Address by the Cosatu Deputy General Secretary Bheki Ntshalintshali, at NUM Annivesary02 - 12 - 07 |
Speech for the NUM 25th anniversary commemoration, Rustenburg, 2 December 2007, by Bheki Ntshalintshali, Deputy General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions
Comrade President Senzeni Zokwana,
Comrade General Secretary Frans Baleni
Comrades and friends
It is a great honour to be invited to address this historic gathering. On behalf of COSATU's National Office Bearers, our Central Executive Committee and 1.9 million members, I congratulate the National Union of Mineworkers on reaching such an important milestone.
For 25 glorious years, since 4 December 1982, COSATU's biggest and strongest union has stood firm in defence of workers' rights. Your members have been in the vanguard of the struggle for a better life for workers and socialist future.
In August this year you commemorated the 20th anniversary of the most famous chapter in the history of that struggle - the biggest wage strike in South Africa's history, when more than 300 000 black mineworkers in the gold and coal mines downed tools for three weeks in 1987. It was a struggle brought South Africa's mining sector to its knees and hammered one of the biggest nails into the coffin of apartheid.
The 14 000 founding members have now mushroomed to 270 000. You have gone from strength to strength and become the giant union that you are today. It is a fitting tribute to your success that your President, Senzeni Zokwana, has been elected as the President of the international sector confederation ICEM, one of three COSATU leaders in similar senior international positions. COSATU congratulates him and has complete confidence that he will excel in carrying out his duties to the world's mining, construction and energy workers.
We must never forget on occasions like this, that while we celebrate our victories, in particular the defeat of apartheid, in which the mineworkers played such a central role, these victories came at a heavy price. We must never forget those who lost their lives, both those struggling for democracy and freedom and those who died, and continue to die, in fatal accidents.
On Tuesday you will be mobilising you members in a national strike against the intolerable number of accidents your members face. The grim toll of deaths and serious injuries in the industry is outrageous. Almost daily, families hear the news that a husband, a father, a brother - a breadwinner - has been suddenly taken from them, as a result of accidents, most of which could and should have been prevented.
An average of 200 workers are killed every year. 199 died in 2006, 202 in 2005, and in just the first seven months of 2007, 122 workers had already been killed. The deaths are continuing almost daily, swelling the number of families left destitute by the loss of their breadwinners and loved ones.
The position is if anything even worse in the construction sector, where Department of labour officials repeatedly uncover breaches of the Health and Safety laws, when they make their all too few inspections of building sites. The result is a totally unacceptable level of accidents, many of them fatal. This carnage in the mines and on the sites has to stop, and stop now!
As well as accidents at work, mine and construction workers and their families have also been hit hard by the HIV/Aids epidemic. Yesterday was World Aids Day, and it would be wrong of us not to remember all those we have lost their lives to this terrible scourge and to rededicate ourselves to the National Strategy Programme to prevent and treat this deadly virus.
Comrades
As we face crucial political challenges posed by the ANC Policy Conference, I want to touch on some of the decisions of COSATU's 9th National Congress and the 4th Central Committee in September. This is necessary because of the way the media misreports and distorts our views and tries to turn what should be constructive debates with our Alliance partners into venomous and personalised dog-fights.
At the heart of these decisions is our conviction that whilst our position as workers has improved dramatically since our democratic breakthrough in 1994, particularly in the areas of democratic and human rights - thanks in no small part to the leadership role that the working class played - we have not yet won our freedom on the economic front. Transformation has not been completed.
We have a democratic constitution, laws that safeguard workers' rights and the freedom to organise, strike and demonstrate. Many unions have been able to negotiate improvements in living standards and many more families and communities now enjoy access to basic services, which used to be restricted to a white minority.
But we still face enormous problems and challenges. Around 20 million of our people are still mired in poverty. The first decade of democracy has unfortunately favoured capital more than the workers and the poor. Indeed some workers, who were working but are now unemployed, or who used to have a permanent job with benefits, but whose jobs have been casualised, are economically even worse off than they were under apartheid.
Inequality has in fact widened, as the rich minority of bureaucrats and capitalists have become richer, while our wages, despite all our efforts to improve them, remain extremely low and have stagnated during the 13 years of democracy.
As the declaration of our Central Committee said in September: "Despite progress recorded in the last thirteen years, the capitalist class gained the most in economic terms. Workers have to contend with poor quality jobs, poverty and unemployment and millions of workers do not enjoy the fundamental rights enshrined in our labour laws. While the Constitution is progressive, the substantive realisation of the rights it embodies remains a promise on paper. The country's economic policy, including the budget, is not based on the promises of the Constitution."
The main reason for this is the government's catastrophic economic policies, notably privatisation and GEAR, which have led to the scandalous situation of a supposedly 'booming' economy in which almost 40% of workers are unemployed, 40%-50% of the population face grinding poverty and we have one of the highest levels of inequality in the world.
The workers' hardships are made even more severe by the disastrous policy of regular increases in interest rates. It is a policy makes it costlier for investors to start new businesses and create new jobs, and puts pressure on existing firms to offset the rising cost of servicing loans by retrenching workers.
Consequently the rate at which we are creating new jobs is nowhere near what is required to meet even the modest ASGI-SA target of halving the 2004 levels of unemployment and poverty by 2014. In addition far too many of the relatively few new jobs that are being created are casual, temporary, insecure and low-paid, especially in construction and retail.
In addition these interest rate hikes have also directly cut workers' living standards by raising repayments on bonds and on goods bought on credit, at a time when inflation, the very problem that the Reserve Bank claims to be solving, is skyrocketing upwards, particularly the price of most basic foods, like bread, milk and maize meal.
And it has now been confirmed that this situation has been exploited by the bread manufacturers to fix prices illegally, so that the poor consumers have had to pay even more for this essential food! We are demanding that the guilty companies should not just be fined; they must be forced to cut the price of bread so that the customers get some benefit from the Competition Commission's verdict on price fixing.
We also want to see a much broader investigation into similar price-fixing cartels in the production and distribution of bread and other food products. One thing we know for certain is that none of the increased prices finds its way into the pockets of the workers who produce the food, who remain the worst paid and most exploited sections of our class.
The NUM, like every other union, must keep monitoring these price increases and make sure that next year's wage demands fully compensate workers for the drop in their real standard of living over the past year.
Comrades
In order to make the second ten years of democracy a decade for the workers and the poor, we have to make sure that there is a radical shift in the policies adopted by the ANC National Conference. Job creation and cutting poverty must be the supreme national priorities, with strategies to accelerate growth and distribute the benefits to the poorest sections of our society.
But if we are to achieve this we also need a new style of political leadership. One unfortunate result of the move to the right in sections of the ANC leadership in the mid-1990s was the emergence of an undemocratic and materialistic culture in our movement and in society as a whole.
One of the most serious aspects of this new culture was that the development of new policies, policies, policies that set the course of our economic future, was left in the hands of an elite minority of government ministers, civil servants, business consultants and academic 'experts'.
On the day that GEAR was announced it was proclaimed to be a non-negotiable policy. No ANC branch, region, province and even the NEC were consulted on it, let alone the alliance partners.
This was completely at odds with the ANC's traditional democratic, bottom-up way of formulating policy, yet increasingly those who questioned this new culture were subjected to bullying, insults and labelling to try to keep them quiet.
Democratic space has closed down and, as we have witnessed with the attempted prosecution of Comrade Jacob Zuma, this elite has even used state institutions to resolve political battles and leadership contests. The public broadcaster has also has been used in these factional battles.
Comrades
COSATU has already put on record its view that: "Whilst the historic constituency of the ANC remains the black working class, and the poor majority, the national leadership of the ANC is increasingly becoming capitalist and middle strata in composition and character. Furthermore the ANC is also dominated by cadres drawn from the state and that there are far too few cadres from outside the state. Working class leadership has been weakened within the national leadership structures of the ANC."
In this context, the 9th National Congress resolved to link the fight for new ANC policies with new ways to make sure that these policies are implemented. Hence the idea of an Alliance Pact for Transformation - a serious intervention by the working class to get us back on the road to the revolutionary transformation of society. We have to go beyond the deracialisation of capitalism in a way that does not change the undemocratic and inequitable way in which power is controlled and wealth is distributed.
Congress delegates made it abundantly clear that the current status quo is simply not sustainable. It cannot be business-as-usual. They called on the Central Executive Committee to develop "a set of policy objectives . to measure the extent to which the ANC is able to shift to represent the interests of the working class." The congress then said criteria to measure this shift should include:
1. Implementation of nationalisation provisions of the Freedom Charter,
2. An end to privatisation and commercialisation/commodification of service delivery,
3. Adoption of an economic policy that ensures redistribution of wealth to the poor, and
4. Abolition of legislation that is not worker-friendly.
Further the congress states that these criteria "must include measurable outcomes, with specified timescales so that by June 2008 we are able to assess the extent to which these criteria have been met".
As you well know Congress also made a radical departure from COSATU's traditional position of not involving itself in internal ANC leadership questions. While it appreciated that only the ANC members, through their branches, have a right to elect new leaders, our delegates felt strongly that COSATU, as the biggest component of the Tripartite Alliance, has an interest in seeing a leadership which affirms the ANC as a progressive left movement biased towards the working class and the poor.
The aim is to ensure that the ANC and its NEC are not only representative of its constituencies but also lead us towards the kind of radical change that is so necessary in our society. The criteria for leadership that we have put forward include:
1. Commitment to the radical NDR and thoroughgoing transformation
2. Proven commitment to the Alliance
3. Commitment to the unity of the ANC and the democratic movement
4. Commitment to make this decade truly a decade of workers and the poor
5. Internationalism based on historic position of the ANC that is anti imperialist
6. Working-class leadership
We have used these principles to identify preferred candidates for the top six, most senior positions of the ANC, comrades who collectively are closest to meeting these principles.
That certainly does not mean that if all these comrades are elected the struggle has been won. Whatever the outcome of Polokwane, COSATU and the NUM will always be independent and militant organisations fighting to defend workers' interests. But whoever is at the helm, we insist that it cannot be business as usual in the Alliance and on policy questions. We will keep campaigning for policies to accelerate transformation and empower our class, through job creation, redistribution of wealth and alleviation of poverty.
We were certainly encouraged by the resolutions passed in the ANC Policy Conference, which reveal a significant shift to the left. If they are endorsed in Polokwane and implemented by the new leadership, they would go a long way to destroy apartheid's economic and social legacy.
I wish you well as you confront these challenges. You have been in the front lines of the struggle for a quarter of a century. We are confident that you will play and even bigger role in the next 25 years.
Amandla ngawethu