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Blade Nzimande's speech delivered at the Chris Hani
Institute Launch
We cannot allow the victory of the working class to
be stolen
The life and memory
of Chris Hani has become one of the major symbols for the aspirations
of the working class and the poor in South Africa. His life, sacrifices,
dedication and example captured a person whose entire life was dedicated
to the service of ordinary working people and the poor. Whilst South Africa
has many heroes and heroines who lived and died for similar aspirations,
but Chris Hani was murdered on the eve of the beginnings of the realisation
of the aspirations of the majority of South Africans. His assassination
also directly led to the securing of 27 April 1994 as the date for the
first ever democratic elections in South Africa. His memory lives fondly
in the hearts and minds of millions of South African, particularly the
working class and the poor. This Institute would serve to institutionalise
his memory, but most importantly, as a monument to the aspirations of
the ordinary working people and the poor in South Africa.
One of the many outstanding qualities of comrade Chris Hani
was his ability to make socialist ideas accessible to workers and the
poor and his dialectical understanding of the primacy of mass democratic
struggle.
An important aim of the institute would be to continue this
legacy, by researching and developing socialist alternatives, making socialist
ideas accessible, promoting and popularising socialist alternatives. In
this task the Institute should aim to equip shop stewards, trade union
officials, community activists and the children of the working class and
the poor with the knowledge and the confidence to take the struggle for
socialism to their communities, their workplaces, public spaces, the media,
government essentially all of society.
The working class movement is faced with the enormous task
of defending and advancing workers struggles in a harsh climate that is
not currently favourable to working class interests. The current phase
of capitalist globalisation is marked by huge assaults on workers through
massive retrenchments, casualisation and privatisation and through intensified
ideological attacks.
We are launching this Institute in a conjuncture where the
class contradictions in our country are sharpening and the workers and
the poor of our country, through their own daily experiences, are increasingly
becoming aware of the class dimension of the national struggle. It is
well worth important to highlight some of these conjunctural developments.
The invasion of Iraq by the US and the UK is becoming understood by a
growing number of the workers and the poor of our country for what it
is: a bloody pursuance of the interests of imperialist interests and those
of their transnational corporations. The current accumulation regime characterised
principally by the jobloss bloodbath and loss of income for millions of
our people, serves to underline the class realities and the capitalist
nature of our society.
The SACP has characterised the current period as that expressing
a sharpening contradiction between pursuance of the objectives of the
NDR and the deepening penetration of the capitalist market into every
corner and nook of our society. Put differently the realisation of the
objectives of the NDR is increasingly facing the barriers of an unfettered
capitalist market economy. Through this the workers and the poor of our
country are increasingly understanding that tackling the national question
without squarely facing the class contradiction runs the danger of a stagnation
of the NDR. In other words, the precondition for any further qualitative
advance in the NDR, is a decisive qualitative breakthrough on the economic
front. Ours is to deepen and consolidate this growing class awareness,
as part of deepening the socialist outlook of the working class. Short
of decisive interventions by both the democratic government and a mobilised
working class in the mainstream of our economy, to roll back the capitalist
market and direct considerable public and private capital towards job
creation and poverty eradication, we cannot make any further qualitative
advance in the NDR!
It feels ironic that when thousands of workers and the poor,
fought and died to liberate our country, like Cde Chris Hani, the capitalist
class threatens to steal this victory on the economic front. Our liberation
struggle has in fact liberated South African private capital from the
constraints it faced towards the end of the apartheid regime. Instead
of this private capital focusing on domestic growth and development as
a priority, significant sections of it the major beneficiaries of the
apartheid order have prioritised job-shedding global competitiveness
and offshore listing. Instead of seeking the best responses to the domestic
challenge of job creation and sustainable livelihoods, this private capital
is preoccupied with international best practice, whilst reinforcing
local worst practice. Instead of implementing, for instance, the sectoral
determination on a minimum wage for farmworkers, agricultural capital
is resisting and firing workers, ostensibly defying the laws of the country.
Instead of locating their activities within the overall context of reparations
through job-creating investment, they blackmail all of us by complaining
about the rising costs of investment in our country. Through our democratic
transition, fought for by the workers and the poor of our country, productivity
has risen and South African companies are awash with cash. Yet they are
not investing back onto our economy. It is for these reasons that our
freedom is being exploited literally and in good old capitalist fashion
by private capital to further their narrow pursuit of profit, as if
things have not changed. These are in fact some of the very critical challenges
facing the growth and development summit.
We are gathering at this historic occasion, acutely aware
of the many advances made under the democratic government. Great achievements
and strides have been made in transforming our country and the expansion
of the social wage. It is absolutely critical that we ensure that these
advances are deepened and sustained. The Chris Hani Institute will have
to focus on analysing and researching the question of sustainability of
the gains made. In a capitalist environment there is always a threat of
the capitalist market eroding and undermining some of these many gains.
The very sustained pressure on government to privatise, liberalise and
outsource, is but one example of how capitalist relations pose a persistent
threat to the deepening and consolidation of the gains we have made. The
very welcome extension of the provision of clean, drinking water, electricity
and telephony to the workers and the poor, in urban and rural areas, is
being seriously threatened by the persisting job loss bloodbath. This
is because of the growth of the indigent in our society; millions of our
people who are unable to pay for these services, no matter how affordable
they can be if they were employed.
One of the most important things that Chris Hani said was
Dont just transfer power, but transform it. This statement has become
even more important in the current period, now that the liberation movement
is in power. This perspective become even more critical as we seek to
transform both the state and the economy. We cannot simply use power transferred
from the apartheid regime for the purposes of taking forward the NDR;
we need to transform it in order to serve a new agenda. This means, amongst
other things, that we need to seriously look at the class and gender,
nature and consequences of the exercise of that power, and seek to use
it to reinforce the working class bias of society. A related issue that
flows out of this would be to constantly examine the class beneficiaries
of our policies and exercise of state power at all times. For example
we hope that one of the tasks that the Chris Hani Institute would need
to undertake - working with other progressive institutions and foundations
- is a very careful examination of both the intended and unintended class
consequences of our policies. Which class forces have benefited most from
which policies and what is the overall score for the working class! This
is particularly important as part of evaluating the first decade of our
freedom.
It is to these and many other related challenges facing
the workers and the poor that we hope the Chris Hani Institute will focus
its energies and programmes on. In the light of these changes and challenges
there is a dire need to equip working class cadres to engage with and
analyse current realities, and to be able to envision alternatives beyond
capitalism and its free market. We need to create space for revolutionaries
to reflect on alternatives, to envision and struggle for the real possibilities
for change. Whilst these are principally organisational challenges, the
Chris Hani Institute has a very important role to assist the working class
to have a deeper understanding of these realities and challenges.
The Chris Hani Institute is being established for all these
reasons. We wish to thank the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation for being the
very first partner of the Chris Hani Institute, through concrete co-operation
around a number of projects which are the very first projects for the
Institute! How historic it is as well that the names of these two 20th
century revolutionaries (who both died from the bullets of counter-revolutionaries)
will forever be connected and immortalised through this cooperation between
the two institutions!
Rosa Luxembourg, born in 1871, was arrested on 15 January
1919, together with two other leaders of the German Communist Party, Karl
Liebknecht and Wilhelm Pieck. They were taken for questioning at the Adlon
Hotel in Berlin. Rosa and Karl were taken out of the hotel, and knocked
with rifle butts until they were unconscious. They were quietly driven
away in a German military vehicle, shot and thrown into the river.
Both Rosa and Chris died at a relatively young age (Rosa
at 47 and Chris at 50). They both were passionate and courageous fighters
for the working class, but at the same time both were well known that
even in the midst of struggle and difficulties they never lost their tenderness
and sensibility.
Let the Chris Hani Institute strive and be a perpetual
symbol of Chris Hani stood and died for: democracy, social justice, freedom
and socialism.
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Comrades,
It is a great pleasure
for me to welcome all of you - national and regional office bearers, shopstewards
from all our affiliates and from all over the country, organisers and
educators, guests and friends - to this Second Central Committee of COSATU.
We have much to do here. Indeed, we are at a turning point
in our history, and our decisions at this meeting and at our Eighth Congress
in a few months will do much to determine our success.
It is significant that this meeting takes place almost exactly
ten years after the assassination of Comrade Chris Hani. To honour him,
together with the Communist Party, we are launching the Chris Hani Institute
tomorrow.
The Institute marks an important step forward in ensuring
a comprehensive political education programme for our leadership, activists
and new cadres. We should dedicate all our work here to Comrade Chris
and the goals for which he fought. It is also thirty years since the modern
labour movement was reborn in the crucible of the Durban strikes. Those
strikes revitalised the labour movement, giving birth to the militant,
transformative, non-racial unionism that culminated in the formation of
COSATU. In this input, I will briefly review the background to the Central
Committee, explaining our focus on organisational development.
The organisational review process also has to be located
in the challenges we face in economic and political terms. Finally, I
will begin to sketch a way forward. Comrades, COSATU faces continually
changing challenges, with constant shifts in the demands from our members
and our environment. For this reason, we must always review the demands
on our organisation and develop to meet them. This is a hard process,
but a necessary one for us to survive. This fact was recognised by the
Seventh Congress, which called for a process of organisational review
and development, building on the September Commission Report. To drive
the process, Congress established the Organisational Review Commission.
The Organisational Review Commission last year submitted an extensive
report to the First Central Committee.
The Commission pointed to a range of problems that needed
action. It argued that our movement must act decisively to address some
key challenges - arising above all from the job-loss bloodbath of the
past ten years combined with the new demands on unions as the legal and
political environment changes. The difficulties that the Organisational
Review Commission foretold last year have now begun to take shape. In
particular, COSATU lost over a hundred thousand members overall since
the last Congress three years ago. On the one hand, key industries face
downsizing; on the other, the public service, the source of much of COSATU's
growth in the late 1990s, has now reached almost 100% union membership.
In part as a result of this situation, two large unions -NEHAWU and SACCAWU
- are many months in arrears on their affiliation fees. That flies in
the face of one of our founding principles, which is paid-up membership.
As COSATU, we are still managing our work, but only with great difficulty.
This problem needs strong intervention, and we expect the Central Committee
to give some guidance. Already, the CEC adopted strict measures to ensure
that more of our resources are spent on programmes for affiliates.
The National Office Bearers of COSATU are now analysing
and developing medium to long-term strategies to deal with the shortfall
on fees. We expect to present concrete proposals to the CEC scheduled
for the end of May. CEC directed affiliates to sign debit orders with
a view to improving COSATU's financial institution. I am pleased to inform
you that 16 of the 19 COSATU affiliates, including NEHAWU, have to date
signed debit order to pay their affiliation fees. Only three of our unions
have not signed. The move to debit orders has immediately changed our
fortunes and we are coming to this CC with better hopes for the future.
But we have to see that the failure to pay affiliation fees reflects deeper
challenges that affect all our unions arising out of job losses and the
changed legal, political and social environment. Faced with these challenges,
this central committee must find ways to drive forward the organisational
review in order to serve our members better in the long run. Comrades,
What are the main challenges we now face?
The Central Committee must understand the implications for
our organisations of changes in our economic and political environment.
The key issue for us remains soaring joblessness. We need to understand
the reasons for this situation, which reflects both economic trends and
government policies. COSATU has long recognised that the most urgent challenge
for the union movement is now rising job losses, combined with informalisation
and casualisation.
These trends place a three-fold burden on unions: we lose
members; we face new organisational and financial stresses; and we have
to deal with the very hard issues that arise from workplace restructuring.
At the same time, we must express the demands of the working class as
a whole for the basic right to decent work. The figures on unemployment
are very painful. Since 1995, when government began to collect the data,
unemployment has soared from 15% to over 30% as of September 2002. No
other country has experienced such growth in unemployment unless there
was an economic catastrophe underway. Moreover, these figures only reflect
the narrow definition of unemployment, which excludes workers too discouraged
to seek work actively. If those discouraged workers are included, unemployment
is now at over 40% and close to eight million. Joblessness is particularly
tough on young people. Because it basically results from the failure to
create jobs, they are most likely to be unemployed. Almost three quarters
of the unemployed today are aged under 30, and almost half of all African
youth are unemployed. As unions, we experience the loss of jobs through
retrenchment and casualisation. But there is a less obvious effect. Rising
unemployment makes it easier for employers to replace workers at a lower
wage. All too often, we see this as when permanent workers are replaced
with outsourced or casual labour. Unless we do something about unemployment,
all workers will find it harder and harder to maintain the gains we won
so painfully over the past thirty years.
Indeed, already average incomes from work have begun to
decline. True, our own members have mostly been able to safeguard their
wages and benefits. But more and more workers are trapped in the informal
and survival sector with no unions to protect them. As a result, their
incomes have fallen. Thus, in 1995, 35% of workers earned under R1000
a month. By 2002, almost 40% of the employed earned under R1000 - and
that R1000 was worth a lot less than in 1995. Not surprisingly, these
trends have led to a fall in the share of labour in the national income.
Labour now gets only 51% of the national income, compared to 57% in 1991.
The worsening position of the working class in economic terms reflects
deep-seated structural problems in the economy. We have discussed these
in our position papers and booklets on industrial strategy and for the
Growth and Development Summit. We see two key structural problems. First,
apartheid left us with a divided and dualist economy. Most of our people
were deprived of land, access to capital, even basic services and education.
The explicit purpose of the colonial and then the apartheid
state was to ensure that most people had no choice but to sell their labour
at any price, in order to survive. On that basis, the apartheid state
and business built up a strong modern industrial and agricultural sector.
But our people were welcome only as cheap labour. Today, this legacy of
apartheid still underpins huge inequalities and soaring unemployment.
Most of our people are simply excluded from the modern economy. They do
not have the resources or institutional support they need to earn a living.
If you cannot get a job in the formal sector, or you lose your job, there
is virtually no way to maintain yourself and your family. The situation
has been made worse by a second problem: the restructuring of the formal
sector, with huge job losses, since the emid-1980s. This restructuring
has several aspects. They include:
- The loss of jobs in gold mining,
- The devastation of many of our manufacturing industries since the
economy was opened up, starting in the early 1990s and worsened by big
tariff cuts in 1997, and
- The restructuring of the public sector to commercialise key services
- and the loss of huge numbers of jobs.
In short, we inherited a high level of unemployment
from apartheid - and the restructuring of the formal sector since then
has made the problem worse. Overcoming these structural problems will
not be easy, and will take a long time. But government has not tabled
a co-ordinated strategy to overcome poverty and unemployment. Although
it improved some government services for our people, it has not worked
to restructure the economy toward job-creating growth. Instead, economic
policy, at least until very recently, was geared narrowly to cutting government
spending, holding down inflation and growing exports. These government
policies contributed to soaring unemployment. On the one hand, cuts in
government spending and high interest rates cut back on economic activity
in general. Moreover, the privatisation and commercialisation of services
destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs and drove the price of basic services
beyond the reach of many of our people. On the other hand, although exports
have grown, especially in the auto industry, they did not create jobs.
Indeed, even the auto industry lost jobs in the past ten years.
COSATU has welcomed some shifts in government's policy in
recent years, in particular the growth in the budget and the review of
industrial strategy. But these shifts are not enough to transform our
economy to meet the needs of our people and create jobs. Government still
has not changed its industrial policy to create employment. The high value
of the rand will make the situation worse. This brings us to the political
challenges. Because of course the big question for COSATU is why the government
that we elected, led by the ANC, is not doing more to transform the economy
toward job creation and equity. The ANC has made some big gains recently.
The opposition is now virtually reduced to Inkatha and
the DP. Of these, only the DP has put forward its own positions, which
are just an agenda for capital. COSATU welcomes the ANC's gains, which
must be reaffirmed in the elections next year. But we still disagree with
the government on economic policy.
The fact is that government has not been able to sustain
a strategy to transform the economy toward greater equity. In large part,
this reflects unrelenting pressure from capital. COSATU, together with
the broader democratic movement, has failed to counter this pressure.
In this context, government has proven unable to put forward and pursue
a strong transformatory vision. Instead, it has more and more fallen back
on support for black capital in a narrow sense. But some of the measures
to build up black enterprise, such as privatisation and outsourcing, could
actually impoverish and disempower the majority of black people, who far
from being capitalists form part of the working class. In this situation,
it is critical that workers maintain unity.
One of the most potent weapons in the hands of South African
capital is the splintering of the labour movement, with NACTU and FEDUSA
alongside COSATU. The creation of yet another labour federation, CONSAWU,
is bad news for workers. Instead of working towards one single national
and even more powerful federation, the unions that have affiliated to
CONSAWU have chosen to further fragment the workers' voice and increase
the power of capital. We are aware that the new federation is bankrolled
by World Council of Labour, which is largely a conservative movement from
the divided past of the international labour movement. The World Council
of Labour has split unions in many parts of Africa and elsewhere. Discussions
with this new federation will therefore be even more difficult than the
discussion with NACTU and FEDUSA.
Let me repeat the call we have been making: in the context
of the challenges we face, the need to create one federation in one country
cannot be over-emphasised. Comrades, COSATU sees the upcoming Growth and
Development Summit, which we have demanded for more than two years, as
an opportunity to come to deal with these problems. It should give us
a springboard both to deal with debates in the Alliance. It should bring
together key stakeholders, including business, around a strong development
strategy to place the country on a path of job- creating growth.
We noted with regret the request of the Minister of Labour
to the President that the GDS be postponed to June 7, 2003. Again let
us emphasise, we did not ask for a delay in the GDS. When we met the Minister
recently, we did point out him that we were way out of schedule of the
process envisaged by the Ekurhuleni Alliance Summit held in April 2002.
We pointed out that, unless all parties dropped everything else to focus
on engagements at NEDLAC, the GDS still risks being just an expensive
press conference. But that does not mean that COSATU is not ready. We
have developed our proposals months ago, and submitted them in the Alliance
before anyone else. We cannot accept blame for lack of seriousness in
the face of the challenge at hand.
The little reprieve we now have must help the Alliance to
carry out fully the resolution of the Ekurhuleni Summit. The Summit agreed
on a process that would be led by the Alliance. This would include finding
agreements on the areas that have divided us in the past. As part of uniting
the people's camp, too, the Summit resolved that the Alliance should engage
with other people's organisations. The resolution fell short of fully
complying with COSATU's call for a "Peoples Summit." But it
still made progress in defining a strategic approach to the GDS based
on greater unity within the democratic movement. For this reason, we heralded
the Ekurhuleni Summit as a victory for millions of workers who participated
in the previous national campaigns and general strikes in pursuit of our
demands. We want everyone in the Alliance to work to realise the Summit
declaration.
We must cement unity of the Alliance and deal with areas
of conflict before going to negotiate with government and business NEDLAC.
Otherwise the GDS will not lead to the strong strategies with the mass
support needed to overcome poverty and unemployment. Government only just
gave us their proposals for the Growth and Development Summit. There are
some good things in these proposals. Certainly government now has an improved
understanding of the importance of the social wage and basic services
for our people. And of course we have always supported the skills development
strategy, although it still needs a lot of work. But government's proposals
fall far short of a co-ordinated strategy to restructure the economy.
Above all, they do not give any ideas on how to guide the formal sector
in order to create jobs in the long run.
There is no understanding at all that we cannot continue
with business as usual - we need targeted measures to ensure that the
economy retains and creates decent work for our people. A few more programmes
to support for SMEs and create learnerships won't be enough. In this context,
COSATU is fighting for some basic changes in economic policy. First, we
want business and government to prioritise employment creation. Every
big business and every government department should have to report annually
on how it is helping to overcome the jobs crisis. Second, we need to restructure
the formal sector. Government must do more to support production to meet
basic needs and support labour-intensive activities, rather than just
exports. COSATU sees the sector job summits as critical to restructuring
the economy in this way, but government and business must engage more
seriously. Government should also bolster its infrastructure and redesign
its housing programmes and the IDC to ensure they contribute more to job
creation.
Third, to overcome the dualism we inherited from apartheid
requires far-reaching improvements in basic infrastructure and housing,
education and skills development, land reform and support for small and
micro enterprise. It also involves restructuring the financial and retail
sectors fundamentally, a process we started with the Financial Sector
Summit last year. Finally, there are some short-term measures that would
help. These include the urgent implementation of the Proudly South African
campaign by government and big business; a review of monetary policy to
reduce interest rates and push down the value of the rand; a further relaxation
in the fiscal stance; and a big expansion in public works and community
service, in order to provide income relief and meaningful employment urgently
for the unemployed. Comrades, What are the implications of these complex
issues for our development as a labour movement?
Even if we achieve success at the GDS, we will not see
a quick solution to the problem of joblessness. That means, as the report
to this Central Committee points out, that we have to find new and more
aggressive solutions to the problem of membership losses resulting from
rising unemployment. First, we need to focus much more on recruitment
- that is, successful recruitment, consolidated through stop orders, service
to members and educational work. To achieve this aim, we have to review
all our processes for recruiting and serving our members. We need to understand
why some groups of workers don 't join unions, and find ways to meet their
needs. In every major employer, COSATU affiliates should be the only union
or at least the main one. And we need to reach much more into smaller
employers as well. Second, we need to ensure that every union has a realistic
scope and a sustainable size, through mergers if necessary - including
with unaffiliated unions. We recognise that mergers in themselves pose
serious organisational challenges. But COSATU has long argued that only
large industrial unions can survive in the current economy.
Third, in terms of policy, we need to prioritise engagements
around employment creation. The key processes now are the Growth and Development
Summit, the sector summits, negotiations on trade and Proudly South African,
and restructuring the public sector. Last year 's Organisational Review
Report pointed to the mushrooming in our policy capacity - now we have
to target it to address the key challenge of joblessness. Fourth, we need
to consider how the disagreements on economic policy and the transition
to democracy affect the nature of our movement. After all, many workers
joined COSATU historically in part because they wanted to participate
in the broader struggle. How many people here joined just to get a higher
wage and a pension scheme? We need to improve our political education
and debates so that we can deal with the more complex challenges we face
without demoralisation or unnecessary fights in the Alliance. And we need
to find a way to speak to and relate to young people who did not go through
the struggle against apartheid, and who may not have any emotional attachment
to unions or the liberation movement. Finally, with the pressure on membership
and wages, finances will continue to be a problem. The report to the Central
Committee suggests the need to focus much more on financial management
and controls. Otherwise a small decline in subs can lead to a big deficit
and a financial crisis. And in the current contested environment, we cannot
afford that kind of problem. Comrades, As you can see, this Central Committee
must help us meet serious challenges. Its proposals will go forward to
our Congress in September. But we also expect some short-term help from
the Central Committee. In particular, we need to find ways to help those
unions with serious financial and organisational problems. We need to
initiate a realistic organisational review process that doesn 't require
resources we don 't have. And we need to lay the basis for a renewed recruitment
campaign and for engagement at the Growth and Development Summit, in Sector
Job Summits, in the approaching wage negotiations - and in the elections
next year.
Comrades,
At this historic moment, we remember our president,
Elijah Barayi, who together with countless others worked so hard to build
this movement. We draw strength from the memory of Moses Mabhida, JB Marks,
Harry Gwala, Dorothy Mokgalo, Sam Ntuli, Sam Ntambane, Bheki Mkhize and
countless other worker martyrs - heroes and heroines who carried the red
flag flying before us. This is their movement, this is the movement of
those deep down in the belly of the world sweating for little money, as
we usually sing in their honour. It belongs to our factory workers, nurses
and teachers; and to those vulnerable workers being abused in the farms
and doing domestic work in the bosses' homes. This movement belongs to
all of us. Its survival and strength is critical for our country and our
democracy. We must and shall do every thing in our power to preserve it
for generations to come. That is the challenge of this Central Committee.
We cannot fail!
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