Mass lobby:
• Party urges workers at Cosatu rally to back it after ANC split
Thousands of South Africans march in Wednesday’s anticorruption protests in Durban. Cosatu and the SACP held 13 marches in cities across the country, hoping to attract 100,000 members to protest against state capture and corruption.
The South African Communist Party (SACP) used the Cosatu march in Johannesburg to plead with workers to join it when the party breaks away from the ANC and contests elections on its own.
Cosatu held 13 marches in cities across the country, hoping to attract 100,000 of its members to protest against state capture and corruption.
While the Cosatu leaders emphasised the federation’s support for Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC presidential bid, SACP leaders pursued a different mission.
“We have taken a resolution to contest elections … we do not want to go there on our own,” SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande told the thousands of workers clad in red. He said the working class held the ultimate political power.
The tripartite alliance member resolved at its June national conference that it would locate the question of electoral participation “within the wider context of the need to unite and reconfigure the alliance”.
Business Day has established that the SACP has been engaging Cosatu affiliates with the aim of securing their support for when the federation decides whether it should follow the SACP if it broke from the ANC-headed alliance at its 2018 congress.
Nzimande said the ANC was being stolen in broad daylight and those who regarded the national strike as an action against the ANC were wrong.
Of the leaders who addressed marchers in Johannesburg, only Cosatu general secretary Bheki Ntshalintshali uttered the words written on the many placards workers were waving in the air.
“Zuma must go,” said Ntshalintshali to a loud roar from the workers .... We are not apologetic about our call that Zuma must step down,” he said.
Ntshalintshali said Cosatu’s march was long overdue as people were suffering in the absence of the “rule of law” in the country, further saying the political killings in KwaZuluNatal were, in fact, “corruption killings”, as those swindling funds from the state eliminated people who stood in their way.
Ntshalintshali also made several jibes at those who were opposed to the national strike, saying “numbers don’t lie”.
The Johannesburg march is estimated to have attracted close to 6,000 people, while in Cape Town, city officials placed the turnout at close to 3,000. Although the federation had higher expectations, it claimed the figures were impressive, given that the action was a first of many.
In Cape Town, the federation’s treasurer-general Freda Oosthuysen emphasised the federation’s opposition to the use of Public Investment Corporation funds to bail out struggling state-owned enterprises.
Protesters in East London handed over a memorandum to city officials, demanding they put an end to outsourcing, corruption and state capture.
Memorandums of demands were handed to government offices, banks and private business associations in the different cities across the country.