To my colleagues at Cosatu,
I have no
authority to tell you what you must do, I know. But my conscience as
one of your founding leaders begs me to reflect on the state of our
country and nation.
The Marikana
massacre is a deadly body blow to the democratic social fabric, and
it leaves my heart heavy with sadness. The weight of the
disappointment is staggering as I think back to my political
initiation as a teenager, listening to the powerful political
narrative of Steve Biko. “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
He presented a bold, courageous and impossible vision of a free South
Africa. We were inspired as a generation to stand up and be counted
irrespective of the cost.
So where are
the courageous leaders of today?
The 1976, the
Soweto student uprisings were our Tahrir Square. We were smashed, but
we came back and kept building on the foundations of the sacrifices
of Nelson Mandela and his generation. We painstakingly nurtured a
mass movement. The eighties saw the flourishing of internal mass
struggles led by COSATU and the UDF that pitched us into battle with
a brutal Apartheid state. It took us 18 years to make our liberation
movement, the ANC, the majority party in our Parliament and place
Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first democratically elected
president.
Now, 18 years
later, we commemorate a new massacre under the watch of the
supposedly democratic government we elected. I, like many South
Africans, am devastated.
Yet it can’t
be denied that the writing has been on the wall for some time. Why
did we choose to ignore the facts staring us in the face?
I was part of
the leadership that led COSATU into an alliance with the ANC and
SACP. It had a clear objective. We were making a commitment to a
profound transformation that struck at the heart of Apartheid – the
cheap labour system and its attendant diseases of joblessness,
poverty, gender violence and inequality.
But those
same diseases remain, and we desperately need a frank,
no-holds-barred clinical analysis of our condition. It goes something
like this: inequality has grown. Formal employment has shrunk. A
single breadwinner supports up to eight dependants. The content of
migrant labour remains as deeply entrenched as ever, as subcontracted
labour and casualisation continue to marginalise the workers'
families.
The education
system hopelessly fails the poorest in our townships as half of our
children, mainly of the working poor, are left with almost no skills
to speak of even after 12 years of school. They can’t get jobs and
many of them are unlikely to do so at all in their lifetime. Our
schools have become havens to sexual predators: perverted teachers or
male pupils robbing our girl children of their innocence. The growing
majority of this dispossessed youth cannot see anyone representing
their interests.
That’s what
I’ve gathered from conversations I’ve held with young people
throughout South Africa. All they see is the arrogance of a ‘blue
light brigade’ that believes it has some divine right to rule. They
see a criminal ‘Breitling brigade’ that grows fat on looting the
public coffers, stealing tenders and licences, and pocketing public
funds budgeted for textbooks, toilets and libraries.
This is not
the programme of transformation for which our leaders – beacons
such as Elijah Barayi and Emma Mashinini – sacrificed so much. This
is not the future for which Neil Aggett was murdered by Apartheid
police. This is not the future for which Phineas Sibiya, an
outstanding shop steward, died a fiery death in a burning car at the
hands of Inkatha vigilantes in Howick.
Now is the
time for fearless debate. Power has to be confronted with the truth.
The Marikana massacre shows all the hallmarks of our Apartheid past.
Violence from any side is inexcusable, but deadly force from a
democratic state is a cardinal sin. It strikes at the heart of
democracy.
The COSATU
Congress is important for many reasons, but mainly because it will
draw a line in the sand between justice and injustice. But it needs
leaders with the courage to hold up the mirror. And it needs to ask
the critical question: whether leaders have lost touch with the
membership and the poorest in our country.
I am reminded
of our visit to the Soviet Union in 1990. We wanted to understand how
a powerful state claiming to represent the working class could fall
prey to the crass corruption that represented the worst excesses of
crony capitalism.
It was
obvious to us. There was no democratic participation. The
nationalised economy and state enterprises were simply the feeding
troughs of the voracious elite. The past symbols of socialist
solidarity and social justice were a sham, appropriated by a
rapacious class of party apparatchiks. The labour movement was
emasculated. It had been reduced to a conveyor belt of the political
and predatory party elite. They were the 'yellow unions'.
I realised
then that, had I been a militant unionist in the Soviet Union, I
would have died a miserable death in a Siberian labour camp. There
were no real unions in the Soviet Union. There were just obedient
lieutenants who enforced the orders of their political masters and
enjoyed the minor perks of financial hand-outs. It’s a slippery
slope, and one we can’t afford to send South Africa down.
So today, let
us ask ourselves if splinter unions are just the work of
opportunists. Are we saying that seasoned trade unionists are so
weak, pliant and intellectually inferior that they will risk losing
their jobs and their lives – and for what?
I cannot
believe that. Of course there is the Breitling Brigade, who will use
workers and the poor as cannon fodder, given half a choice. But the
fact is that there is a deep and growing mistrust of leaders in our
country, and the expanding underclass feels it has no voice through
legitimate formal structures. Violence becomes the only viable
language.
So yes, there
has to be trust. I remember more than 30 years ago when, as a naïve
student activist entering the labour movement as a volunteer, I spent
a day handing out pamphlets. That is, I spent the day trying to hand
out pamphlets. I was outside the factory gates for the whole day and
nobody took a pamphlet until an old SACTU activist took me aside and
said, “Sonny boy. You look very committed. But no-one understands
all your rhetoric. Workers cannot eat promises and political slogans.
And if they talk to you here they will be photographed and
victimised. So come home and I will arrange for some of the leaders
to meet you.”
I understood
then that the co-creation of a vision and ownership lies in winning
the trust of the workers, especially the poor. Their trust has to be
won every day. I am comforted that COSATU has done a labour force
survey of its members’ perceptions of their union leaders, but it
is a striking finding that many of the grassroots members are
alienated from their leadership. This should be the core of the
debates at the upcoming Congress. These perceptions need to be
answered.
COSATU has a
proud history. You stood firm when our government, in its insane
denialism, condemned to death so many people living with HIV and
AIDS, or remained silent on the human rights abuses of Zimbabwean and
Swaziland workers. You mobilised amazing organisations such as the
Treatment Action Campaign to make government accountable.
But where has
the social activism gone to in our country? Has it also submerged
below the morass of that the bureaucratic development industry
breeds? You cannot escape your responsibility any longer – our
society is fragmenting and our state becoming increasingly
dysfunctional.
Our
Constitution demands an effective government that is transparent and
accountable. Our Constitution has laid the proud traditions of social
justice, human dignity and social solidarity as the foundation of our
democracy. Public institutions are there to serve the interests of
the citizenry and not the narrow often corrupt interests of a
predatory elite.
That is what
we fought for. We need to stop being subjects and become active
citizens. It is now incumbent on us all to stand up and bring our
country back to the path of reconstruction and development. We
promised a better life in 1994, and we need to deliver it.
As our
founding father, Nelson Mandela, said, “Poverty, like Apartheid, is
not an accident. Like slavery, it is man-made and can be removed by
the actions of human beings.”
The key, now,
is for those human beings to take the appropriate action.
