Input to the POPCRU CEC by COSATU General Secretary – Cde Solly Phetoe

Salutations,
President of POPCRU, The GS of POPCRU and POPCRU NOBs
Leadership of COSATU and Affiliates present
Leadership of the Alliance

Introduction

The federation appreciates the invitation by the most important trade union organisation in South Africa's security cluster, a cluster that is confronted with numerable challenges of security and safety facing many of our people and the crisis-level of violence and femicide experienced by black women in particular. As we meet here today, we are confronted by growing risks in safety and security of citizens, ranging from daily reports of children hospitalised, even some losing their lives due to food poisoning, taking place across the country, callous murders, even mass killing of our people, with recent horrific cases in the Eastern Cape. Comrades, the people of Mqhekezweni in the Eastern Cape are living under constant fear from criminals. Just last week, a senior traditional leader, umam' Nogcinile Mtirara, 71 was gunned down, while 5 matric school girls were raped in the same community. These events follow reports in which these criminal extorsion rings have been demanding monies from women in the area in order to avoid being raped and sexually assaulted.

We have also been seeing reports of taxi patrols harassing people and drivers on the roads, demanding payments. Comrades, all these horrors continue unabated with very little or no response by law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
This CEC takes place following several important engagements by the working-class axis of the Alliance, including the National Political School by our sister union NEHAWU, the CEC of COSATU, the CHI Working-class Leadership School, the National Congress of our sister union SADTU and the recent Section 77 National Day of Action on 7 October 2024. These engagements took place at a critical moment in the national democratic revolution, in the aftermath of what we have characterised as a major setback in the recent elections. The working-class axis of the Alliance has characterised the political decision of the ANC to form a grand coalition with the DA in the name of a GNU as a regression, a movement likely to undermine our pursuit of the national democratic revolution, with very negative consequences for workers and the working class poor.
This CEC must take stock of the South African moment and develop clear programme of action that will strengthen this union, especially its specific role as custodian of our country's security to be wage successful struggles to bolster campaigns for increased resourcing and capacitation of the security cluster. Also, a strong POPCRU will contribute to building a strong and united federation to defend our hard-fought gains of collective bargaining.

May 2024 elections - perhaps a rejection of electoral politics by the masses of the working class?

Comrades, we already know that the 29 May elections signalled a major strategic setback for the national democratic revolution, as the ANC only received 40,18% of the vote. To put this into perspective, beyond the significant loss in national polls, the ANC lost electoral majority in three major provinces that contribute 63% of the country's GDP, namely, Gauteng, where the ANC only received 36,4% of votes; KZN, where it dropped to only 17,6% of votes, and the Western Cape, where it got 21,3% of votes.

To make matters worse, it is not just that the ANC lost its electoral majority, these elections saw the largest number of South Africans who did not participate in these elections, with more than 11 million registered voters not casting their vote. In total, about 60% (24 million) of South Africans eligible to vote, did not vote when including those who did not register to vote (13 million people). This is the most emphatic indictment our people have given against South Africa's electoral political system.
Perhaps, the majority of our people have not only lost faith in the ANC, but have rejected our bourgeois democracy and have given their verdict on the failure of our electoral political system as an instrument to transform their lives for the better.

Comrades, we need an honest reflection on the 30 years of South Africa's democratic transition, which would show us quite clearly, why the majority of our people-the working-class poor regard our politics as irrelevant to them. 42,9% of South Africans (mostly our people) are unemployed and the majority of those living in historically black townships and rural areas decry collapse in service delivery, destruction of public infrastructure as well as heightened violence and crime, making high numbers of traditional ANC voting communities no longer interested in the electoral process.

What has led us to this moment? 28 years of neoliberalism

While we acknowledge the role of imperialist forces and capital (both domestic monopoly and international imperialist) in sponsoring opposition and other counter-revolutionary forces against the NDR, the biggest factor in undermining the ANC in the democratic dispensation has been the consecutive ANC government administrations.
The 28 years of neoliberalism and austerity, in which the GEAR economic policy in 1996 was the genesis of anti-worker, anti-poor and anti-people approach to governance. Not only did the Class Project usher fiscal austerity, it set a framework for South Africa's macroeconomic policy that hollowed the capability of state to deliver basic services. It also privatised the state, in order to bolster the ill-advised ploy to grow the black bourgeois through tender-preneurship, and through arrangements of a narrow BEE arrangement with monopoly capital that saw a few politically connected elites gain shares, equity partners, mostly within the minerals and energy complex sectors.
The neoliberal agenda, instead of transforming the economy, it created a two-pronged class formation of black bourgeoisie, first with the 1996 Class Project BEE cohort vis-à-vis a politically connected-tender-preneurship "businessmen" who created wealth through the misuse and abuse of government service delivery projects.
Privatisation of service delivery and functions of the state not only gave birth to tender-preneurship, it also provided space for corrupt arrangements and capture of the state to blossom, with a weakened state infrastructure, without human resources, nor institutional incentive to prosecutive corrupt practices.
Our hopes that the defeat of the 1996 Class Project at Polokwane in 2007 were going to change our economic policy agenda were short-lived. The 2009 fourth government administration did adopt more expansive economic interventions, with increased investment in public infrastructure, which saw highest rise in employment, and better growth numbers.
But alas! By the end of 2012, leading to 2013 the fourth administration abandoned these, reverting back to austerity coupled with state capture. With austerity, we witnessed massive corrosion of state institutions at provincial and municipal levels. Our people became direct victims of industrial-scale looting, coupled with austerity, as provincial and municipal infrastructure began to collapse under the weight of maintenance neglect. At a national level, SOEs were being hollowed, resulting in what we began to see by 2016 with these institutions collapsing and unable to provide services.
Again, the post 2017 NASREC era came with much fanfare and promise to arrest corruption and end state capture. What we didn't acknowledge was the fact that the NASREC 2017 constituted a slight victory by the neoliberal cabal in the ANC. For instance, in August 2019, National Treasury published an economic policy intervention strategic paper, which the SACP exposed as a copy and paste of both the OECD and IMF reports on South Africa.
Although this August 2019 document was widely rejected by the alliance partners, National Treasury revisited it as the basis for the Economic Recovery and Reconstruction Plan (ERRP), following the devastating Covid-19 pandemic.
Since Covid-19 not only has government accelerated austerity, it also became a primary player in punishing workers in favour of capital. Government reneged on the 2018-2021 PSCBC Wage agreement, as well as refusing to negotiate in good faith at the next PSCBC bargaining council. This single act by a democratic state emboldened the private sector employers, resulting in collapsing collective bargaining processes at the Sibanye Stillwater mine, ESKOM in 2021/2022, MASMART (MAKRO), that even threatened Section 189 retrenchments. As we meet here today, mining has lost more than ten thousand jobs in just the 1st and 2nd quarter of this year.
Persistent austerity and arrogance of the ANC government deployees and their ever growing appetite for blatant looting all happened while the majority of our people lost jobs, with unemployment reaching 29% by 2019. As we meet here today, our unemployment figure stands at 32,9%, with more than 12 million South Africans out of employment (42,9% expanded unemployment).
Our communities in townships, peri-urban informal settlements and rural areas have been experiencing regression in the gains of freedom, because of collapsing infrastructure-electricity, water, road and transport services.
Added to these, most of our people are left vulnerable to violence, unbearable crime, with the state, police and judicial system seen as either incapable and, or unwilling to address their immediate challenges.

Working-class axis analysis of this moment -the GNU?

Both COSATU and the SACP have rejected the GNU. We have also rejected the claim that the GNU is the decision by the people of South Africa with their vote, instead characterising it as an intentional political decision of the ANC ruling elites, to coalesce a Grand Coalition with the DA, while bringing other smaller parties as mere appendages.
COSATU CEC reaffirmed the rejection of the GNU. The federation's CEC also noted an urgent need for discussing the class character of the GNU and to develop an action plan of the Left Axis to respond to the GNU.
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To this, the CEC argued that the primary motive forces of the NDR-the working class must be at the centre of these processes. This include to engage meaningfully and robustly in defending and advancing interests of the working class, during this GNU through, setting a minimum set of goals to hold the GNU accountable and developing a monitoring framework within the alliance
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To build a strong axis of the left, unite the Federation, and defend the revolution, as well as to bring other federations closer to building a strong trade union movement
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To plan for the 2026 Local Government Elections and ensure that we do not de-campaign ourselves as we dislodge the DA and other parties as well as a program to reach out to the 25 million eligible voters who did not vote in the 29 May 2024 elections.
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To develop a radical strategy to defend and counter any attempts either through litigation, political lobbying and or delay tactics, that seek to fight the implementation of NHI, undermine the BELA Act, as well as amendments to the LRA that seek to reverse gains of workers, especially workers' right to industrial action and Collective Bargaining.
The recent CHI Working-class Leadership School resolved on the following preliminary campaigns:
1.
Reasserting and intensifying the revolutionary content of the National Democratic Revolution as a programme to advance non-capitalist development to free the people from exploitation, dismantle the legacy of colonial, apartheid and imperialist domination, and advance to a socialist future.
2.
Working together to forge the popular left front and to build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor for the working-class to contest the direction and leadership of society

3.
Organising unorganised workers and building maximum working-class unity to achieve the objectives of the working-class struggle
The School also identified immediate tasks facing the working-class include:
1.
Rolling back the dominance of neo-liberalism in our economic and social policy
2.
Rebuild domestic productive capacity, among others, through pursuing broad-based industrialisation to overcome the interrelated crises of unemployment, poverty and inequality, as well as uneven development
3.
Pursuing a state-led economic and social infrastructure investment programme
4.
Fighting against neo-liberal structural reforms, including in network infrastructure industries, the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statements and Annual Budgets.
5.
Advancing a comprehensive social security, including through a holistic implementation of the National Health Insurance and the improvement of the Social Relief of Distress Grant and its transformation into a Universal Basic Income Grant
6.
Fighting crime in general to build secure and safer communities, combating interpersonal violence and bring gender-based violence to an end
7.
Consolidate joint campaigns in our communities and workplace to curb the scourge of gender-based violence, intensify our political programme to end patriarchy, by exposing all forms of misogyny in our politics and culture and push for the strengthening of the our investigative and prosecutorial authorities
8.
Fight for transformation of ownership in our economy to empower the working-class and build a thriving public economy, including by securing the turnaround of state-owned enterprises and expansion of this economic sector
9.
Embarking on a final push to secure the reconfiguration of the Alliance and implement a new way forward if the reconfiguration does not materialise

What are key organisational imperatives for POPCRU to consider?

Building a strong trade union organisation in the security cluster to defend workers gains, to fight for increased investment in personnel and training in policing and correctional services.
Comrades, the rampant levels of criminality and violence experienced by our people nullify fundamental rights of citizens. Comrades, our people cannot walk freely in their communities, women have been turned to endangered species by thugs and criminals, and those who try to stand up to these criminals and, or protect themselves and their families are brutalised, some even killed without impunity. We also witness continuing killing and attacks on police and other security personnel, mostly resulting from under-resourcing, lack of training and capacitating of law enforcement.
This union must be at the centre of struggles to demand augmenting resourcing of the police, including more police personnel, increased training including specialised training, so that the police can both defend themselves as well as enforce law enforcement when dealing with criminality.
Comrades, POPCRU must be at the centre of conscientious law enforcement, to restore the integrity and trust between the police and communities. As a progressive trade union, we must put at the centre of this trade union ensuring that the freedom which our people fought for are not reversed. POPCRU must ensure that our members take as a revolutionary task, defending the rights of our people to safety, part of which involves ensuring that no member of POPCRU is associated with corruption and, or criminality. POPCRU must also confront police management and bosses complicit with criminality, undermining even the very safety of hard working police and correctional service members.

Concluding remarks

Comrades, our struggle going forward require a revitalisation of trade union traditions on shopfloor, a strong federation as well as united and effective trade unions. To take our struggles forward, we must first secure our membership, stop the bleeding in our trade union membership, through effective organising and servicing of our members and a commitment to defend workers, as well as consistent worker/political education.
Again, as the federation would like to express its support to POPCRU and the critical role of this trade union in defending our revolution.

We are confident this CEC will seriously consider this input in our deliberations, as we build on our analysis of the moment and develop theoretical and concrete programs to advance worker struggles and broadly the NDR.

Amandla!

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