastrous, decision taken by the City of Cape Town to cut the water supply to residents of Khayelitsha. This decision to severely reduce the water supply is being taken when the entire country is battling a vicious international pandemic in the form of the Coronavirus, which has infected more than a million people globally. This decision was taken against the backdrop of the national government instituting a national lockdown of the country, and with a widespread campaign in support of sanitization and hand washing, which has correctly been promoted as one of the main ways to help alleviate the spread of the virus.
According to online news platform IOL more than fifty families on the Cape Flats are without water as we speak, including the elderly and children. Those living in Langa, Khayelitsha, Gugulethu and Delft are most affected by this decision. The City of Cape Town has implemented what it euphemistically terms “trickle-flow water restrictions” in some areas which means it deliberately and drastically reduces the water supply to a trickle, or in other cases, it has completely cut off the supply. It has justified this barbaric act by saying that this is part of the debt collection measures the City is implementing in order to recover money owed for the supply of water and it has been implementing since the end of March. To date thousands of families are unable to access water supply because of this practice. We condemn the City of cape Town for this vicious and brutal attack on the working class and on all poor communities!
NUMSA wants to be on record that this group of councilors stupidly took a decision to cut residents off from water. We have no choice but to define these actions as what they are - racist, anti-working class and anti-poor. Furthermore, the councilors’ response to protest was that if you have money to buy food then you must have money to pay for rates and services. This decision by the City of Cape Town is sending a clear message that only the lives of the wealthy matter in South Africa. The lives of poor and working class black South Africans, who continue to be economically marginalized, dispossessed and landless, do not matter to this municipality at all.
The decision to disconnect residents at a time of a global crisis shows a wanton disregard by the City of Cape Town for even the most basic of human rights. The City of Cape Town must know that their action is racist, and in violation of the basic rights of any South African. And we the South African working class under the banners of NUMSA the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP), the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), the United Front (UF), and various other working class formations, will fight and smash such oppressive measures as we did against the system of apartheid. We call on all progressive formations of the working class and the poor to join us in this struggle.
We are encouraged by Minister Lindiwe Sisulu’s centralized approach in swiftly providing water tanks to communities in this crisis. The struggle we are waging is for a unitary South Africa and not a federal system of government. We need to use what has been achieved in this crisis in terms of providing water to develop a national system that can effectively and urgently deliver water to communities in need. We would like to demand that the emergency interim measures taken to deal with the health crisis be rolled out systematically, and on a permanent basis, after we have passed this moment of crisis.
NUMSA has one message for the Western Cape government, led by the right wing racist Democratic Alliance that is in charge of running the City of Cape Town: they must sober up and immediately stop their racist, backward and primitive attacks on the poor and the working class. The very same message goes to the eThekwini Municipality that has gone rogue and is hell bent on misusing this crisis to violently destroy Abahlali baseMjondolo, who have successfully organised the poorest of the poor. The eThekwini Municipality’s backward behavior also has no place in our country. We call on the leadership of the provincial government of KwaZulu-Natal, led by Sihle Zikhala, whose leadership we respect having engaged with them on the question of SAA, to act decisively against the gangsters in the eThekwini Municipality. NUMSA is calling on both the national and provincial government to convene an urgent meeting in order to stop these ongoing and absurd attacks on the poor, attacks that are being perpetrated in the middle of a serious global health crisis.
We would like to further note and appreciate the current interventions by Minister Ebrahim Patel representing the economic cluster. His role in actions such as the ban on price fixing by private companies gives us confidence. These are the kinds of measures that show that the state can intervene in the economy to put the needs of society before the accumulation of private profit. They should be used as an indication of how we can work towards unapologetically building a state that delivers quality, healthy and safe lives for all South Africans.
Meeting the needs of our people can be achieved through the state intervening directly in the economy and openly taking full ownership of all the commanding heights of the economy. This can be done through nationalization of all commanding heights of the economy, including all our minerals, to drive a job led industrial strategy, and to transform South Africa’s economy as we know from being a minerals, energy and finance complex to being an economy that works in the interests of all South Africans, black and white. We also need investment into our SOEs, the destruction of the corrupt tendering system, and measures to ensure that the livelihoods of the working class are defended with a job led economic strategy. Furthermore, the state needs to make sure that the healthcare system is nationalized, and that all South Africans have access to quality health care and not just the elite wealthy minority.
The lesson to be learnt from the backward, racist, right-wing local state in Cape Town is that the state in a capitalist mode of production is but nothing but a tool of oppression. We need to make a decisive break with racial capitalism and ensure that all South Africans live in a society with proper infrastructure to be able to reproduce themselves with quality lives. This requires access to decent houses that restore the dignity of our people, access to quality education and the redistribution of rural and urban land. We need to do away with the corrupt tendering system and mobilize our people into housing brigades to occupy land and design and build their own quality houses with proper infrastructure. All members of the brigades must be paid a living wage and provided with all the necessary training to equip them to build houses fit for human beings. This is the only solution to build a society that is not divided along the lines of race, class and gender.
The extreme inequality currently experienced by the poor and working class of South Africa reproduces the same conditions of the apartheid state through other means. This is why the City of Cape Town can so easily disregard the lives of poor blacks and Africans in particular, and the eThekwini Municipality can act against the organised poor with such violence. We will not tolerate these tactics. We shall return fire by fire and we shall fight with everything at our disposal to deal with both municipalities.
If they continue we might be left with no option but to take legal action to interdict this inhuman decision of the City of Cape Town, who are continuing their decades long war against the economically marginalized and dispossessed. NUMSA is calling on all major trade unions and federations from SAFTU, Cosatu, Nactu, Fedusa and Solidarity, along with all political parties starting with the SRWP, ANC, EFF, UDM, Cope, PAC and Azapo, together with all organised working-class communities and formations of the working-class and the poor, including, the UF, and Abahlali baseMjondolo, to take immediate action to stop the City of Cape Town.
Issued by Irvin Jim, NUMSA General Secretary, 6 April 2020
