It would be ‘unwise’ not to vote for ANC, says Zuma:
Despite running battles with ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa, former president Jacob Zuma wants the ruling party to return to power after next year’s general elections.
Zuma, who at one point referred to Ramaphosa as “corrupt”, over the weekend told ANC ward 10 branch members in Mandeni on the north coast of KwaZulu-Natal, that despite the internal problems within the governing party, people should vote for it in next year’s polls.
“The ballot is the only weapon available to us if we want to overcome poverty and promote development within our communities. We know that there are currently a number of political parties promising people all sorts of things.The reality is that all these political parties have done absolutely nothing for our people. The ANC is the only political party with a programme which is able to give the poor economic power,” Zuma said.
“So, if someone within the ANC treated you badly, that can’t be an excuse for not going to the polls and voting for the ANC. The ANC doesn’t belong to any individual — it’s a party for the people. The ANC wants to bring real changes in this country and the only way it can do that is when we give it a decisive majority at the polls.
“So, it’s unwise not to vote for the ANC in next year’s general elections because you are aggrieved or because you have a problem with a certain leader. This will never change anything. Instead, such a decision will reverse the gains we have made over years of struggle for the betterment of the lives of indigenous people.”
Zuma, who in 2018 was recalled by the ANC national leadership while serving his second term as the country’s president, remains popular in KZN.
The ANC KZN secretary, Bheki Mtolo, said Zuma will work for ANC victory in the upcoming elections. “He reiterated his commitment towards campaigning for the ANC to ensure the party’s resounding and landslide victory in next year’s 2024 general elections,” said Mtolo.
“[Zuma] encouraged the people of this province to vote for the ANC in order to defeat the beneficiaries of apartheid who want to see indigenous people forever trapped in abject poverty,” he said.
As previously reported by the Mail & Guardian, a new poll conducted by the Brenthurst Foundation and SABI Strategy Group has found that the governing party is set to lose its majority in Gauteng and KZN in next year’s elections. The survey was based on a 15 minute telephonic interview conducted with a sample of 1 500 registered voters between 11 September and 3 October this year.
In Gauteng, 37% of respondents said they would vote for the ANC, equal to the number of those who said they would vote for parties in the Multi Party Charter for South Africa (MPC), while 18% intended to vote for the EFF.
In KwaZulu-Natal, 32% indicated support for the ANC, compared with 27% for the IFP, 19% for the DA and 15% for the EFF.
The ANC in KZN has indicated that it will rope in Zuma, former ANC premiers Sbu Ndebele, Zweli Mkhize, Willies Mchunu, Senzo Mchunu and former MPLs, Mike Mabuyakhulu and Sipho Gcabashe, in the party’s KZN elections campaign.
“The ANC will be announcing a programme of action of the elders as we enter the critical phase leading towards the elections,” Mtolo said.
This article first appeared in The Witness.
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Fuelled, fed, nourished by Joburg:
Emigration, living abroad by choice, as opposed to the exile of Ernest Cole and Thami Mnyele, has been a propulsive event in the careers of many artists.
The story of South African art is, in part, a story of relocation, of artists such as Lerato Shadi and Dineo Bopape redefining themselves in other places, typically cities of the global north.
But does the reverse hold true? Can Johannesburg, a city built by immigrants, replenish strangers? Especially artists? Absolutely, says Paris-born Tabita Rezaire, who for three-and-a-half years called the elusive metropolis home.
“South Africa really was so healing for me,” says Rezaire when I reach her by video at her home in a forested conservancy in French Guiana, on the north coast of South America.
The story of Amakaba, the fledgling yoga centre that Rezaire established in 2020 on a small-scale cacao farm outside Cayenne, is strongly connected to her time in Johannesburg.
“Johannesburg allowed me to look at my own wounds,” says Rezaire. “It was fertile, and I say this without minimising the harshness of what the city is for the people living there, but for me it had that effect.”
Rezaire moved to SA’s ragged capital of commerce in 2014 with a romantic partner she met in London. Her life journey up until that point had been an apprenticeship in emancipation, of fashioning a “disobedient living scheme” to challenge institutionalised oppression, as she put it in a recent essay.
Born to a French Guianese father and Danish mother, Rezaire studied economics in Paris and Copenhagen. It was alienating, so Rezaire opted to pursue a postgraduate arts degree in London. Her focus was cinema and 1960s agit-prop performance. She met a Zimbabwean man, an artist, with whom she moved to SA.
She shortly fell in with a creative set of artists and designers who shared her interest in digital communication technologies, cheap internet aesthetics, collage, video and personal emancipation. They included Bogosi Sekhukhuni and Nolan Oswald Dennis, with whom she founded the artist group NTU, a brief-lived “agency concerned with the spiritual futures of technology”. She also befriended Jamal Nxedlana and Ravi Govender of CUSS Group and became besties with pioneering installation artist Dineo Bopape.
“I had a sense of community in SA, artistically, spiritually, politically,” says Rezaire. “I was very fuelled, fed, nourished, nurtured.
“I really felt that strongly.”
Life in Johannesburg was not without its complications. Her relationship cratered. This personal tumult coincided with a period of intense social ferment and revisionism. The status quo was forcibly being audited, notably by university students, and found wanting. For Rezaire this was thrilling — and so unlike Paris or London.
“South Africa, it’s so open; there is really a willingness to look at history, to look at the past, and the legacy of that past, what it does in the present and in the future — and to really understand the medicine that is needed.”
That medicine, at least for Rezaire, was yoga. It was Euridice Kala, an experimental Mozambican photographer then living in Johannesburg, who suggested Rezaire join her for a session of kemetic yoga at the Yeoville Recreation Centre. Developed in Chicago during the 1970s, kemetic yoga combines poses from Indian yoga with postures suggested in ancient Egyptian art, in particular hieroglyphs.
“I took the class and went ‘Wow!’ I got hooked.” Yoga prompted her spiritual awakening. “I trained and eventually started giving classes in Yeoville. And then I met the whole kundalini yoga community.”
Healing is central to Rezaire’s daily practice as a yoga teacher, doula (birthing coach) and farmer.
It also informs her lexicon as an artist. Last year, Rezaire published Womb Consciousness. It is a sprawling survey of her research-driven and joyously recombinant art that features more than a dozen contributions by poets, theorists and artists.
Her father, psychiatrist Théodore Rezaire, is also a contributor.
“My work is very constellation-ish,” says Rezaire of the book. “I don’t know if there is such a word.” She laughs. “The book goes into different areas: ancestral memory, womb worship, the divine feminine, technology, indigenous knowledge, the African sphere and so on. It touches on different things of interest, areas I explore, investigate and try unearthing.”
It includes some of Rezaire’s own writings, notably an essay titled Decolonial Healing: In Defence of Spiritual Technologies. By turns incantatory and analytical, it begins with her posing pointed questions.
“As electronic networks swiftly replace intuition-based technologies, what effects do computing technologies have on our heart-mind-womb-lands? How can we retrieve ancestral knowledge as a weapon against modern/colonial imperialism?”
Rezaire ventures that the answer has something to do with engaging African and indigenous ancestral technologies of information and communication, by daring to “reconcile the worlds of organic matter, energy and electronics to nurture a mystic-techno-consciousness”.
The intellectual foundations of this essay go back to a 2014 essay titled Afro Cyber Resistance. Interested in theorising the work of her new friends, notably Sekhukhuni and CUSS Group, she coined the phrase “Afro cyber resistance” to speak of strategies of digital resistance and creative emancipation in the face of cyber-racism and the distorted representation of black people, especially Africans, online.
For a certain constituency of artists and intellectuals interested in the evolution of digital arts in Africa, Rezaire has emerged as an important essayist-maker in the mould of German filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl and American artist Martine Syms. But even avant-garde artists face transforming kudos into wonga.
In 2017, Rezaire presented her debut solo exhibition with Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. It was heavily weighted towards new-fangled photography and film. Standout works included Deep Down Tidal (2017), a standing-room-only film exploring how privately owned fibre cables retrace old colonial shipping routes, and Sugar Walls Teardom (2016), an intimate film installation framed by the encounter of a pink gynaecological chair.
“The womb is the original technology,” reads a title overlaid onto Rezaire’s lo-fi animations appearing on a video monitor.
Her techno-mysticism can read as goofy but it is unapologetically feminist. Sugar Walls Teardom includes a deliberation on American physician James Marion Sims, the so-called “father of modern gynaecology”, who experimented on African-American slave women as part of his research.
While living in Joburg, Rezaire started to voice an aspiration to “find some land and start a village”. It remained a vague ambition. In 2017, she visited French Guiana, the homeland of her father and one of five overseas departments of France.
“We are still France,” explains Rezaire. “We vote for the French president. We have French passports. We learn French history at school. We have euros. We are French citizens. It is a very complex territory.”
While in French Guiana opportunity knocked in the form of a patch of riverine land in a forest.
“Wow! And then panic. How am I going to do this? What about my career? Fierce, fierce, fierce.”
The chance passed.
Rezaire says she was too attached to being an artist, the recognition it gave her and sense of identity, to act decisively. But artistic success, which has the veneer of glamour but often involves hurried travel and endless obligation, also prompted Rezaire’s decision to embark on “a grieving journey for the death of myself that needed to happen so that a new version of me could come through”.
“I was always on the computer, editing things online. And then the travelling — I was always removed and displaced. I couldn’t have it. That’s why I had the yearning for an anchor, the need to be grounded, to be rooted like a tree and not move. I wasn’t unhappy, just misaligned, unbalanced completely.”
Rezaire has swopped hurry for grounded routine and healing. Amakaba follows the sustainable farming techniques pioneered by Ernst Götsch in neighbouring Brazil known as syntropic agriculture. Its cacao crop is used to make chocolate sold at local producer markets. The profits are negligible.
The yoga centre is similarly modest, although Rezaire’s ambition is to replicate the Isha Yoga Centre of Sadhguru in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. And what about her lauded artistic practice?
“I make pottery,” she shyly responds. “I am transitioning in my art-making.”
A thought comes to her. Her index finger pops upright. “Though.” Rezaire mentions her 2019 film Mamelles Ancestrales, which explored megalithic architecture in Senegal and the Gambia. Last year, she started to work on a new film. Its subject is a stone circle on the border of French Guiana and Brazil.
“It seems to be my last video work. But who knows? I am open to being surprised by life.”
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Santaco will form security company to ‘clean up’ crime:
The South African National Taxi Council (Santaco) has big plans to join the fight against crime to “clean” the streets of KwaZulu-Natal, in close partnership with the police and security companies, to protect its taxi operators and commuters.
As the organisation starts a three-day imbizo, Santaco KwaZulu-Natal chairperson Boy Zondi announced on Monday — together with the eThekwini metro police and industry regulators — that the council has plans to form and register its own security company, while ensuring that the private security firms it currently hires are legally compliant.
eThekwini metro police spokesperson Colonel Boysie Zungu; Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority (Psira) KwaZulu-Natal manager, Ncamisile Mhlongo and Nonhlanhla Hlope, the acting chief director at the provincial regulatory entity within the department of transport, responsible for issuing licences to taxi operators, confirmed their support of the initiatives at the media briefing.
Zondi said Santaco was launching the security initiatives at the behest of provincial police commissioner Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, who is expected to attend the imbizo on Tuesday, after he urged the organisation to “formalise” its contribution to safety and security and its relationship with the police.
Santaco launched Operation Hlokomela — which involves taxi drivers and their representatives assisting people on the roadside outside of their working hours — after a young girl from the Sekhukhune district in Limpopo went missing after hitching a ride to Polokwane.
Zondi said Santaco had resolved at its annual general meeting that it needed to “build a strong partnership” with security companies and “all enforcement units” and that this had arisen “out of the challenges we are facing as a taxi industry in KZN”. This, he said, included high crime at taxi ranks and the presence of people wearing branded clothing who pretended to be protecting passengers (hlokomelas) but instead robbed them.
“The first challenge is you wake up in the morning and go to the taxi rank and there are people coming into the association by force and the association doesn’t know what to do,” Zondi said.
“So, we decided at the AGM that we need to form our own security company but, before we can form our own security company, we need to partner with existing security companies who are going to assist us with the problems we are facing.”
Zondi said taxi operators were aware of rampant crime, such as muggings, at taxi ranks and in the small towns where they operate, “so we decided to partner with law enforcement”.
In Port Shepstone, on the South Coast, where crime was prevalent, Santaco had hired unemployed people to patrol the streets to protect commuters from criminals.
“People were snatching bags in the road. We employed people and now they have cleaned Port Shepstone town — you can go and walk there now with your cellphone,” Zondi said.
“We thought, let us start that partnership we started in Port Shepstone and roll it out throughout KZN … and try to help law enforcers to get rid of everything that is illegal in KZN … We want to partner with all law enforcers in KZN to help them clean KZN.
“In KZN, there are 17 million people, and a few police officers. It is impossible for the police to be everywhere and we are in charge of all the taxi ranks. We have more than 200 taxi ranks in KZN where we can help close that gap and say, ‘Not in our area … everything that is not supposed to be happening in our taxi ranks — no more.’”
“When we come out of our imbizo, any form of wrong things taking place in our taxi ranks must come to an end. We are not going to leave it to the police any more but we are going to catch every one and take them to the police.”
Zondi said police commissioner Mkhwanazi had been “the one pushing” for the taxi industry to formalise its involvement in the fight against crime, especially after it had assisted the government in bringing the July 2021 looting and civil unrest under control.
He said the industry would continue to hire private security firms until it was ready to register its own company.
The metro police’s Zungu said the city police’s relationship with the taxi industry was “not that bad but I hope this imbizo will assist in improving the safety of operators and their passengers and that it will assist in terms of how we conduct operations”.
“There are fake ‘hlokomela’s’ and Santaco will assist us to come up with a strategy to ensure the ‘hlokomela’ runs an operation in line with the laws of this country and it will assist in reducing the conflict in the industry that is taking the lives of operators and passengers,” he said.
Mhlongo said Santaco had invited Psira to the imbizo to guide its compliance with the law in terms of the security firms it hires.
“Every security provider in the country has to be registered with the authority. Santaco has invited us so we can enlighten them to be fully compliant and ensure they are trained in terms of the security standards to ensure there is compliance in the security industry,” Mhlongo said.
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