COSATU+1st+Dep+Pres+Sdumo+Dlamini+to+SANCO+Congress

Cosatu Media Release, Wed 2006/12/13 11:42 AM
=Speech by COSATU First Deputy President, Sdumo Dlamini, delivered to SANCO 4th Congress on 13 December 2006=

President Mlungisi Hlongwane

Deputy President Ruth Bhengu

General Secretary Linda Mngomezulu

Entire leadership of SANCO, delegates, comrades and friends

I bring revolutionary greetings to COSATU's long-time ally SANCO, from the COSATU Central Executive Committee and our entire 1.8 million paid up members.

Thank you for the honour of inviting us to address your historic congress, an honour we will cherish for a long time to come.

COSATU is an organisation of the workers, which is a leading detachment of the working class. SANCO is an organisation of the poor - the working class. The Alliance that has developed between SANCO and COSATU is therefore natural. We have shared the same battlefields basically for many years, spanning back to well before the formal creation of COSATU and SANCO in the eighties.

COSATU is a revolutionary trade union movement that has linked workplace struggles for wages and better conditions with communities' struggles for freedom, better houses, education and public transport systems. SANCO activists have led the many of these community struggles. Because the battles were the same, SANCO and COSATU have always had a huge overlap in membership. Moses Mayekiso, your former President, and the current President Mlungisi Hlongwane, are the products of workers' struggles. Many of the people gathered here may be unionists or former unionists themselves.

It is for this reason that COSATU has not opposed the Alliance agreement that SANCO should form part of the revolutionary Alliance with ANC and the SACP. At the time when this decision was taken we pointed out that COSATU has not formally in its structures decided to back or oppose this decision. The fact we voiced this does not mean we have less regard for SANCO.

Equally the fact that some COSATU, ANC and other leaders do no always salute SANCO does not mean that COSATU have less respect for SANCO. Equally it cannot mean that because some SANCO leader forgets to say "Viva COSATU" that should be interpreted that SANCO leaders do not have a respect for COSATU. COSATU fully recognises SANCO as its ally in the NDR. COSATU's 1.8 million members need SANCO to fully live up to the role it has set out for itself, which is different from COSATU's role.

It would be useful at this stage to recap some of the nature of the National Democratic Revolution, including both its very real achievements, as well as some of its deficiencies. The //post-apartheid socio-economic order// can be characterised as one in which there is positive economic growth and opportunities for amassing wealth for a few, whilst at same time this development sits side-by-side with massive underdevelopment for the poor and unemployed.

Unemployment is a national crisis, with two out of every five workers needing jobs not being able to find opportunities. Of the unemployed over 70% are under the age of 35 - mostly African women - and rural areas fare worse in comparison to urban areas. Two of three African children are unemployed.

The quality of jobs is also declining as permanent, secure employment is rapidly being replaced by precarious and vulnerable forms of employment. On paper, workers have gained rights that in practice are being //'hollowed out'// as employers use various strategies to circumvent the labour law. [|[1]][1][1]

Income inequality is also high and growing. According to the UNDP Human Development Report (2003) the Gini Coefficient was 0.596 in 1995 and rose to 0.635 in 2001 suggesting that income inequality was worsening.[|[2]][2][2] This is of concern not only from the ethical perspective of the NDR that seeks to make society more equitable, but also from an economic perspective. The rising level of inequality can be seen in the workers' share in the national income declining since 1994 while the share of profits has increased. This has important implications for our development path, as it is indicative of the lower levels of labour absorption and stagnation of their wages.

According to the Labour Force Survey figures, 16.7% of all officially employed people in South Africa earn less than R500 a month, 34.3% earn under R1000 a month and a total of 60% of all workers earn less than R2500 a month. Many of these workers are sole income earners in their households. To illustrate the distribution of an income of R2500 per month between five (two parents, two children, and a grandparent) translates into an income of R500 a person a month or R30 a day. Access to employment is therefore not a ladder out of poverty for those earning below subsistence level - they remain trapped in poverty and high levels of desperation.

Poverty has at best stabilised, but remains high and it is estimated that 40%-50% of the population live in poverty. There is a debate on whether poverty has decreased. As the People's Budget Campaign has discussed, after reviewing many studies, the probability is that poverty has increased between 1996 and 2001 with the situation getting marginally better since 2002.

In short, the **//post-apartheid socio-economic order//** can be characterised as one in which there is positive economic growth and opportunities for amassing wealth for a limited few. This growth is not equitably shared. While there is a formal break with the apartheid racial ordering of society the dualistic development path continues, albeit with new features. Fundamentally the accumulation regime has not changed; hence development and under-development continues to coexist.

This did not have to be, and neither was it inevitable. Of course no one can claim that it is possible to root out more than 300 years of colonial legacy in 12 years. Similarly, it cannot be argued that what is taking place in South Africa is entirely in line with the National Democratic Revolution, as historically conceived by the liberation movement. The NDR is about thoroughgoing transformation of social and property relations. There have been numerous warnings against the danger of superficial change, or, put another way, the dangers of simply replacing a white ruling oligarchy with a black one, but leaving the social and property relations unchanged. The ANC's 1969 Morogoro Strategic Perspective in particular was scathing on this as acceptable for our NDR.

The Freedom Charter's economic vision, taken forward in the RDP, offers a radical programme for such a change of social and economic relations. With the adoption of GEAR this economic transformation vision has not been taken forward and economic reforms largely concentrate on making the economy internationally competitive.

The picture above does not mean we have made no gains in the past 12 years. Yes, more people have access to housing, electricity, water and sanitation, education and healthcare. Yes, our government has extended social services and ended racial and gender based discrimination in social services such as pensions, child support and disability grants. These gains must not be taken for granted; they are important and certainly have changed the lives of millions.

But is the nature of a capitalist system that whilst government is giving with one hand the capitalist class is reversing these gains. High levels of unemployment, poverty and growing inequalities, even within black communities, mean that we face a new challenge of cuts to services, prepaid meters, evictions and continued red-lining by the financial institutions.

But where is SANCO in all of this? Many SANCO branches gallantly led communities to resist and to advance their demands for a better life for all. But at the same time a lot more branches were silent and nowhere to be found when communities needed leadership on the challenges they face.

We all understand that SANCO has to position itself in relation to the branches of our joint ally, the African National Congress, on one side, and organisations that are generally styled as "Social Movements" on the other side.

While COSATU is not hostile or sectarian in relation to these new social movements, we would be seriously concerned if SANCO allowed itself to be eclipsed by them, because they appear to lack the full potential that SANCO does have for broad representation of the masses' concerns at local level.

We do feel that lessons can usefully be learned from the experience of some of these social movements.

Notable among them have been:

· The **Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee**, which has taken up the cause of popular access to affordable electricity; · The **South Durban Community Environmental Alliance**, which has championed the fight against cruel, health-destroying pollution suffered by people who are obliged to live near uncontrolled oil refineries and other hazards spewed out by careless capitalist enterprises blinded by their obsession with greater and greater profits; · The **Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign**, which has ridden the rising tide of spontaneous opposition to harsh and over-bureaucratic management of people's land and housing needs - needs which cannot in the last analysis be denied.

There are other "social movements", and new ones may appear at any time. One reason for this is that all too often, in the particular areas where stress spills over into crisis, SANCO has not consistently provided leadership. and its voice at national level has disappeared. We do understand that SANCO has its problems, but we will always regret it when SANCO misses the boat, so to speak.

At this point I would like to mention some matters which COSATU very much hopes and fully expects are temporary difficulties which SANCO will put away for good at this Congress of yours.

COSATU completely rejects all of the things that have been said about COSATU having an improper interest in your elections at this Congress. This is typical rumour-mongering of the worst, most baseless, kind. It is not the first time such rumours have been floated. There was another occasion some years ago. Let me repeat, there is absolutely no basis for these rumours. They are fabrications. The claims that have been made are scurrilous, and even libellous. We reject these claims utterly.

What we as COSATU want is a strong and credible SANCO that is the champion of the people. We are your allies, and this is what is expected of you as a collective. Who you choose to execute your collective responsibilities is your business.

COSATU has too much experience of improper interference from outside its ranks to make the mistake of attempting any such thing in relation to SANCO, or the ANC or the SACP for that matter, noting that both these other alliance partners will be having an elective Congress or Conference in 2007. That however does not mean we have no interest on who leads our Alliance partners. Of course we want leadership that would strengthen SANCO, ANC and SACP. We want working class biased leadership, not a leadership hostile to workers and the poor. But how we influence that cannot be as alleged in the presidential address yesterday.

We have repeatedly made it clear that each alliance partner must have complete autonomy in its inner democracy. We practise what we preach, and we are not about to undermine our integrity in this regard for the sake of some petty personality issues.

Let us now return to the practical business at hand. What is the COSATU wish list for SANCO? We are your allies and we should have a wish for your future. This is not unprincipled interference; as our allies we ask you to join us in the struggle for fundamental social transformation of our society to address the issues we have raised in this address.

Firstly we wish that SANCO would implement its resolutions, in particular in relation to playing a role as a civic movement that, whilst it is part of the revolutionary Alliance, its membership broadly accommodates all citizens irrespective of their narrow political and ideological differences. SANCO would then truly champion the issues of all residents and lead them as they pursue their demands for better houses, and other social services. A SANCO that would lead efforts against prepaid meter systems, cut offs and evictions. Where this role clashes with the role of ANC branches, SANCO must seek to form alliances with such branches and not see them as opposition and competition.

SANCO's independence, like COSATU's, but in your case at a local rather than a national level, is tested all the time. The ANC locally can use the power of patronage. In the context of mass unemployment this is a very potent instrument. Protégés of ruling-party figures placed within the other alliance partners are always trying to be "not problematic". They forget their responsibilities to their own autonomous body and membership while pandering to the more powerful one. This destroys the alliance by destroying the identity of its constituent parts.

The question of BEE and leadership is the challenge that COSATU is confronting. ANC Secretary-General Kgalema Motlanthe has said that we should make sure that the people to eat first, but instead, some of us who should know better jump to the head of the queue. COSATU is developing a new Code of Conduct for leadership that would certainly forbid worker representatives within its ranks and at all levels from leading a double life as business people.

What will SANCO do about this problem? For you it is even more difficult, because by your nature you already have business people within your ranks, even if they are only small entrepreneurs, while in our case our membership is made up almost entirely of employed people.

What is the solution to clashes between SANCO and the ANC? We believe that such "turf wars" are completely unnecessary. There is no contradiction between the two structures. SANCO is capable of organising more widely than the ANC. At the same time it organises a mass that is thoroughly supportive of the ANC. For these reasons SANCO is not only a natural ally, but a very useful one to the alliance as a whole, and to the ANC and COSATU in particular.

COSATU understands that the National Democratic Revolution has class and gender dimensions, but that its principal purpose is the complete elimination of national oppression.

SANCO must work to resolve the national contradictions at local level. SANCO's mission is to move the spaza economy, with all deliberate speed, towards the condition of the cities. The Freedom Charter states: "All people shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions." This must be part of SANCO's charter, too, but we must retain our revolutionary character. SANCO cannot be purely about business and not about the poor. How do we balance these roles?

We wish there was more time to raise more challenges. COSATU and its entire leadership and membership wishes SANCO success in this congress and in the future.


 * Amandla ngawethu!**

2468 words

[|[1]][1][1] C.F. Bezuidenhout, A and Fakier, K, 2006, //__Maria's Burden: Contract Cleaning and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in port apartheid South Africa__// and Von Holdt, K and Webster, E (eds), 2005, //__Beyond the Apartheid Workplace: Studies in Transition__//__.__ [|[2]][2][2] Gini coefficients measure the extent of income inequality in the country. If a Gini coefficient equals 0, there is perfect income equality. A coefficient of 1 is an indication of perfect income inequality.