CITICHAT 49/2002 13 December 2002.
Year end Review
So, 2002 has come – and gone! I can’t really believe that this is the last Citichat of the year. But a good year it has been for the inner city. Whilst not minimizing the huge amount still to be done, there has been much real progress on many fronts over the past twelve months. It is of course always easier to tackle the challenges ahead when there is already a momentum and the momentum is in the right direction. After a couple of decades of decline, the last two years in particular have witnessed a reversal in the downward trend. Whilst not allowing oneself to become carried away, I believe that we are well set to move up a gear as we go into 2003. So, let’s look at some of the progress made and the highs and lows of the past year.
Newtown. For many years an area where the amount of talk and good intentions totally eclipsed any action, this past year has been one of implementation and activity. Work on the R80 million Nelson Mandela Bridge has virtually been completed with the exception of the road surfacing of the bridge, the pedestrian walkways and the roadworks at either end. This latter aspect will continue to cause some frustration for motorists for some months yet, particularly at the northern end where it feeds into Bertha/Jan Smuts, but, as they say, there is no gain without pain. The R40 million contract for the elevated M1 motorway on-and-off ramps connecting the south to Newtown is on target for completion by March 2003.
Mary Fitzgerald Square was basically transformed by the end of 2001 (R12.5 million) and this year has seen all the finer details being put in place. The temporary stage structure at the eastern end, erected for a full programme of activities over the festive season will be replaced with a permanent ‘buskers’ stage’ in 2003. (Don’t miss the jazz concert “The Gathering of the Young Lions” on the 16th December. Jimmy Dludlu, Judith Sephuma, Don Laka, Basadi Women of Jazz and many more).
Another ‘buskers’ stage’ will be erected on the grassed Newtown Square. A R6 million contract for upgrading the roads and footways from Mary Fitzgerald Square west to the Oriental Plaza will commence in the first quarter of next year. 40 CCTV cameras were installed in the area and are linked to the Carlton Centre’s CCTV control room. Part of Turbine Hall was upgraded during the year and was used for filming and commercial shoots as well as the highly successful SA Fashion Week, the Mini Cooper launch and Joy of Jazz International Festival. The Electric Workshop was also upgraded and is in demand as a venue for corporate functions, dance and music events but is slated to be converted into an interactive Science and Technology Centre. The Newtown Music Centre that opened during the year is primarily a training and performance centre for musicians. Adjoining it is the Dance Factory a 300 seater theatre and studio used mainly for dance performances Transport House, long a blight in the area was cleared of illegal squatters and will be upgraded next year as a sports arena for Dance Sports SA. The beautiful things’ exhibition from the Ubuntu Village at the World Summit (which if you didn’t see is a MUST) has recently opened at the Bus Factory completely retro-fitted during the year which will house crafters next year providing training and retail under one roof. Have a look at the eclectic wrought iron fence to the yard of this President Street building. A Visitor’s Centre is planned for completion during 2003 which will house the Gauteng Tourism Authority and broadcasting facilities for a popular radio station. There is a sharp increase in letting/investment in the Newtown area and there is no doubt that it will more and more become a magnet for creative industries and the performing arts.
Chinatown: Just south of Newtown, is one of the oldest precincts in the city the urban design framework for which was completed during the year and approved by Council, some refurbishment has commenced but the bulk of the work should start in the new year.
Faraday Precinct Development. Located on the southern edge of the inner city, partly below the M2 motorway the R40 million project provides a new inter-modal node around the old Faraday rail station together with a managed market facility for general consumer products and traditional medicines and muti. Facilities will be provided for commuters, taxi operators and drivers, consulting and treatment rooms for traditional healers; a precinct center with meeting and training rooms, visitors center and some residential accommodation. Various phases of the work will be completed over the first quarter of 2003.
Fashion District: Increased activity has been mainly through Rees Mann’s Sew Africa with its unique fashion support services - a café where aspirant designers can check out the latest from up to date fashion magazines, a fashion show facility, training rooms, bridal boutique and what I gues what one would call a haberdashery. But 2003 should see the upgrade programme begin in earnest with a R3 million injection into the public environment and hopefully an increased impetus to what promises to be a special precinct in the city.
Braamfontein. A number of corporates together with Council are in the forefront of the R200 million urban upgrade project which has recently commenced in Braamfontein. Sappi is investing in a massive redevelopment of their corporate headquarters which will include the closure of Ameshoff and Simmonds Streets where they border their property thus creating a pedestrian zone and piazza which will link into the Civic Theatre. Under the proposed piazza, a new parkade is already under construction which will provide 3 000 bays for Sappi staff during the day and which will be utilized by the Civic Theatre at night. The public spaces, restaurants, etc of the Civic Theatre were also refurbished and uopgraded during the year. Under Bernard Jay the Civic has staged a remarkable reversal of fortunes and its programmes play to packed audiences – I believe they are sold out over the Christmas season! Sappi are also funding an upgrade to the public park in front of the Theatre. Liberty Life Properties, the JD Group, Gensec and ApexHi will together with Sappi also be funding the R6.5 million upgrade of the public environment in Ameshoff and Stiemens Streets together with interlinking north-south streets. Liberty are also constructing an above ground parkade for their staff on the corner of Melle and Ameshoff.
The Council, through the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA), will spend a further R20 million in upgrading the area to the south of Stiemens initially down to De Korte Street, the upgrading of Jan Smuts/Bertha to where it links into the Nelson Mandela Bridge and the connection to Constitution Hill. Wits University, currently studying its twenty year development needs will be looking at the upgrading of the area on its southern boundary and its connection with Braamfontein. The Wits School of the Arts has been developed from the old Dental School and provides links to both Newtown and Braamfontein cultural facilities.There are also some interesting possibilities under consideration for creating a stronger linkage between Braamfontein’s commercial area via Civic Theatre and Metro Centre to Constitution Hill.
Constitution Hill
Hillbrow Health Precinct and Centre of Excellence. The City Council, Wits University represented by the reproductive Health research Unit (RHRU) have formed a partnership to develop the area just south of Constitution Hill into an Inner City Health Precinct using the Esselen Street Clinic as the hub.over a phased three-year period.
Drill Hall. This historic building has been in the news on a number of occasions this year particularly related to its general degeneration, illegal occupation and a fire which destroyed part of the building. However the fire seems to have stimulated action and a project to restore the building as a place of historical significance and as a public open space with opportunities for recreation is now in progress. The intention is for the site to form part of the historical and cultural tourism trail of the Inner City. It will commemorate the Treason Trial, provide accommodation for the Rand Light Infantry and the National Reserve Force Council as well as provide new public open space and recreational facilities.
Jeppestown I have a soft spot for this elderly node just to the east of the CBD – it reminds me of some similar areas in East Manhattan – two developments to note here. The first is the R10 million upgrade and new facilities around the Station which is almost complete and includes an informal trading market, taxi ranks, a public bath house and a public square. The second is the exciting self generating education project at the School for Practical Philosophy
Housing Richard Yell pioneered inner city loft living some time ago and the interest in this form of accommodation has been steadily growing throughout the year. On the other side of town to Richard’s pad is Ron Prentice’s spacious 30m x 18m converted warehouse space on End Street which I haven’t yet personally seen but has been described as ‘wow’.
Friday, December 13, 2002
Friday, December 6, 2002
Durham BiNational Civil Society Forum Citichat 6 December 2002
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!
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!
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!
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!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
