ON THIS DAY
King Moshoeshoe, founder of the Basotho nation, dies.
British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury rejects peace overtures from Paul Kruger.
“Spanish flu” first reaches America. One-quarter of the US population contracts the deadly virus, resulting in 500 000 deaths. South Africa was the fifth-hardest hit country, with deaths almost as high as those in the US, out of a global death toll worldwide of almost 22 million. It has been called “the single most devastating episode in South Africa’s demographic history”.
The Lend-Lease programme begins, allowing Britain to receive American weapons, machines, raw materials, training and repair services. Ships, planes, guns and shells, along with food, clothing and metals went to the embattled British while American warships began patrolling the North Atlantic and US troops were stationed in Greenland and Iceland. By 1946, the figure reached $50 billion in aid from the US to its Allies.
Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, is captured by British troops. (A brutally efficient murderer, he introduced the pesticide Zyklon B, containing hydrogen cyanide, into the killing process. Under his watch, Auschwitz became the most efficiently murderous instrument of the “Final Solution” and the Holocaust’s most potent symbol. During his time there, about 3.5 million people died in captivity. He was hanged in the camp.)
A US bomber accidentally drops a nuclear bomb on a family home in South Carolina, creating a crater 75ft wide and injuring six people. Fortunately, the fissile nuclear core was stored elsewhere on the aircraft.
Hundreds of Kosovo’s University of Pristina students protest for political rights, which leads to the Kosovo War and independence from Yugoslavia.
Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the last leader of the USSR. His policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) help end the Cold War.
Responding to a request by Chief Lucas Mangope for help restoring control in Bophuthatswana, the right-wing AWB randomly kills 42 people, and, before the world’s press and TV cameras, two are executed by a Bophuthatswana policeman.
Simultaneous explosions on rush-hour trains in Madrid, Spain, kill 192 people.
At least 21 people are killed by mudslides in and around São Paulo, Brazil. | THE HISTORIAN
SAFTU’S municipal affiliate union Demawusa’s legal battle against deregistration by the Department of Labour secured a major boost yesterday after the decision was suspended with costs by the Labour Court.
The union had approached the court for the suspension of its January deregistration by the Registrar of Labour Relations – a decision that it is appealing against.
At the heart of the dispute is Demawusa’s failure to provide the registrar with proof that it conducted secret ballots with Johannesburg Metrobus workers before last year’s bus strike.
In August last year, the union was interdicted from embarking on the bus strike over wages, with the condition that it first had to conduct a secret ballot of members in terms of Section 19 of the Labour Relations Amendment Act.
Demawusa went ahead with the
THE DA underperformed during last year’s general elections because it tried to please too many people, but ended up having a strategy that did not resonate with people, said its interim leader John Steenhuisen during his visit to Pietermaritzburg yesterday.
He said he was confident that after next year’s local government elections, the DA would govern a number of municipalities, including eThekwini and Msunduzi, through coalitions because he would change the campaign strategy. Steenhuisen said if elected as the leader during next month’s national elective conference, the party would not allow policy strike on September 16 and insisted that it had conducted the ballots, but the registrar informed the union of the intention to deregister it if it failed to provide proof.
Judge Robert Lagrange indicated that the department appeared to have been too harsh on the union.
“On the face of it, the deregistration of the union on account of an alleged failure to comply with balloting provisions on one occasion and non-provision of information connected therewith despite express requests from the registrar to furnish it, does seem a somewhat drastic step to have taken, and it is arguable that the guidelines on balloting were not intended to be binding prerequisites for acceptable conduct,” Lagrange said.
The judge pointed out that even if the union had not complied timeously with the request to provide proof of the ballot, there was good reason to believe that it could rectify such a defect belatedly. inconsistency to persist.
He commended a panel made up of former DA leader Tony Leon, former DA chief executive Ryan Coetzee and Michiel le Roux, founder of Capitec Bank, for coming up with a report that revealed the weakness that cost the DA many votes last year.
“I think that the panel has done an excellent diagnosis of where we went wrong, and what we did was try to be too many things to too many people, but ended up being nothing to anybody,” he said.
It was believed that last year’s election result and the panel report were the reasons former leader Mmusi Maimane had to resign from the party.
The initial aim of visiting KwaZulu-Natal’s capital city was to campaign
He also pointed out that there were no union members accusing the union leadership of ballot rigging.
Demawusa president Sello Selepe said the department saw the small union, which was first recognised in 2016, as a soft target and aimed to ensure that it was not able to recruit and represent municipal workers.
“The point we are actually raising is that this is actually politically motivated. Immediately after deregistration, there was a letter from Salga (SA Local Government Association) indicating that municipalities must dissociate themselves from recognising this organisation. The plan was on the table,” Selepe said.
He admitted to shortcomings on the part of Demawusa relating to submissions of the union’s financials and audited statements to the department, which are part of compliance requirements in terms of the act.
Salga had not responded to the allegations at the time of publication. for the Ward 25 by-election to be held on March 18.
Steenhuisen told elderly people at Woodgrove Retirement Village in Howick that unlike the DA, the EFF and Freedom Front Plus performed well because their positions were clear to everyone.
He said with the local government elections approaching, the party should fight to be better than it was last year. “That requires ideological coherence as no organisation can exist without full ideological coherence.
He said that the DA had tried and failed to govern through coalitions in Joburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay “because we tried to govern through other people’s values and principles”.