African Climate Alliance programme manager Gabriel Klaasen addressed an anti-nuclear vigil outside Parliament on Friday morning. Photo: Matthew Hirsch

Vigil at Parliament also marked exactly 38 years since Chernobyl Disaster

BY  Matthew Hirsch

Environmental activists gathered outside Parliament on Friday morning for a vigil to mark the seventh anniversary of a landmark court ruling against the South African nuclear deal.

The 26th of April also marks the 38th anniversary of the Chernobyl Disaster.

The group of about 40 demonstrators chanted, “Power to the people” and “Genoeg” is genoeg”, while waving placards reading: “God’s earth needs clean energy” and “Say no to nuclear power”.

The vigil was organised by the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute, partnering with Earthlife Africa Johannesburg, the Green Connection, Koeberg Alert Alliance, Project 90 by 2030, and the African Climate Alliance.

In 2017, The Western Cape High Court ruled that the government’s nuclear agreements with Russia, Korea and the US were unlawful and unconstitutional. In the ruling, Judge Bozalek said: “The applicants estimate the cost, which will ultimately be met by the public through taxes and increased electricity charges, could be one trillion rand, and this estimate was not disputed by the respondents.”

At the vigil, concerns were raised that new nuclear power procurement was back on the table.

“I’m doing this for my children’s children,” said demonstrator Zelda Ann Hintsa from Peace and Healing Circles South Africa. “If we don’t stand up then they can just do anything they want. The government itself is sending out mixed signals and that is a concern.”

“Too often we keep fighting but we don’t take a moment to pause and acknowledge our victories,” said African Climate Alliance programme manager Gabriel Klaasen.

He said the passing of the Climate Change Bill was significant but it remained a concern that nuclear power was still on government’s agenda.

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Khayelitsha resident Bongani Mpako was provided with a solar light as part of a community project with local business. Photos: Mary-Anne Gontsana

About 75 households in Khayelitsha were given solar street lights in a move to make the area safer

BY Mary-Anne Gontsana 

The 20-metre-high mast light in the yard of Khayelitsha resident Bongani Mpako’s home has not been working consistently for two weeks.

This week, the Mpako family was among those in Site B that received 75 solar streetlights in the hope of improving safety in the community.

“The high-mast light goes on and off. We report it, and workers come out to fix it, but a few weeks later it is off again,” says Mpako.

Mpako, who has lived in one of the many densely populated informal settlements in Site B for several years, believes that poor lighting increases the risk of violent crime.

The 75 solar lights were installed through a partnership between community organisations in Khayelitsha, the People’s Environmental Planning and LightUp, and e-hailing service inDrive.

The light above Mpako’s front door has a solar panel secured onto his roof. The light switches on when the sun sets and goes off automatically at daybreak.

Vincent Lilane of inDrive said, “Our drivers complained that they could not work in Khayelitsha at night. And that’s when we decided to put up lights.”

Resident Ntombi Soya said she could finally walk to the toilet at night safely. “Lighting has been one of the biggest issues here,” she said.

The City of Cape Town says it is also looking into solar-powered lighting for informal settlements as part of its new Urban Energy Poverty Alleviation Programme.

“The City and its partners have been in a number of communities to assist residents with solar lighting solutions. In the City’s supply areas, almost 100% of the older informal settlements have been electrified. But there are many existing and newer settlements on land where it is not possible to electrify, such as on wetlands, in ponds or nature reserves,” said Mayco member for energy, Beverley van Reenen.

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24 April 2024 Joint media statement: Equal Education and the Equal Education Law Centre head to court to ensure the immediate placement of all out-of-school learners in the Western Cape   #SofundaSonke Equal Education (EE) and the Equal Education Law Centre (EELC) will be heading to urgent court to ensure the immediate placement of all unplaced

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All Media invited to community indaba in Xolobeni on Friday 19 April

As ACC, we are inviting all media to a community indaba on Friday 19 April about the elections.

All political parties standing in the national elections are invited to come and argue why people should vote for them on 29 May 2024 elections.

The community indaba takes place at Umgungundlovu Komkhulu in Xolobeni. This is on the coast of Amadiba A/A in Mbizana, Eastern Cape.

Demands of ACC:

1. Protect communal land.

2. No traditional leaders in business deals. Bring back their dignity. No selling of our communal land.

3. Stop the new Bantustan laws (TKLA)

4. Stop the “Land Expropriation Without Compensation Bill”. Its only aim is to take communal land

5.Abolish the tender system. It corrupts and kills our economy. It takes more money from the public service to enrich a few.

6. Prioritise our local service before national administration.

7. Stop budget cuts in health and education. Don’t chop off the pillars of our country. Fight the system of austerity

8. People shall have the Right to Say No to project they don’t want and determine their destiny with the development they want

9. Support our local agriculture for food security.

10. Support our local eco-tourism in order to create local jobs.

11. Protect our livelihood, our local fishing, our rivers from pollution

Presentations and discussions will start at 10am and end by 1pm.

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Youths from Mphadzha village fetch water from John Makamu’s home. Makamu drilled his own borehole. Photos: Bernard Chiguvare

BY Bernard Chiguvare

• Only one public borehole is working for 11 villages and thousands of households in the Nthabalala area near Elim, Limpopo.
• Getting water is a daily struggle for the villagers.
• Some villagers have now pooled funds and plan to sink their own borehole for about R90,000.
• “We have no choice but to think for ourselves,” said a community leader.

Every morning in the early hours, Awelani Mukwevo has to find a way to get enough water for her household in Mathuli village, Limpopo. She either has to buy it, or to scoop some water with a plastic bottle from the top of an open borehole pipe near Thavha River (see the photo at end of this article).

The water shortage is because only one public borehole in the Nthabalala area near Elim is fully functioning, according to John Makamu, Nthabalala Tribal Coordinator.

Makamu has now sunk his own borehole and sells the water at R2 per 25 litres.

The single functioning public borehole, in Mphadzha village, can only supply water for two hours a day before it has to fill up again, according to David Maduwa, chairperson of the Nthabalala water committee. The water is pumped to a reservoir two kilometres away and from there is piped to the villages of Mpofu, Maduwa and Mphuphulenzhi. The water is not enough even for these villages and there are 11 villages in the area that need water.

Maria Mashele, who lives in Mphadzha, says she needs about 1,000 litres a week for her household, and she has to buy water. It costs her R400 a month. She has to use her social grant money.

“I have to be very strict with my children and siblings not to waste water,” said Mashele.

Residents say whenever a borehole broke, the municipality simply sank a new one. Mphadzha therefore has two more boreholes, but one has broken pipes and no power; the other borehole, which used to deliver a good supply, has had a broken motor since 2017, said Maduwa. Since it broke, the community has been battling with water outages, he said.

Masethe village has a borehole, but the water is dirty, according to Makamu. Manyima’s borehole is broken. The villages of Mathuli, Magoba, Munzhedzi, Ramulumo and Tavhanyini do not have boreholes.

Makamu said they have had several meetings with Vhembe District Municipality, which is responsible for water supply. He said when the Thavha River borehole was sunk in 2016, “we were informed that there will be sufficient water for all the villages.” But the borehole has no power.

Tshiphiwa Razinani, of Vhakoma Trading Enterprise, the contractor who sank the borehole and was busy with the piping and the pump, told GroundUp he had not been paid for his work and so he had downed tools.

“For the first three months I managed to pay my ten workers from my own pocket but could not continue like that,” said Razinani.

The borehole has since been vandalised.

Matodzi Ralushai, spokesperson for Vhembe District Municipality, said the municipality was aware of one borehole that needed to be mended. He did not respond to our questions about Razinani’s payment.

Ward 18 Councillor Parrot Mashau (ANC), whose ward includes Mpofu, Mphadzha and Maduwa villages, said, “We are currently trying to get water tankered to these villages”.

The villagers of Mphadzha, Mpofu, Maduwa and Mphuphulenzhi have now decided to drill their own borehole. There are 240 households and each contributed R200 a month in February and March. A contractor has quoted them R87,000, but the community is looking for competitive quotes.

“We have no choice but to think for ourselves, otherwise we will suffer for a long time anticipating that the municipality will fix the boreholes,” said Maduwa.

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The National Union of Public Service and Allied Workers in Nelson Mandela Bay and the Cry of the Xcluded Demand the Immediate Permanency of CHWs as Workers in the Public Health Department. End this Government’s Austerity Policies and the Exploitation of CHWs!

The National Union of Public Service and Allied Workers, together with the Cry of the Xcluded in the Eastern Cape, will on 12 April 2024 be in Nelson Mandela Bay Health District to march for the permanency of Community Health Workers (CHWs) and call for an end to their exploitation.  This will also be a day to call for an end to this government`s neoliberal austerity policies through budget cuts and its murderous impact on service delivery. As we speak, security officers have not been paid for over three months now. 

Communities cannot even call for ambulances as none of the Department of Health’s phones are working. The Health Department’s phones have been cut off by service providers due to non-payment. A huge question for us remains. How is this possible with all the income streams the department is receiving outside of the treasury? Including the millions worth of claims from the Road Accident Fund for maintenance of hospitals. 
As we speak, the district office does not have an Assistant Director, a DD, or an HR, and all these are critical positions that would assist the district in dealing with employment and closing gaps in vacant positions in various facilities. Whether this is austerity or a result of corruption is a matter that should be subject to a forensic investigation of the entire department. We are thus calling for an urgent forensic investigation of these issues.

The story of CHWs in South Africa is tantamount to the story of many health workers in Palestine. It must be understood as a story of gendered exploitation and the marginalization of women. This is also a story that depicts just how austerity, like any feature of capitalism, is dependent on the exploitation of women to achieve its intended objectives. CHWs, 98 percent of whom are women, have been highly casualised and precarious for over 32 years now. Many often survive with a one or three-month contract if they are lucky. 

Precarious contracts have subjected many CHWs to many vulnerabilities including intimidation by employers to work outside the obligations of their position. Employers exploit CHWs to the extent that they are even forced to work long hours with no compensation for overtime. These workers also cannot complain because they run the risk of not having their contract renewed the next month.

These highly exploited CHWs are the same women who cannot qualify for government RDP houses because they are now on persal, an indication that they are government employees, although with lower pay. It must be noted that CHWs have endured since they began working in 1991. From that time until the early 2000s they were only paid with a loaf of bread. It was after nearly ten years that they started to receive monetary pay. Therefore, CHWs are people who, against all odds, have shown their loyalty and faith in our health system. 

Moreover, because of this same persal CHWs cannot even get their kids to tertiary as they do not qualify for NSFAS, while their stipend could in no way allow them to afford university fees. This predicament has driven many care workers into depression. Besides this, many are retiring without anything to show for their years of work or their contribution to the South African Health system. Many have lost their lives during COVID-19 without any proper funeral policies for their families to bury them. 

We know Community Health Workers. We have seen them walking everyday in the communities of the working class (although sometimes being barked at by working class dogs) tracking treatment defaulters whether from TB or HIV. We have seen them on the front lines during the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. The response from the Eastern Cape government toward the valiant efforts of CHWs is zero-based budgeting, which is an advanced way to practice budget cuts that are both brutal and murderous as depicted in this statement.

This is why NUPSAW and CryX are moving with this action and demanding for:

1. RESPECT, RECOGNITION AND LEGITIMACY FOR CHWs
• Community Health Workers are not respected as adults and key cadres to primary health care. Some operational managers ill-treat these workers, which adds to the frustration they already have and takes advantage of their vulnerable position.

• Some are threatened daily about being dismissed or that their contracts will not be renewed.

• Some officials address them in a manner where it makes them feel unimportant, demotivated and small.

2. WE DEMAND ALL TOOLS OF TRADE
• Community Health Workers must be supported with the necessary equipment to execute their work efficiently.

• Protective gear for weather and protective equipment must be supplied.

• Uniforms should be of good quality.

• A dedicated and conducive space should be made available for administration work of CHWs. 

3. WE DEMAND TRANSPORT AND SAFETY
• Community Health Workers work in socio-economically poor environments with high levels of violence. Sometimes they face resistance and abuse from the same patients they are attending.

• Community Health Workers are poor. The department should make provisions for transporting them to their areas of work.

4. WE DEMAND OPPORTUNITIES FOR CHWs TO APPLY FOR VACANCIES AT THEIR FACILITIES
• Community Health Workers have no job security, and in some facilities, they are disregarded when they apply for vacant posts despite meeting all requirements.

• We demand that they are also considered for recruitment and selection processes.]

• We also demand transparency in these selection processes, where there is a high level of corruption and nepotism, and CHWs are the ultimate victims.

• NUPSAW will be embarking on campaign to stop these cruel acts of corruption and nepotism and expose those involved.

5. WE DEMAND THE TIMEOUS RENEWAL AND PROCESSING OF CONTRACTS
• Firstly, we are making a call to the department to do away with the yearly renewal of contracts and adopt a permanent contract for Community Health Workers.

• Our experience in the Eastern Cape is that on a yearly basis, Community Health Workers are subjected to a situation where, for some, they will not receive their salaries for April, May, and June after their contracts have been completed. This leads to the financial obligations of CHWs being missed, and worse, it leaves their families without food.

6. WE DEMAND OPPORTUNITIES FOR EDUCATION AND TRAINING

• CHWs are excluded from skill development programs when they are part of the public service set-up and critical to health sector service delivery. Opportunities for advanced training and education should be made available.

7. WE DEMAND PERMANENT ABSORPTION OF CHWs TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH

• We demand the urgent implementation of Resolution 1 of 2018, which ensures the development of standard operating procedures for recruitment selection, appointment, placement, remuneration, skills development, dispute resolution, occupational health and safety, process and absorption of community health workers. We have witnessed the union bashing and intimidation done to our members and advise the department to immediately cease its wrongdoing.

• NUPSAW still maintains that there is no rational or legal basis for the continued exclusion of CHWs from being absorbed as public servants because the type of work they do is of a permanent nature.

• All CHWs must be permanently absorbed and enjoy benefits in relation to their permanent status.

• The province must show the political will to absorb these workers and follow the example of Gauteng province.

• We want decent salaries for CHWs and improved conditions of service as a matter of urgency.

8. WE DEMAND A STOP TO THE EXPLOITATION OF CHWs
• It is reported that in some facilities, exploitation of the CHWs is evident, wherein they are forced or made to do work outside their scope of work. With some reports, we are made aware that in some facilities, newly employed lay counsellors are made to do data capture or administration clerk work, thus closing employment opportunities for those who are unemployed. This conduct is tantamount to exploitation at the highest level, as they are not remunerated for the work they are forced or made to do.
• NUPSAW and CryX shall embark on a campaign to expose those facilities perpetuating such acts.

For enquiries, contact:
1. Mzikazi Nkata, NUPSAW Provincial Secretary on 072 242 3263

2. Pumlani Matinise, NUPSAW Deputy Regional Secretary on 071 303 2939

3. Vuyokazi Made, Cry of the Excluded Provincial Coordinator on 073 325 7009 

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The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) welcomes the official scrapping of e-tolls. This is a victory for the working class and motorists in general who fought against e-tolls and actively boycotted paying them.

In coordination with the labour movement and civil society organisations such as OUTA, the residents in Gauteng have successfully repelled e-tolls. But by announcing the scrapping of e-tolls, the ruling party is conveniently attempting to turn their worst defeat inflicted by workers into a weapon for electioneering.

However, the Gauteng provincial government has said those with outstanding e-toll debt are still obliged to settle that debt. SAFTU rejects this debt that has accumulated over the years and encourages motorists not to pay, just as they have successfully refused to pay over the years.

From the onset, the South African National Roads Agency (SANRAL) has struggled to collect e-toll charges because residents of Gauteng refused the commodification of their roads in more than a decade-long battle. The “user-pay” principle is a method through which pro-capitalist governments and the private sector seek to commodify basic goods and services. It feeds into market liberalists’ desire to turn every sphere of our life into a site of accumulation, from commodifying water to electricity. The working class must guard against and resist the “user-pay” or “cost-recovery” models in public services and infrastructure wherever they rear their ugly heads and in whatever form they appear.

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SAFCEI’s Executive Director Francesca de Gasparis says, “By relying on unrealistic costing for nuclear power, the IRP2023 seems to be an attempt to push South Africa into purchasing up to 14,500 MW of new nuclear reactors. Others have raised concerns about the IRP. The costing of nuclear underscores our reasons for joining the call for the IRP2023 to be redone. While noting that the Integrated Energy Plan for South Africa, Section 6 of the National Energy Act, came into operation at the start of this month – after a legal intervention last year by SAFCEI and The Green Connection.”

Construction costs are typically quoted as the cost, excluding finance charges, and this total ‘overnight cost’ is quoted in cost per unit of capacity. As part of its IRP2023 documentation, the DMRE gave two figures for new pressurised light water generation III+ reactors. According to the DMRE, the total overnight cost for a 1500 MW reactor is US$3,6517/kW, while a 1250 MW reactor comes in at US$4,270/kW. However, these costs do not correspond with the department’s own commissioned study into the price of new nuclear power plants for South Africa – Supply-Side Cost and Performance Data for Eskom Integrated Resource Planning by Electric Power Research Institute – and those of plants currently or recently constructed.

“But when we consider the real costs associated with constructing a new nuclear plant, such as with the study that looked at Areva’s 1600 MW EPR and Westinghouse’s AP1000 (capacity 1117 MW), then we see quite a different picture. Using the current exchange rate, we see that the total overnight costs are estimated at US$6,458 and US$6,172, respectively, which is way more expensive than the costs suggested by the DMRE in the IRP2023. For the entire nuclear plant, this works out respectively at US$10.3 bn for the EPR, which is R193,85bn in rand, and US$6.9 bn for the AP1000 which is R129,87bn, at today’s exchange rates,” says de Gasparis. 

The multi-faith environmental justice organisation questions how the DMRE’s costs in the IRP2023 are between 54.7% and 66.9% lower than its own commissioned expert study, adding that this appears to be a blatant attempt to rig the IRP, in order to make nuclear energy fit. According to the IRP, the optimum new build for South Africa is a combination of nuclear power and renewables. But when compared to known costs of these two reactor types, the study itself is flawed. 

Professor Steve Thomas of Greenwich University wrote in his recent report “A much more reliable indicator is the cost of the ‘previous’ project, perhaps with some addition as the trend in the real cost of nuclear power plants has been upwards throughout the history of the nuclear industry. If we take the mean value of the last four projects for EPRs and AP1000s, where costs are known, it is roughly valued at about $12,000/kW in the 2024 economy. The problem is, therefore, not so much that large numbers of hopelessly uneconomic reactors will be built, it is the ‘opportunity cost’ of wasting a decade or more on an option bound to fail, thus sacrificing the more financially attractive options that are much less prone to failure and much quicker to implement.”

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