Willie Madisha has been under surveillance and has received death threats
Glenda Daniels
Private security guards will be hired for the president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), Willy Madisha. He collapsed from nervous exhaustion this week after a string of death threats.
Madisha has been singled out by the ruling party’s top officials, union sources say, because of his outspoken views on the government’s economic policies and poverty in the country. Attempts to target him are evident in a top-level African National Congress document that speaks of “ultra-leftist tendencies” in the Cosatu leadership who are “counter-revolutionary” and need to be “isolated and defeated”.
Madisha (42) collapsed at a function held in honour of former president Nelson Mandela in Kempton Park and was taken to a private clinic nearby. He was released on Thursday.
The Mail & Guardian understands that over the past year senior ANC officials have told Madisha a few times that they had heard there were plans to “deal with him” and that he had “better be careful”.
He recently received an SMS message that showed a cocked gun with the words “we know where you live”.
It is also understood he is taking strain because he believes he is under surveillance. His phone and cellphone are also thought to be bugged.
Madisha’s colleagues have even advised him to hire a bookkeeper and close his bank accounts to avoid a possible set-up to smear him with corruption charges. Such a smear would have the effect of isolating him from his constituency, they say.
The latest vilification, according to Cosatu, is an ANC document that alleges ultra-leftists in the leadership of the trade union movement and the South African Communist Party are counter-revolutionary and aim “to make the national democratic revolution fail”.
“All this became too much for him. It’s especially stressful when you think your own comrades are targeting and isolating you,” says a union insider.
His colleagues say he “works ridiculous hours and hardly sleeps, but recently the strain of what has happened in the alliance and now the document has been too much”.
Madisha is married with two children and lives in Pietersburg. He grew up in Attridgeville, near Pretoria, and was active in United Democratic Front politics in the 1980s while studying for a teaching qualification at the Transvaal College of Education in Soshanguve. He moved to Zebediela and there he became the first ANC chairperson of the local branch after the organisation was unbanned.
In 1995 he was elected deputy president of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, rising to president in 1996. He is also an SACP central committee member. Since 1996 he has been the national chairperson of the South African Council for Educators.
Since he was elected Cosatu president in 1999, Madisha has been outspoken on issues such as HIV/Aids, becoming a thorn in the side of President Thabo Mbeki. He recently took a public HIV test, setting an example to his constituency not to hide the scourge. “Unless something drastic is done immediately it is reported that by the year 2010, Aids will account for 67% of deaths in the country. We must urge our country to move away from a state of denial to a position where treatment of those infected will become paramount,” he said recently.
At Cosatu’s KwaZulu-Natal regional congress last week Madisha said that workers were “people who know about poverty, who see their loved ones dying of Aids. Are we counter-revolutionary if we talk about these things?”
ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe said those who are deeply involved in working for the public should make some time to rest and “not push themselves to the limit”.
He said the death threats should be reported to the investigating authorities. Cosatu says it has instructed its lawyers to work with the authorities to get to the bottom of the matter.