Wednesday, December 22, 2004

squatters in South Africa

south africa

This article is from the Kenya Times, which in the past was the mouthpiece of the oppressive ruling party in Kenya. I haven't seen any coverage of this elsewhere. If the South African government is sincere, it will work with squatters to create local control over their land and redevelopment. If it simply ships squatters off to substandard and horribly maintained privately-owned buildings, then this is nothing but a land grab.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The bad news is: No one else is Nelson Mandela!
By that I mean that Mr. Mandela seems to be able to transcend petty politics and have vision and is unusual as a human being let alone as a politician. This is not to suggest that the present government of SA needs to spend decades incarcerated to improve its horizons.

An article at the following link suggests, rather. the frustrated exercise of power. The first response of a bureaucracy under attack is, "what rules are in our favor?" That way, overt politics can be masked behind rules. But shouldn't the subject be the squatters?

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=124&art_id=vn20041206101518694C453950

bc

Anonymous said...

In my previous post I meant that there is only a symbolic link between Nelson Mandela and the present government of SA, particularly for a North American.

Mr. Mandela is a figure of inspiration and one would hope that might be a model for others.

rn said...

A glitch in the blogger software made it hard to read that link and impossible to hotlink it. So here it is again:

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=124&art_id=vn20041206101518694C453950