‘If we cannot succeed with the agenda of decent work and poverty eradication with Jacob Zuma as the President, Kgalema Motlanthe as the Deputy President responsible for poverty eradication, Gwede Mantashe as the ANC Secretary-General, Ebrahim Patel as the Minister of Economic Development and Rob Davies as the Minister of Trade and Industry, then there is little possibility that we can succeed to make any next period that of workers and the poor.
“This is the moment that comes once in a long time. We, the leaders of the generation largely responsible for this political climate, so pregnant with real possibilities, cannot afford to squander this moment,” according to Cosatu’s Political Report, from its 10th congress, held in September 2009.
This excerpt shows how confident and hopeful the leadership of the Congress of South African Trade Union (Cosatu) was about the prospects of what we called the Polokwane moment (following the ANC conference) just a few months after Jacob Zuma took power.
Read more in Daily Maverick: Elections 2024
We thought we were on the cusp of radical change. We thought a new dawn was about to break. We were profoundly wrong. Let us examine the circumstances that led to that situation.
We were not wrong to mobilise against privatisation and neoliberalism or to agitate for the removal of those persons who would divert and dilute the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and ignore the economic demands of the Freedom Charter.
However, we were wrong to believe that the then president, Jacob Zuma, represented an alternative to the economic programmes of President Thabo Mbeki. Again, we were wrong in believing that Mbeki had hatched a plan to stop Zuma from ascending to the position of president. For this, we have apologised to him and the country.
Admitting that it was a serious and tragic error for the working class to rally behind Zuma in 2005 and beyond, does not mean we harbour personal hatred towards him, as his supporters continue to claim.
Critically engaging with Zuma’s politics on public platforms and social media to express an opinion does not mean we suffer from perpetual anger towards the former president. Nor are we obsessed with him.
Thanks to Cosatu’s insistence during this period, workers across South Africa mobilised behind Zuma. The fact that he came from KwaZulu-Natal and Mbeki came from the Eastern Cape was irrelevant. We belong to a long tradition of nonracial unions and have buried tribalism and divisions based on the different languages we speak. Our rallying call was to the whole of the South African working class.
There can be little doubt that the extent of the labour mobilisation around the Zuma presidency made the authorities reluctant to arrest and charge him at the time of the conviction of his then financial adviser, Schabir Shaik. That mounting wave of support for Zuma made the then Director of Public Prosecution, Bulelani Ngcuka, blurt out contradictory statements — for example, that there was a prima facie case against Zuma but that the case would not be winnable in court.
The workers and Zuma
Anyone who knows Zuma will admit that he is very likeable. He is easy to relate to and down to Earth. Workers used to say, “Through him, we see ourselves.”
After the cold calculations of Mbeki, his appalling Aids denialism and his refusal to engage with labour and civil society on a range of pressing issues, Zuma came across as being accessible, comradely and prepared to listen to us. Thus, he was regarded as a breath of fresh air.
Policy debates to chart a way forward for the country cannot, however, depend on someone’s personality. Being personable does not automatically mean you will be a good leader. What you do is far more important than what you say, or how you say it.
What we have now said repeatedly, as this reality dawned during the 2010s, is that it is simply not true that Zuma was a champion of the interests of the working class and the marginalised poor.
Despite attempts today to portray the former president as a long-standing revolutionary or even a progressive thinker, his record is the opposite. He is simply not left-leaning, politically or ideologically. His most recent utterances prove beyond any doubt that this former member of the South African Communist Party’s (SACP’s) Central Committee, who can conveniently quote Karl Marx when he needs to, is not himself a Marxist or any form of socialist we recognise.
We continue to challenge this ideological confusion, so common in the ruling party and the Tripartite Alliance over the last three decades, where there has been much left-talk and sloganising but policy implementation belonging decisively to the right of the political spectrum. Speaking left and walking right has been the reality.
Workers gave Zuma political support, not personal support. Political support does not involve unconditional devotion. Politics is not the same as a love affair, “to have and to hold from this day forward … through sickness and health … till death do us part”.
The working class led by Cosatu and the SACP rallied behind Zuma not only because they were chronically disappointed by Mbeki and those who imposed neoliberalism, who were Aids denialists and who abandoned solidarity with humanity during that first decade of freedom.
Cosatu, the SACP and countless others concluded as early as 1995, following the announcement of the privatisation programme, that the government had abandoned the RDP and the Freedom Charter’s economic demands, and was instead pursuing neoliberalism and privatisation. We concluded that in economic terms, the primary beneficiaries in the first decade of SA’s democracy were from the same class and race we thought we had defeated in 1994.
This was a political assessment that had nothing to do with the liking or hatred of anyone.
Based on that political assessment, we mobilised workers and the youth in opposition to what the SACP labelled the “1996 Class Project”. Cosatu’s first openly political strike was held on 10 May 1999, protesting against a jobs bloodbath in which one million jobs were culled between 1997 and 1999.
At the time, we were seething with anger that the space to engage with the government’s economic policy direction had been closed down, and we were told to accept the “realities” of a world where austerity was “necessary” and “inevitable”.
We tried and used every opportunity to prepare and present researched propositions to point out to ANC leaders that the trajectory we were on would only make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Our views were dismissed by both President Nelson Mandela and his deputy, Mbeki, as being informed by our young age and impatience. After all, we had not studied economics in Great Britain, as had Mbeki, and we remember his extraordinary comment in June 1996 when launching the strategy for Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear): “Just call me a Thatcherite!”
At that moment, the debates among us included whether the Tripartite Alliance arrangement — the ANC, Cosatu and SACP — was not helping us, and that perhaps we must leave it. When Zuma became deputy president in 1997 at the Mafikeng conference, he became the guy to go to, to express our frustrations. He gave us a shoulder to cry on. I remember vividly his counsel was to never leave the movement even if, during certain periods of its long history, it had a bad leader. The struggle was a long one and we had to stay and fight from within.
The pendulum swings
We used this insight to calm ourselves and those we led. We were persuaded to be more strategic. It was from these informal engagements that we gained affection for Zuma. Hardly surprising then that we would rally to his defence when Zuma was dismissed from his position as deputy president of South Africa in 2005. Conspiracy theories about a political plot to stop him from ascending to the position of president began to be openly advanced, not just from within but in the public discourse.
The song Wenzeni uZuma — weNgcuka khawuphendule was composed by a shop steward, Patrick Cokotho of the SA Clothing and Textile Workers Union (Sactwu). He led a big group of workers practising the song all night in a hotel during the Cosatu national congress in 2007, (a month after Ngcuka began investigating and prosecuting the Arms Deal). Sadly, Cokotho died in his sleep on the morning of the start of the congress. That’s how that song became so popular.
We argued then that the pendulum was now in favour of the ruling class, which experienced massive tax cuts (from 52.5% in 1992 to 39% in 1999), a much higher rate of profit (by 2001, rising to third-highest in the world among industrial countries), and permission to list their companies overseas. Meanwhile, the government was aggressively reducing exchange controls, allowing much-needed resources to leave our shores.
All our engagements with the ANC leadership about our workers’ dire economic situation came to nought. Our proposals were arrogantly dismissed and scorned.
The anger we felt against those in the boardrooms was effectively fuelled by street and grassroots mobilisation. The forces against Mbekism culminated in what we thought would be the watershed ANC Polokwane conference of December 2007. We had prepared well. We fought to raise Zuma to ANC president, Motlanthe to deputy president and Mantashe to secretary-general. While we had confidence in all the top six, it was Mantashe whom we trusted the most ideologically.
Five priorities
Polokwane developed a 16-point economic programme summarised into five priorities for the 2009 national and provincial elections. It is worth reminding ourselves what these priorities were:
- Decent work, which was explained as not just the creation of jobs but jobs that paid a living wage and were capable of freeing workers from the clutches of poverty. It was here that we thought we had a firm ANC commitment that the government would ban labour brokering and ensure employers would have to comply with labour laws.
- Education was made the second priority for obvious reasons. Every Stats SA report shows that most people who cannot find jobs have no matric qualification.
- Healthcare, especially the commitment to introduce National Health Insurance, was made the third priority
- Land redistribution was the fourth priority because the government had missed its target of redistributing 30% of arable land in the first five years of democracy; by 2007, the figure was still around 5%.
- Fighting corruption and crime was the final priority. This was a direct response to the growing concerns of society about the rising levels of criminality and corruption.
It was through a rigorous assessment of what happened to each of these 2007 demands that we began to have grave concerns. Furthermore, it was noted that our “Messiah” wasted no time in visiting the British queen and dined with the multinationals in London, assuring them that the policies of the ANC under Mbeki were not going to change. Indeed, they were not changing and the facts that followed spoke for themselves.
Under Zuma, the lethal denialism of Mbeki that led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of our people was addressed and the supply lines for medication were finally opened, but this was not because of Zuma. Amass movement formed by the Treatment Action Campaign and supported by millions forced his hand.
Unemployment and education
Under Zuma’s watch, all indicators of the five priorities were on a downward trend. Unemployment worsened. According to the 2021 second-quarter Quarterly Labour Force Survey data, the unemployment level went up to 7.83 million and the unemployment rate rose to 34.4% — the highest since the introduction of the survey in 2008.
Notably, between 2009 and 2019, the youth share of the total employed decreased by 8.5 percentage points, from 28.6% to 20.1%. In absolute terms, the number of young people employed also decreased during that time. There may be several factors explaining this decline, but the rise in the number of young people not in employment, education or training is one of Zuma’s more concerning legacies.
You cannot imagine how devastated we were to see this trend established.
We must say upfront that access to education has continued to increase over the past three decades of ANC government. Let’s give credit where credit is due. However, the quality of education at all levels continues to be a major challenge.
Zuma’s response to the #FeesMustFall campaign was an announcement in December 2017 that the government would subsidise free education for poor and working-class students. The definition of poor working-class students was confined to “enrolled TVET college or university students from South African households with a combined annual income of up to R350,000”.
The first response of Zuma before announcing that the government was going to subsidise free education for poor and working-class students in response to the #FeesMustFall campaign was to cast the courageous student activists as a third force. This was and is a repudiation of what he and his followers claim him to be: a revolutionary.
Progressive as this move was, it meant that the fault lines of the commodified education system still needed to be addressed since it excluded a cohort of working-class students known as the “missing middle”. Our educational system is facing quantity and quality crises.
It is estimated that 40% of all learners who enter South Africa’s basic education system do not complete matric. Of the 60% that remain in the system, only 76% passed matric in 2020. Less than three out of 10 black children who pass matric advance to tertiary education.
School dropouts and exclusions in higher education have led to a dramatic increase in the number of young people who are “not in any form of employment, education and training”, which increased to 8.8 million in the second quarter of 2021. Our children cannot compete with the rest of the world when it comes to mathematics and reading comprehension, with South Africa regularly ranking at the bottom of global proficiency scores.
Healthcare and land redistribution
The third priority was healthcare and the introduction of National Health Insurance (NHI). Under Zuma’s leadership, the ANC had yet to progress on this note. NHI has still not been introduced (only this year has it been signed into law because of pressure from working-class organisations).
Land redistribution did not move at a fast pace. Despite promising to distribute 30% of the land at the Land Tenure Conference in 2001, the combined Zuma and Mbeki years saw only 7% distributed by 2017. On the 30th anniversary of democracy, the government is still working on realising this first goal of redistributing 30% of land to black people.
Corruption and crime
The last commitment was to fight corruption and crime. Both of these measures have become worse in every respect. The Institute for Security Studies’ Gareth Newham wrote in an article in March 2023:
“Since 2012, the ability of the SAPS to solve murders has more than halved, dropping by 55% such that, in the 2021/22 financial year, only 14.5% of murder cases were closed as detected. The situation is as bad for armed robbery, with detection rates declining by 53% since 2013. Last year, the police could only close 10.4% of cases as detected. This means that 86% of murder cases and 90% of robbery cases went unsolved.”
Arguably, this increasing impunity for violent crime has contributed to the 62% increase in murders and 32% increase in armed robberies since 2012. It is therefore not surprising that organised crime flourished in the decade under Zuma, including the spread of the construction mafia.
The most dramatic failure of the ANC under Zuma was on corruption. The Zondo State Capture Commission, which Zuma was compelled to appoint in January 2018 — after pressure from then Public Protector Thuli Madonsela — provides some proof of the public sector graft.
According to the report, more than R500-billion was stolen from the people of South Africa — even though the late-1990s Arms Deal and Hitachi’s corrupt relationship with ANC leaders from 2007 were omitted. Also omitted was private sector corruption, which is massive, with the AIDC and Global Financial Integrity reports showing that illicit financial flows amounts to an estimated 7% of SA’s GDP annually.
The Zondo Commission revealed the devastating impact of corruption. State-owned enterprises have been plundered through corruption, leaving them as empty shells in which they can barely maintain positive equity. This has created the conditions for them to be asset-stripped and privatised at extremely low prices. Today, SAA, Eskom, Transnet, the ports, Denel and the SA Post Office are in the pipeline for a new set of public-private plundering, essentially commercialisation and privatisation.
The new realities hit home
Faced with this political reality, some of us began to express our concerns as early as 2010. For the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), what broke the camel’s back was the election of a multibillionaire businessman, Cyril Ramaphosa, to the position of deputy president at the 2012 ANC national conference.
At a 2013 special national congress (SNC), Numsa said: “President Zuma’s administration has been marked by one scandal after the other if one considers the landing of the Guptas group from India at a National Key Point, which posed security risks for the country, and the presence of the president’s family in business deals.
“President Zuma’s reign has seen the continuation of neoliberalism through policies such as the National Development Plan (NDP), the Employment Tax Incentive Bill, Youth Wage Subsidy, labour brokers and e-tolls.
“This SNC calls on President Jacob Zuma to resign with immediate effect because of his administration’s pursuit of neoliberal policies such as the NDP, e-tolls, labour brokers and youth wage subsidy; and the track record of his administration, which is steeped in corruption, patronage and nepotism.”
Numsa’s 340,000 members were dismissed from Cosatu in November 2014 for making this assessment, among others. Other Cosatu-affiliated union leaders had already been dismissed. The ANC’s National Executive Committee at that time had become a wall of sycophants in support of Zuma. The ANC Youth League, once a critical component, had been cruelly hollowed out, as were so many other bodies and state institutions such as the intelligence, police and critically, state-owned enterprises.
Many were decrying the Guptarisation, Zumafication and even Zulufication of the Congress Movement and the state. The slogan we shouted after the 2007 Polokwane conference, “iANC ibuyile” (the ANC has returned to its branches), had turned into a nightmare as the organs of people’s power were hollowed out.
A loose cannon
Let’s return to some of Zuma’s most revealing statements that demonstrate his inability to embrace a genuine left approach to the challenges we face. These days, he is certainly not a version of the left-leaning leader we thought we knew two decades ago. Quite the reverse. He has shown himself to be extremely conservative in his outlook.
Many observers have pointed out the misogynistic, homophobic and xenophobic overtones in his speeches, showing he is prepared to “popularise”. Zuma has been identified as a traditionalist who has nothing new or appealing to say about the future and is taking refuge in the past. Despite his pretences, he will turn the clock back to the Stone Age. No one can constrain or guide him as before, because he is surrounded by “devotees”. He is now a loose cannon.
Among the most ridiculous and impractical policy proposals he has advanced are:
- The establishment of a school on Robben Island dedicated to providing education to pregnant teenagers. (For obvious reasons, he says nothing about older men impregnating young girls. One of his devotees in the youth component of MK has decried the reduction of “blessers”.)
- Military conscription for young people, supposedly to teach them discipline (even though the SANDF has continual scandals of misbehaviour and corruption).
- Scrapping the current Constitution and what he sees as Roman-Dutch-Saxon law and replacing it with African law that he has yet to define.
- A return to corporal punishment (despite the Constitutional Court’s ruling outlawing it).
- Intolerance of people who have a different sexual orientation from his, even though he is one of the drafters of the Constitution, whose Bill of Rights outlawed discrimination of people based on their sexual orientation.
Zuma was 67 years old when he became president. He was 76 when he was pushed out of office. He is now keen to return at the age of 82. Yes, age is just a number, but at 82? Really?
Workers must not be fooled again
What worries us more is that some members of the working class have fallen for the propaganda and misinformation driven mostly by the shameless beneficiaries of Zuma’s two decades of misrule. Quite clearly, those who benefited from Zuma’s patronage networks are keen to reload. If crude populism, dressed in traditional language and traditions can help restore their fortunes, they are prepared to walk that route.
These very same people say nothing about the worsening of unemployment, poverty and inequality that continued unabated during Zuma’s reign. They invent narratives that he was blocked by white capital, which may very well be true; but he only played that card when he realised he was on his way out.
In its assessment of the past 30 years, including during Zuma’s tenure, the SA Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) has stated that it would be an understatement to say things are falling apart. We are on a march towards becoming a failed state.
Zuma was a key leader of the ANC even before 1994. He was its deputy secretary-general when he was elevated to the position of the party’s deputy president in 1997. He became deputy president of South Africa in 2004, was elected president of the ANC in 2007, and became president of the country in 2009. This means he was not on another planet when these disastrous policies were adopted and implemented.
What we are seeing now is an attempt to rewrite history. To once again present Zuma as a victim (his most prized status) of the judiciary, the establishment, white monopoly capitalism, backstabbers and the media. There is an attempt to promote him as a peacemaker, someone who can unite and speak to the needs of the marginalised. Someone whose versatility enables him to embrace tradition but who can take us on a modern development path. This is fake news of the highest order.
Let’s be clear: Zuma remains part of the problem, not part of the solution, and is not anything near a socialist solution to the challenges we face. The Zuma campaign style has not changed: it still hinges on crude populism and conservatism.
Workers who are misled into following him are effectively laying down a landmine for themselves. Regrettably, there is no clear political alternative in the form of a pure workers’ party that embraces democratic ownership and control of resources. The paralysis in the working-class movement has prevented us from seizing the moment to build a true alternative based on a socialist programme.
The “crisis of representation” that we are facing, in which we have no clear champion fighting for working-class interests in Parliament, makes it all the more important to build a strong and united labour movement outside Parliament that can work together to resist capitalist policies and put on the agenda a genuine socialist alternative.
One of the popular sayings in Numsa is that workers are capable of electing their worst political butchers, and as the great Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka put it, “Only in Africa will thieves be regrouping to loot again and the youths whose future is being stolen will be celebrating it.”
Let us work hard to ensure that simplistic and reactionary rhetoric does not replace rational discussion and a class-based programme. The NEC of Saftu in July 2022 said that only the working class is central to the resolution of the capitalist crisis.
Let us remember the encouraging dictum of Mao Zedong, that “Every obstacle is an opportunity.” We must redouble our efforts to build a working-class movement that will not be distracted by the empty promises of dishonest politicians.
We have a world to win, let us not be confused, demoralised, misled or persuaded by those who only look to the past for justification. DM
Hypocrite. Zuma’s biggest cheerleader now takes off his drum-majorette skirt and lo and behold, emerges as a critic, removed from what he helped create. So many words this cadre uses to analyze when only one word is needed – STUPIDITY. You could add greed, you could add hubris, but stupidity cannot be analyzed, it just needs to be acknowledged.
The mere fact that MK has got to where it is, is absolute proof that the voters have not learnt anything in the past 30 years. With every successive Government since 1994 the level of corruption has just steadily been increasing with no recourse and here we stand with Billions of Rands having vanished, nothing to show for it but failure. 29th May will be telling indeed but I doubt it will be the watershed moment that South Arica desperately needs.
Couple of weeks ago some journo quoted Churchill (who else): “The strongest argument against Democracy is a five minute conversation with an average voter”
Mr Zuma was never the problem Mr Vavi, the problem was the blind support he received from leaders such as yourself. It is that blind support that is continuing to keep us in darkness.
Where is your accountability? Where is your personal responsibility? If you want to lead by example then take responsibility for the blind support you gave to a thief, rather than blaming the leopard for having spots.
Superbly put!
Pithy!
Accountability? Responsibility? Honesty? Integrity? What are these?
Don’t come here with your strange colonialist concepts!
Thanks my brother. South Africans like continue to amaze me. It is yet to done on him that China, Vietnam and Russia have since abandoned the leftist thoughts that led to mouth of Zuma dragon….lol. God help South Africa of Nelson Mandela.
I’m not sure which is worse or if they’re mutually indistinguishable threads of the same mindlessness: supporting Zuma in the first place despite his track record of corruption, or still blathering on about a worker’s paradise despite evidence from across the globe for decades that it doesn’t work and simply destroys everything it touches. Vavi, you’re history; you offer nothing to South Africa, maybe you should just join your wife’s business flogging policies to the Cosatu workers who still have jobs despite your best efforts to destroy the economy. And wow – your star-studded ‘A Team’ to create that worker’s paradise? Zuma, Motlanthe (not a bad man, no idea if he was ever effective at anything other than being Zuma’s poodle), Mantashe (destroyer in chief of mining, power and oil & gas in South Africa and all the industries that depend on them), Patel (the growth python of the economy, using slow, plodding, stupid policy to squeeze the life out of entrepreneurship), and Davies (a singularly useless minister with no clue as to how a 21st century economy should work). Seriously, Vavi, you’re a painful luddite who should be too ashamed of your destructive history to be spouting off in public.
Well said, all of it. A rogue’s gallery of visionless incompetence and greed that continues to parade and pronounce to a media that continues to give too much benefit of the doubt.
Hypocrite
You Mr Vavi and your merry crew of “workers” are responsible for this mess. Anyone who spent 5 minutes studying Zuma would know that the man was an evil snake who was in the ANC for the advancement of Jacob Zuma and nothing else. And yet here we sit, a country Stuffed, with a militant lazy workforce who DEMAND everything and yet give very little back.
The normalization of the terms ‘ruling class’ and ‘ruling party’ in this piece is deeply troubling. But not surprising.
We don’t need rulers, we need leaders!
And he still spouts Socialism as the solution, it didn’t work in Russia, Cuba, and it will not work here. So Vavi, the sooner you keep out of politics the better, all unions have done is to destroy economies with their strikes and demands, what we need here is a new government and a Margret Thatcher to sort out the unions and create employment.
Vavi – you and that other odious racist scumbag and bully, Malema, should hang your heads in shame forever as both of you were in the forefront of supporting that vile Zuma and threatening all and sundry who opposed him. Remember – Tsunami & would die for Zuma! You also hanker after a failed and cursed creed of communism that has led to nothing but misery, failure, poverty and suffering for all the countries that fell under its yoke and tyranny. The best thing that could happen to SA is for you, Malema, Zuma and the rotten anc to disappear and give this country a chance to right the ship.
Did he really just try to inspire readers by quoting Mao? Surely even Vavi cannot be that tone-deaf?
I enjoyed reading your article, Mr Vavi. I however have to point out that you omitted the clear charges of corruption that was leveled against Zuma before he became president, which was ignored by all and sundry. What happened during his “rule” was predicted and ignored. Why would workers not ignore it again? This is the key question that your article did not answer.
Secondly, Socialism has failed in every country it was implemented in – although unabated capitalism isn’t the answer either, please don’t put forward a clearly failed system – have you not read “Animal Farm”?
Using union power to crumble an economy is endemic in South Africa Mr. Vavi. We see continuous and unending demands for worker pay-packets which are way above inflation and underlined by strike action, real or threatened and chronic inefficiency. Prescribed minimum wages may be honourable but they keep millions unemployed because of unaffordability of small and medium enterprises to meet those pay demands. Union bosses have fat incomes and in true ANC style, will protect those incomes by spouting never ending and misleading rhetoric to their members. SA unions are scaring foreign investment away at high speed as was shown last week in the purchase condition made by BHP (the biggest mining group in the world), that they want to buy Anglo American and its assets with the exception of Anglo’s substantial assets in SA.. They are simply not prepared to accept the work conditions imposed here by unions, BBB-EE, political interference, and widespread corruption.
The naïveté of these bumbling clods (the unionists, that is) – while carrying genuine grievance to what they perceived as an ANC that betrayed the Marxist/Socialist promise made to them – defies comprehension!!! One needn’t scratch hard through the surface layer to see the Potatohead for what it truly represented – a putrid, corrupt political flip-flop who spoke the language one wanted to hear so that they raised it to the position of power where it could continue on its merry way of swimming in the gravy bath.
Mantush et al, knew what it would deliver – and it did – and simply used the workers to push their agendas being blocked by Mbeki. Mbeki had his faults but he knew that the modern world had no space for Marxist/Socialist ideals and was working on properly integrating SA into the global economic sphere. Their (Mantush et al, that is) absence and silence insofar as the Potatohead’s MK Party shenanigans are concerned, speaks volumes. Contrition is not part of that speech, mind you.
“The NEC of Saftu in July 2022 said that only the working class is central to the resolution of the capitalist crisis.”
There is no working class solution to a “…capitalist crisis.” Capitalism is the name of economic progress. The management of the level of crime and corrupt practices is the best way to ensure it works equitably. Crime and corruption are practically impossible to divorce from human nature, it’s just a case of how much latitude is fostered by your environment.
Let me first say that I am not a socialist, but must point out that socialism is not only a bad thing. Many socialist governments in northern countries have done good things. Those of you who have used it certainly meant Communism.
I think what you’re thinking of is Social Democracy – a system used by countries like Finland, Norway and Denmark to become some of the best countries is the world
Absolutely spot-on.
There is a *vast* difference between socialism and communism. The ex-president of the USA, D J Trump, loves to conflate the two for convenient electioneering and political purposes.
This post by Vavi blows a lot of hot air but to think how many people have expressed discontent and unwarranted hatred towards the former president of the country, am sure President Zuma has actually made peace with all that thus he could still make an impact his opponents can only dream of in modern politics . Secondly the media of SA has made great strides in making sure that people of this country feel this way about President Zuma and in an attempt to provide balanced and more informative views about our leaders including Zuma, ANN7 was shutdown but many of us believe we know anything about the leadership of President Zuma even if there was no court in the land to have found him guilty of anything thus the slogan Wenzeni uZuma. It is not true that President Zuma did not care about the workers and marginalized, At the height of his presidency, his cabinet proposed a bill that would see Black people claiming 30% within the mining industry and a nuclear power station to avoid exactly what many South Africans have been crying about in past five years of high unemployment, petrol & food prices and loadshedding. People should just admit that they are too ignorant to the many things that are happening this country and leave President Zuma alone.
Hahahahaha
Many of us warned of what would transpire if Zuma became president. You called down the Zumani any way — because you thought a corrupt and compromised leader would be easier to control. Bleat away in the wilderness, Vavi. You’re irrelevant. But the harm you have helped to the nation will outlive you.
Thank you Mr Vavi, I can appreciate the time spent to write this article. Thank you, The content provided a good flow of information over the time period. An opinion you have a right to make , much of which is verified (as I a mere cutizen so no inside relying on DM and other media over the years.)
BOT
“The problem with socialists is that they eventually run out of other people’s money”. (M Thatcher)
It hapenned!
What is it that you don’t understand Zwelinzima?
‘All animals are equal … but some are more equal than others!”
YOU failed the workers! You became rich from the sweat of workers … who are now starving!
Millions of jobs have been lost because of your unproductive, toxic militant ideology.
Thousands of business owners had no choice but to shut down their businesses … because of your ideology.
Can you now SEE and UNDERSTAND the complete FAILURE of SA because of your wrong ideology?
All the jobless workers can’t eat ideology!
Please rid SA society of yourself and take your prez Zuma along with you.
Both of you overstayed your welcone!
Vavi moet net wag. He is irrelevant
I love how ANC, its partners and unions, and MK, is bringing out all the corrupt and immoral skeletons that media and opposition already knows, and showing it to their ever diminishing supporters. Keep it coming. This monster will eat itself up on its dying bed.
Of course the obvious question is this: If your judgement then was so abysmal, why should we trust your judgement now? Schabir Shaik was convicted in 2005. Zuma’s rape trial was in 2006. His character was not in question in 2007. We all knew what he was. Yet here we sit, watching Zwelinzima Zavi frantically throwing his shoulder to the stable door while the horse disappears over the hill.
Zwelinzima Vavi played a very prominent role in enabling the rise of Jacob Zuma and the looting spree which followed.