While South African parliamentarians attended a swanky pre-International Women’s Day celebration at Cape Town’s International Convention Centre, a group of destitute women in decaying Kewtown, just seven miles away, worried about looming homelessness.

Charlene Paul and her baby stand in front of her house, next to Athlone Training Stadium, which is to be demolished. Credit: Ann Hellman/IPS

The women were notified by the municipality that their homes will be bulldozed to make way for an extended parking lot for Cape Town’s Athlone Training Stadium, while others were asked to vacate their flats for renovations. But residents fear their flats, situated in a prime location for the Soccer World Cup in June, will be rented out to soccer fans.

At parliament’s official International Women’s Day conference on Mar. 5, themed ‘2010 FIFA World Cup Legacy for Women’, South Africa’s minister of Home Affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, told the assembled Members of Parliament, cabinet ministers and representatives of local non-governmental organisations that several projects had been established to benefit women long after the World Cup has ended.

“There is a project of reducing carbon emissions. FIFA has called for people to be involved. Women should seize that opportunity. The country will be spending a lot on infrastructure. Women must also look at how to use those possibilities to increase their economic opportunities,” suggested Dlamini-Zuma.

The country’s deputy minister of economic development, Gwendoline Mahlangu-Nkabinde, was even more upbeat. She promised to send ten corporations working in the field of renewable energy and development finance institutions to women to help them to find jobs.

“Those of you who are into renewable energy, those who want skills and want to get started in renewable energy, come and see me,” she said. International football association FIFA has indeed set up several ‘legacy projects’ across the country that are supposed to generate economic benefits for South Africans.

But these projects are a smokescreen to hide the suffering of poor communities displaced by the World Cup, claim four women from Kewtown, who feel abandoned in poor living conditions, while government funds get spent on making the soccer world cup a “world class event”.

Pamela Beukes, Rachel August, Charlene Paul and Mariam Michaels have lived in the run-down community of Kewtown, which was formerly classified by the country’s apartheid government as a “Coloured” area, for their whole lives.

Paul is set to find out on Mar. 12 from Cape Town’s Wynberg Magistrates Court if she and her three children will continue to have a roof over their heads. They received notice that their home, situated next to Cape Town’s Athlone Training Stadium, will be bulldozed to make way for an extended stadium parking lot.

“I don’t see the benefit of the World Cup [for us], because we are losing this property,” Paul told IPS.

Paul shares a row of five, one-roomed ‘houses’ with 18 other adults and children. Most of them were born and bred in Kewtown. Because they were never allocated council housing and had nowhere else to go, they occupied the structures illegally many years ago, after seeing them standing empty for years.

“We don’t see the need for this structure to be bulldozed when there is a housing shortage,” said Paul.

On the other side of the training stadium, Mariam Michaels also says she fears the World Cup will force her into homelessness. After city officials asked her to vacate her council flat for renovations two weeks ago, she has been living with her two daughters and four grandchildren in a converted shipping container.

The Cape Town city council has embarked on major upgrades of council flats near the stadium for the first time in 30 years, painting their derelict exteriors and fixing broken plumbing and roofs.

“They said they would give our place a makeover. It’s for the World Cup. I have lived here 27 years and my windows have been broken for the past five, but the city never showed any interest in fixing them before,” Michaels told IPS.

“The council officials promised us the renovations would only take six weeks and then we would be moved back. But I don’t know yet if that will happen,” she added.

There are fears among community members that they will not be able to return to the council flats and instead be abandoned by the city. They are also concerned about their safety. Rachel August, one of Michael’s neighbours, told IPS about people running through the shipping container area at night, throwing stones on the metal roofs.

“The council told us it was not true that we were being moved to make way for the World Cup, but we have no guarantee. All we can do is wait and see. If they leave me here, I will cause chaos. That flat has been mine for 35 years, and I want to go back” said August angrily.

Local community organiser Pamela Beukes says the women became apprehensive about the city’s true intentions when local councillor Charlotte Tablisher first told community members that the renovated flats would be rented out to World Cup visitors, but later renounced the idea, after vociferous protests.

“What made us suspicious was that people could have remained in their flats while these renovations were done, but the city insisted they move out,” Beukes explained. “Because people are sitting in shipping containers and in not their homes, right now we can’t say that we have had any benefit from the World Cup.”

The Kewtown community will live in anxiety until the renovations, which the city council said will take six weeks, will be finalised at the end of March. If they are not moved back into their flats by then, they say they will hold a protest march to demand their rights.

The seizure of large commercial farms – almost all white-owned – has continued despite the formation of a unity government in Zimbabwe. The country’s farm workers say they are the biggest losers.

Since 2000, up to 75 percent of farmworkers in Zimbabwe have been evicted by govt-sponsored land seizures. Credit: IRIN

The workers say that Southern African Development Community (SADC) leaders must intervene immediately to stop the violence against them.

About one million farm workers have been evicted from farms across Zimbabwe since the year 2000, according to the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

This is a huge percentage of the total Zimbabwean farm worker population, which was estimated by the Justice for Agriculture Trust based in Harare at somewhere between 1.3 and 1.9 million before the land seizures began. Zimbabwean refugee rights group People Against Suffering, Suppression, Oppression and Poverty (PASSOP) says around 100,000 are now working on farms in South Africa.

IPS spoke about the situation for farm workers with three Zimbabweans considering joining their peers on South African farms. Fearing government persecution by Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organisation, all the farm workers insisted on anonymity.

“They were promising to give us labourers good wages after removing these white farmers,” Rufaro* said.

But things quickly soured. “Some ZANU-PF youth went around hitting and raping farm workers and beating them to death. Farm labourers were thrown out of the farms with their employers and some farmers ran away without paying anything to farm workers,” said Letty*.

The workers said at least three major farms had been invaded since the unity government was formed – Usasa Seedlings, Mount Carmel (a mango farm) and Stockdale citrus farm.

Stockdale, in the Chegutu district in Mashonaland West, was invaded in April 2009 by the speaker of the Zimbabwean parliament, Edna Madzongwe, despite a ruling by a SADC tribunal which said 78 white farmers who faced losing their farms could keep their land.

The SADC tribunal ruled in favour of the farmers in November 2008, finding the land redistribution programme discriminatory on the basis of race. With the Zimbabwean government failing to act on the ruling, the tribunal in June 2009 referred the case to the SADC summit of heads of state.

The farm workers said Mugabe has simply ignored rulings from the SADC tribunal, which was set up in Namibia in 2007 to rule on disputes in the Southern Africa region.

For now, an estimated 60,000 farm workers find themselves living in makeshift camps, often on the roadside near where they were evicted from, waiting for the government to resettle them.

“Some few farm workers who were lucky were resettled. But if they labelled you MDC you were not going to receive anything. We need land now to resettle the poor who have no place to stay,” Tapiwa* said.

Many farm workers are living on donor handouts now, while others have fled to South Africa. Letty said that of the few farm workers who still have jobs, women are in the majority. Because they are paid less, they are still found in small numbers at work on Zimbabwe’s potato and horticultural farms.

“After the land invasions started,” Rufaro said, “and we were evicted from the farms, most of our kids did not go to school for two years. We women end up having kids at home without food, because we had no money and all the shops were empty because the farms had closed down.

“The stress for women with four kids at home day and night for two years… it was a pity for us,” Rufaro said.

“Most women who used to work on farms are moving up and down to Malawi, Zambia and South Africa, to buy anything that they can sell to put their children back in school. We are moving up and down just to take care of having food at home,” she added.

In the long term, all three say, land reform will only work in Zimbabwe if the land grabbed by members of Zanu-PF over the past ten years, is handed over to the state.

Tapiwa said he did not advocate a return to white-owned commercial farming in Zimbabwe. “The best method is that those who have farms now must hand them over to the government. Government must subdivide them and give them to the landless people to farm,” he said.

Johannesburg-based land reform expert and academic Stephen Greenberg agreed. Greenberg said the South African government was in a “positive” discussion with the land sector about promoting smallholder agriculture.

Instead of buying up huge white-owned farms and transferring them to a few people, a new smallholder farming model would see farms being subdivided to give more people access to the land.

“It’s about the mentality of what commercial agriculture is and seeing what is really possible,” Greenberg said.

He told IPS that the model had already been put into practice in Masvingo, south eastern Zimbabwe.

“There were white commercial farmers farming a few cattle on huge tracts of land that they said was poor quality. These farms have been divided up into 10-20 hectare plots that are now producing crops,” he said.

Tapiwa had a warning for South Africans – “We should have organised to bring our government to task, especially during the voting period. I see in South Africa the economy is also in the hands of whites,” he said.

“You need to have a move here towards taking control of the economy and then once the economy is in blacks’ hands, move towards the land.”

“That is why we are advising you South Africans to make a plan now before you reach the point where you grab the land,” said Rufaro.

But Greenberg says that while the ruling ANC is likely to come under more pressure to redistribute the land, South Africa’s rural areas lack a strong movement to take back the land.

“Although there is a frustration, there is not yet a rural movement strong enough to take the land in South Africa” he said.