OPEN LETTER TO COSATU PRESIDENT ELIJAH BARAYI
24 November 2014
Dear President Elijah Barayi,
My apologies for disturbing you from your resting deck, you might be having crucial meetings or involved in polemical debates above our skies, in the land of the departed, with the revered leaders of our movement President OR Tambo or MK's Chief-of-Staff cde Chris Hani.
The situation right now from the land of the living compels us to write this hearty Open Letter to you, and other leaders of our founding Federation - Cosatu.
Today working in the comfort of freedom and enjoying the privilege of leading workers - from the fancy offices in stinking downtown Johannesburg - we thank you and your generation for painstakingly creating Cosatu. The Cosatu we inherited many years ago, steeped and immersed in a rich and glittering history of revolutionary struggle for the downtrodden and exploited majority, today lies in ruins!
We now dare to wonder whether we deserve this rare privilege in your absence, to be in Cosatu.
One now has a penchant to write and communicate via emails or Twitter, unlike during your turbulent and difficult days of using torn furniture boxes to pen correspondence to affiliates or draft bargaining demands to the filthy rich bosses!
The Federation of workers, Cosatu, that you and others played an immeasurable role in building 29 years ago, after many bitter years and tough engagements, in order to unite workers in South Africa during difficult and dangerous Apartheid conditions, finds itself in tatters.
A Federation that was established through the sweat, blood and tears of workers, mainly from Black and African working class hostels, townships, rural slums and villages, and plying their trade in capitalist owned industries and factories, is on the brink of its demise. Its revolutionary legacy is about to be thrown into the dusty bin of struggle history and heritage.
Your maiden speech as Cosatu's President, which you delivered at Curries Fountain, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, has been the glue that has kept our Federation intact for the almost 29 years of its existence. Your oratory brilliance, accompanied by your sharp tongue and agile mind remains entrenched in our heads. Your powerful ultimatum to the then apartheid President, PW Botha, to scrap the pass laws continues to reverberate in the many battles we continue to confront 29 years later.
The Federation today, finds itself consumed in boardroom divisions and factional fights, whilst the workers and the vulnerable are at the receiving end of neoliberalism and capitalist brutality in factories and in our communities. In the boardrooms, on one hand are the forces of reaction defending the neoliberal capitalist trajectory the ANC adopted, and on the other hand are the militant revolutionary leaders fighting for the radical implementation of the Freedom Charter and the abolition of the South African capitalist system.
Already, our country is ranked as the most unequal in the whole world; the workers we represent are rated the world's most angry by the World Economic Forum; HIV/AIDS infections continue to increase unabated; racialised poverty continues to be the order of the day; unemployment rate escalates beyond controllable measures, mostly affecting Black and African working class youth.
Disappointingly, we are soon going to scoop an Olympic "gold" medal for having the highest number of service delivery protests, compared to Spain, Greece, Brazil and China. All these ugly and scandalous realities are being blindly denied by the ANC/SACP leadership and those in power under the ideological fog of "a good story to tell", whilst our 20 years of negotiated settlement continues to benefit the propertied and owning class.
For almost two years now, since our last Cosatu 11th National Congress in 2012, held during the centenary year of the ANC, we have spectacularly failed to advance or implement our agreed resolutions and campaigns as mandated by over 2.2 million workers. The divisions and factional fights have undeniably led to a situation where Cosatu, supposedly a shield and spear of workers, is gradually losing its relevance to the workers on the shopfloor, including amongst the many South Africans, who had consistently seen Cosatu as a voice of conscience.
But because we are entangled in destructive fights internally, we are unable to rally workers behind a radical programme and rolling mass actions on the streets to secure revolutionary gains on behalf of workers and the poor. We are unable to turn the tide around and engineer a radical programme or a "Freedom Charter Moment", so that ultimately a better life for the workers and the poor is attained and realised.
Some amongst us in the Federation have wrongly characterised these divisions as ‘rupture', whilst others correctly believe that the Federation has been captured by forces of neoliberalism. The latter beliefs are not far-fetched from the truth, since some fellows or Cosatu's leaders are in the pockets of politicians and a powerful SACP/ANC faction. As a result our own comrades are dependent on these leaders for survival through political patronage to secure and guarantee their fancy or classy positions, post their trade union activism. This is happening at the expense of workers who continue to suffer, as a result of the failed and disastrous neoliberal policies being steam-rolled by ruling elites.
Cosatu's CEC's meetings now are no different from JSE-listed companies' shareholder meetings, where voting wins the order of the day on each and every decision the Federation needs to resolve on. There are no longer democratic debates or mandated positions from Affiliates.
Worker-control has now been substituted with Stalinism or political arrogance by a majority ANC/SACP bloc in CEC meetings. Others have guts to preside over CEC meetings with questionable credentials through renting positions of being Shopstewards or democratically elected worker representatives. The constitution is being flouted in order to achieve a particular agenda in the meetings. Those who claim to be custodians of the Federation's constitution are selective in its interpretation to appease their political handlers residing in powerful houses in the country.
Interestingly, some of the leaders of unions during meetings are trade unionists, but elsewhere outside the meetings assume their true class positions or loyalty of being businessmen or labour brokers. They are not even afraid to take workers out at SASOL refineries, and gamble with genuine workers grievances; later in the evening they sign lucrative tender deals for themselves and their spouses. They are not even scared for not calling constitutional meetings in their respective affiliates to account to workers, but surprisingly they always have ‘mandates' on each-and-every issue being discussed at the CEC.
Disturbingly, there is one General Secretary of an affiliate, who is trade a unionists during meetings, but a businessman/labour broker outside the meetings, who happens to run a union from a fancy Mug & Bean restaurant. One wonders when he services workers or visits workplaces. Not long ago, one General Secretary of another affiliate was handcuffed on both hands and legs with heavy metal chains by the Hawks, for allegedly misappropriating millions belonging to workers.
These are just a few examples of the disgraceful challenges we face in the Cosatu of today.
President Barayi, you might have head reports from the new arrivals or entrants in the land of the departed, pertaining to the events in Marikana, where workers were slaughtered with live ammunition by the ANC government police. This, we have correctly called it the first massacre post 1994 committed by the ANC government. Cosatu was not even there to defend these mine workers. In the De Doorns, farmworkers went on strike for a living wage on their own. The paralysis has rendered Cosatu to be typically a dog that can bark, but can't bite!
The least said about the vanguard - the SACP, the better. The SACP is at the centre of the deep divisions we find ourselves in today. Instead of the SACP being our vanguard, its leadership is busy fomenting disunity within Cosatu. What is even worse and intriguing about the SACP, is that it has successfully anointed itself as the most strident lone voice, loudhailer, cheerleader and defender of neoliberalism and white monopoly capital interests in the broader Liberation Alliance today.
We are not confused by this ideological vacillation of the SACP, given the fact that its leadership is serving in the bourgeois state since the ascendency of President Jacob Zuma to the South African presidential throne. The SACP leadership simply acts to safeguards its Cabinet posts, perks and parasitic middle class lifestyles by weakening and fragmenting working class formations like Cosatu who are seen as standing in the way of their struggle for personal upward class mobility.
To be sure, the SACP has really not been a revolutionary force, post 1994 in South Africa! When Blade Nzimande secured for himself a ministerial position in Zuma's government, he not only altered the SACP constitution to suit his new role, but has swiftly moved to convert the SACP into an unpaid public relations outfit for the right-wing leadership of the ANC and its government policies.
It is worth mentioning that the "liberator" - the ANC - owing to its status as a "ruling party", responsible for maintaining the status quo, of driving neoliberalism in South Africa, post the 1994 negotiated settlement, has betrayed the struggle. And parts of the major divisions that have emerged in the Federation are a result of the neoliberal policies that are being championed by the ANC, and have led to the slaughtering of the working class.
In short President Barayi, the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) has long been off the rails; and the ANC has passionately been pursuing neoliberalism and has long abandoned the Freedom Charter.
President Barayi, we should also report to you that one of Cosatu's committed affiliates, Numsa, has been "surgically" removed from the Federation! Numsa was expelled from the Federation not because of its much talked about Special National Congress (SNC) resolutions, but it has been expelled from the Federation for taking resolutions that are correct as resolved by workers.
Interestingly, the expulsion of Numsa is being celebrated by the SACP leadership of Blade Nzimande!.
They even went as far as calling the 350 000 members belonging to Numsa as "stinking dead corpse that need to be kicked out of Cosatu (house)".
This was said by SACP's General Secretary Blade Nzimande, during a Provincial Shopsteward Council (PSSC) in KwaZulu-Natal. We were all shocked to hear such a venomous and repugnant statement directed at workers by the leader of the SACP, without any form of sanction or repudiation coming from the Politburo (PB) or Central Committee (CC).
President Barayi, you may wish to know that under the leadership of Gwede Mantashe as Secretary General of the ANC and Blade Nzimande as General Secretary of the SACP; the ANC Youth League, as a critical voice of the working class youth, has been killed. The SACP has been reduced to a veritable choir for neoliberalism. And now, under the leadership of these two, COSATU is being murdered too.
The ANC started dying soon after the 1994 "democratic breakthrough"!
In the not-so-distant future, we shall join you and have ample time to reminisce about the state of the progressive trade union movement, especially Cosatu. We shall talk about the mistakes we committed along the way, and the many victories we had scored for the working class and the poor. And when we come to update you President, we shall not protest when you ask hard and difficult questions.
For now, dear President Barayi, please know that our struggle continues to reclaim Cosatu, to be an independent, militant, fighting and campaigning Federation of workers. We shall not dare fail the workers of South Africa and future generations.
We are looking forward to hear your thoughts and views on matters reflected above, because your wisdom and guidance shall help us to move forward in the interest of workers and the poor.
Yours sincerely,
CASTRO NGOBESE
NUMSA
National Spokesperson
This open letter first appeared in the Star newspaper.
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