Address by Zwelinzima Vavi, General Secretary of COSATU, to the 20th Anniversary of the South African Students' Congress (SASCO), Rhodes University, 10th September 2011
COSATU is humbled to be present in this important event that marks a milestone in the history of SASCO as a student organization. I am so honoured to return once more to celebrate with this critical component of the working class which has proven to be a dependable ally of the working people.
20 years ago, in this historic campus, SASCO was launched as a non-racial student organization aimed at advancing the aspirations of the student populace in South Africa.
The merger of SANSCO (South African National Students' Congress) and NUSAS (National Union of South African Students) gave birth to the biggest student organization in the country - SASCO.
We salute the bullet braving student generation of the 1980s whose struggles made an immense contribution and created a momentum in these struggles of our people led by the working class to the defeat of apartheid.
This is the generation of Bathandwa Ndondo who was shot point blank by the Transkei Bantustan security police. It is now 25 years since the death of this gallant hero.
We remember the brutal massacre of students carried out by Inkatha warlords in the University of Zululand 28 years ago. We remember the countless epic battles fought in many campuses between your members and the police. Blood and tears dripped, we went through pain and immense suffering.
The lives that were lost and the families that were torn asunder by the murderous apartheid regime are some of the visible scars on the face of a democratic South Africa. Our freedom was not delivered on a silver platter. As we gather to recall the immeasurable contribution of the student movement to our struggle let us make a solemn declaration that we wont allow our hard won gains to be threatened by the new coalition of variant rightwing and neoliberals. We won't allow tenderpreneurs to hijack our glorious movement so that they can use our collective legitimacy to amass wealth whilst students remain sidelined by high fees and whilst the poor are trapped in degrading poverty.
Comrades and friends,
The history of SASCO underlines the importance of having a radical student movement that openly and decisively takes sides against oppression and exploitation and identifies itself with the working class and the poor.
As the organized section of the working class, the trade union movement has benefitted immensely from the contribution of SASCO and its predecessors.
SASCO as an organization carries on its shoulders a formidable history of activism and resistance against apartheid injustices.
Its predecessors AZASO - which adopted the Freedom Charter in 1981, and subsequently changed its name to SANSCO, was a trusted regiment in the struggle against the oppression of black people and women as well as the exploitation of the working class.
SANSCO as an organization understood the links between workers' struggles in the factories, community struggles against apartheid and its stooges in local government and students' struggles in racially segregated campuses.
SANSCO understood that the majority of black students in institutions of higher learning under apartheid South Africa were descendants of the working class and therefore the struggles for black trade union recognition, against low wages and harsh working conditions, against unemployment, lack of housing and basic services, occupied a special place in the heart of the student movement.
Progressive and non racial trade unions that gave birth to COSATU 26 years ago owe their very existence to the role played by NUSAS. We shall be forever be indebted to SASCO. The worker/student alliance remains a formidable and potent weapon in our country to this date. COSATU would not be the same if it were not for the contribution and role of SASCO and other student formations. SASCO would not be the same without the contribution of COSATU.
The most important lesson that can be drawn from student struggles in this country is that education is a terrain of struggle.
Dear comrades,
Your own mission which is to struggle for the transformation of higher education and society in general also means that you can never be spectators in the theatre of class struggle! It also means that you can never stand on the fence and plead neutrality when the capitalist class is butchering the working class on a daily basis.
Your history as an organization is populated by cases where you refused to be mere spectators and neutralists, even if this refusal was matched by threats of bullets and chains from the apartheid state.
As the trade union movement, we are indeed confident that we have SASCO's support when we say that a society which creates obscene opulence on the one hand and indescribable poverty on the other hand, is simply not sustainable.
We know that SASCO shares our sentiment that it is ludicrous to claim that workers are selfish in their wage demands and are locking the unemployed out of jobs. As students who are located in the arena of knowledge production, we hope that you will assist us in exposing this big lie and show that the real parasites and vultures are the bosses and the CEOs who produce nothing and yet amass most of the wealth created from the sweat and toil of workers.
We hope that students will continue to expose the injustice of a society that rewards executive directors in the Top 40 JSE listed companies with salary increases and bonuses as high as 25% and 56% respectively whilst refusing to give in to the modest wage demands by workers is equivalent to robbery! These unjustifiable salary increases and bonuses, which amount to R4.8 million rands could have been spread amongst the unemployed people and created as much as 25 000 jobs. This clearly shows that there is no future under capitalism!
As a student formation, you have amongst your membership, accountants, economists, architects, engineers, scientists, mathematicians, lawyers and sociologists in the making.
As COSATU we have come to rely on SASCO as an intellectual reservoir to provide us with these skills and with young revolutionary minds, whose sense of radicalism and energy is a daily inspiration to the working class.
Accountants produced by SASCO have never disappointed us in volunteering their skills to aid the workers' movement in understanding how much profits do capitalists extract from us workers?
The economists produced by this gallant student formation have always joined forces with the workers in our quest to increase our wages and to narrow the huge gap between the rich and the poor.
We rely on these revolutionary accountants and economists to help us counter the current onslaught waged on workers which seeks to further erode workers' gains and lead to a race to the bottom in terms of workers' wages and working conditions.
We need your accountants and economists to support us when we make the call for the disclosure of company profits, executive pay and bonuses as a plank from which to advance our Living Wage Campaign.
Recently, the Sunday Times Rich List confirmed what we have always believed. It confirmed that South Africa is a rich country, but the biggest problem is that this wealth is monopolized by a few capitalists (20) who own R112.2 billion in wealth whilst 48% of the South Africans are living below the poverty level of R322 per month. This is what we mean when we say that in economic terms, the first ten years of our democracy have benefitted the capitalist class.
As COSATU, we are convinced that the depressing reality that our economy still largely benefits a few wealthy capitalists will continue unless something drastic is done to overturn the apartheid wealth gap. It is simply untenable that we can have 16% of employed workers earning less than R500; 33.4% earning less than R1000 and 60% earning lower than R2500. There is simply no justice in this.
We also know that the future sociologists amongst you will embark on research about the extent of poverty amongst the employed. We hope that you can tell us and the rest of society how exactly do workers survive with these meagre wages. We also hope that you can depict the links between the employed and the unemployed, especially the question about how is the workers' wage partitioned within the family and how many unemployed people actually depend on the wages of their employed relatives.
This would be part of continuing the legacy of the generations of student activists before you. It is part of the lasting legacy of an organisation that has been a consistent defender of the oppressed and exploited.
As COSATU we applaud SASCO for echoing working class slogans and consistently reflecting the struggles of the oppressed and exploited majority. SASCO was amongst the most reliable ally in the fight against privatization, outsourcing and the sale of state assets under an anti-working class policy called GEAR. Students in various campuses have been reliable allies of workers particularly when workers faced massive retrenchments and the downgrading of their working conditions and benefits.
Today, we speak without fear of contradiction that SASCO is amongst the most reliable formations and refuses to be relegated to a by-stander in the struggle against capitalism and all its ills.
Comrades and friends,
SASCO branches in many campuses continue to play a pivotal role in assisting workers in their everyday confrontation with untransformed university management. The underpaid and overworked cleaners and security guards who labour from night into the early hours of the morning must always be confident that in SASCO they have an ally.
SASCO must be a first port of call for the unorganised, casualised workers who work under labour brokers and have little knowledge of their rights as workers. SASCO must assist trade unions to organise the unorganised and equip workers in insecure jobs with theory and class consciousness.
It is SASCO that must prick society's conscience and ask, is it fair that young men and women who should be students just like you and studying to realise their academic aspirations are instead employed as cleaners and security in our universities. What kind of a society produces so few success stories and millions of failures?
What impact does our the deplorable state of our public education have in producing young people whose destiny is dropping out of school or simply not doing well enough to access higher education? What contribution does a mud school, a school without desks and chairs, without a library, without a laboratory, computer lab and proper toilet facilities have on this dire situation.
As COSATU we have committed ourselves to challenge the structural inequalities that still haunt our schooling system 17 years after the dawn of democracy. We have also pledged our commitment to making a contribution to change how education is conducted in these schools. This means that a teacher being in class and teaching on time is as crucial as the delivery of learner support materials to schools on time. It also means that we have taken a zero-tolerance approach to teachers that prey on the girl child and see her as a mere object for his sexual gratification.
We urge SASCO to join our campaign to make our schools function and to give working class children a fighting chance.
The mathematicians and scientists amongst you must work hand in hand with school teachers and pupils to reverse the tide of hopelessness engulfing many working class schools.
As part of its historic mission to transform higher education and make it accessible to the poor, we call on SASCO to join forces with the trade union movement in holding universities to account on the Recognition of Prior Learning.
We call on SASCO to revive the call to make universities centers of people's power and not ivory towers which are divorced from neighbouring communities. SASCO must lead literacy campaigns for neighbouring communities in order to equip workers and the unemployed with reading, writing and computer skills.
In celebrating this historic milestone, SASCO must recommit itself to fighting the commodification of services for the poor. Side by side, the student movement must struggle with those for whom decent work is an illusion, decent housing a distant reality and for whom clean water, electricity, tarred roads, employment, a roofed school class room and university access are mere fantasies.
We call on SASCO to never abandon its role as an intellectual pool of the progressive trade union movement in this country that has always armed it with ideology and a fresh sense of zeal, energy and radicalism!
SASCO must strengthen its campaigns for quality student services, for the expansion of the higher education system, for the strengthening of the FET sector, the building of universities in Mpumalanga and Northern Cape and for free, quality, public education. The struggles against financial and academic exclusions, skyrocketing fees, racism and sexism in institutions of higher learning must remain the core focus of SASCO's program in the coming years.
You must never abandon your call for a curriculum that develops working class children into swords in the war against exploitation. You must at all times emphasize that a degree in town planning is meaningless if it continues to reproduce the same apartheid plans which rendered the black working class foreigners into the cities. You must be firm in saying that an architecture qualification is meaningless if it continues to reproduce the same poor quality matchbox houses that were the hallmark of apartheid and are still being built even today under a democratic South Africa. Your mission is to struggle for a people's education and curriculum transformation is a critical component of this.
Dear comrades,
SASCO would have done betrayed its own historic mission if it failed to champion the cause of women in South Africa. Women in this country are battered and bruised, raped and maimed and simply not enough is being done to confront the problem.
For the coming years, SASCO's maturity as an organization will be judged by the extent to which it refused to twist its tongue on women's oppression in this country.
SASCO branches must be proactive in confronting the scourge of rape in campuses, where some female students are attacked and raped in the dark and empty library corridors.
The date rapes that occur in some of the campus parties organized to welcome first year students must form the daily occupation of all SASCO branches.
Earlier this year, what was supposed to be one of the happiest days in a young woman's life turned out to be the worst day, as she was raped by a man who had given her a lift from Walter Sisulu University to fetch her graduation attire. This young woman will always be haunted by this horrible act.
Today, many young women live under the constant fear of what is now known as "corrective rape". Many of these young women are potential members of SASCO whose interest in the organisation will be determined by the extent to which it highlights their plight and champions their cause.
These young and mainly black working class women are subjected to untold torture from their own families, their communities and the patriarchal men who think that they have an ordained right over women's bodies. SASCO must be a home and refugee camp for these vulnerable women.
SASCO branches must expose university lecturers who utilize their power to take advantage of financially and academically struggling students, particularly those from working class backgrounds.
Is it not time that that SASCO members stand up and say - not in our campuses and certainly not on our sisters and mothers?
History will judge us harshly if we keep mum on the brutal war waged by rapists on women through rape and other forms of sexual violence.
A Chinese wall standing between the class struggle, the struggle against patriarchy and racism can only be found in the comforts of a library armchair. SASCO's history is one that has understood and appreciated the umbilical cord that connects student struggles with working class struggles.
In the same way that the children of the working class in institutions of higher learning challenged the apartheid regime, SASCO must also join forces with the working class in the struggle to defeat capitalism, patriarchy and racism. SASCO's contribution in pursuing all these struggles will be noted in the historical records as one of the greatest achievements of the student movement.
We wish SASCO a cheerful birthday and may you continue to do "Everything for the Revolution and nothing against it". May you continue to be vibrant and energetic actors in the theatre of class struggle!
Issued by COSATU, September 10 2011
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