ONE in four South Africans are unemployed, and poverty is rife eighteen years after the release of Nelson Mandela and 14 years after he became president of South Africa.
A former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town yesterday described poverty in South Africa as being worse than ever and now constituting a ‘state of emergency’.
Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane added: ‘The anger, the frustration and the feeling of hopelessness especially among young people is a recipe for possible disaster.’
Official figures show that 25% of South Africans are unemployed, leading the cleric to declare: ‘Never before in the history of South Africa have such large gatherings of people consistently said “we have no food”.’
He continued: ‘It is unthinkable that so many can go without food.’ He then challenged the government to go with him from village to village to tell people what was going to be done about feeding their families.
The cleric listed five key issues facing people.
These are extreme hunger, widespread unemployment, the prevalence of Aids and tuberculosis and the lack of primary health care, inadequate social security, and the rising anger at government inaction in a situation of ‘the astronomical increase of the cost of living, particularly food prices and prices of paraffin’.
The archbishop also warned of the potential for widespread social unrest if such a situation continued.
The problem is not that there is a danger of widespread social unrest, but that the South African revolution was halted prematurely at a change of the political leadership.
It replaced de Klerk with Mandela, and a government made up of representatives of the black majority replaced white minority rule.
The revolution was physically halted at its bourgeois democratic stage of development, while leaving the ownership of the banks and the industries and the land in the same hands.
In fact it was not even a thoroughgoing bourgeois revolution, since it maintained a system of land ownership that was imposed on the black majority by the Dutch colonisers and British imperialism.
What has distinguished this settlement of the apartheid problem is the determination that the ANC leadership – in which the Communist party and the trade unions have played a leading part – have been shown to have kept their bargain with the South African ruling class and international capitalists. This was that their property and wealth would remain untouched.
Now 18 years after the release of Nelson Mandela, the Church is ringing the alarm bells that the anger of the working class and the rural poor has reached the stage of revolutionary action.
In fact, the revolution that was abandoned by the ANC and the Communist party, once the middle class had found their place in the sun, that they were so thirsting after, is now set to resume.
The task ahead is for the working class and the rural poor to overthrow the ANC government, that has shown itself to be an exceptional servant of local and foreign capital, and replace it with a workers and small farmers government.
This will resolve rural hunger by taking the land away from the white farmers and handing it over to the rural poor, while at the same time organising a number of major state-owned farms that can be used to produce large quantities of food to put an end to rural and urban hunger.
A workers and small farmers government will also expropriate the mining industries and the major manufacturing industries, and the banks, and place them under workers’ control and management, where production is planned to satisfy people’s needs.
For these tasks to be carried out, the revolutionary movement of the working class must be reflected in the building of a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, to lead the struggle of the working class and the rural poor to the victorious taking of power and the establishment of the basis for a socialist South Africa.
