Durham Civil Society Forum

CITICHAT 48 /2002 - 6 December 2002


Binational Civil Society Forum

Some weeks ago I wrote about my deep concern regarding the urban poor. A concern, that the inner city’s marginalised people were not going to be beneficiaries of the positive progress that is being achieved in the city’s revitalisation programme. I pointed out that ‘joburg 2030’(the City’s long term economic vision) has the following as one of the foundational tenets of its long term strategy “ that a better city and a better quality of life for its citizens is fundamentally based on the ability of the city’s economy to grow. ” Whilst this might be all well and good, it did seem to me that, in the absence of a real and specific plan to address the future of the huge number of the poor, the unemployed and the homeless in the inner city, they would be by-passed due to their lack of education and skills. I felt that we had no plan, short term or long term, for the urban poor. That proved to be the case in the recent eviction of illegal occupiers of an inner city building. I have no quarrel regarding the Council’s bona fides relative to the necessity to evict, many of such buildings endanger the lives of the illegal occupants – but I have a huge problem that we don’t appear to have a plan in regard to the people caught up in such situations.

I was able to dwell on this issue further this week as I had the good fortune to be one of twenty South Africans invited by the United States-Southern Africa Centre for Leadership and Public Values to meet with twenty US participants in a Binational Civil Society Forum held at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. As an aside, a number of the American participants questioned me regarding the evictions which were prominently featured in the media throughout the States - all of them commenting that the Council had come across in a very poor light. There is no such thing as local news any more!

Back to the Forum. The goals of the Forum were to:

• Reinforce participants’ understanding of the potential of civil society for addressing critical societal challenges in South Africa

• Establish mutual linkages between South Africa and American participants

• Form on-going working groups whose aim over the next few years is to strengthen South African NGOs in four key areas.

 Community and the New Philanthropy

 Self-Help/Participatory Development

 HIV/AIDS and

 Reconciliation and Justice

Sub-divided into four groups with each group focusing on one of the above, the key areas were unpacked by participants over a two-day period and a programme of work developed to take each issue forward. Possibly more about this in the future.

What was reinforced for me again - through the input of a number of prominent South Africans at the Forum –was this burning issue of poverty. In the urban context, poverty manifests itself in homelessness, street children, begging, prostitution, drugs and alcohol abuse, the illegal occupation of inner-city buildings which inevitably results in criminal exploitation. But even beyond these aspects are the resultant de-meaning and de-humanising of the individual, the loss of dignity and of respect. So I was particularly interested to learn at the Forum of a new movement in South Africa to be focused on restoring human dignity - ‘The National Plough-Back Trust’ (NPBT) which aims to rekindle the spirit of “Ubuntu” in order to increase the well being of society.. “The NFBT recognises the abject poverty that many communities experience and seeks to raise the nation’s consciousness in order to revisit the core of what it means to be part of civil society.” It also recognises that the sustainable upliftment of our society as a whole, whilst clearly dependant on financial assistance, will not be successful without positively changing the attitude of the people. The concept of Ubuntu has played an immeasurable role in our society - last week I mentioned the work being done in Jeppestown under the banner of ‘Jeppe Phakamisu Ubuntu’ (Upliftment and Fellowship in the Community) - and the NPBT seeks to rekindle that spirit of Ubuntu and is calling on the nation to ‘plough back’ into those communities from which they have come. Initially conceived to focus on rural areas, the NFBT is now being planned to cover all geographic areas. I don’t know whether NFBT would be the kind of body to assist in our specific case, but it is interesting that there is not just a recognition of the problems of poverty, but an active movement to do something and do it at scale.

In a newly published report provided to us at the Forum, ‘The Size and Scope of the Non-profit Sector in South Africa’ (Mark Swilling and Bev Russell) data is provided that demonstrates that “the bulk of government funds goes to urban working class and middle class communities. Communities of the poorest of the poor are not the primary participants. The Editor of the Report, Adam Habib (who was a participant at the Forum as was Mark Swilling) comments “This finding should be devastating to a state ostensibly committed to alleviating poverty and addressing the inequities bequeathed by apartheid. It calls for a rethinking of state funding patterns, and a reconceptualisation of government’s present poverty alleviation strategy.” I think it also calls for a rethinking of these issues at local government level! Regards, neil

PS I wrote this edition of Citichat last evening in my hotel room in Durham, North Carolina whilst it was snowing heavily outside. The lights draped over the trees and the falling snow provided a real Christmas card scenario. But, during the night the freezing weather caused the major electricity supply cables to burst, the whole area is without lights, local roads are blocked with scores of trees unable to bear the weight of the snow and the airport has shut down, so there is another side to Christmas card scenarios! On the lighter side, the hotel is actually on the university campus so on Sunday afternoon I thought I would have a look at Durham. I took a cab and asked the cab-driver to take me ‘downtown’. As he drove off I heard him ask on his radio, “Where’s Downtown?”- we may have problems but at least we have a city centre!