The streets leading to the stadium in Reagile in the North West were closed to traffic for hours on Tuesday morning as more than 5 000 members of unions affiliated to the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) marched through the township to a Workers’ Day rally.
Marchers sang liberation songs as they marched from Kafatla Street at the entrance to the township near Koster to Tsele Street and the stadium.
Security was tight at the stadium and everyone entering was searched and made to pass through a metal detector.
Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi was scheduled to address workers in Reagile and it was expected that he would touch on challenges facing farmworkers and contract workers.
Reagile township is in the Kgetleng local municipality, which is predominantly a farming area.
ANC ‘enemy of working class’
Meanwhile, the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) charged on Tuesday that the African National Congress (ANC) government is as much an enemy of the working class as are big capitalists and racist bosses.
The government has ”again and again failed to listen to the workers and the poor”, the APF said. Instead, it has adopted policies favouring capitalists and profiteers. It has also consistently refused ”even the modest demands of workers for a living wage”.
The APF hosted a Workers’ Day rally in Sebokeng, in the Vaal Triangle, on Tuesday in support of ”all the working class struggles in the country”. It lent its backing in particular to that area’s residents, many of whom it claimed had been retrenched after it was discovered they had been poisoned with manganese gas.
Despite the country’s transition from apartheid to democracy, it remains one of the most unequal societies in the world, the APF said. Social misery is deepening, with broad unemployment of almost 40%, a lack of delivery of social services and the prevalence of HIV/Aids.
”For democracy to work, the poor and the marginalised need to have an equal voice in the delivery of social services, budgets and the general allocation of resources.”
The APF said the government and the Labour Department have shown time and again that they are more interested in competitiveness and profits than in the lives and welfare of vulnerable and abused workers.
It is only through combined worker and community struggles that the poor can force bosses and the government to change their attitudes and policies, it said.
Crime protest
In Pretoria, South African performers planned to release hundreds of red balloons into the air at the Union Buildings in a protest against crime.
Dozens of artists — including actress Vinette Ebrahim and fellow cast members on the Afrikaans soap opera 7de Laan — gathered outside the Pretoria Art Museum early on Tuesday. They wore red shirts and carried red balloons symbolising lives lost to crime.
The march, organised by Artists against Crime, was scheduled to start at 10am. Pretoria police were monitoring the proceedings. — Sapa