Pietermaritzburg, 1 November 2003 By Blade Nzimande, General Secretary, South African Communist Party (SACP)
Education for Sustainable Livelihoods and Communities
(PACSA – Pietermaritzburg Agency for Christian Social Awareness; ESSET – Ecumenical Service for Socio-Economic Transformation)
1. The PACSA-ESSET Course is an Important Initiative to Liberate Society from Capitalism
Director of Ceremonies, leaders of various organisations, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and graduates, I am very deeply honoured for the invitation to address this function. Let me take this opportunity to congratulate PACSA and ESSET for this very important initiative. I would also like to warmly congratulate the graduates for the work they have successfully undertaken.
In my short message today, I wish to throw a few questions for your consideration, co-operation and joint action in the future.
I wish to congratulate PACSA and ESSET on starting and running this course. I value the importance of information, literacy and lifelong learning. Many of our people need economic literacy. In my view, democracy is not complete without economic democracy and justice. The struggle for economic democracy and justice begins with economic literacy otherwise debate, discussion, decisions and policies on the economy will be continue to be dominated by the interests of those with economic power. Many of our communities need informed and educated people in their midst who can work and mobilise communities to struggle against poverty and joblessness, and for a people-based, people-driven, people-controlled economy which puts people first. Indeed, it is my hope that graduates from the PACSA-ESSET course can play this role in our communities. In addition, the PACSA-ESSET course has given these graduates new skills, new knowledge, confidence and better chances to be employed given the difficulty of finding work in our country. For all these reasons, I applaud and appreciate the PACSA-ESSET Course on Economic Literacy for Socio-Economic Justice as an important contribution to empowering the workers and the poor in their struggle to change and control the economy. I also appreciate the fact that these graduates have taken this chance to learn more about the world and how it works.
In other words, what you have done through this course is to demonstrate that unlike in the past, we can use education as an instrument for liberation rather than an instrument of oppression. Through your initiative, you are challenging some of the values that still imprison our minds about what education should be about. In fact, you are reminding of one of the most important lessons we learnt from the mid-1980s when the concept of struggle of people's education for people's power emerged. This lesson was that education by its very nature is a mass activity and unless we mobilise the mass of our people to build an education system that reflects them and advances their interests then education will not be able to empower the people to take control of their lives, their communities, their country, the economy and the world. Your course says clearly and loudly that the struggle for people’s education continues!
2. The Importance of Community Education and Economic Literacy for Development and Building People’s Power
You may think of what you have started as small, but I can assure you it is a great beginning. It is a great beginning because it is addressing one of the very pressing needs of our society today. Economic literacy in itself is very important and it can be used as a tool to assist our communities to roll back the frontiers of poverty through building sustainable livelihoods and communities.
The critical contradiction facing South African society as we approach the end of the first decade of freedom is that of a political democracy but whose economic power is only located in the hands of the few. In simple terms, the most critical challenge facing South Africa today is to roll back and defeat the scourge of poverty and joblessness. If we are to further deepen and consolidate this political democracy, we need some decisive advances on the economic front. Without a serious momentum for jobs and sustainable livelihoods and communities, our very democracy is under threat.
Education in general and economic literacy in particular, is one of the most crucial tools we require in resolving this contradiction. In a capitalist system, which in South Africa still remains dominant, the education system is still dominated by values which do not empower ordinary people so that they can have the knowledge and information on what they can do to resolve this contradiction. Our education system still encourage our children to believe in the illusion that they can be the next Harry Oppenheimer without telling them about the misery suffered by millions as a basis for the “success” of the Oppenheimers of this world who are “successful” simply because they extract maximum profits from workers by paying them starvation wages, refusing them decent benefits, making them work under unsafe working conditions, refusing to subsidise their transport, education and housing costs, and so on. Unlike your very important course, the education system does not challenge the basis of an economic system based on exploitation of the majority by a few. Your course is beginning to inform and educate young students about this reality of capitalist exploitation as a basis for the racial, gender and class inequalities in our society.
In addition, high levels of literacy are an essential component of growing our economy and tackling the most fundamental challenges of development in our country such as poverty, ignorance and disease including the HIV/AIDS pandemic which threatens to wipe out communities, a generation and our very precious freedom right from our eyes. Poverty, ignorance and disease thrive in conditions of illiteracy, weak social integration, and the unavailability of adequate, affordable and efficient public resources. The majority of our people are disempowered even to realise their own creative means to try and make ends meet not least because they are not literate. High levels of literacy would also provide a stronger basis for skills development.
Therefore, education must be used as a tool to contribute to substantial changes and improvements in ordinary people's lives. But this will not happen unless we connect education to the mass mobilisation of millions of our people to take control of their destiny. Otherwise the future of our children will be decided in closed boardrooms by an unelected few who are not accountable to the people. If education is about the people, then it must build the power of the people over the economy and every other aspect of their lives. If we are to take forward the struggle for people’s education for people’s power, then we cannot avoid the difficult and long task of educating, conscientising, mobilising and organizing our people behind socio- economic transformation that will benefit the poor, who form the overwhelming majority of those who are illiterate in our country.
This means that in our education and economic literacy work, we must develop organic and sustainable links with our people - organised workers, hawkers, the unemployed, farm workers, domestic workers, the homeless, women, youth, students, church leaders, - basically all our people in all the locations and trenches that they occupy in our country. We must use our education and economic literacy work to advance our people's struggles for a better life. In this way we will make economic literacy work relevant and to meet the needs of a changing and democratic South Africa. It is for this reason that I appreciate the course outline and content of your modules.
Your contents include the topic of globalisation and how it contributes to poverty. I like this because it emphasises the importance of economic literacy in the light of both our global and national realities. We all today talk about a global village, and the phenomenon of globalisation. But it is not often that we stop and ask what globalisation is. It is good that your course has enabled your students to ask this question. I am sure that your students, after having discussed what globalization is, will agree with me that in essence this globalisation is mainly about the globalisation of the system of capitalist exploitation across the world. Globalisation is an unequal economic system that favours rich countries whose multi-national corporations exploit the world’s resources, accumulate huge profits at the expense of the poor. Even the recent invasion of Iraq is a manifestation of capitalist globalisation – what the capitalists cannot get by economic or political means they will grab by the use of force and war.
We are now witnessing the fact that the triumphalism of the proponents of globalisation of the early 1990s is waning as the reality of global inequalities become more apparent and cannot be swept under the carpet. For instance 80 more countries were poorer at the end of the 1990s than they were at the beginning of the 1990s. About half the world's population does not have access to clean drinking water. Furthermore, according to a report released in June 2000 by the International Labour Organisation (ILO World Labour Report -Income Security and Social Protection in a Changing World), globalisation has led to job losses and increasing poverty for people in developing countries. The same report states that a quarter of the world's population of 6 billion lives on less than $1 a day. Between 1195 and 2000, the world's poor have increased by 200 million. Just these statistics alone show how the grim the future will be if it is left to the forces of capitalist globalisation.
Therefore, an understanding of the capitalist system empowers us to mobilise all those who stand for socio-economic justice to challenge the system. Your course is an important contribution to this struggle.
3. Building Sustainable Livelihoods and Communities
Our conception of the urgent need to build sustainable livelihoods and communities contains four critical dimensions. The first dimension is that of job creation. Without sustainable jobs and job creation we are not going to make a serious dent on poverty. An immediate challenge in this regard is to ensure that we mobilise our communities to participate in the implementation of the resolutions of the Growth and Development Summit held in June this year. Some of the key resolutions of this summit include the goal to half unemployment by the year 2014, through amongst other things public works programmes, learnerships, targeted investment from government, labour and the private sector. One of the key tasks therefore is that of assisting our communities and engaging local and provincial governments around these issues. With the knowledge that our graduates have acquired they should be able to assist in this regard.
The second dimension of sustainable livelihoods and communities is that of land reform in order to ensure access to land for household based agricultural production and to ensure that the majority of our people own and use land productively. We are saying this precisely because much as job creation in the formal sector of our economy is very critical, we cannot rely on this alone to create sustainable livelihoods and to roll back the frontiers of poverty. The current land ownership pattern is unsustainable and undermines economic transformation. It is therefore also important that we engage with the department of agriculture in this province as well as NGOs and CBOs working in this sector to begin to work towards this objective. This particular challenge can also be extended to include a very concrete campaign to mobilise our people to have food gardens, as one of the ways through which to deal with the worst forms of poverty.
The third dimension of sustainable livelihoods and communities is that of the development of community-based, community-owned and community-controlled enterprises, in particular co- operatives. One of the key resolutions of the Growth and Development Summit was that of supporting the building of a co-operative movement. South Africa has a long history of co- operatives – the successful white agricultural co-operatives, the old mutual banks, burial societies, savings clubs, stokvels, and so on.
But not many people are aware of what a co-operative is. Central to the task of organising our people in their various localities and formations and educate them about the desirability and potential of co-operatives.
Simply put, a co-operative is both an association and an enterprise which is different from other types of companies. It is different because it is owned jointly and democratically by its members. It is based on the common social, cultural and economic needs of its members and members join a co-operative voluntarily. In a co-operative, activities are undertaken in order to services and benefits to members. A co-operative is different from private companies because the profit it makes is shared equally amongst members and can be used to support community development rather than being taken by one individual.
For example we should be encouraging retrenched workers, say from the construction sector, to come together to form community-based construction co-operatives which can build bigger and better RDP houses rather than giving contracts to private contractors who are not concerned about the size and quality of houses that they build. In fact, we need to mobilize such construction such that government gives contracts to them first before considering the private sector. Critical in this regard is to engage our government to prioritise a procurement and tendering strategy that support co-operatives as well.
We can do the same in almost every sector of the economy. Our burial societies can pool their money together to make coffins, provide undertaking and other services. Our School Governing Bodies can be encouraged and educated about co-operatives in order that they mobilize parents to build bread-baking and uniform-making co-operatives rather than allowing millions of rands to leave our townships to enrich bakeries and companies which sell school uniforms which are only interested in profit.
The building of co-operatives is linked to the campaign to make banks serve the people. Already, this campaign has achieved the following:
The release of the Financial Sector Charter is an important step in the ongoing struggle to transform and diversify the financial sector in our country. Through the Charter, the financial sector commits itself to direct investment, extension of basic banking services to poor communities, accelerated human resources and skills development in the sector mainly through the transformation of the racial and gender composition of the workforce in the sector.
The fourth dimension of sustainable livelihoods is comprehensive social security including ensuring that more and more of our people who qualify for social security grant are actually registered and benefit from these. Many problems still exist in our social security system. There are many practical problems experienced by the most vulnerable and marginalised when trying to access social security. There are still many serious gaps and shortcomings in the overall social security system itself. Many poor families are simply not aware of their social security rights. There are often huge problems for poor people when trying to apply for social security – they do not have IDs, there are massive delays in many Home Affairs Departments, the process is cumbersome, they are treated rudely by officials. There are still problems in many pension pay-out points – elderly people are expected to queue for long hours, or to come back the next day. Pensioners are also the target of all kinds of dubious salespersons at poorly supervised pay-out centres. Many of these problems are associated with privatised pension pay- out systems Medical certificates for disability grants sometimes appear to be refused on an arbitrary basis.
Our new graduates must be mobilised so that they go door-to-door, hold community meetings and factory lunch-hour meetings, and visit pension pay-out points, and Social Development and Home Affairs offices. They must make communities aware of their social security rights. They must assist, where they can, those who need help. They must listen to problems, and identify issues that must be changed.
Conclusion
In conclusion, PACSA and ESSET have done very well to start the course. I call on PACSA and ESSET to strengthen their course by also considering the inclusion of co-operatives and the financial sector as part of the course content.
Well done to the graduates! I commit myself to work with you in order to ensure that your new skills and knowledge can be used to employ and deploy you as community development workers who help to mobilize communities for people-driven development. Congratulations once more!
Thank you