Walter+Sisulu+warned+of+Vavi,+says+Lekota,+Msomi,+City+Press



=Walter Sisulu warned of Vavi, says Lekota=

S’Thembiso Msomi, City Press, Johannesburg, 4 November 2007
ANC national chairperson Moisuoa Lekota says late struggle icon Walter Sisulu had warned long before the party even came to power that Cosatu leader Zwelinzima Vavi would fight an ANC government.

Lekota said yesterday Vavi’s purported statement that workers had been better off under apartheid reminded him of ­Sisulu’s remarks in 1992 at a ceremony to hand over Walvis Bay to ­Namibia.

“On that occasion he (Sisulu) told Vavi that he was worried by the way he was speaking and said it seemed that if the ANC took power at 10, at 11 Vavi would be fighting the ANC government.

“I do not know what comrade Walter had seen and understood of him, but it is significant that as early as that time, he foresaw that Vavi would fight the ANC government,” Lekota said.

But Vavi denied yesterday that he had said workers lived better under apartheid or that Sisulu had cast doubt on him.

The Cosatu leader accused Lekota of “misusing” Sisulu’s name to “achieve cheap political mileage”.

At the time of the Walvis Bay handover, Vavi was Cosatu’s organising secretary.

“I was not even the deputy general secretary then. I did not have the profile I enjoy today as I was not in a position to articulate Cosatu policies,” he said.

“So how could Sisulu have been concerned and predict that I would be general secretary one day,” asked Vavi. He said Lekota had not even been in Walvis Bay at the time. “He was not there, someone must have lied to him (about the statement),” he said.

Sisulu, Thabo Mbeki and Vavi had represented the ANC alliance at that ceremony.

Lekota has taken particular exception to comments Vavi supposedly made at an SA Municipal Workers’Union meeting that the apartheid regime had done better for the black working class than the ANC government was currently doing.

He has labelled the alleged statements as “the most reactionary and counter-revolutionary statement I have heard”.

Vavi denies making the statement. He said journalists had pulled the quote from the written version of his speech from a section in which he had written about the plight of casualised workers.

“In fact I did not even read that part of the speech.”

Vavi said he had written that: “A worker who was a permanent worker during apartheid and who enjoyed benefits such as medical aid, pension etc, and who had subsequently been ­retrenched and offered his ­previous job as a casual or subcontracted worker, and who ­today earns a quarter of his previous salary with no benefits, will think the past is better than today.”

He added that Cosatu was on record as saying that the post-1994 era had brought a much ­better life for workers than the apartheid era.

But Lekota does not see Vavi as a friend of the ANC.

“The only impression I get is of someone who has come to believe he owns Cosatu and whatever else might have been decided, he can decide for them as to what is to be done,” he said.


 * From: http://www.news24.com/City_Press/News/0,,186-187_2214699,00.html**

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