It is time to bundle out capitalists seeking to steal the African National Congress away from the working class, Congress of South African Trade Unions general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said on Tuesday.
”Now is the time for workers to forcefully claim the ANC as their own,” he told the eighth National Congress of the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers’ Union (Saccawu).
”The time has now arrived when workers should not shy from declaring up front that the ANC must retain its bias towards the workers and the poor.
”Today, the ANC has become the most contested organisation in the world. Now is the time to state unequivocally that we want to make the ANC in our own image, whilst recognising that elements of capital outside and within the ANC will struggle bitterly to steal our organisation for themselves,” Vavi said at the Birchwood Hotel in Boksburg.
”One thing is for sure — workers must never abandon the ANC. We don’t want a new UDF, we don’t want a new left political party, nor a split in the alliance.
”Rather, we want the ANC to be maintained as an organisation primarily of the workers and the poor. We will never hand over this weapon, built up with our blood, sweat and tears, to the other side on a silver platter.
”We will never let the ANC be privatised by the rich. It is a working class formation and a leftwing liberation movement — it must remain ours,” Vavi said.
Relations within the ANC-Cosatu-SA Communist Party alliance remain tense over contrarian views held about the upcoming corruption trial of ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma.
Zuma has received enthusiastic support from Cosatu, the SACP and the ANC’s own Youth League, among others, as he is seen as more sympathetic to their views.
The race to get rich
They also believe President Thabo Mbeki’s macro-economic reforms over the past ten years have only benefited the wealthy, including the country’s black economic empowerment mandarins — many of them former trade unionists.
”For years now we have been drawing the attention of the Congress movement to one of the most pressing challenges facing our revolution: that is, the temptation to embark in a mass race to get rich through whatever means possible and in the shortest period possible,” Vavi continued.
”The capitalist system by its nature breeds corruption, predator politics, survival of the fittest and the law of the jungle, where the system itself thrives on feeding on the weakest.
”All leaders and members of the movement have a responsibility to resist this temptation and lead by example. The idealism that inspired the demands of the Freedom Charter are in danger of being eroded and replaced… Some of the difficulties we face now can be traced to this tendency.
”Some want political power, not to realise all the demands of the Freedom Charter, but to pursue their own interests — to gain a share in white businesses or to increase their profits at the cost of consumers and workers.
”Some enter the succession debate [in the ANC as to who should replace Mbeki], not from the standpoint of who can better achieve the goals of the RDP [Reconstruction and Development Programme], but who can guarantee my business interests.
”The working class must be alive to the fact that they may find themselves used as cannon fodder to meet this unending lust of businessmen to be richer than they are today,” Vavi warned. – Sapa