Numsa Response to the DA on the question of nationalisation of mines and other strategic and monopoly industries, KZN, June 6 2012
"The people shall share in the country's wealth!
The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people;
The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole;
All other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the well-being of the people;
All people shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions." (Freedom Charter, 1955)
Numsa has noted the press statement from James Lorrimer, DA so-called shadow minister of mines, on Numsa's demands for the nationalisation (expropriation without compensation) of mines and all other strategic and monopoly industries.
The DA statement was released on the 4th of June 2012.
The DA says our Numsa Congress has been accompanied by "loud rhetoric on nationalisation". We think that this opening sentence of the DA statement very accurately captures the dominant white supremacist view about the Black and African peoples demand for nationalisation without compensation of the mineral wealth and other strategic and monopoly industries in South Africa today.
This extremely insulting white racist view (reducing the demand for nationalisation to mere rhetoric) best reflects the dominant white attitude to black people in general and Africans in particular in this country: that they are empty heads incapable of any serious thoughts, let alone, ability to survive without the supervision of the white man.
The undying belief in white supremacy is best captured in the warning that the demands for nationalisation will lead to the destruction of existing jobs and prevention of the creation of new ones.
We see here perfectly expressed the white belief that Black people in general and Africans in particular are consigned to the fate of serving white economic interests via white provision of jobs. We note the threat of white disinvestment in mining should the demand for nationalisation persist.
The DA reduces to loud rhetorical noise the fundamental demand and basis of the more than 350 years struggle for liberation of Black people in general and Africans in particular in South Africa - that nothing short of returning the wealth of the country to all the people of South Africa can do the centuries old injustices of oppression, dispossession and exploitation, and remove the basis of racism.
The dominant white racist South African view as best captured in the DA statement on demands for nationalisation is that black people and Africans are permanently wedded to white people as mere suppliers of labour; they are incapable of ownership of real wealth.
We repeat the demand no amount of white supremacist racist hogwash and dehumanising view of our humanity will diminish, as contained in the Freedom Charter:
"The people shall share in the country's wealth!
The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people;
The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole;
All other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the well-being of the people;
All people shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions." (Freedom Charter, 1955).
We suffered and shed our blood for more than 350 years for our right to our natural heritage in the wealth of this country to be returned to us. If need be, we are willing to shed our blood again, to regain this right, a right so essential and necessary for the restoration of our humanity.
Any so called investors - local or foreign - who are happy to invest in any of our mines and strategic and monopoly industries only if we, the Black and African people remain at the bottom of the food chain, tied to permanent poverty and unemployment, must take their investment elsewhere.
We, the Black and African people of South Africa refuse to be pinned down in a state of permanent poverty as a precondition for any investment in our wealth. This is the essence of the continuing white racist capitalist system of South Africa.
The DA, a tiny minority white party by any stretch of imagination, describes us as belonging to "the wilder fringes of South African politics".
It is only in South Africa where the ideology and practice of white supremacist capitalism, best codified in the Apartheid ideology, has managed to deceive white people that they are in fact the majority, the mainstream, precisely because they own and control a disproportionately large share of the country's wealth!
Black people and Africans in South Africa are still, 18 years into our so called democracy, not very visible, and therefore not "part of the mainstream" to most white people because of the combined English and Afrikaner white racist practice of "separate develop" which consigned Black and African people to 13 percent of the South African soil and inferior existence.
Only a pathetically sick moron can describe Numsa as belonging to the wilder fringes of South African politics. We are a large union with no less than 300 000 members - the largest metalworkers union in Africa.
Typical of the white racist arrogance deeply imbedded in the DA, it has announced in the said statement that it will soon "be putting forward another vision for the South African mining industry." This, in opposition to what the ANC has proposed in its research on mineral wealth, will, according to the DA, be done "in order to ensure that policies that allow us to exploit that wealth to the benefit of all our people" are in place.
Implied here is that only the DA has a monopoly of policy making capacity, and intelligence. In a sentence or so, the ANC proposals are dismissed, with contempt.
This is simply breathtaking Olympic Gold Medal winning levels of white supremacist and diehard racist arrogance.
After more than 350 years of combined English and Afrikaner domination of mining, land ownership and white ownership and control of strategic and monopoly industries, the DA, the archetypical racist political mouthpiece of white political power in post 1994 South Africa wants to inform us that suddenly they now have a new brainwave and have found better ways to greedily feast on cheap Black and African labour, as they selfishly plunder our natural wealth for themselves.
More than anything else, we find the DA statement on our perfectly logical and justified demands for nationalisation without compensation a perfect reflection of the persistence of white supremacist ideology and practices in the dominant white political circles in South Africa today.
Numsa wants to serve notice: the 1994 democratic breakthrough was premised on the understanding that all South Africans had a responsibility to ensure that the wealth of the land was shared among all of us. Only this could be the true foundation for building a non racial, non sexist, peaceful and potentially prosperous South Africa.
In the past 18 years, we have seen South Africa become the most unequal place on Earth and white incomes and dominance in the economy and society have increased. Black and African poverty has increased, with a disproportionate share of unemployment affecting African youths.
We are no longer willing to wait much longer for real, deep systemic and structural transformation of our economy and society in favour of all the people of South Africa.
Our very sense of our inherent humanity is at stake here. You have been warned.
Irvin Jim
Numsa General Secretary
Numsa 9th Congress, Durban
6th June 2012
Issued by NUMSA, June 6 2012
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