Embattled Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi has come out swinging in a speech to the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (Sadtu) in the Eastern Cape, again apologising for his affair with an Eastern Cape employee, the subsequent rape allegations and lambasting government for adopting the national development plan (NDP).
Last weekend, shocking claims emerged that Vavi had raped a Cosatu employee. The accuser did not lay criminal charges against him but brought an internal complaint against Vavi to Cosatu. Vavi laid extortion charges against her, and alleged that the 26-year-old woman asked him for money in exchange for her silence.
Vavi admitted to having sex with her, but insisted it was consensual. The accuser withdrew her complaint to Cosatu on the first day of the inquiry.
Addressing the meeting of teachers on Friday, Vavi also pledged solidarity with Eastern Cape Sadtu members – a controversial union branch accused of blocking access to education in that province with strike action.
On Friday, Vavi called the Eastern Cape teachers "heros and heroines".
He again apologised for the rape debacle, adding: "I am back on my feet."
"I have decided to come to your regional biennial general meeting to apologise to each one of you and through you, to all Cosatu members and every South African, for letting them down. I don`t blame anyone but myself for the mistake. I don't want to compare myself to anyone but to my own standards that I have established as a family man who has championed the struggle to restore the basic tenants of society and our liberation movement, for integrity, honesty and service," Vavi said.
'Only human'
Vavi added that he was "only human and not a perfect saint", and that he learnt from his "mistake", which he vowed never to repeat again.
In the process of this "mistake", Vavi said he handed over to the "enemies of the working class a victory on a silver platter".
"I will work hard to regain the lost ground and trust of both my family and South Africans. In the meantime, my coming to you should signal a determination on my part not to allow that error of judgment to determine my destiny. I am back on my feet. I have a mandate to fulfill," he said.
He said it was a "privilege" to address the conference.
"You can be assured that you have the unanimous backing of the federation in your fight against those enemies of progress who are constantly attacking and insulting your members … In defending you against these insults I am by no means suggesting that you are angels who face no challenge to improve service to our country. We, however, reject with utter contempt the slander that you are undermining our education system and protecting your 'privileged' position … On the contrary, you are the heroes and heroines of our education system. In return for minimal financial reward, you do more than anybody to work to improve and transform our education system and go far beyond the call of duty to give your learners the best possible start to life," he said.
Vavi said an example of this was the decision by the Western Cape High Court in Cape Town this week to keep open 17 schools earmarked for closure by the Democratic Alliance-run Western Cape government. Vavi felt that the unions helped sway the court's decision.
"Thanks to the pressure from Sadtu and other unions, as well as from the alliance, the court ruled in favour of the poor, working class learners and parents in the Western Cape.
'Scandalous'
While the ANC's government made strides in addressing inequality in education, he said, a "scandalous two-tier service provision" system remained, in which poor and black children remained trapped by inferior education.
"[There are] 2 400 schools, mainly in rural areas, [that] have no water supply, 3 600 have no electricity and 1 000 have no ablution facilities. Only 7% of schools have libraries, only 5% have stocked science laboratories and just 1% of the schools have internet access," Vavi said.
He added that this forms part of a broader crisis of unemployment and poverty, which would be perpetuated by the NDP.
"The more realistic expanded unemployment rate‚ which includes those who have given up looking for work‚ was a massive 36.8%, up from 36.7% compared to the first quarter … This is despite the fact that the ANC, government, and society as a whole have made job creation a top national priority … The main explanation of this is that certain key centres of the state, notably the treasury and the Reserve Bank, are still wedded to the neoliberal policies adopted under former president Mbeki – the misnamed growth, employment and redistribution (Gear) programme adopted in 1996, which did the exact opposite to what its name suggested.
"It created neither growth nor employment and only redistributed from the poor to the rich, and the treasury and Reserve Bank's conservative monetary policies continue to put the brakes on the ANC and government's developmental and expansionist intentions on paper.
These people seem to take their mandate not from the ANC conference but from the boardrooms of big business, desperately looking for a 'quick-fix' solution to 'restore business confidence', which inevitably boils down to the same market-driven Gear-type 'solutions', similar to those being driven in Europe, with the same disastrous results.
Unfortunately the same failed policies have found their way into the national development plan, which some leaders are [saying] has become sacrosanct. They want everybody to swear allegiance to this document, despite its Gear macroeconomic policies, support for labour market deregulation and private-public partnerships. Some NDP fanatics demand that we must all rally behind it, in order, once again, to restore investors' confidence in our economy.
The problem with the NDP is that it is … based on the misguided illusion that 'the market' is the key to economic recovery, despite the overwhelming evidence from history and around the world today that the capitalist market economy, particularly a country with such massive levels of unemployment as ours, leads to crises like that of 2008 and that tough, effective state involvement is essential if we are to direct investment into [the] manufacturing industry and create jobs," Vavi said.