S. African unions firm on strike

By M. S. Prabhakara

DURBAN, AUG. 26. With only four days to go before the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) begins in Durban, there is still no resolution of the confrontation between the unions and the Government on the threatened two-day general strike on the issue of privatisation.

Though the strike ends before the WCAR opens on August 31, the disruption caused by the strike will undoubtedly affect the conference. The NGO Forum affiliated to the WCAR will begin its four-day meetings on August 28. Delegates have already started arriving for the conference.

The strike, called by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), a partner of the tripartite alliance led by the African National Congress, is scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday. In a statement yesterday, the South African Communist Party, another member of the tripartite alliance, came out in support of the strike.

In his strongest intervention disputing Cosatu's stand on privatisation, the President, Mr. Thabo Mbeki, writing in his capacity as ANC President in the latest issue of the party's newsletter ANC Today, put out on its website on Friday, accused Cosatu, without directly naming the trade union federation, of ``telling lies and claiming easy victories'' - echoing the admonition of Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau, an icon of African liberation movements. In one way or the other, Mr. Mbeki has used this formulation to criticise his opponents in the alliance on several earlier occasions, most notably at the 10th Congress of the SACP in July 1998.

Comparing his critics within the alliance, ``those apparently from `the left' (who have) joined hands with the right wing'', to leaders of the old South Africa such as Louis Botha who were congenitally opposed to the aspirations of the black majority, Mr. Mbeki says: ``Like Both and his progeny, these resort to misinformation... As part of this campaign, they turn their backs on the long-standing morality of our movement, never to tell lies and never to claim easy victories... One of the lies they tell is that our Government has betrayed policies agreed by the broad democratic movement with regard to the issue of restructuring of state assets... Everything our Government has done since 1994 with regard to the public sector has kept to these positions. Any claim to the contrary is absolutely false and cannot be substantiated with any facts whatsoever. The question that arises is why lies are being told and false claims made of the possibility of easy victories over the colonial and apartheid legacy. Whose interest they serve, who abandon the morality of revolutionaries, so that they can use workers as cannon fodder to launch an offensive aimed at defeating their own liberation movement!''.

A full page Government advertisement today specifically juxtaposed the strike with the opening of the WCAR. Noting that the conference, being held in Africa for the first time, would be discussing ``issues at the core of our own society's transformation'', the advertisement asked the question: Why try to hold a paralysing strike on the eve of the Conference against Racism, when delegations are arriving?

Interestingly, the advertisement claimed that ``restructuring of state assets'', a key item of the Reconstruction and Development Programme, is ``not necessarily privatisation'', the advertisement claimed.

This resurrection of the RDP, in contrast to the virtual absence of any reference of late to its antithesis, the macroeconomic strategy adopted in June 1996 and encapsulated as Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR), has been a feature of recent verbal polemics, though the Unions insist that the essence of GEAR, envisaging growth of a particular kind along a particular trajectory, all informed by market orthodoxy, has not been abandoned by the Government.

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Section  : International
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