SACP Gauteng strongly condemns desperate attempts of the Johannesburg Housing Company (JHC) to stop its weekly protest actions
29 August 2013
The SACP strongly condemns the desperate attempts and right-wing tactics of the Johannesburg Housing Company (JHC), the Inner City housing monopoly, that are aimed at stopping the revolutionary, democratic, anti-corruption and peaceful weekly pickets against it.
These became clear at the meeting convened by the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Division (JMPD) to discuss the picket action yesterday. The JHC lawyers made spurious allegations about the conduct of protesters but they failed to provide proof when they were challenged. We have also learnt that JHC plans to seek an interdict against our legitimate picket action taking place tomorrow.
JHC alleges that protesters threw stones at JHC and intimidated their staff. Metro Police contested the validity of these claims as they were responsible for the security of the picket and JHC dismally failed to provide a shred of evidence to back-up their claims.
It is clear from these desperate and shocking manoeuvres that JHC feels the positive impact of the picket. We warn the JHC to refrain from these acts and return to the people, working class and poor what is right-fully theirs. We firmly believe that the JHC will finally tremble before the might of the people, working class and poor led by their only vanguard Marxist-Leninist Party, the SACP.
The pickets are in solidarity with the working class and poor of the Newtown Housing Village located west of Johannesburg in Fordsburg. Scores of residents were evicted from their houses around mid-June amid a bitterly cold winter. The heartless action rendered homeless many women, people with disabilities, children and the elderly. Some learners from these families had to drop out of schools.
The SACP supports the legitimate demand of the displaced families that the JHC must return to the rightful and historic owners the property that the first non-racial democratic state gave them. This ground-breaking housing initiative was part of the plans to break with capitalist methods, to use cooperatives as a model to deliver low-cost housing to Africans and Black people, working class and poor and to roll back the colonial spatial anomalies inherited from apartheid colonialism.
The SACP believes it is unprincipled and morally wrong for the JHC to take advantage of the working class and poor people to pursue its narrow, selfish and inhuman culture of greed based purely on profit accumulation. This shows a complete disregard of human life.
The SACP hopes to unravel the real reason behind the vicious and cruel conduct of the JHC to target the property of these poor African, Black working class people. We hope to unearth soon the real material and historic source of this attitude of JHC.
We also undertake to get to the bottom of the controversial liquidation process that led to JHC buying the property with 351 family units at an auction value of R28 million. We believe this transaction explains the real truth, facts and historic vested interests of JHC.
Our Marxist-Leninist theory and practice will surely helps us to separate appearance from reality, fiction from truth. We believe there is more to the liquidation process than meets the eye. We challenge JHC to come clean on this matter.
The planned picket will proceed tomorrow, 30th August 2013 at the Head Office of JHC Head Office in Marshalltown. It starts at 10h00. The pickets will run until SACP`s Red October Campaign and we will ensure that JHC and those associated with them, meet the demands of the people, resolve this conflict and do not resort to barbaric and backward strong-arm tactics.
Issued on behalf of the SACP Gauteng Province
Contact:
Mamabolo Jacob: Provincial Secretary: 082 884 1868
Lucian Segami: Provincial Spokesperson: 079 522 0098
