Firstly I want to send my warmest greetings to all Numsa members, to staff and to your families as well as to the organisations and friends of Numsa who worked with us in 2012.

I am honoured to have the privilege of being part of Numsa’s leadership, and on behalf of that leadership I wish you a good festive season, a well-deserved rest and a merry Christmas.

What is the situation today in South Africa?
This has been an extremely tough year. All the leading organisations in our country have had their National Congresses, and they will culminate in the congress of the ANC in December.

But none of these Congresses has changed the reality for the majority of South Africans. It is a reality of the ongoing triple crisis of poverty, unemployment and inequality
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We have been horrified by some actions of government in the face of this reality. We saw the armed forces of the state gun down our fellow workers outside their workplace in Marikana.

We have seen the government pressing ahead with their plans for e-tolling, against the clear will of the people forgetting the freedom charter that sad there shall be no government that can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.

This picture is completely unsustainable, After 18 years of our democracy we are still confronted a daily reality that shows us that apartheid has not ended. It continues by other means. This can only demonstrate the consequences of securing only political power without economic power.

We, the majority black people of South Africa, continue to send our children to inferior schools and our sick people to inferior hospitals. We look at our inferior roads and transport and we compare them with the Gautrain that we can’t afford to use.

We compare the matchbox houses which the government is building with the mansions of the capitalists. I remember one comrade who is an old activist of Sanco: he defined these RDP houses as ovezinyawo – you sleep in a house which is so small that your feet must sleep outside.

Why does the government stick to an economic strategy that does not benefit us?

It is clear that the government’s economic strategy doesn’t work; they talk about creating jobs but everything they do is designed to destroy them. Their strategy of growth first and redistribution afterwards doesn’t work. It has never worked anywhere in the world.

The table of the capitalists grows bigger and, as always, we are left feeding from the crumbs that fall from it. This is something the DA will never accept. This is what leads to the triple crisis.

What is Numsa’s response?
Our Congress this year was very clear – there will be no change in the miserable conditions of the majority of South Africans until we dump the government’s current macro-economic framework and take control of the economy ourselves.

That is why we must nationalise the key sectors of the economy, under the control of us as workers.

Once we do that we can stop the wealth that comes from the mines and the banks just filling the pockets of shareholders – many of them foreign shareholders who just come here to make profit and run away. We can use that wealth to build the industrial manufacturing sector, which is the only way of creating the jobs we need.

That is why we must immediately impose an export tax on all our strategic minerals, as China has done with metallurgical coal.

That is why we must stop shipping ferro-chrome to China and instead build factories to use it here, in South Africa.

That is why we must stop Sasol and ArcelorMittal from charging South African companies exorbitant prices for their raw materials.

That is why we must fight against the constantly increasing electricity tariffs.

That is why the contracts for the government and parastatal infrastructure projects must go to South African companies. PRASA and Transnet rolling stock must be built in South Africa – we have the capacity; Kusile and Medupi power stations must be built with South African components by South African workers.

It is because the government fails to do these things that small and medium companies are closing. And then they lie and say that it is our fault as unions for fighting for a living wage, for campaigning to ban labour brokers and get rid of the youth wage subsidy

What must we, as the working class, do?
Marikana sent a clear message to all South African capitalists and their supporters: the working class from the mining sector, the manufacturing sector, the public sector and the farming sector has had enough of extreme levels of exploitation.

We know how extreme exploitation is when the farmworkers’ demand for a meagre R150 a day is rejected out of hand and Helen Zille asks the government to send in the army to end the strike.

This exploitation, which makes the South African capitalist class fat, has been the backbone of South African capitalism throughout history. It has its roots in the 1910 Union, in the Land Act which, 100 years ago next year, stole our land from us, and in the Koornhof Bills which told us we weren’t even South Africans.

Our task is to address the land question so that land ownership is transferred into the hands of black farmers, equipped and trained to farm it effectively. We must fight against the strategy of accumulating wealth by paying inferior, insulting colonial wages that super-exploit black and African labour.

In the Cosatu congress we called for a section 77 dispute so that workers take to the street and force government, through a strike, to take measures to reverse these reactionary strategies and start to rebuild the South Africa economy in the interests of the working class and the poor, to defend existing industries and build new ones, to manufacture our own buses and trains, tools and tractors.

In order to do this we must scrap the property clause in the constitution so that we can address the fundamental question of ownership and control of the economy including equal access by both black and white.

So we call on the ANC, in its congress in Mangaung, to adopt a revolutionary programme in the interests of the working class and the poor. And we call on the delegates to that congress to vote for a decisive working class leadership; don’t vote into power in our movement those who have become the worst butchers of the working class.

Numsa in 2013
2013 is a big year for wage negotiations in Numsa as our Motor, Tyre and Rubber and Auto sectors will be going to the negotiating table. We also know that those negotiations won’t be easy – the bosses are united and determined that it must be the working class that pays for the economic crisis which they created.

They certainly don’t want to pay for it themselves. We as Numsa members must be more united than ever as we face this challenge.

So we call on you all metal workers, the youth, the women to enjoy the festive season and recharge and be ready for the struggles of the New Year.

Numsa has declared 2013 a year we shall take to the street to ensure that South Africa reverses the seriously deepening levels of de-industrialization.

We must rise to the challenge to campaign for a fundamental change of direction – to build factories and industries that will give jobs for you, our members, as well as for your families and for your children.