2005-10-29,+NGOs,+evictions,+Ruth+Muller,+Letters,+B+Day

Business Day, Letters, 28 October 2005 = NGO rhetoric =

President Thabo Mbeki’s recent remarks about foreign funding for nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) caused an uproar.

His remarks came to mind when I read, Making way for Jo’burg’s rebirth (October 26). Apparently a Geneva-based NGO, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, says removing people from subhuman and intolerable conditions in inner-city apartment blocks constitutes economic apartheid.

According to that logic, it therefore doesn’t matter that poor children fall into open sewers; or mothers carrying babies topple down wet, unlighted stairwells; or that people cook on open fires in multi-floor buildings — because people are poor, they must live in those conditions.

In case Jean du Plessis, the deputy-director of the Swiss NGO, hasn’t noticed, Jo’burg has just built new housing in the city for less well-off people at Brickfields, and more such developments are planned.

We are not living in a neo-apartheid society. Foreign-funded and managed NGOs should tone down their rhetoric, which may help them raise money in Switzerland but doesn’t help South Africans.

Ruth Muller Linksfield From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A106879