South Africa’s transition to democracy over the past decade has proved a disaster for the country’s poor, Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) Western Cape secretary Tony Ehrenreich said on Monday.
Speaking in Cape Town’s City Hall at the launch of a grassroots coalition to tackle poverty in the province, he harshly criticised the government’s failure to stem job losses in certain sectors.
”Economically, we have overseen a disaster. There’s 40% of our people unemployed… the inequalities between the rich and the poor have grown…
”We never fought to make a few black people wealthy, we fought to enrich all of our people,” Ehrenreich said to loud applause.
The coalition comprises about 72 different organisations, representing labour, churches, land sector NGOs and fishing communities, among others.
Ehrenreich said there were many things government needed to do, especially about the economy and designing ”a package of social measures” that met the needs of the people.
”You would know that thousands of clothing workers have lost their jobs because of the policy choices they’ve made in this country.”
The same applied to thousands of miners and workers in the printing and metal industries, as well as municipal workers, he said.
Earlier, Cosatu deputy provincial chairperson Wente Ntaka told the crowd of about 1 300 people who had packed the hall that former deputy president Jacob Zuma had been attacked by South Africa’s leaders ”left and right, centre, criss-cross… ”.
He had also been attacked by the Scorpions, who, she said, were meant to fight crime and not fight and destroy the country’s leaders.
”Our resolution is clear… we are going to defend our deputy president from being attacked. We are going to defend him until he is proven guilty by a court of law,” Ntaka said. – Sapa