Cops fire rubber bullets at students

2010-10-13

Johannesburg – Police fired rubber bullets at protesting students who disrupted exams and barricaded the entrance of the Lowveld College of Agriculture in Mbombela on Wednesday.
“Students barricaded the entrance of the college with stones and burning paper. Nobody could enter the college. Police were forced to fire rubber bullets to disperse the crowd,” said Captain Klaas Maloka.
The rampage started on Wednesday morning when about 100 students refused to go to class and started protesting outside the gates of the college.
Maloka said no arrests were made and police did not receive any reports of students injured during the shooting.
“The situations has gone back to normal and the gates have been opened,” said Maloka.
Dumisani Mhlanga, president of the student representative council (SRC), said students were supposed to begin writing their exams on Wednesday but decided to protest because they were unhappy with management.
“We are unhappy with the outdated curriculum. In March this year only nine students out of 50 got their diploma,” said Mhlanga.

Ineffective
He said the third year programme was ineffective and the books in the library were outdated.
“Accommodation and meals at the College are very expensive and it left much to be desired,” said Mhlanga.
Students would continue to protest until Mpumalanga MEC of Agriculture, Rural Development and Land Administration Meshack Malinga intervened.
“The management takes a long time to respond to our problems. We will not go back to class until our demands are meet and the MEC intervenes.”
Mhlanga alleged that two students were injured during the shooting.
Acting spokesperson for the Mpumalanga department of agriculture, rural development and land administration, Zanele Shabangu, said the college management and the SRC were scheduled to meet on Thursday.
“The SRC handed in a memorandum of their grievances two days a go and wanted management to respond today (Wednesday) at 10:00.”
Shabangu said college management felt the notice was too short and there were issues they did not understand in the memorandum.
“We invited the SRC to be part of a meeting today (Wednesday), but they did not attend.”
A way forward for the college and for exams that began on Wednesday would be discussed on Thursday during the meeting.

South Africa Police, State Workers Clash on Strike’s Third Day

from signalfire blog.

August 20




Aug. 20 (Bloomberg) — South African police clashed with state workers who protested outside government buildings as a wage strike entered its third day.
Police used water cannons to disperse protesters at Johannesburg’s Helen Joseph hospital today, according to video televised by Cape Town-based e News Channel. Officers broke up a group of strikers who blocked roads to a hospital and a courthouse and in eastern KwaZulu-Natal province’s town of Chatsworth, police said.
“We have got our crowd-management teams deployed in all nine provinces,” police spokesman Phuti Setati said in a telephone interview from Pretoria. “Those who are breaking the law will be dealt with. We have got to protect lives and property.” Officers are still investigating incidents of violence, he said.
While state employees are demanding an 8.6 percent increase in pay and a housing allowance of 1,000 rand ($136) a month, the government says it can’t afford to raise its offer of a 7 percent increase and a 700 rand allowance. South Africa’s annual inflation rate is currently 4.2 percent.
The Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference expressed “horror at the incidences of violence and intimidation perpetrated by participants” in the strike.
“In particular we abhor the inhuman conduct of denying doctors and patients access to hospitals and teachers and pupils access to their schools,” the group said today in a statement issued to the South African Press Association. “Care is being denied to the weakest and most vulnerable.”

Soweto Hospital
Police fired rubber bullets yesterday to disperse workers who entered the grounds of the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto township, south of Johannesburg, police spokeswoman Nondumiso Mpantsha said.
Union officials are due to meet with Public Service and Administration Minister Richard Baloyi at 2 p.m. local time today to discuss ways of resolving the impasse, Chris Klopper, chairman of the Independent Labor Caucus, which includes 10 unions representing 460,000 workers, said by telephone from Pretoria.
Unions representing about 1.3 million state workers say their members can’t survive on their current salaries and that the strike will continue until their demands are met.
“The strike will be intensifying all around the country,” Sizwe Pamla, a spokesman for the 250,000-member National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union, said today in an interview. “Our members have reacted positively to calls for a strike.”

Struck in 2007
Government employees last struck in 2007, when schools, hospitals and immigration offices were disrupted for 29 days, the longest-ever walkout by state workers.
South African laws prevent strikes by certain categories of workers who provide essential services, accounting for about a third of state employees. Even so, many nurses have joined the labor action, said Fidel Hadebe, Health Ministry spokesman.
“The impact of the strike has been quite severe in a number of facilities,” he said today by telephone from Pretoria. The provinces of “Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Kwazulu- Natal have been worst-affected.”
Members of the South African Defense force were deployed to several hospitals to fill in for striking workers, while critically ill patients who were unable to access treatment at state facilities were transferred to private hospitals.
Several newspapers said patients had died because they had not been treated or received medication. The health department was still investigating the reports, Hadebe said.

‘Right to Strike’
“As much as we offer our condolences to those families, we don’t want our members to be blackmailed when they have a legitimate right to strike,” Pamla said. “Hospitals by their nature are places that people go to get saved, but it doesn’t always happen that way” and it can’t be proven that strikers caused the deaths, he said.
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, representing 70,000 workers, said today that car and fuel retail-industry workers plan to strike from Sept. 1 after employers failed to meet their demands for a pay increase. Numsa members in the tire and rubber industries will begin a walkout on Aug. 30, the union said.

Protests in Senegal kill one person

At least one person has died as a result of the latest in a series of sporadic demonstrations against chronic electricity cuts in Senegal. A 25 year old man was pronounced dead on Wednesday, police say, shortly after arrival at a nearby hospital.

The incident occurred following a power cut in Yeumbeul, a suburb of the Senegalese capital Dakar, prompting residents to immediately take to the streets and building barricades.

Police in the area then intervened, forcing the protesting youth to retreat. The ensuing commotion resulted in the demonstrators falling down from blacktops along the streets.

A police source told Seneweb that the unidentified victim of last Wednesday’s demo was foaming in the mouth as he was been driven off in a police van to a nearby hospital.

Since the end of the football World Cup in South Africa, Senegal has suddenly plunged into endless blackouts, affecting every sector of the economy.

One newspaper report says that some areas of Dakar have gone without electricity for three whole days.

On Wednesday the people of Dakar followed on the path of several localities in the interior of Senegal, staging a series protests against the seemingly endless power cuts.

People engaged in all sort of trading depending on electricity – tailors, shopkeepers, beverage sellers, hairdressers, carpenters, cell phone repairers, etc, - all took to the streets to express their anger and demand a solution to the outages which they say have halted business.

The action of solidarity with the residents of informal settlements in South Africa!

Fri, 09/07/2010 -

This afternoon, about 13 hours, the South African Embassy in Moscow, a small group of anarchists held an unauthorized picket in support of social activists and residents of informal settlements in South Africa.Participants unfurled a banner "No to repression against activists in South Africa," had scattered leaflets in the open windows of the embassy and lit the fireworks. On the banner was the emblem of the movement represented "Abahlali baseMjondolo" ("Movement Shack Dwellers") - a powerful grass-roots protest movement of the poor in South Africa, which is subjected to repression.

Everyone managed to escape from the scene, and a banner left at the neck of a perturbed police officer.

Text of leaflet:

No to repressions! STOP REPRESSIONS!!! No to repressions!!! STOP REPRESSIONS!!!

We do this action in order to express solidarity with all oppressed people in South Africa! Since the residents of informal settlements, are being evicted in the transit camps «Blikkiesdorp», with informal traders, who at the request of FIFA banned the trade during the World Cup in the tourist areas.We express our solidarity with those whose voices are silenced and silenced in the modern "democratic" South Africa - a movement "Abahlali baseMjondolo" in Durban, which in September 2009 and underwent a planned attack in the settlement, "Kennedy road".

We see how, after coming to power of the African National Congress, the majority black population continues to live on the brink of poverty.Deportations to concentration camps, the demolition of informal settlements, forcing the poor as a class outside of the cities that are intended elites should be a place of residence of the rich and the cradle of their capital - that is what the ANC offers for their citizens who fought L for many years against apartheid and received in return a new system of exploitation and oppression.

We want to remind the Government of South Africa that the whole world looks up to you! As a long time ago, we express our protest, and his anger policies of oppression and domination in the poorest residents of South Africa.

With Anarchists

Moscow

Riot police break up World Cup wages demonstration

June 14th, 2010

DURBAN, South Africa — Armed riot police charged into hundreds of security stewards at a World Cup stadium, using tear gas and firing rubber bullets to break up a protest over low wages hours after Sunday’s match between Germany and Australia.

Police appeared to set off two percussive grenades, causing loud bangs, to drive the workers out of a parking lot under the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban after Germany’s 4-0 win in Group D.

Associated Press reporters saw about 30 riot police charge into the crowd to drive it out of the stadium. While calm quickly returned to the stadium, some of the security stewards, wearing orange and green jackets, continued milling around outside.

An AP photographer said police fired tear gas at protesters outside the stadium. A nearby street was littered with trash where the protesters were forced away. Concrete blocks had been pushed into a street.

About 100 police later surrounded a group of about 300 protesters on a street near the stadium and separated the men from the women. The protesters later left peacefully after discussions with police.

Lt. Colonel Leon Engelbrecht, a police spokesman assigned to the World Cup, confirmed that tear gas was used to help end the lengthy protest, but nobody was seriously injured.

A woman was hit by a rubber bullet but not badly hurt, he said.

Engelbrecht said the protest arose from a dispute between stadium workers and the security contractor over pay, and that disgruntled workers tried to stay in the venue after the match.

“It’s a concern that the security company didn’t have this settled before the tournament,” Engelbrecht said. “Dialogue will continue to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.

“It’s fortunate it was well after the game.”

Rich Mkhondo, head of communications for the local World Cup organizing committee, said the protest did not have any impact on security at the match or any spectators.

“Two hours after the end of the first match at the Durban stadium last night, there was an internal pay dispute between the principal security company employed by the organizing committee and some of the static security stewards employed by the company at the match,” Mkhondo said in a statement e-mailed to the AP. “Police were called on to disperse the protesting stewards.”

Mkhondo said later that World Cup organizers are meeting with stadium stewards and the security contractor, Stallion, to resolve the dispute but that “we don’t get involved on what an employer pays their employees.”

A FIFA spokesman had no immediate comment.

Protesters said they gathered at the venue to complain about their wages, claiming they’d been paid a fraction of what they were promised.

“We left our homes at seven in the morning and now it is nearly 1 o’clock (a.m.),” Vincent Mkize said. Before the tournament, “In the dry run, they didn’t want to tell us how much we would get.”

Another of the stewards, Fanak Falakhebuengu, told the AP he had heard they would be paid 1,500 rand ($195) a day but they were only getting 190 rand ($25).

“They were supposed to give us 1,500, that’s what FIFA told us, and they gave us 190. We are working from 12 o’clock until now,” said another man who asked not to be named. He ran from police before he could give his name.

Many of the protesters were waving small brown envelopes that had held their pay. One handed to a reporter had the figure 190 written on it under “amount payable.”

Others said they had been abandoned at the stadium after the match and would have to walk about four hours to get home. They said no transport was provided for them.