Positions ‘not a licence to loot’
‘Struggle credentials being used by government office holders as a means to enrich themselves and families’
THOSE who fought to end apartheid should not use their legacy as “a licence to loot”, Transport Minister and SA Communist Party general secretary Blade Nzimande told mourners at the funeral of Struggle stalwart Eric “Stalin” Mtshali 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 that today you must use your position in the movement or the government to loot and enrich yourself,” Nzimande said at the Sugar Ray Xulu Stadium in Clermont, near Pinetown, KwaZulu-Natal.
Other speakers included former president Jacob Zuma and Minister in the Presidency Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma.
Mourners included Mtshali’s family members, Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba, Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Zweli Mkhize, Police Minister Bheki Cele, KZN Premier Willies Mchunu and KZN ANC chair Sihle Zikalala.
Mtshali, 84, was a founding member of the South African Congress of Trade Unions and was 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.
“Those values are even more necessary today; the values of selfless service to our people.”
Touching on Mtshali’s love of political education, Nzimande said that to solve one of the “problems” faced by the alliance, it should be remembered that organisations and alliances could not be united without being grounded in some sort of political knowledge or understanding.
“We cannot take our revolution forward unless we have an educated cadreship,” he said.
Paying tribute to Mtshali, who died on October 12 after a long illness, Zuma said the poor would only be liberated through socialism.
“Socialism is still a distance away, and we need to do more to shorten the distance between ourselves and socialism.
“Let us be more vocal about the need to establish socialism as quickly as possible in this country, so that we can deal once and for all with the problems that face the majority of our people,” he said.
Zuma said although he and Mtshali had defended the Freedom Charter, they both had some reservations about it. “From a critical point of view, when we had fallen in love with communism at a young age, we would call the Freedom Charter a bourgeois document. We would defend our stance until our leaders said ‘no, this is the progressive document of the ANC, which is not the Communist Party”.
“Even when we were both in Parliament, we would say we had compromised, as he would question the whereabouts of nationalisation, and I would tell him that ‘this is out of negotiation’.”
Speaking on behalf of President Cyril Ramaphosa, Dlamini Zuma said Mtshali, as South Africa’s representative in the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), “belonged to all of us, in South Africa and in the world”.
“As all true Marxists, he understood that the disorganisation of the working class was one of the fundamental causes of their exploitation.
“His focus in the WFTU on mobilisation and strengthening trade unions in Ethiopia, Sudan, Zambia, Tanzania and Morocco, among many others, proved that Stalin was also an internationalist,” Dlamini Zuma said.
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