Speech Delivered by COSATU president, Comrade Sidumo Dlamini at the NUM National Congress held from 3rd – 7th June 2015, held at Birchwood Conference Centre

3 June 2015

The President of the NUM, comrade Piet Matosa

The entire collective, who include the National office Bearers and leadership of the NUM from all levels of the organisation

Leaders of our revolutionary Alliance present here today

Invited guests

Comrades and activists of NUM

And the entire delegates who come from across the length and breadth of our country.

We remove our hats to salute the leadership and members of NUM, for remaining steadfast in defending this Union from the total onslaught which was being launched from all sides.

The NUM is still alive and many doomsayers thought that by this time this Union will have been history and they had calculated that having dealt with the NUM by this time they would have been in the middle of their project to weaken and destroy COSATU enroute to dealing with the ANC led liberation movement as a whole.

We want to report to all the enemies of organisations and those who had dreamt that NUM would be dead by now that instead the NUM is becoming stronger every day, growing quantitatively and qualitatively in leaps and bounds. 

In the recent past to date, the NUM has been moving from one great victory to another.

You can never destroy an organisation which grounded on its members like NUM is.

You can destroy an organisation whose members know and see it as their liberator.

You cannot destroy the NUM when it can still negotiate and win serious battles in the workplace. 

You cannot destroy NUM because they know that the NUM is a tried and tested trade union.

When the NUM says you will receive a 21, 46 percentage increase to workers at Gold Fields they know it will happen.

When the NUM says you will receive a housing allowance of between R3000 and R 3 500 they know it will happen.

There are many examples where the NUM has secured qualitative gains for workers in the recent past and we should acknowledge the good work done by the NUM leadership at all levels.

Workers know that it is only the NUM which can stand up and take up a sustainable fight directed only to employers without setting workers against each other.

Employers and all our enemies together they can continue to form alliances to destroy our organisations, we can guarantee them one thing and it is the fact that they will fail and they will fail dismally at they have failed so far.

We want to report to you delegates to go back and tell our members that your Federation, COSATU is alive and is getting stronger every day.

We are much focused and we have just come back from a very successful Special CEC in which we were joined by two of the Unions who had previously decided to boycott our CEC.

We gave them a warm welcome back home.

They are our comrades and like all of us COSATU is theirs too.

They will raise all their issues inside COSATU and have their views subjected to a democratic process inside the Federation.

We call on members of those Unions which remain outside of the Federation to ask their leaders as to why they continue to boycott the CEC because the Special National Congress they asked for has long been agreed to in the November 2014 CEC and has now been endorsed by an out of court settlement.

These union leaders who continue to keep their unions out of the CEC, some even against the decisions of their constitutional structures must now tell us of the intention is was to paralyse COSATU or to build it.

If the intention was to weaken COSATU, then the plan did not work because the workers’ Federation continues to grow even stronger and even clearer about the tasks which need to be undertaken moving forward.

We have defined our tasks in this period to be three legged: The first task – is developing and implementing programme for Organisation building on the ground. 

We need to win the confidence of workers at the shop floor at the same time we need to build the unity of the Federation in the actual battlefield of workers struggles and not only to rely on boardrooms.

Already the CEC has agreed on the most urgent tasks to take forward programme of the Federation.

They include immediate intervention at the Eastern Cape, meeting with all the Unions who have specific organisational challenges.

This include ensuring that our Unions comply with the requirements of by the Department of Labour to avoid threats of deregistration.

But at the same time we will be meeting with the Minister of Labour to raise an issue about some of the bureaucrats who appear to be hell bent at targeting our unions for deregistration by demanding impossible things such as a list of phone numbers and home addresses for members.

 The Second task is focusing on systematic Ideological Work.

We need to develop the capacity of our members to know who is on our side and have the ability to identify the enemy even if wearing our regalia, shouting our slogans, singing our songs and even if they use our language.

As Lenin put it in “ What is to be done that “the worker must have a clear picture in his mind of the economic nature and the social and political features of the landlord and the priest, the high state official and the peasant, the student and the vagabond; he must know their strong and weak points; he must grasp the meaning of all the catchwords and sophisms by which each class and each stratum camouflages its selfish strivings and its real “inner workings”; he must understand what interests are reflected by certain institutions and certain laws and how they are reflected.

But this “clear picture” cannot be obtained from any book. It can be obtained only from living examples and from exposures that follow close upon what is going on about us at a given moment; upon what is being discussed, in whispers perhaps, by each one in his own way; upon what finds expression in such and such events, in such and such statistics, in such and such court sentences, etc., etc.

These comprehensive political exposures are an essential and fundamental condition for training the masses in revolutionary activity”.

The fact of the matter is that there is an intensified ideological offensive which is being waged against COSATU, the SACP and the ANC and it is unfortunate that some amongst have not realise that what has been happening in COSATU is part of this multipronged offensive directed at the ANC led liberation movement.

As we speak COSATU is being taken to court almost every month by some Unions who use workers money to pay lawyers instead of using these resources to advance workers struggles. 

This is part of this multipronged offensive which is aimed at weakening us.

It is based on a calculation that we must spent time in courts and have our resources and our attention taken away from workers issues and spend time standing in front of a Judge whom it is hoped will at some point overrule the constitution of COSATU and our founding principles.

Matters which must be discussed by the ordinary National Congress will be discussed by the ordinary National Congress and those which belonged to the Special National Congress will be discussed in that appropriate meeting.

We have received letters demanding that we have the Special National Congress attend to appeals about the expulsions. 

As far as we know, the Special National Congress is meant to discuss two items and that is the Unity of the federation and the leadership issues.

Those who want to make appeal about their expulsion have a constitutional right to make their appeals at the ordinary Congress in November 2015.

It is now clear that the Special National Congress was never intended to build COSATU but was part of the strategy to steal it away and use it as a platform to build momentum towards the formation of a political organisation using our infrastructure.

Comrades, you must rest assured that we will defend COSATU from anyone and from any group or section of the society with an agenda to destroy our Federation. This is the only instrument of war which is at the hands of the workers to fight against employers.

We call on the members of NUM and from all our unions to stand up and defend COSATU from our enemies.

It is very possible that we will soon be dealing with an Alliance of forces which include the DA and those who went out to form splinter organisation and some from within our ranks whose strategic objective is aimed at weakening the ANC at local government elections. 

This Congress must have proper and unemotional discussions about all these matter.

On the other hand there is an open offensive to take away our hard won rights including the right to strike and the right to collective bargaining. 

Very soon we will be marching to the office of the Free Market Foundation as part of our campaign to oppose the constitutional challenge, launched on 5 March 2013 by the Free Market Foundation (FMF), to the extension of bargaining council agreements to non-parties.

We argued that this is nothing less than a war against the entire labour relations regime, with the aim of leaving workers defenceless against even more ruthless exploitation by employers than they suffer already and plunged into even deeper poverty.

The Central Executive Committee said that this is not only a legal battle but it is a political and ideological battle which should also be fought on the streets.

The third task is developing a programme for radical economic Transformation. This will entail setting out the short-term, medium-term and long-term objectives to deepen the National Democratic Revolution [NDR] and the attainment of Socialism.

The programme will reflect the multitude of challenges facing the working class at the point of production and reproduction; and in all sites of power - the state, judiciary and the media.

To that end, we embrace the challenge to sharpen our ideology and theory of revolution.

We will open space for discussion on the left and empower our members and leaders to understand the different theoretical approaches.

As we speak the SACP has developed a discussion document titled going to the root, to which as COSATU we are preparing an input and we also preparing towards the Alliance Summit which will on amongst others discuss how we can develop the Alliance’s common understanding and approach to what we mean by a more radical phase of our transition.

Comrades, it is now clear to us that we will never have a National Health Insurance if we do not wage a relentless struggle against the senseless high costs of medical fees.

We will have to heighten our campaign on the demand for the state pharmaceutical company. 

We cannot fold our arms and do nothing when the Mining Charter assessment report tells that Mining Charter more than 61% of right holders failed to invest 5% of their payroll on skills development; that only 45% of mining companies have complied with the conversion of hostels into single and family units and that 64% of mining right holders failed to contribute and comply with Mine Community Development.

The question we should be asking is why the government is not taking away licences from these arrogant and counterrevolutionary mining houses?

Comrades, this Congress has a responsibility to do everything that will keep NUM united for the battles which we need to undertake.

We need this congress to come up with a decisive programme of Action which will support the campaigns of the Federation.

No freedom is won if it is not stubbornly fought for by those who feel the oppression. No freedom will ever be given on silver.

No ruling class shall ever surrender its rule without a fight.

Everything we want shall be won in the battle field.

All these tasks cannot happen on their own, they need committed members, Cadres and Activists who are prepared to lead from the front and we hope that this NUM will provide leadership.

Comrades, the name given to this meeting is called a National Congress and its tasks are to develop a programme and later elect leadership to lead in the implementation of such an agreed to programme.

 Please let us avoid calling this an elective congress.

We do not have such concepts in our movement. 

These concepts are imposed to us as if our organisations exists to convene congresses and to elect leadership.

Important as it is to elect a new leadership through a democratic process but we should avoid making this an end point of our existence.

There is now a new tendency in the labour movement, which include the interference by service providers and the use of our investment companies to have dirty money being used to influence the outcome of our congresses.

I am sure that the NUM will fight this tendency should it be seen raising its ugly head in this congress.

The NUM is our hope and our pride as COSATU.

It is one of those unions who knows the value of unity, it is one of those unions which set the pace of organisational management and development, it is one of those unions which has demonstrated resilience of survival under the staggering storm of attack from the opposition.

The NUM is one of the exemplary unions which can survive all kinds of weather.

We call on you the delegates to keep this union united, to keep COSATU united and to keep the Alliance united.

We wish this congress all the success and we know that it will not be a talk shop, all decisions which will be taken here will help to build COSATU and the entire liberation movement.

We wish you all the best

Forward with the Unity of the NUM

Forward with the unity of COSATU

Forward to the unity of the Alliance

AMANDLA!

Issued by COSATU, June 3 2015