Making rights mean something to the poor
ANNIVERSARIES are important, for they give focus to the significance of the event being marked or celebrated. When we, as a country, mark March 21 as Human Rights Day, we ensure that the shocking events that took place in Sharpeville 58 years ago – when 69 people were shot dead and another 180 were seriously wounded for protesting against unjust laws – continue to have a place in our collective memory.
The events of that day at Sharpeville shocked the whole world and exposed apartheid as a crime against humanity.
The Sharpeville Massacre, as it came to be known, was a decisive turning point in the history of the struggle by the black people of our land.
The struggle for self-determination, for human rights and for equality by South Africans received increased international sympathy and support from that day.
There is therefore no better way that the democratic government could have underscored the significance of the day than by calling it Human Rights Day.
The crux of the Freedom Charter is the list of rights it envisages for a united, democratic and prosperous country for all who live in it.
However, we need to have a fundamental discussion about the entire notion of human rights so that our people do not find them to be meaningless.
The democratic dispensation ushered in an era of basic human rights such as political and civil rights. But now we need to engage more deeply on issues of economic, social and cultural rights.
For example, while the right of a person to move around and to live where they want to live is guaranteed in the Constitution, the problem remains a lack of means for many of them to do this.
Due to our history, a substantive understanding – and thus application – of human rights is always important in our country.
I specifically make reference to the right to movement and settlement because it is what we in Buffalo City Metro are confronted with as a municipality.
The reality is that apartheid segregation, compounded by the lack of means of our people, still limits people’s right to live where they wish to live.
The unavailability of land parcels within the city centre reinforces apartheid spatial patterns in terms of human settlement.
The substantive understanding of human rights appreciates our past and thus assists us in designing interventions that do not assume we are all moving from the same starting point. For this reason, it is founded on a redistributive justice model which posits that past discrimination should be rectified, for failure to do so would simply continue to leave different groups and people at varied points.
This takes me to the discussion about the notion of the Right to the City, which was first used in 1968 by the French urban theorist Henri Lefebvre.
It has over the years gained prevalence in urban scholarship and practice, to the extent that it was a theme for the 2010 UN Habitat World Urban Forum conference, where the main argument was that it is the best theoretical understanding that will “bridge the urban divide”.
In South Africa, ensuring that people have a Right to the City includes making it clear that everyone has a right to be in the city. This means the city should be welcoming to all its inhabitants without any form of alienation or attempts to dispose of people because of their race, gender and/or economic circumstances.
It includes giving all people the right to access the opportunities and resources of the city without any discrimination.
This is why the main agenda of this current council has been to invest in socioeconomic infrastructure and mobilise investment in order to create an economic environment that allows people to explore their talents without limitations.
It involves people having a right to define the policies and programmes of our municipality, thus taking part in shaping the content of our urban reality.
Our integrated development planning and budget processes are platforms for institutionalising the thinking of the citizens of the metro into the programmes that the municipality implements.
The mayoral imbizo programme provides a further platform for people to participate, in defining the kind of city they hope it will become. Our country’s Integrated Urban Development Framework tries to create an outcome which is very much geared towards guaranteeing every citizen’s Right to the City.
The framework has eight policy levers, each intended to address a challenge in our urban reality in a manner that fundamentally alters it for the better.
The policy levers are intended to address all the matters related to integrated spatial planning, which encompasses integrated transport systems and human settlements that are anchored by integrated urban infrastructure.
It also contains measures that are intended to create effectively governed cities with active citizen participation and an inclusive economy.
Our metro growth and development strategy, Vision 2030, properly aligns with the integrated urban development framework as it is intended to create an economically thriving, well-governed, connected, green and innovative city.
We are making a variety of practical interventions which will eventually ensure that the Right to the City is guaranteed to all of our citizens.
To ensure spatial integration and unlock economic development, the municipality is now directing urban development and is thus not leaving the task to private property developers.
The municipality is now identifying strategic land parcels and determining land uses for them to ensure that any development contributes to urban integration.
We envision a city where there is a seamless overlay between developments and public transport. We are also ensuring that new human settlements are not built far from where our people work.
Our municipality is making a variety of developmental interventions that will foster a new form of urban integration that guarantees everyone’s Right to the City.
Our council has identified the need to provide socio-economic infrastructure in newly developed settlements, and to this effect, all settlement plans will make provision for socio-economic infrastructure.
This is so that the human settlements being created are truly habitable spaces with the relevant amenities.
For us, therefore, the Right to the City is in tandem with the Freedom Charter’s substantive conceptualisation of rights, more particularly the pronouncement that “there shall be houses, security and comfort”.