Lekota party 'for the rich'

Cape Town - The president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has declined an official invitation from Mbhazima Shilowa to attend the meeting of the national convention to be held in Sandton at the weekend. No surprise there, then.

Sdumo Dlamini, the president, said "thanks, but no thanks", adding that he believes Shilowa and Mosiuoa Lekota are both angry men.

"Come on!" he told Lekota. "You are just an angry man who is not happy that he was not elected in a democratic process.

Of Shilowa he said that although he announced that he was quitting the ANC because of the way Thabo Mbeki was treated, said: "I see in him a very angry man who believed too much in the individual who is running and less because his leader is no more in charge."

Dlamini pointed out that both men could afford to give up eight months of cabinet minister's salary, suggesting "that the salary was worth nothing to what you already have, the wealth of your lifetime and for your future generations," he told them. "These are people who are filthy rich and do not care about a monthly cabinet salary!"

Dlamini said in a open letter published on Wednesday: "Shilowa and Lekota are now forming a political party of the very rich, in Sandton where the poor cannot reach. They want to use the poor to secure their wealth which they have acquired under the banner of the ANC, the banner of the workers and poor of this country."

The Cosatu president said that the two men are part and parcel of the leadership that demobilised the masses of the country and the ANC itself in the interest of capital. "They are today the very people who want to destroy the ANC from the outside, as they have failed to do it internally," he added.

- I-Net Bridge