The South African state aims to criminalise poverty and grassroots organising

South Africa is suffering through a profound social crisis. Unemployment is at catastrophic levels, especially among young people, where it is over 60%. Hunger is widespread, with more than a quarter of families going hungry. Last year, more than 10,000 children died of starvation.

 Public institutions have been hollowed out by organised corruption, often tied to criminal networks, as well as decades of austerity. Many municipalities are collapsing under debt, mismanagement and infrastructural decay. The rates of murder and rape are among the highest in the world, and more and more people have to live in shacks every year. 

 For many people, daily life has become increasingly precarious. Entire communities experience state abandonment while a small political and economic elite continue to accumulate wealth. The promise that democracy would bring dignity and meaningful social transformation was first broken and has now been abandoned.

 The crisis is not socially or politically sustainable, and major efforts are underway to resolve it with a dangerous movement to the right.

 There is a well-funded attempt to build a right-wing, and at times fascist, project around xenophobia against African and Asian migrants using the language of ‘invasion’, ‘contamination’, ‘cleansing’ and ‘removal’. Migrants are blamed for unemployment, crime, housing shortages and collapsing public services while the actual causes of the crisis are ignored.

 Xenophobic organisations, with March and March currently taking the lead, are organising regular street thuggery in which migrants and people from ethnic minorities are blocked from entering schools and hospitals, and intimidated and beaten in the streets.

 At the same time, the state is advancing legislation that would enable it to criminalise the poor in general, and activists and poor people’s organisations in particular. The proposed amendments to the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act (PIE) specifically target organised land occupations – precisely the spaces where poor and working-class people have built the strongest forms of democratic self-organisation in post-apartheid South Africa.

 The PIE Act was introduced in 1998 as part of the democratic transition away from apartheid. It replaced the apartheid-era Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act of 1951, one of the central legal instruments used to criminalise black urbanisation and enforce forced removals.

 Under apartheid, black people were only permitted to enter cities as labour, labour exploited in the interests of white supremacy. Urban life was organised around racial control and exclusion, both supported by violent forced removals. 

 The post-apartheid Constitution sought to break with this history. The PIE Act required courts to consider all relevant circumstances before granting eviction orders and established that evictions had to be “just and equitable”. Courts were also required to consider whether alternative accommodation was available before people could be removed from land or housing.

 The principle underlying the PIE ACT was clear: in a society marked by mass dispossession and extreme inequality, poor people could not simply be treated as trespassers to be removed in defence of property rights.

 The proposed amendments break from this constitutional and democratic logic. The new Bill would allow courts to approve evictions even where people would be rendered homeless if the state argues that it lacks resources and the court accepts that argument. This fundamentally weakens one of the most important protections developed in post-apartheid constitutional law.

 The amendments also dramatically expand criminal liability around land occupations. The current law correctly criminalises the extraction of profit from occupations by renting or selling shacks and land. This is a genuine problem. Occupations are increasingly captured by violent mafias of various kinds, most of them linked to local politicians. These mafias are willing to kill when people struggle to decommodify land from below. Our movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, has suffered repeated assassinations. 

 However, the new Bill criminalises “inciting”, organising or supporting occupations even where no money changes hands. The penalties include fines of up to R2 million (more than $100 000), imprisonment and mandatory asset forfeiture. This is an outright attempt to criminalise the struggles to decommodify access to land from below.

 This provision in the Bill could be used against activists, organisers, lawyers, NGO workers and community leaders involved in organising or supporting occupations. The Bill also criminalises forms of collective survival and self-organisation that are central to life in poor communities. Membership fees, contributions for electricity connections, infrastructure, services and legal defence would all potentially become criminal offences. If the Bill were to become law, Abahlali baseMjondolo – the movement in which I serve – would be instantly criminalised, as would other organisations struggling for land.

 One of the reasons that land occupations continue, despite repression, is that they are often the only route through which poor people can secure a place to live close to work, schools, transport and urban life. The market has failed. The state has largely failed. For millions of people, occupation is a practical response to exclusion.

 But occupations are not only about land. When occupations are organised democratically, they can become important spaces of collective life and popular power. In well-organised and democratic occupations – some of which have been developed into communes – residents hold mass meetings, elect councils, and establish systems through which disputes can be resolved without violence. People work together to produce food, secure water, organise electricity connections, build pathways and drainage systems, establish crèches and communal kitchens, build community halls, and create systems of mutual aid for people facing hunger, illness or unemployment. In the communes, political schools are built, and the occupations become nodes in wider progressive networks. 

 These forms of organisation are often fragile and always shaped by the pressures of poverty, state repression and violence from political and other mafias. 

 Municipal anti-land invasion units routinely carry out violent evictions and demolitions, often in violation of existing law. During evictions residents are attacked with rubber bullets and tear gas. Homes are demolished without court orders. Building materials are confiscated or destroyed. Medicines, schoolbooks, identity documents and personal belongings are frequently lost in demolitions. Activists are often arrested on dubious charges and tied up in lengthy legal processes. 

 At the same time, occupations continue because they are often the only available route into urban life for people excluded from the formal property market. Millions of South Africans cannot afford private housing and have no realistic prospect of receiving state housing. Occupying land closer to cities becomes a way to access work, schools, clinics, transport networks and informal economic opportunities. 

 This is why organised occupations are treated as a political threat. The issue is not only land. It is also the emergence of forms of democratic organisation outside elite control. In post-apartheid South Africa the most sustained attempts to build democratic structures rooted in poor communities have emerged in and around land occupations, and they are becoming a significant base for the left.

 The PIE Amendment Bill has been developed and proposed by the cabinet of the Government of National Unity (GNU). The GNU is the coalition government formed after the 2024 national election, when the African National Congress (ANC) lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since the end of apartheid. It brought the ANC into government with several other parties, most importantly the Democratic Alliance (DA), a centre-right white-dominated party that strongly defends property rights and market-led economic policies.

 The DA has for years advocated a harder line on land occupations and evictions. In 2022, it proposed a Bill making amendments to the PIE Act that was widely criticised by housing activists and legal organisations for weakening protections for poor occupiers and shifting the law in a more punitive direction.

 But the current version emerging under the GNU goes further than the earlier DA proposal. It expands the scope for criminalisation, widens the liability of people involved in organising occupations, and strengthens the coercive powers available to the state. A law originally introduced to place constitutional limits on eviction is being reworked into a more aggressive instrument for suppressing land occupations and the forms of collective organisation that often emerge within them.

 South Africa now faces a dangerous pincer movement against the poor. On the streets, xenophobic organisations mobilise violence and intimidation against migrants and vulnerable communities. At the level of the state, the GNU advances legislation that expands criminalisation and repression against land occupations and grassroots organisations. Together, these forces push toward a more authoritarian response to social crisis, one that seeks to contain the poor rather than address the conditions that produce poverty and exclusion in the first place.

 Abahlali baseMjondolo is holding meetings to discuss the PIE Amendment Bill and strategies to oppose it, in occupations and communes across the parts of the country where we organise. Other progressive organisations, like the South African Federation of Trade Unions, have also come strongly, along with radical intellectuals, lawyers, and others. All of these forces are also working against xenophobia.

 The battle for the future is well underway.

Thapelo Mohapi is the General Secretary of Abahlali baseMjondolo.