Jubilee+South+Africa+collapse,+George+Dor+and+MP+Giyose

=Jubilee South Africa=

19 March 2006
Dear comrades and friends,

As many of you are aware, Jubilee South Africa has recently gone through deeply troubling times. Matters reached a point where the Jubilee National Executive Committee was physically barred from access to the National Office and the organisation’s resources by a group led by certain members of staff. This situation pertained from early March to early May.

We feel we are now starting to turn the corner. We recently held an extended NEC meeting, including up to four representatives per Jubilee provincial structure, which gave its full backing to the NEC.

We have now regained access to our offices. We are in the process of regaining control of our bank account. But we have also discovered significant problems, not least of which is the huge financial hole left by staff who squandered our resources.

We are thus embarking on a process of assessing the extent of the damage and taking the necessary steps to regain financial stability. Should we be able to overcome this very substantial challenge, we will work towards the holding of our National Conference at the earliest opportunity.

Having access to the facilities at our office means that we are now in a position to communicate more systematically. As an initial step in this direction, the Jubilee South Africa Chairperson, MP Giyose, has written a letter briefly sketching the NEC’s perspective on the crisis. The letter follows below.


 * George Dor**
 * General Secretary**

JUBILEE SOUTH AFRICA CRISIS: A BRIEF EXPLANATION AND A REQUEST
I write deeply conscious of the fact that the events of the last few months must be as bewildering to you as they are saddening. How can Jubilee SA have been brought to the brink of collapse by its own leading protagonists? How can friends of Jubilee make sense of what’s happened when Jubilee’s leaders, people they’ve (hopefully) respected, now make the most serious of allegations against each other?

I wish there was a simple answer to the dilemma. But there are two sides to the story and it is difficult for third parties – without access to all the information and with almost certainly very limited time to give to this complex of claims and counter claims – to come to any clear understanding of what has happened.

Having said this, the NEC recognises that most of the information that has been made publicly available has come from the other side, the side, led by staff, that identifies itself with what it likes to call the ‘interim NEC’. The reason for this imbalance will emerge shortly. What I’m asking of you is to give us a little of your time as I attempt to give, in the shortest possible way, the NEC’s account of what has happened, and, more particularly, of the way forward.

I write this at the request and endorsement of the NEC. This is why the pronoun ‘we’ is sometimes used.

At the outset, we wish to acknowledge that we might well have made mistakes. But we don’t think we’ve made substantive errors. Above all, we are confident that we have at all times acted in good faith. This last point needs to be emphasised because our integrity and motives have repeatedly been attacked. To be sure, they’ve been elevated to create the idea of there being fundamental political differences between the two sides. We are well aware of the political and personal epithets that have been hurled at us. We disown all of them.

We will not tax your solidarity by responding to all the various accusations levelled against us. What I propose to do instead is to account for how this dreadful state of affairs began. The hope is that this might suffice to give you an insight with which to view the mountain of subsequent accusations heaped on us.

The NEC is accused of a witch hunt against Eddie Cottle, a member of staff appointed in January 2005. As part of this witch-hunt, the NEC is supposed to have sacked Eddie. A variation of this theme is that the NEC took Eddie to court, rather than resolving the matter internally. None of this is true. This assertion is made with confidence notwithstanding the often many faces of ‘the truth’.

Individual members of the NEC might well have thought that Eddie was not the best person for Jubilee. The NEC, however, as a collective body, gave little consideration to such matters when considering Eddie’s request to work from Cape Town.

Jubilee’s national office has always been located in Johannesburg. All staff have always worked out of the Johannesburg office, as a condition of their contracts of employment.

The NEC was first asked to consider Eddie’s relocation in November last year. We were informed that Eddie had already in fact moved to Cape Town for personal reasons. The National Coordinator, Alvin Anthony, saw the move as not being inconsistent with Jubilee’s needs or organisational structure, but the NEC took a different view. We differed from him in four important respects.

First, we were conscious of establishing a precedent. If we agreed to Eddie’s relocation, how could we not agree to other members of staff moving anywhere else in the country, for whatever reason? Second, inherent in the precedent, if it were to be set, was the possible decentralisation of Jubilee’s national office. Thus, thirdly, the NEC did not think it was appropriate for it to take such a major decision by itself and accordingly decided to refer the matter of decentralisation to the National Conference, then scheduled for March 2006. And fourth, the NEC expressed no opinion at that stage as to whatever decision the National Conference might come to. In other words, all that the NEC was saying to Eddie was that we could not agree to his immediate request but that, if the National Conference were to agree to decentralise the national office, the (newly elected) NEC would be able to reconsider his request.

Eddie appealed against the NEC decision and asked us to reconsider the matter. We did so in December last year, when we re-arranged the very tight National Council agenda to meet with Eddie. Alvin attended this meeting. Responding to an NEC question, Eddie told us that he would resign from Jubilee if we were to ask him to return to Johannesburg pending the matter being referred to the National Conference. In the absence of any persuasive arguments against the four considerations behind the NEC’s original decision, the NEC re-affirmed its position.

Eddie and Alvin immediately took the matter to the National Council, which overturned the NEC’s decision.

The credentials of this National Council meeting are open to question. The staff had been entrusted to organise the meeting, but certain structures, both provincial and partner organisation, had not been invited. The matter of Eddie’s relocation was not on the agenda and participants did not have the necessary mandates. The meeting was highly conflictual, a proposal for a task team to look into the matter more dispassionately was brushed aside and the question of Eddie’s relocation was finally put to the vote when only 13 voting delegates remained. The staff, including Eddie, also voted.

But, even if the National Council had not been beset by these problems, the decision that it took still raised the fundamental constitutional matter of the respective powers and functions of the NEC and National Council. More specifically, the question at hand was whether the National Council has the power to overrule the NEC on individual staffing matters. The NEC therefore sought a legal opinion on this question from a widely respected lawyer with a longstanding association with Jubilee. He was unequivocal in concluding that the National Council had exceeded its constitutional powers.

On the basis of this legal opinion, the NEC wrote to Eddie. We asked him to return to work in Johannesburg. Mindful of what he had told us in December, we stated that we would take his non appearance in Johannesburg as confirmation of his resignation. We also offered to forgo his contractual need to give us a month’s notice. We did this in order to assist Eddie because, as an NEC, we had no hostile intent towards him, notwithstanding some of the deeply wounding things he had already said about some NEC members.

Eddie’s response to this letter was to take us to the Labour Court, where the matter was decided on whether the National Council was able to reverse an NEC decision on staffing matters. The judge came to a different conclusion to the one given the NEC some 3½ months earlier.

I have gone into this matter in some detail. I have done so because I think it makes so plain that the NEC acted in good faith, at all stages of this protracted event. Perhaps the only point needing emphasis is that we had no reason whatsoever for doubting the very firm opinion given us by the lawyer who was respected by everyone in Jubilee.

Unfortunately, ‘the other side’ chose not to see it in this straightforward light, but accused us of rescinding a National Council decision without the authority to do so and, as already stated, attached all manner of less than honourable motivations to us.

No less disturbing was the role of the National Coordinator. The situation called for mature leadership from him, as the bridge between the NEC and Jubilee’s staff as well as the provinces. The NEC acknowledges that Alvin was placed in a difficult position. He disagreed with the NEC and, correctly, made his position clear to the NEC. However, when the matter became a constitutional dispute between two of Jubilee’s major decision-making bodies, his role ought to have been one of neutrality.

Although Jubilee’s most senior employee, he was still nonetheless an employee bound by that employment relationship. As such, the manifest expectation was that he would be required to continue working with the NEC, regardless of the final outcome of the constitutional matter. Unfortunately, the Coordinator not only identified himself with one of the sides, overwhelmingly so in fact, but indeed took on a leading role on behalf of this side. In this way, he destroyed the trust that forms the very basis of the employment relationship involving senior management. The NEC formally warned him about his decidedly inappropriate behaviour, but to no avail.

It has since become clear to the NEC that the matter of Eddie’s relocation was no more than a manifestation of a comprehensive plot by staff to wrest control of the organisation from the NEC and the Jubilee structures in the provinces. Two staff members developed a document describing Jubilee as an ‘NGO’, denying the reality of a national organisation based on its provincial structures. The programme staff largely failed to assist in the strengthening of the provincial structures, thus flouting the central recommendation of the internal evaluation unanimously endorsed by the National Council in 2003. Much positive work was done in campaigning against ABSA/Barclays, but this was also structured in the form of a Johannesburg-based campaign under the direct control of the programme staff, thus largely bypassing Jubilee Gauteng and almost entirely excluding the other provincial structures.

Matters reached a head in the early months of this year when Alvin tried to organise a further National Council without the authority to do so. The NEC made it clear to Alvin that it did not agree to this meeting. We were fully committed to the organisational decision to hold our long overdue National Conference and the need to direct our scarce resources towards provincial preparations for the conference and the conference itself.

The meeting organised by Alvin fell well short of quorum requirements for a National Council and the few people present from provinces outside of Gauteng were not carrying provincial mandates. The intention of the meeting was to pass a vote of no confidence in the NEC and form the “interim NEC”.

In addition, Alvin wrote and circulated numerous letters attacking the NEC and most of its members, openly stating his refusal to work with the NEC. Eventually, the NEC had no option but to take disciplinary action against him. Although not expected of organisations as small as Jubilee, we wished justice to be both done and be seen to be done. We accordingly took the matter to an entirely independent person, an advocate not known to either party, and asked her to hear all the evidence from both sides and to come to her own conclusion.

It is possible to take each and every allegation against the NEC and to provide an explanation completely different from the one provided by our detractors. But this will serve no useful purpose. I trust enough has already been said to indicate what is in store.

Two further issue do need to be addressed, however. First, staff, with the support of some people alarmingly ready to use violence and intimidation, forcibly excluded the NEC from our national office and the resources of that office. Jubilee’s staff have used those resources, together with Jubilee’s time, to present their view of things on an almost daily basis. This increasingly included circulation to international allies and Jubilee’s funders. We have not been able to present our perspective, being locked out of our office and no longer able to draw on Jubilee’s full-time staff.

The use of intimidation and violence extended to the barricading of NEC members in the private home of one of its members in an attempt to prevent them from attending Alvin’s disciplinary hearing. It also included the levelling of threats to people in the provinces not to come to an extended NEC meeting held late last month to discuss the crisis, and the repeated physical disruption of the meeting itself.

Secondly, much of the information circulated has suggested that the NEC has been closed to options such as mediation to address the crisis. This does not bear up to scrutiny. At the December National Council, the NEC responded in support of the proposal to set up a technical committee to look into the matter of Eddie’s relocation. In January, the NEC welcomed an initiative by Chemist Khumalo of Ceasefire to mediate between the parties. In March, the NEC met with two of Jubilee South Africa’s patrons, Yasmin Sooka and Dennis Brutus, and responded positively to the proposal developed by Yasmin Sooka. Most recently, the NEC committed itself to the process facilitated by Oupa Lehulere, John Apollis and Mondli Hlatshwayo. In each instance, it was ‘the other side’ that either didn’t participate or disengaged from these attempts. Having exhausted the resources of the organisation, they have now embarked on an attempt to set up an organisation in direct opposition to Jubilee.

Finally, what about the future? In spite of the disruption, the extended NEC was very successful. Seven of the nine provinces sent up to four delegates each. We committed ourselves to learning from our mistakes, recommitted ourselves to Jubilee’s objectives and pledged ourselves to saving our organisation, if at all possible. The meeting gave its full backing to the NEC to lead the organisation to the next National Conference and again stressed the need to hold the conference at the earliest reasonable opportunity.

Finances hold the key to whether we will be able to keep going. We have only recently been able to return to our offices and have only temporarily been able to gain access to Jubilee’s bank account. What we discovered was alarming. The account has now been frozen because Alvin has told the Bank not to engage with the NEC and the Bank thus claims it cannot establish who has legitimate control over the account. This should be resolved soon and in our favour. Once this happens we will also need to undertake a detailed audit of Jubilee’s finances over the past several months.

What we would most welcome is an opportunity to meet with you and your organisation. But, in view of our limited resources, this is probably not going to be possible, especially for organisations outside of Johannesburg. What we ask is please to contact either George Dor or me if you would like us to visit you. We can then discuss directly with you whether such a visit is possible. Alternatively, if you have any specific questions or comments or requests for documents, please do let us have them.

We are all too painfully aware of Jubilee having been consumed by its internal conflict. Several months have been lost. We are now eager to move forward.


 * MP Giyose**
 * National Chairperson**

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