‘Do not use your position to loot’
Nzimande says fake leaders are misleading nation
Revolutionaries should never use their legacy as a “licence to loot” state resources.
So said South African Communist Party (SACP) general secretary Blade Nzimande at the special official funeral of Struggle icon Eric “Stalin” Mtshali in Durban yesterday. “As we say goodbye to comrade Mtshali, we need to remind ourselves that the fact that you were in the Struggle against apartheid is not a licence to use your position in the movement or in [the] government to loot and enrich yourself,” Nzimande said at Sugar Ray Xulu Stadium in Clermont, Durban. Without mentioning anyone by name, Nzimande said: “We now have leaders that are fakes, that don’t want people that are politically informed because they want to control them and tell them what to do so that they can use our organisation to suit their own hidden agendas,” he said.
He said it would be difficult to take the ANC and the SACP forward unless there was an educated cadreship.
“If Mtshali’s generation were not hard-headed about the fight against apartheid when we were told to keep quiet in the Struggle, we probably would not be where we are today… in a free democratic society,” he said.
Mtshali, 84, was the founding member of the South African Congress of Trade Unions and part of the Umkhonto weSizwe leadership in what was then Natal. He was widely revered within the ANC and SACP. Nzimande said Mtshali’s values had guided the Struggle against apartheid and were not abandoned after apartheid ended in 1994.
“Those values are even more necessary today. The values of selfless service to our people. One of their most important contributions is that they never allowed the movement to die, especially in the 1960s when the apartheid regime had thought that it had defeated our Struggle,” he said. Mtshali was buried yesterday at Chesterville’s Heroes Acre Memorial Park, west of Durban.