Press Statements Lecture in honour of Chris Hani - June 2005

By Zwelinzima Vavi, General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions

Comrades,

We are gathered here today to commemorate the birthday of Comrade Chris Hani, the giant leader of the liberation movement and a working class hero.

Chris Hani was a man of humble beginnings born out of a working class family in Sabelele in the Transkei. Little did anyone in his family and village know that they were moulding a diamond for the poor and the oppressed.

Like many who remained in the country I saw Comrade Chris for the first time when he returned to the country. Before meeting him, I had heard many stories about him, in particular his huge memory and ability to remember names of thousands of people. Eventually when I had the honour of meeting him in a group, he called me by name without me having to introduce myself. I have come across many comrades who told me that he knew them by name before they could even meet.

Comrade Chris was passionately loved and respected by cadres at every level, irrespective of their age. He embodied the best traditions of our movement - willingness to make sacrifices for the common cause without seeking personal gain and gratitude.

Of course Comrade Chris was most liked by workers, the poor, youth and militants in our country. To them he represented the future we seek to build. He represented hope. He was an absolute inspiration to millions.

Tshonyane was a touring intellectual, and yet he was so simple and had a gift of making Marxism and Leninism sound so simple to all and sundry. He possessed incredible communications skill. He was both a listener and an orator who could get any renowned coward to feel like confronting the most revered enemy.

Tshonyana was renowned for his guts. He refused to be silenced, never cowered, and was never intimidated by the apartheid regime. His whole life was an act of defiance that inspired many to realise that they could fight for the freedom to make choices.

Comrade Chris was also notable for his absolute integrity within the democratic movement. He was never one to cover up problems and refuse to deal with them. Rather, wherever he saw mistakes and injustice, he would set out to correct them. He was a peoples' leader who enjoyed an intimate relationship with the poor and the working class as a whole. His peculiar popularity was earned through consistency and the fact that Chris Hani as a leader was there with the people and understood the needs of the MK soldiers in exile and managed to keep personal relation with the majority of the cadres.

It is particularly appropriate that this meeting coincides with the 50th Anniversary of the Freedom Charter, and comes a day after our strike action that gave a voice to millions of workers.

Both Comrade Chris and the Charter represent to poor people the tangible promise that a decent life is possible. The very action of writing down our demands in the Charter enabled ordinary people to defy the humiliation imposed by the apartheid system. It enabled people to say that we have a vision that the apartheid state cannot take from us.

Comrades and friends,

We are gathered here following a successful general strike by COSATU, an action that demonstrated that workers like Chris Hani cannot be intimidated or demobilised. The question is how we can take forward workers' demands in line with the legacy of Chris Hani.

We believe that Comrade Chris would emphasise two issues in the current phase of our struggle: the need for an objective understanding of progress in our National Democratic Revolution (also known as the NDR) and the role of mass mobilisation in that process.

The NDR famously has three key thrusts - to liberate black people, women and working people. We need consistently to evaluate our progress in each area.

In essence our revolutionary struggle is about mass empowerment. In the process, opportunities will be created for a few to rise economically and become part of the middle class or even the capitalist class itself. This must be seen in the context of the struggle to improve the lives of the majority of the people in our country who remain poor and disempowered. But the de-racialisation of the middle class must not happen at the expense of the struggle to transform society whilst ensuring that the oppression of women and workers is reversed.

At the recent SACP-COSATU bilateral, we effectively agreed that progress has mostly been made to deal with the national, gender question and oppression of workers. But inequalities and poverty remain, with workers getting less in economic terms from the new dispensation than the bosses. That means in effect that only a tiny minority of black people, and especially black women, have benefited in economic terms from liberation - although virtually everyone has gained to some degree from political and social progress.

Yesterday our members demonstrated their understanding that unemployment, job losses and poverty are the critical challenges we still face. Their experience is borne out by the statistics.

To start with, some four million people are unemployed. That means two workers out of every five cannot find work. Most of them are unemployed, and have never had a job since they left school. Meanwhile, employment growth has remained very slow. Indeed, the latest data show that in just the first three months of this year, employment dropped by 135 000, reflecting the wave of retrenchments in the past six months.

For many people who do have work, even formal jobs, pay and conditions remain appalling. This is especially true of workers who are not union members. One formal-sector worker in four earns less than R1000 a month. Many still suffer racist abuse on the job, with no hope of promotion or training. Casualisation affects increasing numbers.

The situation has changed least in agriculture and domestic work. There, most workers earn under R1000 a month, many employers provide neither paid leave nor job security, and racist and sexist abuse is common. For these workers, all too often apartheid has ended only on the television, not in their daily lives.

The fact that liberation has so far benefited the rich in economic terms emerges from one simple fact: the share of profits in national income increased from 1994 to 2004, while the share of wages declined. This in itself points to our failure to restructure the economy in the past decade.

What do we want - what would Chris Hani demand - for our second decade of freedom? The key challenge is to restructure the state and the economy to focus on ensuring greater equity and an end to poverty. For that, employment creation remains the central task.

In August, COSATU's Central Committee will seek to refine our demands on industrial policy. Our basic demand has long been that business and government focus all their efforts on employment creation.

A crucial step to achieving that aim is to expand relatively labour-intensive production in the formal sector, so that we create both more paid jobs and more opportunities for smaller enterprises. Achieving this aim requires far-reaching changes in current strategies. They include a greater focus on meeting basic needs in our own economy, rather than looking exclusively to exports; shifting exports gradually toward more labour-intensive sectors such as food processing, plastics and services; and ensuring a competitive exchange rate and appropriate tariff regime.

We also need to ensure that the investment commitments made at the GDS are met rigorously, so that productive investment increases qualitatively from its current very low levels.

At the same time, we must provide more resources and services for poor communities, so as to open the door to new kinds of economic activities. Critical measures include a substantial expansion in land reform, increased access to financial markets and retail networks for micro enterprise, and continued improvement in basic government infrastructure and services in our communities.

COSATU's proposal for a strong industrial strategy is contested by business and some government officials. They argue that the only way to develop is to maintain free markets for the formal sector, while using tax revenues gradually to improve services for the poor. At the same time, they support strict limits on taxation and government borrowing, effectively reducing the state's ability to rapidly uplift poor communities.

This free-market approach has been embodied in the recent discussion document for the ANC's National General Council. While it calls for a strong state, its most elaborate proposals would weaken the state's protection for workers. This approach buys into the idea that only exploitative labour relations can lead to job creation.

That flies in the face of our own experience in South Africa as well as the history of development around the world.

In the event sectors that largely ignore the labour laws - agriculture, domestic and the informal work - have lagged behind the formal sector. These industries typically do not provide paid leave or written contracts, contrary to the provisions of the BCEA, and the vast majority of workers earn under R1000 a month. Yet their share in total employment actually dropped from 40% in 2000 to 34% in 2004. This points to the fact that where employers have no incentive to improve conditions for workers, they also have no incentive to become more productive.

Comrade Chris studied the political economy of development in depth, and understood the importance of economic transformation for the NDR. He would certainly have agreed that only a structural approach, which diversified the economy in ways that supported equality and jobs, could achieve our aims.

The second crucial question facing the democratic movement today is how best we can ensure transformation. Chris Hani himself said clearly that the critical task is to build our organisations. That is why he went into full-time work for the SACP in the early 1990s, rather than seeking political office through the ANC. At that time, people were starting to dream about mouth-watering prospects high in government. It was part of Thembisile's greatness that he understood that mass mobilisation remained the key to our victory, even as we established democracy.

The fact is that leaders in government always face pressure from business. Companies always have resources to organise, to lobby, to wine and dine. In contrast, working people and poor communities have only the vote once every four years. Their power to influence politicians between elections remains limited, unless they have strong organisations to give them a voice.

In short, it is our organisations that give us power, through their militancy as well as their size. We cannot, then, prioritise policy work or political positions over building our organisations. As COSATU has resolved in its 2015 Plan, that means above all strengthening our internal structures and organising the unorganised.

In this process, a critical question is how we structure our organisations themselves in the current phase of the NDR. We must continuously review the relationship between the elements of the Alliance as well as the role of rest of civil society. We clearly need to do more to define the key roles and responsibilities of these organisations in taking forward the NDR.

A second critical question, and one that is crucial for the Chris Hani Institute itself, is how we manage the relationship between policy experts, our organisations and our members. Mass-based organisations cannot afford simply to sponsor independent policy thinkers who put out their own line without a mandate. Rather, we need to ensure that our members basically understand policy debates and mandate broad strategies in that context.

This places a huge burden on our organisations. Communicating our policy engagements and helping members understand the issues take up a great deal of time for leaders as well as officials. At the same time, we have to delay policy engagements until we have clear mandates in place. And we have to rein in our policy people on a continual basis, as they inevitably have to deal with proposals for which no collective mandate has yet emerged.

This, too, is in the spirit of Comrade Chris. He left us the rich tradition of ensuring that the concept of Socialism must be deeply rooted in the movement. As an intellectual leader who was part and parcel of the working class, he understood that complex notions of Socialism were meaningless to impoverished people struggling to survive. He is best known for his utterances saying that Socialism is not about big words but about simple concepts and meeting basic needs of the poor as a start. Rhetoric and jargon were foreign concepts to comrade Chris.

In the realignment of forces currently underway, none of us doubt which side of the equation Chris Hani would be on. He would have been in the truck yesterday supporting the demands of workers for jobs and in condemnation of casualisation, poverty wages and huge inequalities that remain firmly in place. He would be astonished by the levels of unemployment. He too would have joined in the calls that the next decade be declared a workers' decade in economic terms. He would have repeatedly reminded us that the Freedom Charter calls for the sharing of national wealth and for work and security for all. These clauses must be given a meaning for the millions of the unemployed and the working poor.

Comrades, it will never be the bourgeoisie that brings about a more equal society - this task falls squarely on the shoulders of the workers and the working class. As we commemorate the life of Comrade Chris Hani as a selfless son of our country, let us re-commit ourselves to working selflessly to transform our society. Our central challenge remains to give our people a voice and the power to ensure our liberation translates into growing solidarity and broad-based prosperity.

Taking his life away robbed workers and the poor a true champion and their future. We can only salute him truly by emulating his examples and stand firm shoulder to shoulder with the poor and marginalised whilst at the same time educating them that the system of capitalism is not designed to meet all the demands of the poor. In his memory we must ensure that we multiply the forces of those who understand this basic truth and want to invest in building a life where the state spends all its energy in building a better life for all, in particular the working class.