* BULLETIN : 3
   May 2006

Last week six provinces committed one thousand subsidies each to the Federation of the Urban Poor (FEDUP) - the Shack Dwellers International affiliate in South Africa. These provinces are: Gauteng, Western Cape, KwaZulu Natal, North West, Limpopo and Free State. When you throw in the R5 million committed by the Eastern Cape Province you come up with a sizeable R224,168,000 in subsidies.

The National Minister of Housing, Lindiwe Sisulu with support from her advisers and her Department, facilitated this agreement. It was a demonstration of a serious commitment to a local (South Africa) and international partnership with Shack Dwellers International that triggered a further commitment of 12,000 stands to the Malawi Federation by the Malawi Minister of Housing.

The commitment in South Africa deepens and institutionalises a partnership that has taken two years of sustained engagement to generate. It is the culmination of hard work, careful strategising and bold planning by a group of grassroots activists and development professionals whom many in the housing sector, especially professionals and grassroots careerists, had written off as a spent force barely 12 months ago. 

It was not the capacity of this core group of activists that they under-estimated. It was the course of history. There are those who constitute their practice in a way that encourages shack dwellers to follow their agendas. There are others who chose to follow the shack dwellers themselves.

Many of the critiques of the SDI configuration in South Africa (FEDUP and uTshani) will be waiting and watching, certain in their conviction that this initiative is doomed to fail.

The fact is that an outright failure is not likely to happen. Rather it will be much the same as it was last time, when the erstwhile SDI configuration in South Africa (SAHPF, uTshani and People’s Dialogue) parlayed a R10 million grant into 17,000 houses, many hectares of people-owned land, a national movement of the urban poor seeking to contribute towards the creation of inclusive cities and towns, and significant but not sufficient policy impacts.

Contradictions generated by these dramatic successes resulted in several setbacks. Detractors and sceptics have focused on these setbacks and chosen to ignore, minimise or distort the accomplishments of the SDI configuration during the years 1991- 2001. These reactions have been negated by the events and announcements of the past week.

But there were also those who stuck it out with the leaders of the South African alliance as it went through the painful steps of reconfiguration, and who defended the tens of thousands of shack dwellers who had been drawn into the Federation process by the clarity of its message: organise yourselves around your own capacities in order to secure resources and entitlements from others. No one promised the urban poor or their local and international backers that such a strategy was going to be without its problems and its setbacks.

These institutions and individuals need to be acknowledged. They know who they are. So too should those who succumbed to a superficial critique that failed to recognise that social movements wax and wane – a failure that contributed to a temporary deepening of the crisis facing the SDI process in South Africa from 2001 to 2005. These sceptics too need to be acknowledged, for they steeled the resolve of those who were determined to keep the struggle going, and taught us a few hard political lessons.

The role of this brief report is not only to celebrate this major breakthrough for SDI in South Africa but to demonstrate that these developments are the historical evolution of an earlier practice – certainly more experienced, more conscious of problems and obstacles – which is the practice of poor people beginning to organise themselves through land tenure and housing in order to liberate themselves from an inhuman life.

It always has been and remains a question of how people can make history under conditions pre-established to dissuade them from intervening in it.  There are those who argue that confrontation and rebellion are the only genuine expressions of self-and collective assertion.

The SDI project is about much more than housing. It presupposes that all people must be objectively freed from all needs – including the need for land and housing, but it presupposes that this freedom has a lot to do with securing these rights practically, in a way that refuses controls and directives dictated by others. This can only come, at this moment in history, when directives give way to dialogue and the brokering of deals. This takes a strong, united movement of the urban poor – a movement that does not get built overnight. It requires alliances, engagement, and negotiation, far more than it requires demands. Implicit in the politics of demands as a singular strategy is the assumption that others have the right to construct solutions for the poor.

With effect from today the South African SDI affiliates face the challenge of negotiating the conditions for the delivery of these 6000+ subsidies. They also face the myriad challenges that come with people-driven project management in dozens of settlements throughout the country. These challenges are magnified by a developmental universe in which poor people are still seen as objects whose needs and whose liberty from want and exclusion is wholly dependent on the good will and capacity of others.

There are bound to be mistakes. There will certainly be problems, but the very fact that FEDUP and its allies now operate on a much high level in terms of financial and political capital, demonstrates that the process is resilient. It has the capacity to survive setbacks, forge stronger and increasingly more effective alliances that deliver tenure security and housing as an important by-product in the struggle to create self-conscious and self aware citizens, intent on being active subjects, deeply engaged in their own liberation from exploitation and from want.