re posted from                         ABAHLALI baseMJONDOLO

Our country is in turmoil. Hope is what we have been living for and it seems like hope has been lost. This is the hope we as the shack dwellers carried with us in 1994 when almost all of who were eighteen or older at the time voted for the ANC and the so called ‘freedom’ was attained. We waited for freedom to reach the shacks. We were patient. But that freedom never reached the shacks.

The country goes deeper into crisis as the unemployment rate increases

7 June 2021
Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement

The country goes deeper into crisis as the unemployment rate increases

Abahlali baseMjondolo has always understood and taught that the poor were made poor and are kept poor by oppression. Our ancestors were made poor by the loss of their land and cattle and the destruction of their autonomy by colonialism. They were kept poor by the system of racial capitalism that developed out of colonialism. We have been kept poor by the ANC which has fought for themselves and their families to become part of that system rather than to build a new society in which the human dignity of all is recognised. 

The reality is that the poor are getting poorer and that the inequality between the rich and the poor is getting worse.

There are no jobs for most of us and when we establish our own communities, build our own homes and grow our own food we are violently attacked by the state. Autonomy is taken as a crime. They want to keep us poor, dependent on welfare for survival, under the political control of gangster councillors, and existing only to be a vote bank for the ANC.

We want a safe, full and dignified life. We want to know that there is a future for us, and especially for our children. We want a world in which every person counts as a person.

During the pandemic starvation and hunger became the order of the day for many families in shack settlements and in the rural areas. Today children continue to go to sleep without food. Those who have food for the whole month are surviving by God’s grace.

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The country goes deeper into crisis as the unemployment rate increases