Today, the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) joins millions in reflecting on 31 years since the democratic breakthrough of 27 April 1994. We lower our banners in memory of those who gave their lives for the dream of a South Africa free from colonialism and apartheid.
But as we mark this Freedom Day in 2025, we are compelled to ask hard and painful questions about the state of our democracy, the condition of our people, and the path forward for the working class and poor.
31 Years Later: A Democracy in Crisis
South Africa today teeters on the precipice of failure. We stand at the doorstep of a failed state.
The material conditions of the working class — which SAFTU has tirelessly raised in statement after statement — have worsened to intolerable levels.
While the political right to vote was achieved in 1994, economic liberation has been brutally deferred. Rural areas remain zones of abandonment. Informal settlements and townships are scenes of permanent degradation — where millions live without dignity, trapped in overcrowded, unsafe, filthy, and uninhabitable conditions.
Now even small towns, once relatively livable, are decaying rapidly, racing to join the working-class residential areas in collapse. Potholes, broken water infrastructure, electricity blackouts, refuse piling up, crime, and environmental hazards are no longer exceptional — they are the new normal.
The social backlogs that democracy promised to overcome have instead deepened.
The Broken Promises: SDGs and NDP 2030 Now a Mirage
South Africa committed to ambitious targets under the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and our own National Development Plan (NDP 2030). Yet, 31 years into freedom:
- Unemployment remains a national disaster, officially at 31.9%, with the expanded unemployment rate at 41.9%.
- Poverty remains entrenched, with 63% of the population living below the upper-bound poverty line of R1,558 per month, and 23.7% living below the food poverty line of R760 per month.
- Inequality remains extreme, with a Gini coefficient of 0.63, ranking among the worst in the world.
- Education is in crisis: while access has expanded, quality remains deeply unequal. Poor learners attend overcrowded, under-resourced schools, while wealthy elites access world-class private education.
- Healthcare is under siege: despite important advances in access, austerity and creeping privatisation have led to collapsing infrastructure, understaffing, and unsafe public hospitals.
- Safety and security have collapsed: Murder, rape, and violent crimes have soared, with police services underfunded, demoralised, and unable to guarantee the safety of communities.
- Climate change disasters are devastating communities, with thousands displaced by floods, droughts, and fires. Yet government planning remains reactive, uncoordinated, and wholly inadequate.
Instead of urgent public investment and planning, we see elites squabbling for tenders, leaving poor and working-class communities defenseless against natural and social calamities.
Workers’ Rights: A Gain Under Threat
We recognise that workers’ rights, relatively progressive labour laws, and access to collective bargaining represent important gains of our democracy.
However, these rights are now under relentless attack through proposed anti-worker amendments to labour laws, casualisation, union-busting tactics, and the erosion of the right to strike.
Unless we mobilise powerful and united resistance, the gains workers fought so hard for may soon be rolled back, leaving the working class even more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.
Corruption: A Cancer Eating Away Freedom
Rampant corruption has hollowed out institutions. Billions meant for public services are stolen. Town after town, province after province, has been looted into dysfunction.
SAFTU, true to its mission of working-class leadership, has reported acts of corruption to the Office of the Public Protector, and will continue to expose the looters who rob the people of their future.
The so-called Government of National Unity (GNU), stitched together by elites to defend profits over people, offers no hope of transformation.
Acknowledging the Strides
SAFTU acknowledges important gains made under democracy:
- Expanded access to basic education, although with major quality gaps.
- Broadening of water and electricity access, even as maintenance and expansion have stalled.
- The rollout of social grants, protecting millions from absolute destitution.
But these gains are now under direct threat.
The growing involvement of the private sector — which demands profits without taking any risks — has led to:
- Escalating electricity prices, making electricity unaffordable to millions while Eskom is carved up for private profiteers.
- Water services being outsourced, commodified, and increasingly priced beyond the reach of the poor.
- Healthcare threatened by creeping privatisation even as the National Health Insurance (NHI) faces relentless attacks.
The neoliberal logic of turning basic human rights into private commodities is undoing the very freedoms we celebrate today.
The Struggle Continues: People’s Power Needed
Freedom without economic justice is an empty shell.
Freedom without decent work, without dignity, without safety, without housing, without access to quality public services — is not true freedom.
SAFTU calls on workers, communities, youth, the unemployed, and the poor to build a mass movement to reclaim our democracy and our future.
We must intensify the struggle against austerity, privatisation, corruption, environmental collapse, and all forces that rob the working class of its rightful place in society.
We must fight for a South Africa where the economy serves the people — not the other way around.
We salute the sacrifices of the past. But we owe it to the martyrs of our struggle to keep fighting for the full realisation of freedom.
A Statement was issued on behalf of SAFTU by General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi.
For more details, contact the National Spokesperson at:
Newton Masuku
066 168 2157
Newtonm@saftu.org.za
