SAFTU is critically anticipating the upcoming National General Elections. The seventh democratic elections are perhaps the most important since 1994, given the legislative changes that have given individual candidates to contest, and because they mark 3 full decades since the democratic breakthrough.
To say things are falling apart is an understatement. It is our contention based on observation (proliferation of political killings, corruption mafias taking over local government and community developments, murder levels comparable to war zones, etc) that we are on a march towards a failed state.
It is however not true that apartheid colonialism is better than democratic South Africa, no matter how liberal this democracy is. In their battle against white minority dictatorship, workers overwhelmingly supported the demand for ‘one person, one vote, in a unitary state.’ This demand represents social progress and advancing our civil, political, labour and human rights.
The gains registered by workers on all fronts are not insignificant either. Strides have been registered in some areas of development such as increased inclusive access to education, healthcare, electricity, water, roads, etc. High prices and inadequate subsidisation, privatisation, corruption, and neglect are reversing some of these strides.
Bias against the working class
The history of slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and capitalism informs us about the deep roots of the current crisis. The government has not taken significant steps to overhaul the colonial economy. In the period preceding the demise of apartheid, the National Party government began embracing neoliberal policies, shown in the commercialization of Eskom in 1984 and the partial privatisation of Iscor in 1987.
Disappointingly, the ruling party embraced a neoliberal path in 1996 by adopting Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR). Since then, we have suffered from neoliberal macroeconomic policies, pillared by fiscal, monetary and industrial frameworks that serve big business far more than the working class. The result continued deindustrialisation and the loss of more secure, better-paying jobs in the manufacturing sector, replaced by precarious jobs with no job security or benefits.
To make things worse, the government imposed further austerity after the 2008-09 world capitalist crisis. It cut the corporate income tax from 52.5% in 1992 to 27% today. The state is failing to maintain the public health system and to ensure schools halt learner drop-outs, averaging 40% of learners in every schooling cycle. It is failing to make higher education free and available to the working class as was promised in the Freedom Charter, the 1994 Election Manifesto and to the #FeesMustFall activists in 2017.
Treasury refuses to expand the fiscus and use that as a basis for a stimulus package to expand the economy. As such, it is ignoring demands for a Basic Income Grant (BIG) at the upper-bound poverty line to create more employment through demand-led economic growth. The government has refused to introduce a solidarity tax or wealth tax as part of a redistribution strategy in the world’s most unequal country. Black people remain the face of the landlessness and propertyless section of our society. The country remains two in one a beautiful place for economically affluent and mainly white people, retaining all their inheritance from apartheid and colonialism; and the other for the black majority, keeping all the socio-economic suffering and disadvantages from colonialism, apartheid, and capitalist oppression.
Features of the failed state
Along with ongoing community protests, the July 2021 looting, arson and social chaos demonstrated our society’s extreme desperation, with police overwhelmed to the point they could not contain the riots, and the army also stretched thin given simultaneous deployments in northern Mozambique (on behalf of the French and U.S. oil giants TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil, and now the same troops moved to the DRC on behalf of mining capital which is still using child labour).
Law and order – and the justice system as a whole – are grinding to a halt. In this society, some (if not most) women no longer report cases of rape. Despite the shame that comes with the stigma, they are discouraged by the failures of the justice system in which there is 11% chance of conviction for rape perpetrators.
As for white-collar crime and corruption, PwC ranked South Africa as the world’s worst case throughout the 2010s (and second worst today). The Sandton tsotsis are so extreme, and the Treasury and Reserve Bank are so slack at administering exchange controls that 2023 the global financial system will be “grey-listed” South African banks. Tenderpreneur hyenas continue sabotaging infrastructure so that new tenders (for repair) are issued for them to feed. At the same time, the average outsourced contract is overcharged by at least 35%, according to Treasury’s leading procurement official.
The culture of Batho Pele has, in too many areas of government services, become merely a tokenistic rhetoric. So is the culture of learning and teaching. Most of our towns and cities have joined our townships, informal settlements and rural areas as filthy and uninhabitable.
We are losing our youth to the rising tide of hopelessness. There is a drug pandemic, as more youth (especially drop-outs and the unemployed) find nyaope an escape from idleness created by unemployment and lack of enrolment at education institutions. The rise of gang wars in the working-class areas in part reflects the phenomenon of kids growing up without the love and support of their fathers, as StatsSA reports that 71% of so-called African children are neglected.
Although during COVID-19, we showed a degree of mutual aid, in general, capitalist individualism has pushed society away from the solidarity, selflessness, internationalism and ubuntu that, during the liberation struggle, defeated one of the world’s most criminal, racist regimes.
Capitalism is also trashing our natural environment, causing extreme droughts (with ‘Day Zero’ water shortages) and storms (such as the Rain Bombs that killed 500 people in Durban in April-May 2022).
When it comes to the ‘triple crisis’ facing society, the government is only making matters worse:
1) Unemployment: The narrowly defined rate of joblessness was as low as 16% in 1995, not including those who have given up looking for work, for which we can add another 10%. However, it has ratcheted up to 32% in the most recent StatsSA survey. By the narrow definition, unemployment has increased from 5 million people in 2013 to 8.2 million in 2024. In the 1st quarter of 2024, the number of young people between the ages of 15 and 34 who are Not in any form of Employment, Education and Training (NEET) stood at 9,1 million.
2) Inequality: We have become the most unequal society on earth! Ten per cent of the population owns 90% of the wealth. Oxfam International reported in 2020 that it would take less than 23 hours for an average CEO to take home what an average worker earns during the whole year.
3) Poverty: Two-thirds of our people live on less than what should be considered the poverty line, R65 a day or a mere R1950 a month. The GDP per capita has declined in US dollar terms over the last decade, from $8,700 in 2011 to $6,500 in 2023.
Faced with this crisis, how should the working class vote?
The election debates mainly ignore the issues we raise as the working class. Many people have given up on traditional political parties and are not participating in the elections. However, judging by the number of registered voters this year, there is a renewed interest in the electoral platform. We encourage everyone to vote. Faced with the crisis, SAFTU has adopted the following principles to help guide workers on who to vote and who not to vote:
- Don’t vote for parties not concerned about the root cause of the crisis, which is the capitalist system, implemented historically through colonialism and apartheid.
- Don’t vote for parties that will entrench neoliberalism and austerity that make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
- Don’t vote for the parties that scapegoat the crisis of capitalism and neoliberalism on other workers from other provinces or ethnicities or even outside the borders of the country. Reject tribalism and regionalism.
- Don’t vote for parties that blame the crisis of unemployment, poverty, inequalities, and corruption on the very victims of capitalism and neoliberalism. Don’t vote for parties threatening to weaken workers’ protection in the constitution and labour laws.
- Don’t vote for parties that have done nothing to deal with corruption in the public and private sectors. Look carefully at the leadership lifestyles and predict how their politicians will handle state resources when in power. Don’t vote for those displaying opulence and unexplained obscene wealth while offering empty rhetoric about equality.
- Don’t vote for parties that discriminate against women, people with disabilities or people with a different sexual orientation. Reject misogyny and chauvinism.
- Vote for equality. Vote for parties advocating socialism, which means building a society based on equality of all classes, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and religions.
SAFTU, as an independent but not apolitical trade union federation, will not prescribe which party workers should vote for. Having issued these seven principles, we leave it to workers’ consciences to decide what they believe is in the best interests of the working class and our country.
