Assembly of the Unemployed in South Africa
Unemployed People's Movement | 05.12.2013 10:44 | World
Next week there will be a mass assembly of organisations and movements representing the unemployed in South Africa. Dissident union leaders and others will attend. It looks like this could be a major step on the way to the formation of a new left wing party based on an alliance between workers and the unemployed.
Mokoape, Vavi, Naidoo & Kasrils to Speak at the Assembly of the Unemployed
Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement
03 December 2013
From the 7th to the 9th of December our movement, other organisations of the unemployed and the poor, and our allies in unions, civil society and other progressive formations will converge on Grahamstown for the first Assembly of the Unemployed.
South Africa's economic crisis, intensified by Zuma’s toxic mixture of neoliberalism, corruption and repression and the global crisis since 2008, has rendered millions of our people as surplus to the needs to the economy, in a manner which traps us in poverty and hopelessness. While the public purse is plundered to build Zuma a palace millions are without work, without houses, without access to decent education and without hope.
South Africa's official unemployment rate remains at over 40%. This is on the same level as countries in the midst of severe economic depression such as Greece and Spain. The youth are worst hit with the youth unemployment being over 60%. Since the recent recession began in 2008 South Africa has lost over a million jobs. This is a serious and potentially very dangerous social crisis. No society can survive unemployment levels like this for ever. If there is not a progressive and democratic resolution of this crisis there is a definite danger that it will be exploited by a form of authoritarian nationalism.
This structural unemployment is the legacy of the racist capitalist system created by apartheid to reduce blacks to a cheap source of labour for white capitalists. This system has been presided over and protected by the ANC since it came to power. The former Bantustans remain undeveloped and the ANC, instead of intervening to create jobs or providing a Basic Income Grant capable of providing for the unemployed, continues to promote the idea that 'entrepreneurship' and foreign investors will give us the economic growth capable of solving the unemployment crisis and creating millions of jobs. Nowhere is this lie sold to us by the capitalists and their apologists in the media more apparent than in the National Development Plan rightly condemned by our comrades on the left of COSATU and particularly in NUMSA. In protests across the country Zuma’s regime are rightly referred to as ‘the black boers’.
Since 1994 all citizens have rights on paper. But in reality citizenship is tied to one's role in the economy. Productive people are considered to be those with access to jobs, while the millions of unemployed are seen as surplus or part of a culture entitlement or dependents on the hardworking tax payers. To put it simply those of us without formal employment are treated as if we just don’t count. The ANC has tried to also render us politically marginal by giving a toy telephone to COSATU and repressing autonomous workers and community struggles.
But as the ongoing rebellion of the poor is showing there is a widespread popular rejection of this economic and political marginalisation. And as it has become clear that the worker's movement in COSATU has been co-opted by the crony capitalists in the ruling party and their allies in the SACP who pretend to care about workers and the poor, but in reality just want our votes - the progressive unions and workers in COSATU are pushing away from the toxic, corrupt and authoritarian politics of the Zuma faction that has seized control of the ANC. At the same time others workers have organised themselves outside of COSATU.
The rebellion that started in communities is now also shaking up the trade unions. This has resulted in a real opening up of political space. There are some attempts by corrupt and demagogic individuals to exploit this opening for their own narrow agendas. But there is also a real possibility that workers in unions like NUMSA and AMCU and poor people organised into social movements and community organisations can come together in a new and democratic formation capable of uniting struggles in workplaces and communities for a truly liberated South Africa.
It is for this reason we are launching the Assembly of the Unemployed to discuss the experiences of the unemployed, the challenges of unemployment, the violent repression of worker and community struggles under Zuma and the new political possibilities for tackling the unemployment crisis. This Assembly is happening at a key political time in South Africa and will create a platform for grassroots activists to push for a new South Africa capable of:
1. Creating decent jobs, getting rid of the exploitative dehumanising low wage regime built by the Apartheid capitalists and protected by the ANC capitalists and providing a guaranteed basic income to all.
2. Achieving radical land reform that puts land, urban and rural, in the hands of the people.
3. Resolving the housing crisis in the cities.
We will also discuss the dangers that xenophobia, ethnic politics, sexism and authoritarian demagoguery pose to our society in this time of crisis.
We call on media outlets and those who support the struggle of workers and the unemployed to join us in Grahamstown.
Keynote speakers will include Aubrey Mokoape, Ronnie Kasrils and Zwelinzima Vavi. Jay Naidoo cannot attend in person but he will send a message that will be read out in his absence. The Black Consciousness Party and the Democratic Left Front will also send messages of support.
Contact:
Bheki Buthelezi 060 457 8971
Ayanda Kota 078 625 6462
***
* Dr Nchaupe Aubrey Mokoape (b. 1943) is one of the most eminent, long-serving political veterans in South Africa. As a boy of 15, he joined the Pan Africanist Congress before the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960, and was arrested and imprisoned after the massacre at the same time as its president, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, followed by a year in exile in Lesotho, from where he was deported back to South Africa.
After completing his secondary education at Orlando High School in Soweto, he studied medicine at the University of Natal in Durban (then, its segregated Black Section), where he became the political mentor to Steve Biko, who arrived to study medicine a year after he did. As a former political prisoner and member of the banned PAC, he had a profound influence on Biko, whose break with the white-led National Union of South African Students (Nusas) at its annual congress at Rhodes University in Grahamstown in 1967 saw the birth of the Black Consciousness Movement and the formation of the South African Students Organisation (SASO). The influence of SASO in South African political life helped to revive the struggle against apartheid after the heavy defeats of 1962-64 - the mass jailings, hangings, torture and flights into exile of that period - and was a primary intellectual contributor to the march against "Bantu education" of secondary school pupils in Soweto on 16 June 1976, which changed the political landscape of the country.
As a founder member of the Black Peoples Convention (BPC), of which Biko was honorary president, Dr Mokoape - by then a practising medical doctor - was detained by the security police in September 1974. On 2 May 1976, a month before the Soweto school students' march, he was one of nine men accused in Pretoria of "endangering the maintenance of law and order" in South Africa (the trial of Sathasivan Cooper and Eight Others), when Biko was called as witness for the defence.
Biko's supremely self-confident evidence between May 3rd and May 7th 1976 in expounding the philosophy of Black Consciousness, led by Advocate David Soggot as counsel for the defence, is available in full in Millard Arnold (ed), The Testimony of Steve Biko: Black Consciousness in South Africa (Random House, New York, 1978; Panther Books, London, 1979). It provided a major element in the film Cry Freedom (directed by Richard Attenborough, 1987), in which the adviser to the director, Zolile Hamilton Keke, had spent ten years on Robben Island for membership of Poqo, the military wing of the PAC, and had been detained in police cells in King Williams Town in 1977 at the same time as Biko.
Convicted of having organised rallies in South Africa in support of Frelimo in Mozambique, the accused in the Saths Cooper trial - including Dr Mokoape - were sentenced to either five or six years' imprisonment on Robben Island on 15 December 1976.
Murdered by the police, Biko died in police custody in Pretoria on 12 September 1977.
Nchaupe Mokoape continues to practice as a doctor in Durban. He is president of the Black Consciousness Party.
http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/dr-maitshwe-mokoape
http://www.sowetanlive.co.za/sowetan/archive/2008/12/08/politics-medicine-close-to-his-hear-t
http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/suntoshpillay/2013/05/30/are-we-trapped-in-conversation/
* Ronnie Kasrils (b. 1938) was a founding member in Durban in 1962 of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of he South African Communist Party and the ANC. In exile he became a member of the High Command of MK and then chief of military intelligence of MK (1983), a member of the Central Committee of the SACP (1986-2007) and a member of the National Executive Committee of the ANC (1987-2007), prior to its return to South Africa from exile in 1990. He received initial military training at Odessa in the former Soviet Union in 1964, later training to the rank of brigadier, and worked underground in South Africa for the ANC, the SACP and MK in Operation Vula in 1990-91.
As a member of ANC government for 14 years following the first post-apartheid elections in April 1994, he was Minister for Intelligence Services (2004-2008) having previously been Deputy Minister of Deefence (1994-1999), and then Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry (1999-2004). He resigned his position in the cabinet in September 2008, following the resignation of President Thabo Mbeki.
In exile in London, together with his SACP colleague Barry Feinberg, he was provided with access to the private papers of the eminent British philosopher, Bertrand Russell (3rd Earl Russell, 1872-1970). Together they published:
Dear Bertrand Russell: A Selection of his Correspondence with the General Public, 1950-1968 (George Allen and Unwin, London; Simon and Schuster, New York, 1969);
Bertrand Russell's America, 1896-1945 (Viking Press, New York, 1973);
Bertrand Russell's America: His Transatlantic Travels and Writings. Volume Two (Routledge, London, 1984, 2004);
Barry Feinberg published The Collected Stories of Bertrand Russell, ed. Barry Feinberg (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1972).
His autobiography, 'Armed and Dangerous': My Undercover Struggle against Apartheid (Heinemann, London, 1993; updated and republished, 1994 and 2004) has been followed by a biography of his deceased second wife, Eleanor, The Unlikely Secret Agent (Jacana, 2010).
This year Ronnie Kasrils published articles in the Mail & Guardian in March and June strongly critical of ANC government under President Jacob Zuma and what he described as the "descent into police state depravity."
Despite these criticisms of police state despotism, he has stated: "Whatever the drawbacks and failures I am convinced that in years to come humanity will look back to Soviet achievements as a source of profound inspiration."
In an article published in 1985 in the SACP journal, The African Communist, under his ANC travelling name "ANC Khumalo", he defended Josef Stalin's Pact with Adolf Hitler in August 1939 for the division and subjugation of Poland in as having "proved its validity" and having served to "strengthen the socialist foundations of the Soviet state." He argued that "the Soviet Union is the sheet anchor of world peace and humanity." ("How the Red Army buried Hitler", The African Communist, No. 101, Second Quarter, 1985. pp.38, 45).
https://www.google.co.uk/#q=ronnie+kasrils
http://mg.co.za/article/2013-03-06-mr-president-arrest-this-descent-into-police-state-depravity
http://mg.co.za/article/2013-06-21-00-now-we-pay-the-price-for-our-seduction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
*****
* Zwelinzima Vavi (b. 1962) is General Secretary of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (Cosatu), the partner with the ANC and the SACP in the ruling Alliance which has governed South Africa since 1994.
Born on a farm in Hanover, Northern Cape, with a mineworker father, four brothers and seven sisters, he was a child labourer, looking for work on neighbouring farms. He was later a uranium plant clerk at Vaal Reefs mine, and was fired from AngloGold in 1987 in a major strike which crippled the Chamber of Mines. In 1988 he became Cosatu's regional secretary for the Western Transvaal, and he served as Cosatu's Deputy General Secretary from 1993 to 1999, when he became General Secretary.
He has been severely critical of despotic government in Zimbabwe, leading two fact-finding missions, in October 2004 and February 2005, to assess conditions for a fair poll in the rigged Zimbabwe parliamentary elections of 2005. Members of ther mission were deported from Zimbabwe during the first mission, and turned back from Harare airport at the beginning of the second. He has been critical of the ANC government's approach to despotism and election fraud in Zimbabwe, and to privatisation and corruption in South Africa.
Following public criticism of the Zuma government, he was suspended from his position as Cosatu General Secretary on 14 August 2013, following a sexual affair with a Cosatu employee in the federation's offices, which he has acknowledged did take place, but which he claims were completely consensual. He has alleged entrapment by the woman. No charges have been laid against Vavi up to now.
He has been vigorously defended by fellow trade unionists, particularly in the National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa), the largest union in Cosatu, whose Deputy General Secretary, Karl Cloete, has said the union wants to Vavi to be reinstated.
Numsa is itself in sharp conflict with the major leadership in Cosatu, which is grounded in the SACP and supports the Zuma administration. The union is due to hold a major conference in two weeks, in which it will decide whether or not to support the ANC candidacy in the general elections in April next year.
In discussion documents published ahead of its conference, Numsa states that the "rupture" in Cosatu is one between "forces of capitalism and forces of socialism". It says "Those who want Vavi out of Cosatu want ... a labour desk, a pro-capitalist Cosatu."
In its major policy statement of 3 December this year on its relations with the SACP, Numsa stated that there were "fundamental philosophical, ideological and political problems with the SACP under [SACP General Secretary, Minister of High Education and Training, and leading supporter of President Zuma] Blade Nzimande." The union added that the current Numsa leadership was "very unpopular with the SACP under Blade Nzimande." (See attachment for full statement).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwelinzima_Vavi
http://www.bdlive.co.za/national/politics/2013/12/03/numsa-accuses-anc-of-failure-to-meet-its-promises
*****
* Jay Naidoo (b. 1954) was General Secretary of Cosatu from 1985 to 1993. He was Minister responsible for the Reconstruction and Development Programme in President Nelson Mandela’s office (1994–1996) and Minister of Post, Telecommunications, and Broadcasting (1996–1999). From 2001-2010, he was Chairperson of the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA). He is currently Chair of the Board of Directors and Chair of the Partnership Council of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.
He was guest speaker at the annual Neil Aggett Memorial Lecture at Kingswood College in Grahamstown on 13 September this year, commemorating the doctor and trade unionist Neil Aggett who was found hanged in his cell in John Vorster Square police station on 5 February 1982, following prolonged torture by the security police.
The Neil Aggett Support Group has made a formal application for prosecution of the two security policemen responsible for Aggett's torture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Naidoo
http://www.jaynaidoo.org/event-neil-aggett-memorial-lecture-kingswood-college-13-september-2013/
Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement
03 December 2013
From the 7th to the 9th of December our movement, other organisations of the unemployed and the poor, and our allies in unions, civil society and other progressive formations will converge on Grahamstown for the first Assembly of the Unemployed.
South Africa's economic crisis, intensified by Zuma’s toxic mixture of neoliberalism, corruption and repression and the global crisis since 2008, has rendered millions of our people as surplus to the needs to the economy, in a manner which traps us in poverty and hopelessness. While the public purse is plundered to build Zuma a palace millions are without work, without houses, without access to decent education and without hope.
South Africa's official unemployment rate remains at over 40%. This is on the same level as countries in the midst of severe economic depression such as Greece and Spain. The youth are worst hit with the youth unemployment being over 60%. Since the recent recession began in 2008 South Africa has lost over a million jobs. This is a serious and potentially very dangerous social crisis. No society can survive unemployment levels like this for ever. If there is not a progressive and democratic resolution of this crisis there is a definite danger that it will be exploited by a form of authoritarian nationalism.
This structural unemployment is the legacy of the racist capitalist system created by apartheid to reduce blacks to a cheap source of labour for white capitalists. This system has been presided over and protected by the ANC since it came to power. The former Bantustans remain undeveloped and the ANC, instead of intervening to create jobs or providing a Basic Income Grant capable of providing for the unemployed, continues to promote the idea that 'entrepreneurship' and foreign investors will give us the economic growth capable of solving the unemployment crisis and creating millions of jobs. Nowhere is this lie sold to us by the capitalists and their apologists in the media more apparent than in the National Development Plan rightly condemned by our comrades on the left of COSATU and particularly in NUMSA. In protests across the country Zuma’s regime are rightly referred to as ‘the black boers’.
Since 1994 all citizens have rights on paper. But in reality citizenship is tied to one's role in the economy. Productive people are considered to be those with access to jobs, while the millions of unemployed are seen as surplus or part of a culture entitlement or dependents on the hardworking tax payers. To put it simply those of us without formal employment are treated as if we just don’t count. The ANC has tried to also render us politically marginal by giving a toy telephone to COSATU and repressing autonomous workers and community struggles.
But as the ongoing rebellion of the poor is showing there is a widespread popular rejection of this economic and political marginalisation. And as it has become clear that the worker's movement in COSATU has been co-opted by the crony capitalists in the ruling party and their allies in the SACP who pretend to care about workers and the poor, but in reality just want our votes - the progressive unions and workers in COSATU are pushing away from the toxic, corrupt and authoritarian politics of the Zuma faction that has seized control of the ANC. At the same time others workers have organised themselves outside of COSATU.
The rebellion that started in communities is now also shaking up the trade unions. This has resulted in a real opening up of political space. There are some attempts by corrupt and demagogic individuals to exploit this opening for their own narrow agendas. But there is also a real possibility that workers in unions like NUMSA and AMCU and poor people organised into social movements and community organisations can come together in a new and democratic formation capable of uniting struggles in workplaces and communities for a truly liberated South Africa.
It is for this reason we are launching the Assembly of the Unemployed to discuss the experiences of the unemployed, the challenges of unemployment, the violent repression of worker and community struggles under Zuma and the new political possibilities for tackling the unemployment crisis. This Assembly is happening at a key political time in South Africa and will create a platform for grassroots activists to push for a new South Africa capable of:
1. Creating decent jobs, getting rid of the exploitative dehumanising low wage regime built by the Apartheid capitalists and protected by the ANC capitalists and providing a guaranteed basic income to all.
2. Achieving radical land reform that puts land, urban and rural, in the hands of the people.
3. Resolving the housing crisis in the cities.
We will also discuss the dangers that xenophobia, ethnic politics, sexism and authoritarian demagoguery pose to our society in this time of crisis.
We call on media outlets and those who support the struggle of workers and the unemployed to join us in Grahamstown.
Keynote speakers will include Aubrey Mokoape, Ronnie Kasrils and Zwelinzima Vavi. Jay Naidoo cannot attend in person but he will send a message that will be read out in his absence. The Black Consciousness Party and the Democratic Left Front will also send messages of support.
Contact:
Bheki Buthelezi 060 457 8971
Ayanda Kota 078 625 6462
***
* Dr Nchaupe Aubrey Mokoape (b. 1943) is one of the most eminent, long-serving political veterans in South Africa. As a boy of 15, he joined the Pan Africanist Congress before the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960, and was arrested and imprisoned after the massacre at the same time as its president, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, followed by a year in exile in Lesotho, from where he was deported back to South Africa.
After completing his secondary education at Orlando High School in Soweto, he studied medicine at the University of Natal in Durban (then, its segregated Black Section), where he became the political mentor to Steve Biko, who arrived to study medicine a year after he did. As a former political prisoner and member of the banned PAC, he had a profound influence on Biko, whose break with the white-led National Union of South African Students (Nusas) at its annual congress at Rhodes University in Grahamstown in 1967 saw the birth of the Black Consciousness Movement and the formation of the South African Students Organisation (SASO). The influence of SASO in South African political life helped to revive the struggle against apartheid after the heavy defeats of 1962-64 - the mass jailings, hangings, torture and flights into exile of that period - and was a primary intellectual contributor to the march against "Bantu education" of secondary school pupils in Soweto on 16 June 1976, which changed the political landscape of the country.
As a founder member of the Black Peoples Convention (BPC), of which Biko was honorary president, Dr Mokoape - by then a practising medical doctor - was detained by the security police in September 1974. On 2 May 1976, a month before the Soweto school students' march, he was one of nine men accused in Pretoria of "endangering the maintenance of law and order" in South Africa (the trial of Sathasivan Cooper and Eight Others), when Biko was called as witness for the defence.
Biko's supremely self-confident evidence between May 3rd and May 7th 1976 in expounding the philosophy of Black Consciousness, led by Advocate David Soggot as counsel for the defence, is available in full in Millard Arnold (ed), The Testimony of Steve Biko: Black Consciousness in South Africa (Random House, New York, 1978; Panther Books, London, 1979). It provided a major element in the film Cry Freedom (directed by Richard Attenborough, 1987), in which the adviser to the director, Zolile Hamilton Keke, had spent ten years on Robben Island for membership of Poqo, the military wing of the PAC, and had been detained in police cells in King Williams Town in 1977 at the same time as Biko.
Convicted of having organised rallies in South Africa in support of Frelimo in Mozambique, the accused in the Saths Cooper trial - including Dr Mokoape - were sentenced to either five or six years' imprisonment on Robben Island on 15 December 1976.
Murdered by the police, Biko died in police custody in Pretoria on 12 September 1977.
Nchaupe Mokoape continues to practice as a doctor in Durban. He is president of the Black Consciousness Party.
http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/dr-maitshwe-mokoape http://www.sowetanlive.co.za/sowetan/archive/2008/12/08/politics-medicine-close-to-his-hear-t http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/suntoshpillay/2013/05/30/are-we-trapped-in-conversation/ * Ronnie Kasrils (b. 1938) was a founding member in Durban in 1962 of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of he South African Communist Party and the ANC. In exile he became a member of the High Command of MK and then chief of military intelligence of MK (1983), a member of the Central Committee of the SACP (1986-2007) and a member of the National Executive Committee of the ANC (1987-2007), prior to its return to South Africa from exile in 1990. He received initial military training at Odessa in the former Soviet Union in 1964, later training to the rank of brigadier, and worked underground in South Africa for the ANC, the SACP and MK in Operation Vula in 1990-91.
As a member of ANC government for 14 years following the first post-apartheid elections in April 1994, he was Minister for Intelligence Services (2004-2008) having previously been Deputy Minister of Deefence (1994-1999), and then Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry (1999-2004). He resigned his position in the cabinet in September 2008, following the resignation of President Thabo Mbeki.
In exile in London, together with his SACP colleague Barry Feinberg, he was provided with access to the private papers of the eminent British philosopher, Bertrand Russell (3rd Earl Russell, 1872-1970). Together they published:
Dear Bertrand Russell: A Selection of his Correspondence with the General Public, 1950-1968 (George Allen and Unwin, London; Simon and Schuster, New York, 1969);
Bertrand Russell's America, 1896-1945 (Viking Press, New York, 1973);
Bertrand Russell's America: His Transatlantic Travels and Writings. Volume Two (Routledge, London, 1984, 2004);
Barry Feinberg published The Collected Stories of Bertrand Russell, ed. Barry Feinberg (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1972).
His autobiography, 'Armed and Dangerous': My Undercover Struggle against Apartheid (Heinemann, London, 1993; updated and republished, 1994 and 2004) has been followed by a biography of his deceased second wife, Eleanor, The Unlikely Secret Agent (Jacana, 2010).
This year Ronnie Kasrils published articles in the Mail & Guardian in March and June strongly critical of ANC government under President Jacob Zuma and what he described as the "descent into police state depravity."
Despite these criticisms of police state despotism, he has stated: "Whatever the drawbacks and failures I am convinced that in years to come humanity will look back to Soviet achievements as a source of profound inspiration."
In an article published in 1985 in the SACP journal, The African Communist, under his ANC travelling name "ANC Khumalo", he defended Josef Stalin's Pact with Adolf Hitler in August 1939 for the division and subjugation of Poland in as having "proved its validity" and having served to "strengthen the socialist foundations of the Soviet state." He argued that "the Soviet Union is the sheet anchor of world peace and humanity." ("How the Red Army buried Hitler", The African Communist, No. 101, Second Quarter, 1985. pp.38, 45).
https://www.google.co.uk/#q=ronnie+kasrils http://mg.co.za/article/2013-03-06-mr-president-arrest-this-descent-into-police-state-depravity http://mg.co.za/article/2013-06-21-00-now-we-pay-the-price-for-our-seduction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell *****
* Zwelinzima Vavi (b. 1962) is General Secretary of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (Cosatu), the partner with the ANC and the SACP in the ruling Alliance which has governed South Africa since 1994.
Born on a farm in Hanover, Northern Cape, with a mineworker father, four brothers and seven sisters, he was a child labourer, looking for work on neighbouring farms. He was later a uranium plant clerk at Vaal Reefs mine, and was fired from AngloGold in 1987 in a major strike which crippled the Chamber of Mines. In 1988 he became Cosatu's regional secretary for the Western Transvaal, and he served as Cosatu's Deputy General Secretary from 1993 to 1999, when he became General Secretary.
He has been severely critical of despotic government in Zimbabwe, leading two fact-finding missions, in October 2004 and February 2005, to assess conditions for a fair poll in the rigged Zimbabwe parliamentary elections of 2005. Members of ther mission were deported from Zimbabwe during the first mission, and turned back from Harare airport at the beginning of the second. He has been critical of the ANC government's approach to despotism and election fraud in Zimbabwe, and to privatisation and corruption in South Africa.
Following public criticism of the Zuma government, he was suspended from his position as Cosatu General Secretary on 14 August 2013, following a sexual affair with a Cosatu employee in the federation's offices, which he has acknowledged did take place, but which he claims were completely consensual. He has alleged entrapment by the woman. No charges have been laid against Vavi up to now.
He has been vigorously defended by fellow trade unionists, particularly in the National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa), the largest union in Cosatu, whose Deputy General Secretary, Karl Cloete, has said the union wants to Vavi to be reinstated.
Numsa is itself in sharp conflict with the major leadership in Cosatu, which is grounded in the SACP and supports the Zuma administration. The union is due to hold a major conference in two weeks, in which it will decide whether or not to support the ANC candidacy in the general elections in April next year.
In discussion documents published ahead of its conference, Numsa states that the "rupture" in Cosatu is one between "forces of capitalism and forces of socialism". It says "Those who want Vavi out of Cosatu want ... a labour desk, a pro-capitalist Cosatu."
In its major policy statement of 3 December this year on its relations with the SACP, Numsa stated that there were "fundamental philosophical, ideological and political problems with the SACP under [SACP General Secretary, Minister of High Education and Training, and leading supporter of President Zuma] Blade Nzimande." The union added that the current Numsa leadership was "very unpopular with the SACP under Blade Nzimande." (See attachment for full statement).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwelinzima_Vavi http://www.bdlive.co.za/national/politics/2013/12/03/numsa-accuses-anc-of-failure-to-meet-its-promises *****
* Jay Naidoo (b. 1954) was General Secretary of Cosatu from 1985 to 1993. He was Minister responsible for the Reconstruction and Development Programme in President Nelson Mandela’s office (1994–1996) and Minister of Post, Telecommunications, and Broadcasting (1996–1999). From 2001-2010, he was Chairperson of the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA). He is currently Chair of the Board of Directors and Chair of the Partnership Council of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.
He was guest speaker at the annual Neil Aggett Memorial Lecture at Kingswood College in Grahamstown on 13 September this year, commemorating the doctor and trade unionist Neil Aggett who was found hanged in his cell in John Vorster Square police station on 5 February 1982, following prolonged torture by the security police.
The Neil Aggett Support Group has made a formal application for prosecution of the two security policemen responsible for Aggett's torture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Naidoo http://www.jaynaidoo.org/event-neil-aggett-memorial-lecture-kingswood-college-13-september-2013/
Unemployed People's Movement
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