Numsa statement on the Tshwane protests
24 June 2016
The explosion of violent protest in and around Tshwane is dramatic evidence of a profound crisis not just in the African National Congress but in South African society as a whole.
The protests were triggered by the sudden imposition of Thoko Didiza as the ANC’s mayoral candidate for the upcoming local government elections, without any of the consultation with local communities which the leadership had promised would take place in the candidate selection process.
This showed the ANC leaders’ arrogant contempt for its own members and supporters and the working class and poor majority. It was inevitable, in a city where the ANC was already riven with violent factional divisions, that this would enrage the membership and the broader community.
In the view of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) however, this conflagration, in which buses and buildings have been torched, roads barricaded, police cars overturned and at least five people have been killed, is not simply a conflict within the ruling party over a mayoral candidate but a reflection of a much broader and deeper anger and despair among the poor, African majority.
Numsa also rejects the allegation by ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe that the violence was “pure thuggery”, and not to do with disapproval over Didiza.
On the contrary, these events were an outburst of rage, which had been bubbling under the surface for years, against poverty, inequality, unemployment, casualisation and super-exploitation of labour and the lack of service delivery. The imposition of Didiza was just the spark which set fire to all this combustible material in these poor communities. Desperate factions in the political sphere are a result of an economy that does not absorb people into the labour market. And this is not just a Tshwane problem.
Tshwane is further evidence to back up the finding by the Institute for Security Studies that South Africa is the most protest-prone country in the world. Its public violence monitoring project recorded 2,880 "incidents of public gathering related to protests or public violence" between 2013 and 2015 — 53% of which were violent. They say that confrontational protests are becoming an "endemic feature" of SA’s political landscape and the "language" of the disenfranchised.
Another even more devastating report by the University of Johannesburg uses SAPS data on ‘crowd incidents’ to assess the frequency of police-recorded protests (PRPs), which is taken to mean a popular mobilisation in support of a collective grievance lasting up to 24 hours. The report estimates that between 1997 and 2013 there were about 67,750 PRPs. an average of roughly 11 PRPs per day. Making allowance for under-recording, it is highly unlikely there were less than 71,000 protests in this period.
Yes there are a lot of protests; we are sitting on a time bomb, but what is lacking both these reports is that they don't link the protests to the continuing apartheid legacy that leaves the Black and African majority at the bottom of the food chain or attribute them to the ANC’s pursuit of conservative neo-liberal macro-economic policies and the National Development Plan (NDP) in the face of a collapsed Washington consensus that deepens the crisis of mass poverty, unemployment and inequality.
The ANC, and nearly all other political parties, try to present these protests as simply a law-and-order issue, and demand tougher action by the police or even the army. Some opportunist criminals may well have taken advantage of these protests to loot shops, but that in no way explains the depth of people’s anger, which is inflamed even further when the police respond with tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets, under the pretext of arresting criminals.
These violent protests are all symptoms of a systemic worldwide crisis of monopoly capitalism, which is even more severe in South Africa because of the failure to escape from the legacy of apartheid which has left the economy largely in the hands of the same white elite, and which the ANC government has reinforced by its adoption of free-market, neoliberal policies in the NDP and which inflicts violence on the majority in the form of poverty, squalor and dehumanisation.
We call on our people not to destroy their property, but to protest against policies that are directly responsible for the poor not being absorbed by the labour market. They must demand that the NDP must be dropped, that the Freedom Charter be fully implemented and the state must be the employer of the last resort. It must intervene and nationalize strategic minerals, create jobs by championing a job-led industrial strategy, so that they don't continue to be a victim every five years of an election casino where they get promised heaven and earth but they continue to live in squalor, poverty and hopelessness.
Tshwane shows the urgency to build a new workers’ socialist political party which alone can offer a real alternative to the poor and black majority. We must take ownership and control of the economy from the wealthy white elite and bring to life the vision of the Freedom Charter of a country which genuinely belongs to all who live in it.
Issued by Patrick Craven, Acting Spokesperson, NUMSA, 24 June 2016
