Alex residents queued for hours to buy basic foodstuff after shops were looted. The unrest has caused a humanitarian crisis, as has not been seen since the dawn of democracy in South Africa. Credit: Dan Ingham

By Kevin Humphrey
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA, Jul 23 2021 (IPS)

Twenty-seven years after South Africa’s first democratic elections, the country finds itself reflecting on the catalysts of a week of looting and destruction of property resulting in more than 200 deaths and US$ 1.3 billion in damage.

President Cyril Ramaphosa described the week-long riots earlier this month as a failed insurrection.

Immediately before the violence, former President Jacob Zuma had handed himself over to prison authorities to begin serving a 15-month sentence for contempt of court for refusing to appear before the State Capture Commission. The commission is investigating widespread corruption in the country.

While there is an apparent link between the jailing of the former president and the looting – most analysts agree that several factors led to what has been described as a perfect storm. Of these many explanations, analysts have highlighted this is a country left ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic, which contributed to an increase in unemployment, endemic poverty that has persisted since 1994, the ruling African National Congress’ (ANC) inability to unite its factions and entrenched racial and ethnic divides.

The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) has planned hearings on the matter. It says it considers the “events which led up to violent incidents in different provinces, along with the resultant consequences, are complex and multifaceted.”

The SAHRC also stated that it had noted tensions that have erupted within and between particular communities – from Phoenix in Durban, KwaZulu Natal, where communities took up arms against looters, to Alexandra, popularly known as Alex, in Johannesburg, Gauteng.

Alex is an area where tensions and dissatisfaction go back for many years. The area, which has been inhabited since before the infamous 1913 Land Act, which removed land ownership from all black people in the country, was a major site of resistance during apartheid. Its post-apartheid history has been one of many unfulfilled promises, botched service delivery and allegedly corrupt practices in the Alexandra Renewal Project.

Writing for GroundUp, Masego Mafata says activists in Alex say nothing has changed after a protest in the area in 2019.

“As Alexandra is seized by mass looting and protests this week, a report from the Public Protector and the SAHRC following the devastating 2019 protests has revealed persistent failures by the City of Johannesburg and the Gauteng Provincial government. While the recent protests are reportedly linked to the incarceration of former president Jacob Zuma, the joint report suggests that Alexandra’s community is a tinderbox for public unrest.”

Economic hardships and income inequalities, exacerbated by the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, are seen as a leading cause of dissatisfaction around the country.

In the recently published International Journal for Equity in Health, Chijioke O Nwosu and Adeola Oyenubi say, “nationwide lockdowns have resulted in income loss for individuals and firms, with vulnerable populations (low earners, those in informal and precarious employment, etc.) more likely to be adversely affected.”

The Congress of South African Trade Unions’ spokesperson Sizwe Pamla also pointed to multiple reasons for the rioting and looting.

“While the current events were triggered by political restlessness and frustration following the arrest of Former President Jacob Zuma, it is clear now that criminal elements have opportunistically hijacked this issue and are using it to loot,” says Pamla.

“This is also a reminder that the problem of unemployment and poverty is real in South Africa. COSATU has been arguing for a long-time that unemployment is a ticking time bomb that will explode in the face of policymakers and decision-makers.”

For individuals like Georgio da Silva, the owner of a car repair workshop in Jeppestown, Johannesburg, xenophobia also appears strongly in the mix of contributing factors. He and others in the area have experience in defending themselves and their businesses against xenophobic attacks.

Georgio da Silva, a car repair shop owner, saved his business in an area vulnerable to xenophobic attacks.

Immediately after Zuma reported to Estcourt prison and violent attacks began, Da Silva told IPS he managed to shut down his workshop but had their property damaged. Later he realised that xenophobia was only one of the motivating factors.

It is imperative that the complex mix of factors contributing to this ‘perfect storm’ of anarchy and insurrection be examined to prevent future occurrences – the political tensions within the ruling party also have to be factored in.

The bitter factional battle going on within the ANC resulted in Ramaphosa’s display of weak leadership. Barely having recovered from a week of violence, South Africans were left confused as even members of his cabinet could not agree on the unrest’s cause.

Police Minister Bheki Cele says he did not get intelligence reports regarding the unrest from the State Security Agency’s Minister Ayanda Dlodlo, which she disputes.

Defence and Military Veterans Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula contradicted Ramaphosa by saying the unrest was not part of a failed insurrection. She had since backtracked from this statement.

Political analyst, author, director of research at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection and emeritus professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Susan Booysen, told IPS the “signature of factionalism in the ANC is printed all over the recent unrest in the country. While not being completely a root cause of the unrest, factionalism can be seen as the basic trigger that, once pulled, set the series of events in motion. Clearly, a faction of the ruling party was prepared to take part in instigating this kind of behaviour as a way of ‘getting its own back’ in the over politicised atmosphere that currently holds sway in the country.”

Professor Steven Friedman, Research Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Politics Department at the University of Johannesburg says his “reading of the violence is that factional politics was important but not necessarily in the obvious way.”

While the violence was caused in reaction to the jailing of Zuma, which gave it a factional slant, he doubted the ferocity of violence in KZN  if it had simply been about supporting him as head of an ANC faction.

“My view is that people in political and economic networks, which are part of the faction which supports Zuma became convinced that the balance of power had shifted and that their networks were now in danger of being closed down. This would have ended their political and economic influence, and so they reacted by triggering the violence to protect their networks,” Friedman says.

What needs doing in the wake of this catastrophe is that South Africa deals with the glaring issues that have made this situation possible. These include appalling economic inequalities and a society racked with endemic violence that is the legacy of apartheid and colonialism. The country has democratic foundations, including a widely-lauded Constitution necessary to build a better society.

South Africans do have the capacity to face these challenges and build a country that delivers on its full potential as a thriving nation where there are equal opportunities for all.

–        Kevin Humphrey was an activist during the anti-apartheid struggle and is a freelance writer and editor.

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Haitian-Italian designer Stella Jean (right) has been working with the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI), using Haitian craftsmanship in areas such as embroidery and beadwork in her collections. Credit: ITC Ethical Fashion Initiative 5

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Jun 4 2015 (IPS)

“Work is dignity,” says Simone Cipriani. “People want employment, not charity.”

With that in mind, Italian-born Cipriani founded a programme in 2009 called the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI) that links some of the world’s top fashion talents to marginalised artisans – mostly women – in East and West Africa, Haiti and the West Bank.

Now a flagship programme of the International Trade Centre, a joint agency of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Geneva-based EFI works with leading designers such as Stella McCartney and Vivienne Westwood to facilitate the development and production of “high-quality, ethical fashion items” from artisans living in low-income rural and urban areas.

The EFI says its aim is also to “enable Africa’s rising generation of fashion talent to forge environmentally sound, sustainable and fulfilling creative collaborations with local artisans.” Under its slogan “not charity, just work”, the Initiative advocates for a fairer global fashion industry.“We work with women who sometimes face discrimination in their communities, but by having a job, their position in society improves. They gain independence and respect, and in many situations they become the only breadwinner in their families” – Simone Cipriani, Ethical Fashion Initiative

This year, for the first time, the EFI is collaborating with the most important international trade fair for men’s fashion, Pitti Immagine Uomo, to host designers who represent four African countries.

Taking place June 16 to 19 in Florence, Italy, the fair will present a special edition of its Guest Nation Project, in which a particular area is designated for the “rising stars” of fashion from various countries, according to Raffaello Napoleone, CEO of Pitti.

Napoleone said that the African designers in this year’s Guest Nation give priority to manufacturing in their home countries, helping to reduce poverty, and that they are already known on the international market.

The stylists will put on a runway show, highlighting their men’s collections, in a special event titled ‘Constellation Africa’. The brands – Dent de Man, MaXhosa by Laduma, Orange Culture and Projecto Mental – have designers who represent Cote d’Ivoire, South Africa, Nigeria and Angola, and were selected as part of the African Fashion Designer competition launched by the EFI last December.

“This is where our global society is going: interconnectedness. Global and local dimensions brought together through fashion,” said Cipriani.

Market analysts expect the global value of the apparel retail industry to rise about 20 percent from 2014 levels to reach some 1,500 billion dollars in 2017. With such high volumes, the various sectors of the industry could be an increasing source of employment in many regions, from design to garment-making to sales.

But over the past several years, there has been controversy about the apparent exclusion of fashion designers and models of African descent in high-profile ‘Fashion Weeks’ and other international events

Tansy E. Hoskins, author of a polemical book published last year titled Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, has a whole chapter devoted to the question “Is Fashion Racist?”

She says that several decades after a renowned fashion magazine had its first black model on the cover, “all-white catwalks, all-white advertising campaigns and all-white fashion shoots are still the norm”.

Simone Cipriani, founder of the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI). Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

The Ethical Fashion Initiative is primarily concerned with poverty reduction and ethical treatment of artisans, but Cipriani acknowledges that racism is an issue and that poverty can be linked to ethnicity as well as gender.

Still, the fashion industry does have companies that try to adhere to ethical standards, including diversity, working conditions and environmental sustainability; and 30 international brands have signed on to the EFI project. But not every company is a good fit.

“We try to work almost exclusively with brands that have a clear scheme on responsible business and social engagement, otherwise there’s always the risk of being used and having to clean up after somebody else,” Cipriani told IPS in an interview, during a trip to Paris to meet with designers.

“We’ve had our troubles and have had to work through a long learning curve”, he added. “We also tried to work with big distributors and realised it wasn’t possible for what we do, so here we are.”

Groups such as the EFI and activists like Hoskins say that their major concern is how to make the fashion industry fairer, particularly with decent labour conditions for workers everywhere.

Two years ago in Bangladesh, for instance, more than 1,100 workers died and 2,500 were injured when a factory building collapsed after safety warnings were ignored. The workers made clothing for brands including Benetton, which only this year announced that it would contribute to a compensation fund for the victims.

That agreement followed a campaign in which one million people signed an online petition calling for the company to take proper action.

“What happened in Bangladesh was a horror, and there are many situations in which exactly the same horror can occur,” Cipriani said. “The first thing about responsibility should always be people. Dignified working conditions for people.”

He said that many artisans working in the fashion industry’s supply chain also do not earn enough to live on. “They don’t get the remuneration for their work that allows them to have a dignified life,” he told IPS. “Many of them are paid in such a way that they have to live at the margin.”

In Haiti, which is known for its artistry as well as its poverty, activists say that linking local artisans with international designers can and have made some impact. The Haitian-Italian designer Stella Jean has been working with EFI, using Haitian craftsmanship in areas such as embroidery and beadwork in her collections, for example. She also employs textiles made in Africa.

Jean has been an EFI “partner” since 2013 and she sources several elements of her designs through its projects, Cipriani said. The collaboration started with a visit to Burkina Faso – one of the largest producers of cotton in Africa with an important tradition of hand-weaving – where the designer saw the possibilities of “working with these ethically produced textiles”. She incorporated them as a key feature of her women’s and men’s ready-to-wear collections.

Last year, she also launched a new range of bags, produced in Kenya with fabric from Burkina Faso and Mali and vegetable-tanned leather from Kenya, “making each bag a pan-African product,” says the EFI.

In Kenya, British designers McCartney (who declined to be interviewed) and Westwood have placed several orders for fashion items, and the EFI has carried out “Impact Assessment” studies to evaluate compliance with fair labour standards “and the impact the orders had on people and the communities they live in.”

“We work with women who sometimes face discrimination in their communities, but by having a job, their position in society improves,” Cipriani told IPS. “They gain independence and respect, and in many situations they become the only breadwinner in their families.”

The Ethical Fashion Initiative has testimonials from artisans about the improvement in their lives from the income they received through the orders, with several workers detailing their new ability to pay rent and school fees, among other developments.

Hoskins says that these steps are important, but that the fashion industry cannot be fully transformed without massive, collective action. “Ethical fashion has become a catch-all phrase encompassing issues such as environmental toxicity, labour rights, air miles, animal cruelty and product sustainability,” she argues.

“After 20 or so years and despite some innovative initiatives, it holds an ‘exceptionally low market share’ at just over 1 percent of the overall apparel market.”

In an interview, she said that asking whether fashion can ever be ethical is like asking “can capitalism ever be ethical?”

“For me the answer is ‘no’ because it’s based on exploitation, it’s based on competition, and above all it’s based on profit, and that’s what in the fashion industry drives wages down, drives environmental standards down and down and down,” she told IPS.

“There are small companies doing things differently but they’re producing maybe a few thousand units every year. The fashion industry produces billions and billions of units every single year.”

Hoskins also asked the question: “Why is it not the case that all products are ethically made?”

But reform evidently takes time. With the Pitti trade fair in Italy now collaborating with EFI, the “ethical fashion” movement may get a boost. It is also up to consumers to make the right choices, activists say.

“Consumers must demand change. Consumers can’t be too docile,” says Cipriani.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Young girls prepare to sing a song in support of presidential candidate Gul Agha Sherzai in Kunduz city in North Afghanistan. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS.

By Giuliano Battiston
KABUL, Apr 2 2014 (IPS)

Ethnicities will come to the fore in the Afghan elections due Saturday this week, even though it appears that the young are beginning to break away from such loyalties.

On Apr. 5, around 12 million voters will have the chance to elect a new president to replace President Hamid Karzai, constitutionally barred from a third mandate."What is more important is that the people – particularly the civil society – have pushed the candidates to present articulated platforms.” -- Aziz Rafiee, director of the Afghan Civil Society Forum Organisation

Officially opened on Feb. 2, the race remains open and it’s still hard to predict who will get the chair at the Arg, the presidential palace in Kabul where Karzai has been since 2001 – just after the overthrow of the Taliban regime.

The political and economic power Karzai has accumulated is likely to be inherited by his replacement – whatever the ethnicity.

Pashtuns form the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, about 40 to 60 percent, followed by Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks. Precise numbers are disputed, and ethnicities often overlap.

There are three in the lead among the eight candidates: Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, an academic and former World Bank official and former minister of finance; Abdullah Abdullah, former foreign minister and a prominent leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and Karzai’s main rival in the disputed 2009 elections; and Zalmai Rassoul, national security adviser to President Karzai for eight years and foreign minister 2010-2013. He is seen as the contender backed by the outgoing president.

Many promises are being made – reconstructing the fragile economy, relaunching the peace process with armed opposition groups, and bringing security to the war-torn country – but the contenders seem to focus above all on ethnicity.

“The candidates are relying on ethnic, linguistic, or religious affiliation, because they do not have any political source of legitimacy,” Hamidullah Zazai, managing director of Mediothek Afghanistan, an organisation promoting pluralism in the media, tells IPS.

“One contender says ‘I’m the Tajik representative, you Tajik people should vote for me’, another says ‘I’m the Pashtun representative, you Pashtun people should vote for me’. The ethnic appeal occludes what is more important: programmes, ideas, plans for our future, which are still uncertain.”

Aziz Rafiee, director of the Afghan Civil Society Forum Organisation, tells IPS “there are five important factors in the voting process: ethnicity, regional location, language, branch of religion and political affiliation. Amongst these five dividing and sometimes overlapping lines, ethnicity is still considered the most important by many voters.”

To ensure broader constituencies, candidates have drawn the political chessboard also along ethnic lines: Zalmai Rassoul, considered a weak candidate without the support of Karzai’s pervasive power system, has chosen as his running mate the Tajik Ahmad Zia Massoud, brother of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was the iconic commander of the Northern Alliance before he was killed in 2001. For second vice-president he has proposed Habiba Sarabi, a Hazara, former governor of Bamiyan province.

Rassoul does not speak Pashtu fluently and is not regarded by many Afghans as a “real Pashtun”. He enthusiastically announced the support of both Qayum Karzai, President Karzai’s elder brother (with a huge constituency in Pashtun-dominated south Afghanistan), and Nader Naeem, son of Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan from 1933 until 1973.

Abdullah is a mixed Tajik and Pashtun, but he is seen as a Tajik due to his prominent role within the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance. “By choosing for vice-president the Pashtun Mohammad Khan, he made an interesting choice,” Fabrizio Foschini, researcher with the Afghanistan Analysts Network, tells IPS. “Mohammad Khan is a member of the political branch of the Hezb-e-Islami party, and thanks to him Abdullah can compensate his weakness in the south-south east of the country.”

However, according to Foschini, Abdullah’s real strength is his second vice-presidential candidate, Mohammed Mohaqeq, a Hazara who could secure a large number of votes in the central areas.

Some believe that Abdullah is losing ground while Ahmadzai is gaining. “Ghani [Ahmadzai] had a stroke of genius selecting for vice-president General [Abdul Rashid] Dostum,” says Foschini. “While the Hazara and Tajik vote is highly fragmented, the Uzbek vote will go almost completely to Dostum. Prior to Ghani’s choice, nobody would ever have guessed that an Uzbek might aspire to the second chair.”

To be accepted as running mate, the Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum – a powerful northern warlord in the 1990s and founder of the Jombesh party, National Islamic Movement of Afghanistan – “was asked by Ghani to apologise for his past crimes, and this is something revolutionary,” Mir Ahmad Joyenda, former parliamentarian and now deputy director of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, an NGO based in Kabul, tells IPS.

Joyenda say ethnicities still play a role in the Afghan political landscape but believes that things are changing. “In the past 12 years we have seen changes, mostly in the main cities. There are people – especially the young – who are interested in voting for a candidate offering effective programmes.”

Rafiee of the Afghan Civil Society Forum Organisation agrees. “We can say that Afghans are acting more politically compared to the 2005 and 2009 elections. People will not vote 100 percent along ethnic lines. What is more important is that the people – particularly the civil society – have pushed the candidates to present articulated platforms.”

The next Afghan president will be elected mostly on the ethnic balance of the vote “but ethnic/religious walls are going to be slowly demolished,” says Zazai of Mediothek Afghanistan.