Liberate women, Losi

Imust say the time for female leadership has come very late to Cosatu. Although this is the first step in combating patriarchy in working-class organisations, simply changing genders while leaving the organisation with its neoliberal system intact, will achieve nothing.

The new president, Zingiswa Losi, needs to ensure that Cosatu mobilises against the triple oppression of women in our country – oppression as a race, as a class and as a gender.

I hope Losi works to advance the struggle of working-class women, especially Africans, who are exploited in factories and as domestic workers, underpaid by other women to care for and rear their children while the madams exploit other workers in the workplace and get richer.

Losi and her organisation could help to combat the patriarchy that both shapes capitalist society and supports exploitation of the working classes. She could especially have a profound effect when it comes to equalising salaries and wages of men and women who are doing the same jobs.

Many women have to both work and carry the responsibility of rearing children. There is no natural law that women must have the role of rearing children. Society has changed – we are no longer living in communal societies, but industrial ones.

Hence men also have responsibilities when it comes to children. Combating patriarchy is essential to ending exploitative and corrupt neoliberal capitalism.

There is no situation in history whereby a group were liberated by a political party that was not founded by itself and for itself. – Mhlobo Gunguluzi, via e-mail