It is with great sadness that the Congress of South African Trade Unions is obliged to condemn the remarks about trade unions and their leadership made by Moeletsi Mbeki in his book, ‘Architects of Poverty'.
COSATU has had a very long friendship with Moeletsi Mbeki and appreciates his contribution to the struggles of the workers over many years. The comments in his book, however are factually incorrect and profoundly insulting towards trade union leaders who have devoted their lives to serving the workers' movement
The basis of his argument against COSATU is that its leaders are ignorant and uneducated. He says that "they have no leadership. Cosatu lost their leaders in 1994. The unions are left with leaders who have no education, no knowledge, no expertise. That's why the poor are being ripped off... they don't understand the political economy of SA".
He goes on to claim that "they think they can ingratiate themselves with the politicians of the ANC, so in the past four years they have been crawling to Jacob Zuma, thinking that they will use him. But Zuma has ignored them once he got into power. He ignored them and privatised Vodacom."
The reality is that, despite the fact that the majority of workers were deliberately denied educational opportunities under apartheid, the trade union movement has itself been a great university, in which workers struggled to understand the world and how it can be changed for the better. Many thousands emerged eventually as fine worker intellectuals. They should never be condemned for failing to obtain academic qualifications at universities from which they were excluded.
This is borne out by the fact that so many trade unionists were able to move into important positions in government and industry after 1994. But the unions continued to produce leaders with insight and understanding from then up to today. Many union officials and leaders are still studying and qualifying, often in difficult circumstances, at the very highest academic level.