Address by COSATU General Secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, to the seventh National Congress of NEHAWU, 28 June - 2004

 

Zwelinzima Vavi address to the seventh National Congress of NEHAWU
28 June 2004

Comrade President Vusi Nhlapo, General Secretary Fikile Slovo Majola and all NOB’s Delegates to the Seventh National Congress of NEHAWU International guests from our continent and across the globe
COSATU President and leaders of COSATU and its affiliated unions. Leaders of our revolutionary tripartite alliance

Comrades and friends,

Thank you very much for the honour to address this Seventh Congress of NEHAWU, which will perhaps prove one of your most historic. Receive revolutionary greetings from your federation’s Central Executive Committee and the more than 1.7 million fellow members of the federation.

Your congress takes place at an opportune moment in our history. It takes place a few days after the 17th Anniversary of NEHAWU and 49th anniversary of the Freedom Charter. It also takes place after the successful democratic elections and within the context of the celebrations of our first decade of democracy.

These momentous event calls for strategic review of our work, our achievements and setbacks we suffered. Only on the basis of a thorough review of the past period can we be able to map out the strategic challenges of the coming ten years. For NEHAWU, this challenge is particularly pressing.

I attach a great deal of importance and honour to the fact that you asked me to address your congress. I was in your Third National Congress in 1992, in what was then my capacity as the Organising Secretary of COSATU.

I spent all the days of that Congress helping with what was a pretty difficult event to manage. The union at that time was in a bad shape. It managed to develop a programme and elected leadership that ensured that NEHAWU turned the corner and became the fastest growing union in COSATU. By the mid of the 1990s, NEHAWU had taken a leadership role in COSATU. As a result, when I addressed your Sixth Congress, I was able to praise the role you played in leading the federation in many respects.

This year I am called upon to address your Congress yet again. I had to think long and hard about how I should package my message. I also thought that there should be a reason why you are calling on me in particular to address your congress, given my long history of working with the union. I know that you expect an honest evaluation of the challenges NEHAWU faces in its Seventh Congress. Your best friend is not the one that pats you at the back and tells you all is fine when you make mistakes. You should expect honesty and sincerity from those you regard as real friends and comrades.

Let me start by outlining the political challenge. We have made it through the elections. COSATU has won praise for the unparalleled role we played in ensuring that sweet decisive victory for the ANC, with a 70% majority.

Our shop stewards and activists were in the forefront of the Alliance campaign, dedicating long hours and days to mobilising for victory. We are in particular grateful to those who focused on KwaZulu Natal and the Western Cape where for the first time the ANC has taken over the government. Hundreds of COSATU shop stewards risked their lives to ensure a free election there by volunteering to act as party agents for the ANC.

The programme of the government for the next five years has been outlined. The Ministers are now providing more details to the framework in an attempt to take forward the ANC’s Elections Manifesto. We expect more information in the near future, as the various departments seek to respond to the President’s deadlines.

All of us have made assessments of the current conjuncture. The CEC in its May meeting published a political paper that outlines the challenges we face in this period and the next five years.

COSATU is meeting all strategic ministers in this period. In August we will hold an Alliance Summit. The Summit is critical to ensure that we place the alliance at the helm of the transformation process.

In that month, we will also hold our CEC in Cape Town so that we can interact effectively with parliament and its strategic committees and leadership.

Through these engagements we seek to ensure that we cement the relations built during the elections campaign, and sustain them for the next five years and beyond as part of building this popular movement for transformation – a people’s contract to create work and fight poverty.

The principal challenge we face is how are:
· To position ourselves to lead the ‘peoples contract to create work and fight poverty’, which was promised by the Manifesto?
· To translate the current good relationships in the Alliance into a coherent movement that together drives transformation?
These are the strategic questions of our time. Your congress provides our movement yet another platform to explore the answers to these questions.

One critical challenge we face is to ensure that we maintain a dynamic linkage with our people, ensuring a confident mood to inform how we conduct politics. This two-way education process is critical for our revolution. Nothing is more worrying than a leadership that feels isolated and distrustful of its own constituencies and its own base. Such a leadership is clearly vulnerable and weak.

Equally, for the masses of our people nothing is more satisfying than to feel that the leadership is neither aloof nor ill informed about the challenges they face.

A few weeks ago, COSATU convened a conference of public-sector unions to look at the challenges we face in the transformation of the public service. The main resolutions aimed

· To build worker unity across the Federation, both by strengthening the co-operation of the public-service unions working toward a cartel, and by establishing single unions for education, health, the justice system and general public administration.
· To establish a co-ordinating committee to explore ways to move toward a cartel and to improve our understanding of proposals for a single public service.
· To request COSATU to establish a co-ordinator in the Secretariat that would drive rigorous implementation of resolutions taken.
· To campaign for improved delivery of government services by addressing weaknesses in current systems as well as working to improve the service ethos of our members.

We now understand that the ANC plans to convene a Public Sector Summit to discuss how unions and other stakeholders can contribute to the People’s Contract. This Congress must help us define a realistic way forward. We know that we will not improve service delivery simply by calling on public servants to work better and harder. Rather, we must also create the conditions where every public servant can do more.

At the same time, we are in the middle of a difficult round of negotiations in the public service. We are faced with a relatively low wage offer, despite rapid growth in the national budget. At the same time, we have to ask if we have continued to maintain our strategic vision on the transformation of the public service. Above all, we have not driven implementation of transformatory agreements around pay and conditions of service. We must accelerate efforts to ensure every public servant has decent pay, fair benefits, a real career, and the resources needed to serve our people.

The challenge for this Congress is ultimately to understand the organisational and political demands placed on NEHAWU by the transformation of the state and our society as well as the move toward a single public service. The long-standing resolution of NEHAWU and COSATU to create cartels and ultimately super unions is now more urgent and imperative than ever.

This challenge links strongly to the main issue I want to address today. NEHAWU is emerging from a difficult spell that has been disastrous for the union. We are emerging from the period of deep divisions that threatened the very existence of the union. We are emerging from a period where principles were threatened and objectivity and truth became a threat and an enemy. We are emerging from a situation where cliques tried to stand on each other’s carcass, while each proclaimed itself the true custodian of NEHAWU’s best interests.

We are emerging from a period where clearly wrong practises were condoned in the name of protecting each from another. In this period, some people tried to rationalise actions that were simply wrong.

We are emerging from the period where blind loyalty to individual leaders and camps meant some were prepared to justify the most undemocratic practises. We are emerging from a period when it became common to circulate pamphlets that sought to slander and injure the character of those seen as belonging to opposite cliques.

We are emerging from a period where factions were so eager to defend their evil deeds. The bosses’ own newspapers became a platform to ‘expose the truths’ about leaders of what were perceived as the opposing faction.

In the midst of this mudslinging the organisation suffered and necessitated that we establish a Commission to investigate and develop a strategy to assist NEHAWU to address the problems it were facing. The sensitivities arising out of the findings of the Commission did not allow for open discussion of the Commission and the COSATU’s CEC decision arising from its recommendation. This was done to safeguard unity of the union that was fragile. Not everyone in the union supported the need for the Commission and as a result some openly refused to cooperate or attempt to block its work. For that reason we are grateful for the few who took their time to appear before the Commission. One of the key outcomes of the work of the Commission is the fact that it allowed NOB’s to work together and stopped open hostilities that existed before it was established.

The fact that in this Congress there is a better mood and unity can be attributed to the work of the Commission.

But are we truly out of this period? I am asking this because I learnt of the latest ‘titbit’ circulated by these faceless forces on the eve of this congress. This ‘titbit’ seeks to destroy the perceived opponents of the authors by peddling untruths about some of the NOB’s.

I am calling this a ‘titbit’ because it is similar to the infamous pamphlets that the apartheid security apparatus used to circulate in the 1980s. They sought to destroy leaders of the movement, and in particular COSATU and the UDF, with our founding President Elijah Barayi as the principal target.

In the ugly period, no one gained except the enemies of the working class. The following issues became obvious.

1. NEHAWU abandoned its Operation 400 000, and in fact the union stopped growing in this period and actually lost members.
2. Service to members was undermined as officials who should have been dismissed found protection from one or either of the camps. For example the process of restructuring was managed badly in many cases, leaving thousands of members vulnerable to employer efforts to drive retrenchment. When leadership is divided they become unable to provide strategic leadership to the organisation and the officials will and did take advantage of the situation.
3. The union’s ability to provide strategic leadership to COSATU was undermined. In the 1994 and 1997 COSATU Congresses, you undoubtedly held a most strategic position. In contrast, your situation was so bad that you could not even enjoy the glamour associated with our Seventh Congress held in September 2003.
4. The image of NEHAWU and the trade union movement in general was undermined, as the cabals forgot the bigger picture in pursuit of narrow and often personal gain at the expense of the union and its members. In the process the unions were projected as corrupt with the City Press keen to be used as the platform of this destructive cabals and tendencies.
5. The union was engulfed in such a financial crisis that at one point it was 14 months in arrears, risking losing its affiliation to COSATU. The union did not properly anticipate and manage the sudden growth and agency fee that brought lot of money. Further, the union financial situation had a knock on effect on the Federation, paralysing it for more than a year.

The rest of the COSATU public sector unions could not escape the impact of these challenging times. Government was able to unilaterally impose a wage settlement in 1999 – a slap in the face for the union movement as a whole, in part due to incoherent leadership and poor preparation. To be brutally honest, the public sector unions have still to recover from that public humiliation. I am certain that as you prepare for this tough round of negotiations you will avoid the mistakes of that period.

I am deliberately exaggerating the role of divisions in that defeat to drive home the point that only the employer will remain a victor until NEHAWU sorts out its house.

NEHAWU has always led us in promoting women within the union. Yet during this period, you somehow took steps that were not compatible with your own policy. It seems there is some backlash against your own progressive gender policy, which was perceived an obstacle to individual ambitions.

COSATU was caught in the crossfire in its attempt to resolve the problem. Some were so consumed by the internal fights that they were even ready to sacrifice the Federation. There was even an attempt to deny that problems existed as a means to block intervention by the Federation.

We recognise the strides we have made in the past year or so. These are important and go to the correct direction. NEHAWU is in good standing in COSATU. You are daily regaining your confidence and pride. The divisions are clearly not as deep as they were. More and more of you are beginning to see events as they are. A lie is the lie and a slander campaign is a slander campaign - the days where it seemed that many NEHAWU activists could not see the difference between right and wrong are coming to the end. I fully endorse your unreserved condemnation of the ‘titbit’ circulated on the eve of this congress. The union’s standing in COSATU and society is on the rise again. The presence of the leaders of our people in this congress and their interests in its outcome confirms this.

Still it is not time to drop the your guard there are still signs of problems that faced the union two years ago. For example the very circulation of the titbit and indecisiveness around certain issues such as who can occupy leadership positions in the union, are some of the indicators. Congress must act decisively to uproot divisions within the union.

Let me pay tribute to many cadres who refused to identify with any factions and stood very firm on the side of the truth and correct history of the union, protecting its true tradition under very trying circumstance when they were being lured to support one or the other faction.

The fact that NEHAWU did not completely collapse is a positive sign that illustrate the organisational depth and the stubborn determination to defend this glorious union. Any other movement would have collapsed under such trying circumstances.

So what are the principal challenges facing NEHAWU at this time of our history? What are the inescapable tasks, which perhaps were dodged in earlier Congresses but which must now be addressed without fail? What programme of action will this Congress produce to take the union back to where it belongs – in the forefront of transformation at the workplace, in the public service, and in the state; in COSATU, within the Alliance, and in society as a whole?

Let me offer some answers to these questions.

The principle challenge is to achieve unity and without sweeping dirt under the carpet. Those who sweet talk during meetings and then go on to circulate slanderous pamphlets at night must be shown the door. The staff members who provide uncritical intellectual support to factions must be asked to leave the labour movement. Unscrupulous and unprincipled officials who believe that they are being paid to use union resources to sow divisions and peddle untruths about leaders of the workers never founded this union. Only those committed to unity must stay. The deadwood that only survived because of the existence of divisions must be told to leave.

Operation 400 000 must be revived. We must grow or die. COSATU is keen to have this as the principal campaign as we celebrate our 20th anniversary in 2005. We must make this campaign as high profile and active as the elections campaign, in line with the resolutions of COSATU’s Seventh National Congress. Critical in those resolutions was a consistent effort to prioritise recruitment, with time dedicated by NOB’s, officials and shop stewards; a direct link to improvements in service to members, consolidating our new recruits consistently; and efforts to build worker unity by improving demarcation within COSATU and by gaining affiliation by independent unions whilst pursuing unity with NACTU and FEDUSA. For NEHAWU, a critical element of this campaign is to improve workers’ position in negotiations through development of minimum-service agreements in health.

We will relaunch the recruitment campaign at our 19th Anniversary, with a target of growing at least 6%, or by 105 000 members, in honour of our 20th Anniversary next year. That means NEHAWU will be expected to recruit around 10 000 members. This Congress must think about how it will achieve this aim. You should refer to our Seventh Congress resolution for strategic guidelines to direct the process.

The Organisational Development Programme, about which you first taught COSATU, must be revived parallel to this Operation 400 000. This revolutionary programme was a victim of divisions and power mongering. Yet any union not consistently adjusting and reviewing its operations has no future. We need new kinds of fulltime, competent cadre who have joined the union, not to promote divisions in order to hide behind them, but to serve our members. Members must come first today, tomorrow and every day.
That is what NEHAWU told us in the 1990s, and having learnt this from you, that is what COSATU wants to tell you in the middle of the 2000s.

Finally, NEHAWU needs to help plan the next steps toward rationalising demarcation in the public service and toward building COSATU’s presence throughout the sector. As our public-sector conference agreed, we must ensure one union – one industry across the public sector. In particular, health and general public administration workers must establish single super unions, overcoming the divisions inherited from the past.

Comrades and friends,
NEHAWU has a glorious history, and looks to a glorious future. We must not fail the memory of those dedicated cadre who fought for public servants’ rights in the darkest days of apartheid. By building a united and strong NEHAWU, we provide the best memorial to our leaders, like your founding President, Comrade Bheki Mkhize that true and all round cadre of the movement who was gunned down; for the sake of Yure Mdyogolo your first General Secretary who as the President of the union reminded us yesterday was pushed through his flat’s window. For the sake of those workers who laid their lives to form and build this union we cannot fail.

COSATU is awaiting the results of this congress in particular the work of the commissions with keen interests. We wish you the best of luck.