From the recent indiscriminate use of rubber bullets by metro police on a crowd of market traders — including women such as 86-year-old Lutchmee Naidoo — to eThekwini municipal manager Mike Sutcliffe’s often pompous, usually hilarious, forays into defending the project, Durban’s Warwick Triangle Early Morning Market redevelopment has become a bit of a riot.
Last week Sutcliffe delivered a presentation at a University of KwaZulu-Natal sociology seminar. He discussed “putting policy-based research into practice” in the context of the proposed development that will see the market replaced by a mall.
What the audience got was a masterclass in po-faced barbs and relentless PowerPointing that delivered a deluge of graphics, facts, figures and half-truths about the city’s transport plans and virtually nothing on the methodology and scope of commuter surveys.
These, he said, found that the 460 000 commuters who move through the area every day “overwhelmingly indicated” that they “wanted more choice” when shopping there; hence, a proposed franchise-ridden mall. Typical stuff, really.
What is atypical is the response to the development from Durbanites, whose collective imagination and social conscience appear to have been captured. There is a groundswell of opposition that transcends class and race — despite the municipality’s efforts to racialise the matter.
Allied to this has been a swift response from the provincial government. After Sutcliffe briefed the KwaZulu-Natal Cabinet recently, a task team comprising economic development minister Mike Mabuyakhulu, local government’s Willies Mchunu and safety and security’s Bheki Cele was set up. It met the traders and reported initial findings to the Cabinet. The task team has also come up with a list of resolutions.
Mabuyakhulu says the task team was set up “to bring confidence to the process of consultation” while “closing the gap between the differences of various stakeholders” by calling for further submissions from all those affected, including informal traders in the area, taxi operators and architects.
It is in keeping with President Jacob Zuma’s sentiments. In his inauguration speech Zuma welcomed public dissent and he has been at pains to call for a more consultative government approach.
But the Early Morning Market is symbolic of the discordance between the national government’s attempts to galvanise sociopolitical discourse and a local government attempting to shut them down.
Police harassment of traders has typified the municipality’s response to the dissent around the market. The day after the provincial task team decided that the traders the municipality deems “illegal” could continue to operate until a high court ruling on the matter, an armed phalanx of police swept the area confiscating goods from presumed “illegals”.
The South African Communist Party has been critical of Sutcliffe’s dealings with traders. Provincial chairperson Themba Mthembu said the party was “alarmed” at the “negotiations in bad faith” by Sutcliffe and the city’s head of business support, Phillip Sithole. “The whole project has been riddled by a lack of open and transparent dialogue and consultation, while Sutcliffe has been practising a divide-and-rule strategy [between traders] — sometimes brutally,” Mthembu said.
The city’s actions fly in the face of ANC election promises to care a bit more and they are out of step with general thinking on ways to minimise the effects of the global recession among workers — especially those in the informal sectors of developing countries.
The recent International Labour Organisation conference in Geneva brought together governments (including South Africa’s), business and workers to thrash out standard practices for sustaining and creating jobs. The conference’s provisional Jobs Pact recognises the need for social dialogue between government, business and workers to stifle unemployment. It also highlights the need to promote measures to ensure a favourable environment for the development of micro-enterprises.
The city’s proposal includes relocating more than 800 market traders to an area with hardly any pedestrian traffic. It also proposes to accommodate only 267 informal traders in the mall precinct, leaving an estimated 300 who are directly affected without trading space.
The municipality appears to be acting in a manner that contradicts generally accepted best practice. Yet the outcry from civil society and the intervention of provincial government suggests also that something humanistic has been revived by the Early Morning Market.