The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
SACSIS endorses the right of the poor to decent housing. We also support solutions aimed at transforming the unequal balance in land ownership, which currently concentrates much of South Africa's land in a few hands.
Richard Pithouse -
Shack fires burn hot and fast. It’s not always easy to predict their speed and direction because as paraffin stoves explode in large balls of flame fires can suddenly jump ahead or to the side.
In most settlements the number of taps is entirely inadequate for people to be able to try and put the flames out on their own. Usually the only viable strategy to fight shack fires is to demolish a ring of shacks around the fire and let it burn itself out. But when the wind is...
Fazila Farouk -
Pick up the promotional brochure of any government, NGO or corporate social investment programme and you will read that poor women are an important beneficiary group – if not the most important target of social relief and investment programmes.
Many millions of Rand are raised and spent in the name of alleviating the plight of poor black women, particularly those living in rural South Africa.
For all the time, money and effort put into such programmes, one has to wonder why the...
Richard Pithouse -
Despite all the confident government talk about ‘eradicating slums by 2014’ the fact is that the number of people living in shacks is growing. Recent statistics show that the percentage of the population living in shacks has now increased to 15.4 percent from 12.7 percent in 2002.
South Africa is not the first country where the government has simply announced a date by which shacks will be ‘eradicated’. In 1968 the military dictatorship in Brazil declared that shacks...
Richard Pithouse -
The crisis of social exclusion in our cities is a key factor in the ferment in grassroots political society. It has been central to much popular protest in recent years, to the emergence of well organised grassroots movements to the left of the ANC and, also, the catastrophic pogroms in May.
Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma both support a coercive response to this crisis. Their support for legislation to eradicate shack settlements is, ultimately, support for the state to send in men with...
Frank Meintjies -
The growth in immigrants from the rest of Africa to South Africa, and attacks on such immigrants, dates to the mid-1990s.
What has changed today is that South Africa is home or temporary host to exponentially more immigrants. What is different today is that immigrants are infinitely more intertwined in the lives of ordinary South Africans.
South Africans are generating profits in other African countries. There is a roaring export trade to those countries. Today also, many middle class South...
Ashley Westaway -
In the midst of the drama of the past few days, which has seen South Africans rampaging against foreigners to vent their frustrations at the slow pace of delivery of land, housing and jobs, one story stands out as the antithesis to the story of non-development.
In the little rural village of Cata in the Eastern Cape Province, the employment rate has increased from 4% in 2001 to 26% in 2007. At the same time, the percentage of households with a monthly income of more than R1600 has increased...
