Opening address by COSATU President Sidumo Dlamini to the 5th Central Committee, Midrand, June 27 2011
Members of the Central Executive Committee,
The delegation of our vanguard in the National Democratic Revolution, the ANC led by president Jacob Zuma
The delegation of our vanguard in the struggle for Socialism, the SACP led by the General Secretary comrade Blade Nzimande,
The President of SANCO and your delegation
The President of the ANC Women`s League Cde Angie Motshega and your delegation;
The President of the ANC Youth League, Cde Julius Malema and your delegation;
The National Secretary of the Young Communist League, Cde Buti Manamela and your delegation;
The President of SASCO cde Mbulelo Mandlana and the delegation;
The President of COSAS cde Bongani Mani and your delegation;
The President of FEDUSA cde Danie Carstens and your delegation;
The President of NACTU and your delegation;
The President of SANGOCO and your delegation;
Invited guests from all civil society formations and faith based organisations present here today;
Representatives from various government departments, and other statutory bodies and institutions
Our long time international friends present here today; Comrade Sharon Barron the I General Secretary of ITUC and comrade Philip Jennings the General Secretary of the UNI Global Union
Members of the diplomatic corps
We give special greetings to you the brave and courageous members of COSATU, who over the years have shaped this Federation into a sharper instrument of class battles.
It is you who have built this COSATU into a fearless, principled and true representative of the poor and the downtrodden masses of our people.
It is you the ever combat ready members of COSATU who over the years of relentless struggles in your communities, in workplaces and in every corner of our country have built this federation into a colossal formation respected all over the world.
It is through your spirit of no surrender and your battle cry of "forward ever and backward never" which have built this organisation into a bulwark against capitalist exploitation whose strength has become an envy of even our class enemies.
It is because of your fortitude and determination that we have been able to stand our ground in any platform and against any force to firmly articulate and defend the mandate you gave to us in the congress.
May you all please accept greetings from the Central Executive Committee and the National Office bearers of COSATU?
Comrades, the liberation movement and the country as a whole is still mourning the passing away of the stalwarts and committed members of our movement, uMama Albertina Sisulu and Baba uKader Asmal.
Amongst the chairs of the invited former Office Bearers of COSATU we will miss the wisdom of comrade Allinah Rantsolase the former National Treasurer of COSATU and comrade George Nkadimeng the former 1st Deputy President of COSATU . May we all rise and observe a moment of silence as we pay our deepest respect to these giants of our revolution. May their soul rest in peace!
We have come to this 5th Central Committee to do an assessment on the mandate you gave to us and to reflect on the developments and challenges since the last Central Committee in September 2007 and the 2009 National Congress.
As we meet here today, what we see happening in the world and in our country is a glaring reminder of the correctness and accuracy of the words written in the communist manifesto many years ago that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes"
The world has been engulfed by a devastating man made economic crisis which has deepened human misery in many parts of the developing south and in the developed north and exposed the inherent failures of capitalism. As we speak today unemployment in the world stands at 210 million which represent the highest recorded levels of unemployment in history.
We are confronted with a reality of 45 million new job seekers each year majority of whom being youth which has lost patience with their governments.
When this is coupled with the fact that 64 million more people around the globe have been pushed into extreme poverty since last June because of rising food prices we can only come to one conclusion - at capitalism has reached the limits of its crisis.
All these have led to the massive social and political upheavals, in places as far apart as North Africa, China, Europe, the US, and Latin America.
The ultimate outcome of the resolution of the conflict in each of these regions will determine the terms on which this international economic crisis will be resolved.
This includes whether the solution will lay the basis for the creation of a people's movement in the South and North, which is able to drive a new type of economic arrangement aimed at resolving the crisis in favour of the mass of ordinary people; or whether unaccountable governments and financial institutions, will continue to succeed in imposing arrangements which are primarily aimed at protecting the mighty financial sector, the large corporations, and the billionaires.
More and more we see capital attempting to use the very same crisis it created to exclusively benefit from its solutions at the expense of the working class and the poor. For an example we have seen an increase in attacks on labour taking place at a global scale.
It has among others focused on massive cutbacks in public sector services and jobs, attacks on social protection, unemployment benefits, pensions, and attacks on collective bargaining and other union rights and attacks on income and wages.
The strategy has been to let the recession drag on, to take advantage of the crushing recession in order to extract "enough" concessions from the working people until welfare states are dismantled and labour costs in the more developed capitalist countries are made competitive with those of the less-developed countries.
In the European Union alone workers national income dropped from 68% in 1975 to 52% in 2005. Coupled with these cuts in income the rate of grow of public social expenditures per capita per year decreased from 9% in 1990 to 4% in 2004 and this happened concurrently with a decline in labour and social rights. As this was happening employers were celebrating exuberant profits 33, 2 % between 1999 and 2006 alone whilst labour cost increased only by 18.2%.
This is how capitalism can be merciless; they want to benefit and maximise their profit even during an economic crisis of their own making. When they had an opportunity to inter;ene in the height of the crisis they had two options to bail-out the people whose homes and other assets were being repossessed by the banks, and to intervene to ensure credit was available to keep the economy moving, including by taking over the financial sector; or to bail-out the banks.
Guess what they did, they chose to bail out the banks through nationalisation of private dept forcing ordinary people to pay for greed and the crisis of capitalism.
It is when these things happen that we realised that clearly the class battle lines have been drawn. The battle is no longer hidden it is now open and it is about the choice between reform or revolution; it is about giving capitalism a human face or destroying it and replacing it with Socialism!
This task of building Socialism will require unity amongst all the forces of the left in order to provide clear leadership to the motive forces. It is for this reason that this Central Committee will have to seriously consider how best we can strengthen the South- South relations as a way of developing a common platform from which we can articulate and advance the left alternatives. In this context the Central Committee must seriously consider a call made by the President of Venezuela comrade Hugo Chavez for the 1st Socialist international in the 21st century.
Comrades, we need to draw lessons from these international experiences and developments. The same strategies that capital is employing to deal with workers in other parts of the world are essentially similar with how they respond in our country perhaps only different in form.
For an example in the South African case, we lost over 1.1 million jobs between 2009-2010 which amounts to an average of R35 billion worth of employees incomes being lost. This has plunged 5.5 million South Africans into poverty.
As a result of this perpetual job losses our country continues to be confronted with high levels of poverty and when we demand the creation of decent jobs as a sustainable way of addressing poverty we get blackmailed that we should prioritise those who are unemployed. We are told that South Africa needs Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! And yet we know that our country needs Decent Jobs! Decent Jobs! Decent Jobs!
We are also told that, if workers maintain their high wage demands, firms will be forced to layoff large numbers as profits are squeezed. If workers agree to lower their wage demands or even freeze wage increases, few workers will be laid off.
Yet we know that for thousands of our people in spite of being employed they still remain poor. They continue to sustain working by walking to work, using wood for cooking and electricity for lighting, staying in a shack, collecting water from the nearest school, whilst the rate of exploitation and poverty steadily increase.
The 2010 UNDP report shows that 44% of workers in South Africa live on less than R10 a day, which is almost the same as the daily allowance on the child support grant. But this amount can barely pay for a dry loaf of brown bread a day, which cost R7.50 in 2010. In practical terms this means that 44% of workers in South Africa are working for a loaf of bread on a daily basis.
We all have a responsibility of ensuring that we move faster to find solutions to the problems engulfing our country because it is under conditions of abject poverty, unemployment and inequality which breeds open confrontation between the people and those holding political power.
What complicates the challenges confronting South Africa is that they have a class and race dimension. The majority of those who are unemployed are youth and mainly black and African youth. Research shows that 43% of the unemployed are new entrants into the labour market and are therefore young, 42% are between the ages of 25 and 34 and 60% have less than secondary education.
Research also shows that on average, 400 000 young people do not proceed with their studies after writing matriculation exams every year. This means that we have an army of not just unemployed youth but majority of them do not have skills. This makes them to be vulnerable to abuse by any criminal elements in society as they fend for survival.
It is also under these conditions that they get promised quick and militant solutions by demagogues who simply use their frustration to pursue their selfish political agendas. Unfortunately it is not easy to identify such demagogues because they shout the same slogans and wear the same colors as we do.
Comrade Lenin warned about this when he said "demagogues are the worst enemies of the working class. The worst enemies, because they arouse base instincts in the masses, because the unenlightened worker is unable to recognise his enemies in men who represent themselves, and sometimes sincerely so, as his friends. The worst enemies, because in the period of disunity and vacillation, when our movement is just beginning to take shape, nothing is easier than to employ demagogic methods to mislead the masses, who can realise their error only later by bitter experience."
It is for this reason that we agree with the SACP that part of the immediate task of our struggle is to expose and isolate the demagogic elements within our movement and wherever they exists in society. It is also for this reason that we have agreed to have a joint programme for mass political education so that we can train our people to detect demagogues whenever they raise their ugly heads.
We will train our people so that they can have confidence to defend the working class gains in the National Democratic Revolution and take forward our programme towards socialism. This is what we are all about, we are about Socialism!
For those who may not be aware the SACP is the only vanguard of the working class in the struggle for socialism. This was earned and continues to be earned in the battle field of struggle and not by decree!
We want to make it clear that COSATU may be a federation of unions but it is a federation of a special kind, We are a Marxist-Leninist formation not in words but through our commitment to the struggle for socialism and in that context we encourage our members to fill the front ranks of the SACP and we subject ourselves to the discipline of communists. We accept the SACP as our vanguard towards the struggle for socialism. It is for this reason that we will do anything within our capacity to strengthen the SACP.
Comrades as we deal with unemployment and exploitation of workers, we are also aware that majority of young people are being employed by labour brokers and it is in this context that we will continue to call for the labour brokers to be exterminated.
Slavery could not be regulated out of existence it had to be abolished completely and so are labour brokers. They must be banned completely because they represent modern forms of slavery. We want government to ensure that the current amendments to the labour legislation that will give effect to dealing with labour brokers must be made law during this session of parliament! We expect nothing less from that legislation but to ban labour brokers!
The fight against labour brokers is not to be isolated from the broader struggles for a living wage. We have come to this Central Committee to say enough is enough! We will no longer tolerate to be told and coerced to accepting poverty wages. Employers must now know that we are prepared for an open fight.
From this Central Committee let every affiliate go out and prepare members for a mother of all Living Wage Campaigns. It is an open war on employers.
Comrades and compatriots amongst other questions which this Central Committee must ask and find answers to is whether the ANC led National Democratic Revolution is still on track.
We have got to ask this question because even though we know that government is working hard to address the legacy of colonialism and Apartheid the reality that still struck us every day is that despite progress made by government in various aspects but we still remain with racial unemployment, racial poverty and racial inequality.
We must ask this question because our observation is that the economy of our country is still in white hands. More than 80% of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange is accounted for by the large banks and the few companies in the traditional sectors: mining and energy. All these companies are white, private, and capitalist-owned and they are increasingly being foreign-owned.
The drive towards foreign ownership and private ownership which also include the Reserve Bank deepens the transformation of the South African economy away from working class control.
It is for this reason that we welcome the Governments tabling of a New Growth because for many years we have been calling for this and it fell on deaf ears. It was only after Polokwane that we are even able to talk about such a policy initiative. For this we commend government.
We however continue to argue that the primary aim of the new growth path must to change the structure of the economy and changing the structure of the economy should involve changing its ownership and control patterns. The interests of the working class cannot remain forever subordinated to the dictates of the capitalist class.
We also argue that a new growth path must be founded on a platform that is both redistributive and transformative. Economic growth should be led by sectors that are owned by South Africans and should be supported by policies that increase the retention of profits to be reinvested in a productive and developmental way.
The leading sectors in the economy should have elements of social ownership as the basis for the new growth path to have a socialist orientation. Any other growth strategy will reproduce the patterns of the past, it will deliver profit acceleration on the one hand and poverty-inducing jobs on the other.
We are already participating in meetings which attempts to take forward some aspects of the New Growth path but we must insist that we do need assurance from government that COSATU‘s views contained in our document will be integrated into government's New Growth Path.
We remain worried about the course of the National Democratic Revolution because day in and day out we see some of our comrades who have been deployed in government, particularly those who are bureaucrats, implementing their own programmes, which in many occasions have the potential to derail or totally deviate from the course of the National Democratic Revolution.
Some of these bureaucrats particularly from National Treasury have the nerve to even make pronouncements about their imagined impossibility of implementing ANC programmes such as it happened with the NHI. Thanks to the minster and the ANC-NGC which agreed on the process of implementation.
We want to promise government and our ANC or any one listening that as workers we will fight with everything we have to see NHI implemented in our lifetime! Through NHI we want to change a situation in which only 9% of the African population belong to a medical aid scheme whilst 74% of the white population do.
We have also seen the same anomaly with the announcement of a fast-train project between Durban and Johannesburg emerging outside of the political processes of the Alliance. Its level of priority is in question, yet vast sums of money will be spent with a potential to plunge the country further into indebtedness.
We are equally worried with the introduction of tolls all over Gauteng province without proper consultation and we are even more worried that this is not coupled with a clear plan to revamp public transport into the one accessible and affordable by the working class and the poor . We are sure that the when we meet with the minister he will find an amicable solution to this matter
We also worried that we do not see any move on limiting the use of tenders to deliver basic goods and services and building the capacity of the state to directly deliver these and create jobs. We say this understanding very well that building state-capacity is not a class-neutral issue. For years, big firms have centred themselves around a technically weak state bureaucracy in order to win tenders for profit-making. Building state capacity to deliver basic commodities directly therefore constitutes a threat to business interests. The current weaknesses in planning and co-ordination are to the best interest of some segments of the capitalist class. It offers an opportunity to derail focus on developmental priorities.
As COSATU we are worried that the motive forces that are supposed to be behind the NDR lack coherency and are in disarray. This includes the fact that the NGC reaffirmed the "the ANC as the leader of the Alliance and the strategic political centre". The question that arises is, under such circumstances what becomes of the Alliance and what is its role in advancing the National Democratic Revolution?
We want an Alliance that can mobilise society behind a common popular programme, an Alliance whose authority will not rely on the mercy of incumbent leadership of the ANC but an Alliance whose authority is institutionalized!
Let me report that we have met with the SACP and we had a frank and robust meeting in which we identified areas of mutual irritation and areas for common programme.
We also agreed that the SACP and COSATU may be independent organizations but are integral to each other.
Both COSATU and the SACP have a responsibility to demonstrate respect to each other's congress resolutions including on matters of leadership. More so each of these organizations has a responsibility to take forward these very resolutions as part of the strategic task to strengthen each other.
The ANC leadership has appealed that the matter regarding 2012 leadership must not be discussed. As COSATU we have also said the same thing about our own congress. Tempting as it may be we must respect the ANC leadership's appeal in the same way we would have expected everyone to respect our appeal about our own congress. In the previous Central Committee extreme political circumstances forced us to do the unusual and we entered into an unprecedented discussion where we went out of our way to discuss the leadership of the ANC. We developed a set of principles that were to guide our intervention.
The outcome of the resolutions we took from that discussion resulted to the historical Polokwane outcome in which on among others the current leadership was elected. In the 10th National Congress we made a commitment to ensure that this leadership succeeds in taking forward the Polokwane mandate. We need to ask if there are any extra ordinary conditions similar to the ones which existed pre Polokwane that may compel us into such a situation, where our structures discuss leadership of other formations when we don't expect the same to happen with us.
Even if our members were to do so in future based on their right as members of the ANC we must be careful that we do not get trapped into what we have seen others doing on this matter and that is singling out individual leaders. Ours must remain based on principle, including the principle of collective leadership.
The immediate strategic task we have is to assess progress in the National Democratic Revolution and to see if there are any opportunities or threats existing towards our goal to build a Socialist South Africa. Where there is no clarity or where there is dissatisfaction we have a responsibility to engage directly with our allies in the alliance in particular the ANC and the SACP.
Comrades I want to repeat that throughout this Central Committee, in all our deliberations we must remain guided by the fact ours is a class struggle and this will require consistency and firmness on principle. The country and our people are awaiting the outcome of this meeting with high hopes.
Let the contest of ideas begin, let the truth and principles of our movement reign in our meeting, let the desire to find solutions be the guiding light during our deliberations
The 5th Central Committee is declared open!
Issued by COSATU, June 27 2011
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