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Johannesburg – The South African Communist Party has sold its once-admired heritage for pieces of gold, former Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said on Saturday.
“How can leading members of a revolutionary vanguard organisation provide cover for a president who has stolen from the public purse and who is a refugee from justice?” he said during his address to the National Union of Metalworkers of SA's national bargaining conference on Saturday.
“How can a revolutionary vanguard organisation stand idly by as workers are retrenched and whole communities are on the edge of absolute despair? How can a revolutionary vanguard organisation vote in Parliament to protect a president who has walked all over the Constitution of the country?
“The only sensible answer to this is that the so-called revolutionary vanguard organisation no longer exists. It has been bought and it has sold out. It has abandoned being part of the solution and is now part of the problem. The ZANC [Zuma ANC] itself has lost its historic moral position as a leader of society.”
The SACP said after President Jacob Zuma's apology over the Nkandla scandal that the implementation of the remedial measures called for by the public protector on Nkandla would be a beginning, but “self-correction must clearly go way beyond this".
Young people ‘less skilled’ now
Vavi said protecting jobs and creating employment is increasingly seen as the responsibility of the private sector, with government's role “reduced to that of a passive bystander, fiddling with the small details rather than taking bold measures to control and direct investment to more socially acceptable areas that can serve our people and deliver goods that our people can afford”.
“If you want to see how far we have degenerated as an economy and society you need look no further than one of the most recent reports of Stats SA… about unemployment among our young black African people, aged between 25 and 34,” he said.
“What was uncovered made for very bitter reading. After extensive research it revealed that these young people, 21 years after the birth of our new democracy, are in fact less skilled than their parents who were mostly raised under apartheid. Not only were they less skilled than their parents, but less skilled than any other race or age group.”
This, he said, is a classic case of maintaining a reserve army of labour on a mass scale that will “work for absolute peanuts to escape poverty; that will join in the dog-eat-dog divisiveness so beloved of capitalism and, worse, will have nothing to do with collectivism or working with others to improve society”.
