ANC
Jim Day
AN African National Congress decision to back away from efforts to put Bushbuckridge in the Northern Province under the control of neighbouring Mpumalanga sparked the rioting that is rocking the area.
The ANC decision, according to local residents, was taken at a meeting in the middle of last month attended by representatives of Mpumalanga and Northern Province. Deputy President Thabo Mbeki chaired the meeting at the start, but left before the Bushbuckridge discussion; the ANC’s acting secretary general, Cheryl Carolus, took over the chair from him.
ANC officials in Bushbuckridge say the meeting agreed to scrap negotiations, under way since 1994, to shift the border. The decision was subsequently leaked to local ANC leaders, some of whom then called for a three-week work stayaway and blockades of roads through the area.
Those protests turned violent last week, when Bushbuckridge residents torched government buildings, destroyed lorries and clashed with police sent from Pietersburg to quell the unrest.
The violence subsided but heated up again late this week, when residents burnt a bus. Riot police and army troops are in the area.
“It became very clear to us that people had decided the border would not be shifted,” said Azaph Nxumalo, representative of the Bushbuckridge Border Committee, about the ANC’s decision that led to the protests.
In the wake of the rioting, representatives of the two provinces met on Wednesday in Nelspruit at a meeting also attended by Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi.
In that meeting the provincial and regional executive committees accepted the decision that the boundary would not be shifted, said Minister of Constitutional Affairs Mohammed Valli Moosa.
Earlier this week, Bushbuckridge local leaders were vowing to continue their struggle. “Come wind, come rain, come hurricane or tornado, they want to go to Mpumalanga,” said Freddy Mathebula, regional chair of the ANC in Bushbuckridge. “The people of Bushbuckridge have spoken.”
The dispute has been simmering since provincial boundaries were drawn up in 1994. The parliaments of Mpumalanga and Northern Province have approved resolutions to transfer Bushbuckridge to Mpumalanga, but it would involve a quid-pro-quo trade with the town of Groblersdal, which would shift to Northern Province.
The National Party opposes the transfer of Groblersdal, saying its residents are content to stay in Mpuma-langa. Without the NP’s support it will not be possible to gain the two-thirds majority in Parliament required to alter provincial borders. The ANC has not approached the NP’s leaders about gaining support for the border shift.
ANC leaders in Northern Province have also said they would not consider a transfer of Bushbuckridge without receiving Groblersdal. They say they do not see the Bushbuckridge issue as a border dispute at all: it is a political and security problem.
“We are part of a single country, with one president, in which internal boundaries should not make a significant difference to us,” said Kenny Mathivha, a representative of Northern Province Premier Ngoako Ramatlhodi.
During the protests, black smoke poured into the sky from burning lorries along roads through Bushbuckridge. Teenagers shattered the windows of cars and bakkies trying to drive past the blockades. Crowds surrounded lorries that failed to get through, smashing them with rocks, pouring petrol into the cabs and setting them alight.
Women pulled vegetables from the back of one smouldering lorry while young children looked on. Police leapt from Casspirs with shotguns aimed at the scattering crowds.
Helicopters circled overhead with riot police leaning out with weapons; people darted for cover into nearby shops,. They said police in helicopters had fired rubber bullets and teargas into the crowd.
Hunkering under the shelter of an overhanging roof, residents in the village of Marite near Bushbuckridge explained why they want so desperately to fall under the administration of Mpumalanga.
The Northern Province, they said, is incapable of providing the development projects needed in the area: at night, the village goes dark because it lacks electricity; water is only available from the occasional public tap; schools lack textbooks; the roads are badly deteriorated.
If you look across the provincial border into Mpumalanga, where many of the residents of Bushbuckridge work and do their shopping, these problems are not so pronounced, they said.
Driving to the top of a hill, you can see how heavily populated the area is, as small homes dot the countryside all the way to the horizon. Bushbuckridge is populated by 750 000 people by one estimate; others put the number at more than a million.
It is a region of rolling hillsides and thick bush, bordered by the Kruger National Park to the east and the Drakensberg escarpment on the west. Its history is marked by ethnic battles and poverty, partly because of its former division between the Lebowa and Gazankulu homelands.
One recent study showed that parts of the region have an average monthly household income of about R500, much of which is generated by residents working in Gauteng or on white-owned farms to the north and south of the region.
“We’ve suffered a long time under Northern Province,” said one man as he enjoyed a beer across the street from a burnt-out bakkie.
The barricades put up by residents were peaceful until the afternoon of May 1, when Valli Moosa failed to show up at a Worker’s Day rally.
Locals took this as a sign that the government is not taking their demands seriously. Shortly after the rally, people burnt the government offices in the village of Shatale and clashed with police.
Valli Moosa has explained that he did not know that he had been invited to a Worker’s Day rally.
If the violence does not convince ANC leaders to renew efforts to shift the border, those manning the Marite barricade talk of another threat: that the people of Bushbuckridge will not go to the polls in 1999.