We are privileged to lead your organisation

We, the new national office bearers elected at the Numsa 8th National Congress are privileged to lead your organization.

On the first day we took up our duties, we convened a head office staff meeting. The purpose of the meeting was simple: * It was to communicate to staff that the congress has come and gone. What remains is to service metal workers.

We acknowledged that some of the staff were vibrant actors in the campaigns for particular individuals in the run up to the national congress.

We agreed this is an accepted democratic process before any congress.

We appealed to them to now accept that the congress of workers has spoken and all of them must now rally behind the newly elected leadership and perform their task of servicing members.

We assured them that the new leadership will treat every Numsa member, shopsteward or staff member the same way with absolutely no prejudice.

We say to all our members that the challenge now is to unite the organization. We call on all shopstewards, workers, locals, regions and national structures that had different leadership preferences, including those individuals who contested each other, to take one another’s hand and unite because unity is the rock on which our union stands.

We need unity to defend our members' hard-won gains and to improve their conditions. Yes, we are one union. This was demonstrated by serious pledges made by all nine regions of Numsa after the election results were announced at the congress.

They fully supported the current leadership and gave them a task to further consolidate and build the organization.

One of our immediate tasks is to ensure that both Silumko Nondwangu, our previous general secretary, and Bheki Msibi, our previous deputy general secretary, are deployed within the union as they still have a contribution to make in building and growing the organisation.

This responsibility also extends to the outgoing president of the national union, Mtutuzeli Tom. We have a duty to ensure that he still makes a contribution and that, after serving metalworkers for so many years, his conditions do not worsen.

We will extend this responsibility to all previous Numsa national leaders who could be languishing in poverty. Our national congress agreed that divergent opinions and views are welcome and accepted in our union.

However views must be expressed in the constitutional structures. Once decisions are taken there, such decisions would have to be communicated and defended by all of us. That is democratic centralism.

Decisions of higher structures are binding on lower structures and they are even more binding on elected leaders as they are expected to be custodians of workers' decisions. That’s democracy – any thing other than this is nothing but anarchy.

On 'Shikota'Our movement, the ANC, is facing challenging times with the breakaway from the ANC by the 'Shikota' group. We must support the ANC because: * The ANC's foundations from 1912 were built and constituted by volunteers, who were a progressive middle class.

They subordinated their interest to that of the people. They resolved that no matter how powerful the apartheid regime was with its apartheid, capitalist, colonialist agenda, they remained firm that they will be part of defeating it and destroying the colonial apartheid foundation.

The working class and the poor of our country were to be mobilized to lead the defeat of the regime. The working class and the poor bore the brunt of apartheid's brutality.

They had a vision of the future South Africa. They said that without a return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole there is no liberation. They said that victory must be about more than voting once every five years.

To allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact, is to feed the root of racial supremacy. It does not represent even a shadow of liberation. Chris Hani died for this vision. Jacob Zuma has been crucified.

Many comrades in different provinces who were clear of the reactionary nature of neo-liberal policies that our country adopted in 1996 in the form of GEAR, were criminalized.

But what do we see of this vision in South Africa today? We have all the rights in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We can buy a house in any suburb. We can take our children to the school of our own choice.

But only if we have enough money to do so.Cosatu and the SACP said it cannot be right that after so many people fought and died for this vision, only a few individuals live the ANC slogan of 'a better life'.

When the Shikotas were in the ANC what did they do to support the working class and the poor?* They made sure that the bulk of our people remained poor and dying of hunger and starvation whilst their tiny minority that controls wealth were dying of over eating.*
They enshrined the property clause in the constitution which is about protecting the dominance of the exploiting class and its control of the means of production ie factories and land so that profits generated in these factories and on our land is solely for the benefit of a few greedy individuals in our country.

They tried hard to change the ANC into a political party instead of being a liberation movement that accepts the contributions of all forces of liberation ie Cosatu, SACP.

They did everything to ensure that the structure of the South African economy was not changed * Under their leadership, the RDP office was closed; townships remained with inferior infrastructure, and absolutely no resources; service delivery faltered and failed in many areas.

They failed to halt corruption. * They liberalized trade and destroyed jobs massively across various sectors of our economy.

They removed exchange controls allowing capitalists to take money out of this country to invest in the London stock exchange and make other speculative investments. This compromised investment in productive sectors of the economy that would have created jobs.

They refused to listen to the criticisms of Cosatu and the SACP that these neo-liberal polices were bad for our country and were subjecting millions of our people to extreme poverty, deepening inequalities and unemployment.

They celebrated that their policies had led to economic growth and an economic boom in the recent past.

But when we said that both the growth and the boom were not benefiting the majority because the economy is owned and controlled by a tiny few, they attacked us.

*Instead of transforming the economy they developed a new theory that there are two economies called the first economy and the second economy. Their intention – to defend the interests of the ruling class!

Our congress condemned this splinter group because it undermines the unity of the ANC-led national liberation movement.

Without this unity, our objective to transform the country's economy in line with the Freedom Charter is threatened.

Congress said we must "humbly persuade members on the importance of remaining in the ANC-led national liberation movement" and to appeal to them to vote ANC in 2009.

Congress resolved that we shall continue to champion our members' interests on the shopfloor. We will be there in community struggles.

We will fight side by side to defend the ANC with everything we have. We shall once more put it in power to return the wealth of the land to the people as a whole so we all live 'a better life'.

Irvin Jim Numsa general secretary

Source

Numsa News