THE presence of all of the capitalist world’s leaders could not keep the South African masses quiet about their real feelings for the ANC leader, and South African President, Jacob Zuma.
He was remorselessly booed, and prevented from speaking for some time by tens of thousands of African workers and youth. They contrast the daily sufferings of the black masses in Apartheid-free South Africa with the luxury lifestyles of the ANC ruling group, whose regime runs South African capitalism on behalf of the international bankers and capitalists.
This group is so subservient to the capitalists that it refused to make the day of the National Memorial Service a national public holiday.
Some say they did not want production and profit-making to halt even for a day. Others say that they were fearful that a national public holiday would have seen miners and other workers flocking to the service to confront Zuma and call for his removal because of the massacre of the Marikana miners.
As it is, the organiser of the National Memorial day Cyril Ramaphosa, who began the NUM trade union after the UK miners’ strike of 1984-85, is now sitting on the boards of a number of companies. He used his position in the Mandela regime to become a billionaire capitalist, and one of the richest men in Africa.
After Mandela’s death comes the settlement of accounts.
This was made doubly clear when the presence at the memorial rally of all the leaders of world capitalism, who are all in deep trouble in their own countries, could not prevail on the black masses to endure Zuma’s speech without showing massive opposition.
In fact, sixteen months after the ANC police shot and killed 34 Marikana miners on August 16th 2012, the three-party alliance of the Cosatu trade union federation, the South African Communist Party and the ANC, that provided the basis of the ANC government is in a desperate crisis. Millions of workers are now opposed to it on the basis that it is supporting the same conditions for the masses, as they suffered under Apartheid, almost 20 years after the ending of the Apartheid regime.
The NUMSA trade union is breaking with the Cosatu trade union federation and the South African Communist party on the grounds that, ‘The 1994-negotiated settlement did not change the colonial status of the black majority.’
Its statement reads: ‘It has now become absolutely necessary to publicly repeat the essential historic relationship that has, hitherto, traditionally existed between the SACP and NUMSA.’
It insists that after the 1994 negotiated settlement, ‘In all essential respects, however, the colonial status of the black majority has remained in place. Therefore we characterise our society as “colonialism of a special type”.’
It adds: ‘We now know in 2013 that out of the poorest 25 million South Africans, 24 million are Africans precisely because of their unchanged colonial status after 1994!
‘We now know that in 2008, the top 20% or roughly 10 million South Africans received 75% of total national income.
‘The poorest 50% of the South African population, or 25 million South Africans, received a meagre 8% of the national income. Of course 24 million of these poorest South Africans are African – confirming their colonial status in post-1994 democratic South Africa.
‘We in NUMSA are not surprised at this ugly South African reality. As we now know, the 1994 ANC/SACP-negotiated settlement did not change this in all essential respects. However, the colonial status of the black majority has simply remained in place to date. Nor did it destroy the economic and political basis of the power of white monopoly and imperialist capital in South Africa.’
This is the task that remains to be done.
The South African workers and youth are now mobilising in new trade unions and political organisations to put an end to the current regime by the working class and the rural poor taking the power and expropriating the bosses, the bankers and the great landlords.
It is in this revolutionary situation that Zuma was humbled at the memorial service. Now is the time for the the rapid building up of the section of the Fourth International in South Africa to pay its leading role in the organisation of the South African socialist revolution.
