Problems and challenges facing the new LPM Protea South structure

Press Statement: Landless People’s Movement – Protea South, November 2011
Land now! Organise and Unite! Background

The Landless People’s Movement (LPM) Charter of Demands was adopted by more than 3000 landless delegates from communities across South Africa, and their landless allies from around the world, at the Landless People’s Assembly held in Durban on 30th August 2001 at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR). Further amendments were made following the meetings of Landless Rural Women in Kimberley in October 2001.

The LPM was introduced into Protea South by Maureen Mnisi in 2002. That same year Mnisi was elected Gauteng Provincial Chairperson, and chairperson of the Protea South branch of the LPM. Between 2002 and 2011 no further elections were
held to democratically determine the LPM leadership, and Mnisi held that position for almost ten years.

“Hands off the MST Brazil!” say South African social movements

7 August 2008

To the poor of the world, to all people of good will who work for progressive change:

We, the landless and homeless people and associated activists of South Africa, decry the secret campaign by the so-called Workers’ Party (PT) government of the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul to criminalise, outlaw and otherwise illegitimately harass our landless comrades of the MST.

Under PT governance, Rio Grande do Sul has made substantial sums of money off hosting four World Social Forums – and yet that same government is now cynically using its militarised police forces to wage a clandestine war against Brazil’s most important, poor-driven social movement.

Even the worn-out old statist Left has tiptoed quietly away from its earlier support of the government of Lula (“Squid”) da Silva as his supposedly liberating regime has extended its tentacles into all areas of Brazilian life, from throttling the growth of free trade unions, to extending university exclusions, now to moving against the poorest of the poor.

Tarring-and-feathering the MST as “terrorist” is a despicable tactic more worthy of George W Bush and his henchmen – as Da Silva is now revealed to be. We demand the unilateral cessation of hostilities, plots and illegal actions by the PT, and if not, call on the peoples of the world to resist with all their might their actions, to picket their embassies and boycott their products.

Signed:

1) Maureen Mnisi, Gauteng leader, Landless People’s Movement

2) S’bu Zikode, Kennedy Road Development Committee, Abahlali baseMjondolo

http://www.abahlali.org/

3) Michael Schmidt, International Secretary, Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front, delegate to First Encounter of Latin American Autonomous Popular Organisations (ELAOPA), Rio Grande do Sul, 2003

http://www.zabalaza.net