Tell Our Story. Julie Reid
to the provision of basic public services and infrastructure at the local government level (especially hostels, which have historically been the most neglected), many of the negative experiences of Glebelands have been well documented by Burger, especially in the independent online media publications, the Daily Maverick and Elitsha. Indeed, the general living conditions in the majority of the blocks is similar to that which applies in most poor township communities across the country.
This side of government’s role and activity, however, is the ‘easier’ one to notice and to expose, precisely because government’s service delivery failures have become so normalised in South African society, with the dominant media playing a sizeable role in that regard. However, the other side of that role and activity – the specific links between poor or non-existent service delivery and management, and government corruption, greed, criminality and conscious cover-ups – is regularly ignored and often hidden by news reportage. For the Glebelands interviewees though, they are very much two sides of the same coin.
Take the case of security-related infrastructure, on which tens of millions in public funds has been spent, much of it to outsourced private companies with questionable links to those in government (Ubunye bama Hostela et al. 2014). Such infrastructure has usually been publically presented, including by the dominant media, as practical confirmation of local government’s positive and preventative response to the ongoing violence and killings. But, that is not how one of the community leaders sees and experiences it:
There are people from the state that are making money out of blood … There is a fence surrounding us, what was this fence for? There are cameras here, there are so many people shot next to these cameras but I never heard not even one suspect that was arrested just because of the footage of the cameras … There are private security companies, we don’t know what they are doing here, they are going up and down, doing nothing (G2 interview).
Even more damning is the claim by a resident, who was an integral part of the Glebelands peace committee set up to ostensibly try to halt the violence, that local government officials and politicians are themselves party to the violence and killings through either conveniently looking the other way or through conscious facilitation:
Our government knows something about this violence, I can assure that … Before elections last year [2016] we were at the ICC [International Convention Centre], there was the mayor of Durban there [and] those kings of KwaZulu-Natal … [Also], there was a member of the ANC that is ruling inside here [at Glebelands]. He said we must stop now until elections then after we can start killing people – in front of the mayor … and nobody followed that. After [the] elections one of our peace committee members, Thobile Mazongono, was killed. That’s where they started; as the days go [another peace committee member] was shot again … (G3 interview).
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.