26 December 2020
It deeply saddens the South African Communist Party to announce the passing of its Central Committee member Comrade Nomvuzo Francisca Shabalala (60), who was also a Member of Parliament. “On behalf of the SACP Central Committee and the Party’s entire membership, I wish to express our message of heartfelt condolences to the Shabalala family for the great loss encountered”, said the SACP General Secretary Dr Blade Nzimande. Cde Nomvuzo was hospitalised last week. She passed away around 1am on Saturday 26 December 2020.
Born on 29 April 1960, Cde Nomvuzo Shabalala was a serving member of the SACP Central Committee, the Party’s highest decision-making body when its National Congress, which convenes every five years, is not in session. She was elected to the Central Committee by the 14 th National Congress of the SACP in July 2017. At that time, she was the Deputy Provincial Chairperson of the SACP in Moses Mabhida Province - KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), a position she held from 2015 until 2018.
At the time of her passing, Nomvuzo Francisca Shabalala was serving as an Honourable ANC Member of Parliament. She served in the Portfolio Committee on Basic Education. She also served on the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Ethics and Members Interests. Her Constituency Office was in Empangeni, KZN. Cde Nomvuzo’s parliamentary work started in 2018. She was re-elected during the May 2019 general election. Before then she served as a Councillor and Deputy Mayor of the eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality. The governance of the eThekhwini Metropolitan Municipality was fairly sound under her leadership and that of Cde James Nxumalo as the Mayor under the challenging circumstances that they and the entire council and municipality found themselves faced with.
The SACP in Moses Mabhida Province benefited from Cde Nomvuzo’s leadership as a member of the Provincial Executive Committee of the Party from 2012. In the early 2000s, Cde Nomvuzo was the Deputy Secretary of the ANC Durban South Region.
Her early political activism combined the struggle through trade unionism against exploitation and the struggle against apartheid racial oppression and gender domination. She was an activist of the Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union of South Africa (CCAWUSA). CCAWUSA was renamed the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU) following the mergerof the Cape Liquor and Catering, Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union, and the Retail and Allied Workers Union in 1989. The merger was guided by the need to build trade union unity on an industrial basis and was occasioned by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) through its resolution to consolidate workers’ power under the organising principle of one union in one industry.
Cde Nomvuzo Shabalala was an activist of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and, as a volunteer, an activist distributor of the Speak magazine. The distribution of the Speak was an essential component of her political education and gender transformation activism. The Speak was known in different parts of South Africa by the themes “Engakhali Ifela Embelekweni”; “Ngwana Yo A Sa Llego O Hwela Tharing”; “Breaking the Silence”.
The magazine was established in 1982 to serve as the voice for women, covering their perspectives on gender transformation and the rights of women in a future, democratic South Africa, among others. “Throughout the years of apartheid, SPEAK magazine allowed women all over… South Africa to organise and fight against oppression in personal lives, the workplace, and in politics” (SA History Online).
In memory of Nomvuzo Shabalala, the SACP reiterates its unqualified support for the strengthening of the progressive women’s movement and the intensification of the struggle to end economic exploitation and patriarchy and dismantle racism in our society. It is an essential part of this struggle to confront the networks of neoliberalism, its austerity agenda, and state capture and looting of public resources.
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