Volume 13, No. 14, 10 April 2014

In this Issue: Chris Hani: 21st Anniversary Commemoration What is real work?

Red Alert Chris Hani: 21st Anniversary Commemoration

10 April 2014,
Thomas Nkobi Memorial Cemetery, Boksburg

Do it for Madiba, Vote ANC!
Do it for Chris Hani, Vote ANC!

Address by SACP General Secretary Comrade Blade Nzimande

Today, on this 21st anniversary commemoration of the cowardly murder of our General Secretary Cde Chris Hani, the SACP once more wishes to lower its red flag in honour of this martyr of our revolution. Cde Chris, dare we remind ourselves, was a disciplined, loyal and dedicated cadre of our movement, and a leader of both the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. Cde Chris belonged to both these organisations, and also served in Umkhonto weSizwe, because he was a great believer in that no revolution will take place unless its cadres are at the centre of it, and that all revolutionaries must take responsibility for our revolution.

Cde Chris stood for the unity of our Alliance, as well as the unity of each of the components of this revolutionary Alliance. If there is one lesson that today we need to learn from the life and example from Cde Chris’s life, it is that the unity of the Alliance must be placed above individual interests. For Cde Chris, in line with the traditions of our own movement, no one individual can be bigger than any of our formations. Let us dedicate this 21st anniversary to the unity of our alliance and all its components. In particular the SACP is calling for maximum and disciplined unity among the workers of our country.

Cde Chris was always amongst the first in undertaking new tasks and challenges in different phases of our revolution. When our movement took up arms, he was amongst the first to join Umkhonto. When the movement suspended the armed struggle he was in the forefront of explaining that decision to our people, even though he had disagreed with it when it was debated. The immediate task of the revolution now, on the 21st anniversary of his assassination, is to return the ANC to power with an overwhelming majority on 7 May 2014! Let us honour Cde Chris by going out in our numbers on the Election Day!

In memory of Cde Chris, we especially urge all workers to unite and come out in numbers to vote for the ANC! The working class must take a lead in fulfilling the task of the moment.

The 21st commemoration of Cde Chris comes at a crucial juncture in our ongoing struggle to defend, consolidate and deepen our national democratic revolution. Firstly, on this 21st anniversary we are celebrating 20 years of our democracy as well as its very significant achievements. Secondly, and no less important, just under a month from now, we will be holding the fifth democratic elections in our country. Thirdly, we are commemorating this anniversary faced with the task of driving and advancing our Alliance’s shared strategic perspective and programme, that of leading a second, more radical, phase of our transition.

However, we are also commemorating the life of the tragic incident of 1993 at a time when our ally, COSATU, is facing one of its toughest challenges in its entire history of existence.

Unite our movement in memory of Chris Hani

It is very important that all our cadres must at all times lead an effort to defend and deepen the unity of our movement, our Alliance and all its components. In memory of Cde Chris we must be cadres of and for unity! Most importantly we must all seek unity between our leadership and members of our organisations, as well as unity amongst the majority of the people of our country, including all the motive forces of our revolution.

However, unity must be approached from a revolutionary and not from a mechanical and opportunistic stance. For instance, there can never be unity between the working class and the capitalist class. There also can never be unity between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces. In fact, part of building unity in a revolution, must include the isolation and defeat of those sowing divisions within our ranks. It is from this perspective that we must approach all the key tasks facing our revolution at this point in time.

Let us close ranks, let us unite COSATU

Let us close ranks - let us unite and give no quarter both to the old and new enemies of our alliance and national liberation movement, by defeating the arrogant Party of white privilege and racist exploitation of workers the DA; let us equally defeat demagogic, and neo-fascist tenderpreneurs the EFF!

The SACP calls on the workers to close ranks! The SACP says let us close ranks at the workplace, in the community and everywhere in society! Let us unite and rally behind the African National Congress (ANC) and our Alliance as comprising of the ANC, SACP, COSATU and SANCO.

The working class - consisting of the employed and all the people who make a living from their own labour, the unemployed and the poor, has played a crucial role in our national liberation struggle and the defeat of apartheid twenty years ago in the achievement of our democratic breakthrough in 1994.

There is absolutely no reason to abstain from defending and deepening the advances we have achieved since the beginning of our struggle and the 1994 democratic breakthrough. Similarly, there is no reason to divide and destroy the unity of our Alliance and the entire liberation movement which is led by the ANC. In the first place it is through our unity as a people who suffered oppression and exploitation, working together with other revolutionaries and democrats, that we defeated apartheid. This unity remains critical for us to take South Africa forward and make more advances.  

Now is not the time to allow the working class to be distracted by internal divisions or cults of the personality, or any narrow interests. The ANC-led Alliance still remains the only relevant and most appropriate vehicle to take forward our national democratic revolution.

Our national democratic revolution seeks to eliminate the injustices of the colonial and apartheid past and to transform our country into a united, non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous society in which there is a better life for all. No frustration, disappointment, unhappiness or personality cult or opportunistic posturing can be big enough to justify working class desertion from this critical terrain of struggle.

When the working class is divided:

• Monopoly capital laughs all the way to the bank;
• The SABC is looted by tenderpreneurs;
• Profit greedy private health care erodes the prospects of rolling out the National Health Insurance (NHI);
• Private media oligopolies continue to block digital migration as they squabble among themselves for dominance. Private communication oligopolies continue to rip us off, charging among the highest cell-phone fees in the world;
• The corrupt and their corrupters feel safer, knowing that the organised working class is distracted.

The SACP calls on the workers and the poor to use the election campaign to take back the moral high ground, to close ranks and roll back the corrupting domination of monopoly capital on our society.

As the Alliance, we have a responsibility to help COSATU overcome its problems. But, in doing so we must make sure that we do not reward anarchy and counter-revolution. The unity of COSATU can never be that between the workers and those who are deliberately seeking to divide, weaken and ultimately destroy the federation. We repeat our warning to organised workers to beware of business unionism and the dangers it poses for trade union unity.

There are some who portray themselves as worker leaders, but they are focusing all their attention on fighting internal factional battles, and on opposition to the ANC-led government and the Alliance. By advocating electoral absenteeism or anti-ANC electioneering, whilst attacking the primary political formations of our Alliance, the ANC and SACP and de-campaigning the ANC, they are playing directly into the hands of unbridled personal and factional ambitions, opportunist organisations such as those formed by tenderpreneurs, and the DA - the party of big capital and white privilege.

In memory of Cde Chris Hani, we would also like to call upon all the metalworkers of our country not to allow themselves to be misled into abandoning the ANC. After all what is wrong if the ANC engages COSATU in order to unite all our forces for an ANC electoral victory? Chris Hani never walked away from COSATU, the ANC and the SACP, even when the movement was faced with difficult challenges. Walking away from the Alliance can only act to divide the working class and the only beneficiaries in this instance will be the bosses.

On May 7 - let us teach the DA, the arrogant party of monopoly capital and minority privilege a powerful lesson

We call on the working class to deliver a decisive electoral defeat on the DA:

• A party that opposed farm workers minimum wage being raised from R65 a day
• A party that supports labour brokers
• A party that wants to roll back hard-won labour market legislation in favour of a “flexible labour market”;
• A party that portrays COSATU as the enemy, and marches on its head-office
• A party of hypocrisy that speaks out of two sides of its mouth on black economic empowerment and on land reform, a party that fudges its silent approval of the Zionist apartheid wall in Palestine.
• A party that is seeking to disguise its conservative minority white electoral machine and its neo-liberal agenda behind parachuted black faces and a newly discovered support for ANC presidents of the past.

The DA is a party financially supported by the likes of Natie Kirsh who made his fortune in SA by exploiting township traders and collaborating with despotic feudalism in Swaziland. This is the Natie Kirsh whose company Magal Security Systems supplies intrusion detecting devices to the Israeli Defence Force for the construction of the apartheid wall in West Bank. The wall has been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice. But not only does the DA (like Agang) take dirty money from Kirsh, it takes instructions from him as well. It was Kirsh who instructed Zille and Ramphele to join up in their ill-fated marriage.

We call on the working class - Come out in your large numbers to deliver a massive electoral blow to this party of big capital and white privilege. Electoral abstenteeism simply plays into the hands of this retrograde anti-worker party.

On May 7 - let us also deal a decisive electoral blow against the EFF - the party led by the most corrupttenderpreneurs

Workers are not fooled by these loud-mouthed demagogues, these tenderpreneurs in red berets who not only plagiarised our identities and ideas from our Progressive Youth Movement comprising of the ANCYL, YCLSA and student organisations SASCO and COSAS. 

These loud-mouthed demagogues and tenderpreneurs in red berets have never done an honest day’s work, so where do they get their fancy cars, their Breitling watches? Where do they get their campaign funding? Africa and the world have seen this kind of clowning before. But it is a mistake to just laugh it off - the Hitlers and Mussolinis rose to prominence demagogically sprouting “socialism”, and then butchering the working class when in power.

The EFF practices the same kind of demagogy that we are seeing playing itself out on the platinum belt at present. The EFF, like AMCU, hijacks real grievances but for entirely self-serving leadership purposes. That is why workers in the platinum sector are being led to a slaughter house of loss of earnings and potential retrenchments. This can only strengthen the bosses and weaken the working class.

For all these reasons, we urge workers to come out in their overwhelming numbers to defeat anti-worker right-wing formations - whether they are cloaked in blue or red guises.

In memory of Chris Hani we call upon workers to vote ANC

A working class election campaign gives us the opportunity to consolidate and take forward progress made by:

• An ANC-led government that in the last five years has turned the tide against HIV and AIDS and falling life expectancy rate.
• An ANC-led government that rigorously leads HIV and AIDS prevention programme including prevention of mother to child transmission; the government that has made anti-retroviral treatment available for 2.4 million people; the government that has increased life expectancy of more people with an average of 60 years in 2012.  
• An ANC-led government that opposes privatisation - because of working class and SACP struggles within the alliance itself.
• A government that has rescued the auto sector in our country through public investment of R22bn in 183 projects, preserving 46,000 jobs and adding 9850 more jobs.
• A government that has led interventions in other industrial sectors including clothing and textiles, imposing a 75 percent local procurement requirement on the public sector.
• It is an ANC-led government which, in the past 5 years, has driven an economic and social infrastructure programme, committing R1-trillion of public spending as a key counter-cyclical intervention in the midst of the gravest global economic crisis since the 1930s.
• A government that has introduced the removal of adverse credit information, coming into effect from 1st April, impacting on some 10 million South Africans suffocated by mashonisas and high bank charges.
• A government that in the face of DA opposition has re-opened the lodgement of land claims, to address the plight of millions of the landless and land hungry
• A government that has provided work opportunities to 4.5 million unemployed South Africans through Expanded Public Works and Community Work programmes.
• A government that has opened the doors of higher learning to hundreds of thousands of more children of the working class with a trebling of the National Students Financial Scheme from R3.1bn in 2009 to the current R9.6bn.

Let us close ranks! Let us roll back monopoly capital! Let us deal decisively with corruption! Let us defeat anti-working class forces!

We have achieved important advances since our 1994 democratic breakthrough, but there is much more to be done.

Let us vote ANC for:

• Jobs and decent work.
• Transformation of the financial sector to serve the people!
• For land and food security.
• Defending and deepening our democracy.
• For NHI and universal quality health care for all.
• Access to quality education and skills development.
• Better housing and basic services for all.

Surely, there are many struggles we must continue with. This should strengthen our government and firmly steel it in the hands of people. It will also contribute in the building of a democratic developmental state that we seek to achieve.  

Let us intensify our struggles against labour brokers, and ensure that they are banned. The SACP continues to denounce labour brokering as a practice used by the bosses to deepen the exploitation of workers and render work precarious. Labour brokering denies workers labour market security, employment security, job security and work security. Labour brokering also inhibits income security, social security and social dialogue at work. 

Because of Cde Chris’ sacrifice, today we have a good story to tell!

In memory of Cde Chris we can claim all these victories because indeed it was his blood and that of many of our martyrs that enabled our 1994 democratic breakthrough. But the forces that have no good story to tell are trying by all means to discredit the ANC and President Zuma.

The SACP wishes to reiterate its commitment to the struggle against corruption. We, together with our Allies and government condemn all forms of corruption, whether in the public or private sector. We welcome the fact that the President had on his own appointed the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) to investigate the many allegations of corruption in our country, including the inflation of the prices in the security upgrades of the President’s own residence at Nkandla. Despite this, the President and government fully co-operated with the Public Protector investigation into this matter.

Today as the SACP we wish to say that none of all the investigations have disputed the fact that no private house of President Zuma was built by the state. And that the President never asked for all the security upgrades done at his residence. These were done as they had been done at the private houses of PW Botha, FW de Klerk - illegitimate as these were - as well as at the private residences of former presidents Mandela, Mbeki and Montlanthe.

Of course we have expressed our concern that the timing of the release of the report of the Public Protector seems to have been aimed at influencing the 2014 electoral outcomes. Indeed, the DA and other opposition parties, who have nothing positive to say to our people, have used the Nkandla matter for narrow an opportunistic electioneering purposes. Fortunately our people, as we interact with them on the ground, are not being fooled by all this. They can see through this agenda of the opposition.

Our people can also see the oppositionist stance of those who are today calling upon Thuli Madonsela not to be criticised, and yet they remained completely silent when Madonsela’s predecessors, Justice Selby Baqwa and Advocate Lawrence Mushwana, were being heavily attacked by the opposition. Where were those in the media today who are telling us not to criticise or challenge some of the findings of the Public Protector when Zille successfully challenged Thuli Madonsela to change her findings on potential corruption in one major tender in the Western Cape?

Let us remind all what Helen Zille said:

A provisional report, drafted for the Public Protector, into the Western Cape Government`s ‘alleged improper procurement of communications services’ was leaked to the media a week before the agreed deadline for our response. This in itself is highly irregular, and prejudices our right to rectify what our Senior Counsel, Advocate Geoff Budlender, believes to be material legal errors in the draft report, before the report is finalised. Without casting aspersions on the Public Protector herself, we believe this premature leak prejudices the administration of justice and compromises our rights".

"I will be making all of these, and other points, to the Public Protector myself when I meet her later this week in order to give her the opportunity to rectify the report before she finalises it under her name".

Indeed the Public Protector went ahead and changed that provisional report. Where were all these moral police and self-appointed protectors of the Protector when Zille challenged the Public Protector? Conveniently absent and silent!

We must defeat and expose all the hypocrisy around the Nkandla report, whose intention is not a principled fight against corruption, but a concerted attempt to discredit and dislodge the ANC from power.

The SACP says let us honour the founding revolutionary of our democracy, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela!

Let us honour the revolutionary martyr of our struggle for freedom, Thembisile Chris Hani

Vote ANC!

What is real work?

By Cde Jeremy Cronin

In its hey-day Encyclopaedia Britannica employed thousands of researchers, editors, printers, binders, dispatchers and hard-working sales-people. Now it`s gone, displaced by Wikipedia, which claims to have 50 times more information and is produced on an unpaid voluntary basis and provided free over the Internet. Wikipedia creates huge value, but without a price it`s virtually invisible in official economic statistics. This provokes some intriguing questions. What are we measuring when calculating GDP? What do we mean by work?

It`s the latter question I was pondering once more on a visit to public employment programmes on the Cape Flats. The "real job" debate flared up earlier this year when the ANC election manifesto promised six million public employment "work opportunitie" over the next five years.

The initial DA response was dismissive, these are "not real job" it said. The DA`s march on the ANC`s Johannesburg headquarters was originally centred on counter-posing "bogu" "work opportunitie" with supposed "real job". However, by the time the march actually took place, the position had morphed. Someone realised a sniffy attitude towards public employment programmes wasn`t a smart electoral position in a country with chronic, crisis levels of unemployment. The DA now says it`s "an avid implementer” of these programmes.

Well and good, but one cannot help feeling there`s a tension here between ideology and electoral pragmatism. In the same statement the DA goes on to say job creation is "mainly the business of the private sector”; that public employment programmes are "not a permanent solution”; that "participants need to enter the expanded public works programme (EPWP) without illusion"; that "the jobs are short and there is no guarantee of getting another opportunity afterward..."

Firstly, it`s not true the jobs have to be short. For instance, many of the participants in the Manenberg community work programme (CWP) - part of the broader EPWP - have been on the programme since its beginnings in 2010. Some were doing much the same work voluntarily before, under the aegis of the Proudly Manenberg initiative. But secondly, and not just in SA, how many formal private sector jobs are long-term or guaranteed in this era of casualisation, labour brokering, global financial volatility and mass lay-offs?

Yes, the stipend paid to participants in public employment programmes is relatively low (the current prescribed daily minimum is R71). But if this is the reason the DA regards these jobs as not real, then why did it oppose raising farm-workers daily minimum wage from R65 last year? Farm-work is typically non-permanent (it`s mainly seasonal), and definitely not guaranteed.

In De Doorns amidst some of the most productive farmland in SA, local clinics report child malnutrition as the major issue they confront. The childrens` parents work seasonally, harvesting fruit for commercial farmers typically in hock to the banks and linked into a value chain where most of the surplus ends up with the likes of Tescos in the UK. In Manenberg, CWP participants are providing security for local schools, mounting 24/7 street patrols in challenging neighbourhoods, working on food gardens, clearing storm-water drains, providing home-based care, or painting and repairing local amenities. So what`s the difference between a supposed real job and a public employment job? The one produces profits for the rich. The other provides desperately needed services, assets and some food security in poor communities. Perhaps it`s the latter, then, that is really the real work.

If job creation is "mainly the business of the private sector” (I thought profit making was) then in SA (or Greece or Spain where unemployment levels are currently comparable to our own) then clearly the private sector is not very good at its business.

But beyond the important issues of work duration or compensation levels, there is the profoundly devastating social, economic and psychological impact of prolonged, trans-generational unemployment. And this is where well run public employment programmes have their most important potential - restoring dignity, social cohesion, a sense of collective responsibility and community ownership of streets and public places.

Elmarie has been a Manenberg CWP participant for the past three years. She was released from prison on parole after serving 20-years. She`s in her late 50s, still too young to qualify for a pension. Upon release she had a Catch-22 challenge - how, without transport money, was she to report to the parole board in Mitchells Plain, let alone look for work? In desperation she begged for train fare at the local CWP office in Manenberg. Instead, she was recruited into the programme, becoming its first parolee participant.

Elmarie is now free of parole obligations, but she continues to work in the local food gardens as a key member of a dedicated CWP parolee programme. Parolees on the programme are paid the standard stipend, they share the veggies they grow, and are provided with mentoring to enable re-integration into their community.

Surely it`s clear, we have to think differently. Whether globally or in Manenberg, whether it`s Wikipedia or critically important community work - a profound shift in what gets valued as useful "real work” has become a contemporary imperative.

Cde Jeremy Cronin is SACP 1st Deputy General Secretary, this article was first published in Cde Cronin`s Left Turn Column, Cape Times (9 April 2014