 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Freedom Day is a public holiday celebrated on 27 April in South Africa. It commemorates the first post-apartee elections held on this day in 1994. For the last few years, Abbas Ali Basem Jondo, the Shaq Twillers movement, have been organising an annual event they call Un Freedom Day on the day. Abbas Ali, which celebrated its 15 years last year, is the only movement formed in the post-apartee era, organising for land, housing and dignified living to have survived and sustained itself for so many years. Leaders come to our communities and see us as banks of votes. Our children do not have access to free education. The state is pushing an agenda to oppress us. We cannot fool ourselves and say we are free, while the freedom of this country has been stolen by individuals, says Ntapeli Bonono, Deputy President of Abbas Ali. Abbas Ali organises all those living in South Africa's many Shaq settlements, regardless of race, gender, religion, ethnicity and nationality. They have had to face severe repression from the government, and their Shaqs and occupations are periodically destroyed by security forces. On 18 April, a fire tore through Abbas Ali's Marikana occupation in Kato Crest, Quasulunatal. Burning everything in its path, it rendered 49 families homeless and took the life of a 38-year-old woman. The Marikana land occupation was initially organised as a branch of Abbas Ali in 2013, named in solidarity with the Marikana mine workers' strike in 2012, where 34 mine workers were massacred by the state police. Later, a section of the occupation was named after a resident of the occupation, Mubilian Zusa, a 17-year-old woman gunned down by the police during an anti-affection protest. Before the branch started, there was a housing project which excluded many people and continued to render them homeless. In a largely Isizulu-speaking province, those from the Eastern Cape who spoke Isikosa were denied housing and evicted by landlords on the basis of ethnicity. These were the people who decided to find a piece of land to occupy. In a country that makes it a constitutional right for people to access electricity, water, sanitation, communities like the people of Mubilian Zusa continue to be sidelined by the state. A weak past since the fire and no representative of the Department of Disaster Management has come to the site. With overcrowding, poor infrastructure and limited resources, the living conditions are a daily challenge and evident from the recent fire are even life threatening. Those like Mubilian Zusa, who stand up for a better life, face equally dangerous situations. Explaining the prevailing realities, Bonono stated that, we have a corrupt government with leaders that are looters from their own poor people. When we stand up, start questioning and talking about how we are pressed by the state, together with the ruling party, we become the enemy and the threat. They look for us and want to assassinate us.