Zwelinzima+Vavi,+COSATU+Tribute+to+Moses+Mabhida

COSATU Tribute to Moses Mabhida - 02 December 2006, Harry Gwala Stadium, Pietermaritzburg

 * //Speech delivered by General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi//**


 * President and Deputy President other leaders and members of the ANC**
 * General Secretary and other leaders and members of the SACP**
 * Deputy President and other leaders and members of COSATU**
 * Premier and other government leaders**
 * Leaders of other political parties**
 * Family and friends of comrade Moses Mabhida**


 * Comrades and friends**

Today marks an important historical moment – the reburial of the remains of one of the towers of our liberation struggle comrade Moses Mabhida. The significance of this event does not lie only in the symbolism of the reburial itself; it is a profound message about honouring our heroes and heroines and the struggle against forgetting what we fought for and the men and women that answered the call to fight for the noble goal of freedom. A revolution that does not honour its heroes and draw the lessons from history is like someone groping in the dark without a searchlight.

We will narrate and sing praises to his contributions and his values that became the values of our giant movement. In doing so we remind ourselves and the generations to come of what we have always been and what we should not be.

Comrade Mabhida symbolised the unity in action of our people's movement – he was a true all-round cadre of the movement. His work and actions gave practical meaning to the basic goals of the NDR – to address the class, racial and gender contradiction. As an all round revolutionary comrade Mabhida was a communist, a trade unionist and a radical African nationalist. To him there was no contradiction between the struggle for national and economic emancipation and for better working conditions. These were part of the same stream for defeating colonialism of a special type and capitalism to build a better society free from national subjugation and free from class exploitation and patriarchal oppression.

Unity, of which comrade Moses Mabhida was such a symbol, remains a challenge we face within each component of the Alliance and between Alliance formations. We are not as united as we were when Mabhida was a leader of SACTU and the SACP and when Nkosi Albert Luthuli and Oliver Tambo were leaders of the ANC.

The basic lesson we must learn is that unity is a process where leaders and members work consciously to accommodate one another, to make sacrifices for the common good and to go out to assure and reassure each other. Unity is a process where we learn to forgo our individual pride and egos as leaders but to accommodate one another as long as that accommodation does not undermine the goals of our revolution. Above all unity is about acting consistently through our actions to give meaning to what we call one another //comrade - amafela ndawonye// which means we are prepared to die for one another to cover one another's weaknesses whilst ensuring that we correct those weaknesses.

Unity cannot be declared. One cannot stand on the rooftops and say //thou shall unite// and hope it will happen automatically. Moses Mabhida, Oliver Tambo, Moses Kotane and other giants like them should be turning in their graves as they watch us tearing one another in public platforms using all manner of weapons to destroy one another.

Today, as we commit the remains of comrade Mabhida, we must reflect on how far we have realised the ideals and to what extent we live by values that guided him and many other revolutionaries. Comrade Mabhida epitomised selfless commitment to the struggle of our people without expectation of personal reward. Many in our movement today have turned this on its head – self-enrichment has replaced the selflessness Moses Mabhida taught us. They subvert and subordinate the movement of our people to turn it into a vehicle for personal enrichment. We must use this opportunity to reclaim the values that have guided our movement for decades.

As COSATU we are extremely worried that almost weekly we read depressing stories indicating that a new culture of crass materialism is on the rampage. Greed and selfishness has clearly overtaken the culture of service to our people. Competition is longer for willingness to service people. The humbleness that we learnt from Moses Mabhida, Walter Sisulu and others is being overrun by 'the mine is bigger than yours' mentality - how big is your house or 4X4? Which holiday you were on, how expensive is the private school for your children etc? It is these circumstances that make many leaders to want to live way beyond the already huge salaries they earn from being public representatives.

It is this culture that drives many to want to live a double life - a life of being a public representative whilst at the same time being a businessman or woman making millions in order to sustain these new life styles. Our message is simple - no one can serve a serve both the lion and the lamb at the same time in the same kraal. You cannot be a leader of workers, or a representative of the people, at the same time as being a capitalist - these roles are inherently contradictory.

This trend has profound implications for the NDR and the Alliance. The ANC and NDR have a historic biasness towards the working class and the poor. Increasingly it is becoming hard to count on more than two hands ANC leaders in the NEC with no business interests. What does this mean to this historic biasness when most of the leaders have personal business interests?

Clearly some of them have long abandoned a radical NDR that seeks to simultaneously address national, class and gender oppression. They seek to redefine the NDR to justify personal accumulation. This has caused serious problems in the Alliance as these revisionists seek to justify their new line by reinterpreting the NDR.

Far from waiting at the back of the queue for the people they represent to be the first to get fed, as Secretary General Kgalema Motlanthe urged ANC leaders to do at funerals, these leaders are pushing themselves to the front and taking the food out of the mouths of the poor.

This trend to a policy of 'me-first' and to-hell with the rest is totally immoral and ultimately will destroy our movement. Workers and the poor will lose all respect for leaders who abandon them to mass unemployment and poverty while they become millionaire business people.

COSATU is drawing up a Code of Conduct for its own leaders, and it is sure to include a ban on trade union leaders having business interests. We urge ANC and SACP members to adopt similar rules in their conferences next year. More over we shall lobby ANC members to ensure that the manifesto undertakings regarding fighting corruption are taken forward.

It is a fitting tribute to comrade Mabhida to return home to a free South Africa. We have made important advances in achieving the aims of the national democratic revolution. South Africa is today is a better country than yesterday, thanks to the sacrifices of comrades like Moses Mabhida. The freedoms we have should not be taken for granted and should be defended at all costs.

Still we cannot rest while millions of our people are homeless, jobless and trapped in poverty. We owe it to comrade Mabhida to take the struggle to new heights.

Comrade Mabhida embodied the tripartite alliance in his experience as a revolutionary. Today as we return him to his final resting place we must rededicate ourselves to building a strong united Alliance between the ANC, SACP and COSATU. The Alliance remains relevant more than ever and we must redouble our efforts to rebuild the unity of purpose that guided the alliance for years. Even more important we empower our masses to play an active role in the struggle as their own liberators.

This is important to be said today, when some seek to make proposals contrary to what we learnt from comrade Mabhida, that will ban others from leading more than one of the Alliance formations. They say those who lead more than one formation must choose as if this is a simply choice of chocolate cakes.

Comrade Mabhida was a committed communist for most of his life and rose within the ranks to become the General Secretary of the SACP. As we lay him to his final resting place we must reclaim and profile the role played by communists in the struggle for freedom in South Africa. Our society owes a deep debt to the communists and the SACP for pioneering the non-racial politics which today is a cornerstone of our new Constitution.

If we are to honour comrade Mabhida, the role played by communists in building non-racial politics and anon-racial movement must be acknowledged. In the current climate of vilification of communists we owe it to revolutionaries like comrade Mabhida to assert the right of the Communist Party and revolutionaries more generally to exist and champion the cause of socialism. Capitalism is failing humanity and ought to be challenged and defeated.

The historic proposition that the NDR is the route to socialism in South Africa remains valid and relevant. We are confronted with the challenge of deepening the NDR so that it fully realise a deeper transformation of society.

However we must not lose sight of the long-term goal to build a socialist society, as capitalism will always undermine the full realisation of the goals of the NDR. Comrade Mabhida's revolutionary outlook and practice combined this dialectical approach between the struggle for national liberation, gender equality and socialism.

As comrade Chris Hani once said socialism is not about big words but a struggle to ensure that all people have houses, food, jobs and the opportunity to realise their full potential. This ideal cannot be fully achieved in a society based on private property and exploitation. Our task as revolutionaries is to ensure the NDR is pursued in a manner that changes society on the basis of the Freedom Charter. We must re-dedicate ourselves to a revolutionary programme to transform our society and to build socialism.

Comrade Mabhida was also an internationalist. Today we have to reflect how we have remained true to this internationalist outlook of revolutionaries like comrade Mabhida. To what extent are we part of a broader movement for changing global power relations in favour of the working class and progressive forces internationally? Globalisation – a new stage of imperialism – has now expanded capitalism to many corners of the globe. Ultimately the struggle at a national level is important but to defeat capitalism we need a Global Movement and a new vision of a just and fair society. Again we have the task to take forward the lessons and experiences left to us by comrade Mabhida.

COSATU joins millions of South Africans is welcoming comrade Mabhida back home and to thank our movement for bringing back his mortal remains. This must be the beginning of the process to return the remains of many of our leaders and activists to their final resting place here in a free South Africa. We also join the rest of our movement to wish the family strength during this time when old wounds may be reopening and trust that you will find solace in the fact that our beloved leader is now back home.

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