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The Congress of South African Trade Unions sends warm, revolutionary greetings to its allies and comrades of the African National Congress as they celebrate 99 years of struggle for freedom.
No revolutionary movement anywhere in the world can rival the ANC’s awesome record of almost a century battling for the right of the African people for national liberation, democracy and human rights.
Next year we shall have the mother-of-all parties as our ANC allies reach their centenary year and prepare for their 86th National Conference. They can be sure that the workers of South Africa will remain 100% in support of our great national revolutionary movement.
2011 will also be a critical year for the ANC, as it prepares for the local government elections. COSATU has already, at its 25th anniversary party, reaffirmed its total support for its alliance partners in these elections and is already mobilising its forces on the ground to make sure we harvest the biggest possible vote for the ANC and defeat the forces of reaction represented by the motley collection of opposition parties.
It is highly appropriate that this year’s birthday main celebration should be held in Polokwane, scene of the ANC’s historic 85th National Congress. The key challenge for 2011 will be to convince voters that the excellent resolutions passed in Polokwane in 2007 and reaffirmed at the National General Council on 2010 are being implemented and are starting to transform the lives of the workers and the poor.
The programme adopted at Polokwane, which then formed the basis for the 2009 manifesto, promised key advances - an economic policy based on decent work, a new growth path, a new industrial policy, national health insurance, comprehensive social protection, comprehensive rural development strategy and an assault on crime and corruption.
In our 17 years of democracy we have made massive strides forward in many areas of life. We have destroyed the apartheid dictatorship and lived under the protection of a democratic Constitution and numerous laws which have given South Africans basic rights, to freedom, dignity and equality.
Even the ultra-critical Mail & Guardian this week conceded in an editorial that “South Africa is very far from becoming the failed state that we see in Zimbabwe. In the provision of key socio-economic infrastructure, notably housing and clean water, much has been achieved.”
They are right. Successive ANC governments have raised the number of households with access to piped water to 89%, to electricity and lighting to 80% and to sanitation to 68%. We have built 1.6 million subsidised houses and provided 1.9 million housing subsidies.
With most of the opposition parties in total chaos, there is absolutely no alternative to the ANC. If these parties cannot resolve their own internal disputes how can voters expect them to solve the problems our communities still face. Only the ANC can possibly confront these challenges.

This will not be an easy task however, and 2011 will have to be the year in which we come together as a united movement – government, labour and civil society – to start delivering on the promises made in the 2009 manifesto.
At the top of the list must be job creation. 2009 and 2010 were disastrous years for employment, as we saw jobs disappearing at an unprecedented rate. 2010 should have been the year when we came out of the recession, but for millions of workers, their families and poor communities, things got even worse.
Despite modest growth in the economy, jobs continued to disappear, and by the end of the third quarter of 2010, the official level of unemployment had reached 25.3%, and the more realistic expanded definition of unemployment, which includes those who have given up looking for work, had soared to 36.6%.
In Limpopo Province this expanded figure for unemployment had reached 45.6%, almost half the workforce!
Alongside this overall drop in employment, is a continuing shift from permanent to casual, insecure and temporary employment. The number of workers employed by labour brokers has risen to 6.8% of total employment in South Africa and 23.2% of the country’s temporary and part-time workforce. This is having a disastrous effect on the levels of pay, job security and benefits for hundreds of thousands of workers.
The ANC will harvest a rich reward from the voters if the government is seen to be acting decisively to ban this human trafficking called labour broking, immediately, in line with its first priority area - the creation of decent work. They must ignore the pleas of the owners of these companies, who are making huge fortunes from the exploitation of the most vulnerable in our society – unemployed workers desperate for any kind of income.
Another priority is 2011 is to ensure that all the laws protecting workers’ rights are fully implemented. COSATU strongly supports the new Land Tenure Security Bill which seeks to protect farm workers and dwellers from unfair eviction. Its definition of ‘eviction’ will include cutting off basic services to farm dwellers, preventing them from owning livestock or interfering with cultural practices, and will ban the eviction of disabled people, pensioners and workers living on the land for more than ten years.
As with all such laws however, they will be useless unless they are rigorously enforced. Farmers have been notorious for treating existing laws with utter contempt.
In the longer term the struggle for jobs will depend on how quickly and effectively the government moves our economy and our industry on to a new growth path. COSATU will shortly be issuing its response to the government’s new growth path, and has already published its own Growth Path towards Full Employment.
The one area on which there is agreement is that we have to escape from the strait-jacket of the economic structure we inherited from colonialism and apartheid, which is far too dependent on the export of raw materials. While this has enriched a tiny elite of mining and financial capitalists over many years, it has left us with a shrinking manufacturing sector, which is the key area for the creation of decent, sustainable jobs.
On the other four priority areas, the same urgency is required. Although the 2010 matric results show a very welcome 7% improvement from 2009, this should not lead to any complacency about the dire state of much of our public education system. And we must not ignore the plight of the 675 386 students who began school in 1999 but have subsequently dropped out. They actually outnumber the 643 546 who passed matric, which means that more than half the potential matriculants have no qualifications and very little prospect of employment.

Our key challenge is to bring an end to this two-tier system, where the majority suffer from a education system in which 93% of schools have no libraries or libraries with no books, 88% have no laboratories or labs whish are not stocked and 81% have no computers or more than 100 learners share one computer.
The ANC must join hands with the labour movement, the teachers unions, parents and civil society to help us to roll out the campaign on education adopted at last October’s Civil Society Conference, which will focus on improving the standards of education in the rural and township schools.

We must work together to move faster to implement universal free education in which every school is well funded, well staffed with dedicated teachers and has a library, laboratory and computer centre.
It is the same with our public healthcare system. 2011 must be the year in which the National Health Insurance system is finalised and starts to be rolled out. The Minister of Health has achieved fabulous successes in the fight against the HIV/Aids pandemic. But we shall be held back in the battle against this, and other widespread diseases, unless and until we transform the quality and quantity of basic healthcare services, especially in our poorest communities.
On crime and corruption we are clearly making progress. Again even the curmudgeonly Mail & Guardian concedes that “there are encouraging signs that South Africa is becoming a less violent society – the official murder rate has fallen sharply since the mid-1990s”.
There is still much work to be done however. COSATU has congratulated various government ministers for their bold plans to clamp down on corruption, but 2011 must be the year in which words are turned into deeds and we see corrupt politicians, officials and business people being brought before the courts.
The federation also welcomes the ANC President’s strong stand on climate change at the recent UNFCC Climate Change Conference in Mexico, when he warned that in some African countries yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50% in the next 20 years and that between 75 and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to increased water stress by 2020.
“The climate is changing,” he said, “and regions such as Africa and small island states are becoming more vulnerable as we spend hours, months and years deliberating. Drought in Africa, flooding in the Philippines, Pakistan and China, wild fires in Russia and other parts of the world are warnings of what lies ahead if we do not act sooner. We dare not delay”.

Poverty remains an absolutely crucial challenge. We have achieved wonders; in 1996, only 3 million people had access to social grants; today the figure is 15 million and rising. There are still many thousands of poor South Africans however who are not eligible for any of the available grants, so the demand for a Basic Income Grant to provide a safety net for all citizens must remain on the agenda.
The underlying tragedy however is that so many South Africans are solely dependent on grants. The priority remains to create work opportunities, with decent levels of pay, so that the poor can escape from their survivalist existence and enter the market as consumers. This will not only transform their own lives but play a vital role in building a modern, advanced economy.
Many of South Africa’s super-rich will howl that all these reforms are going to cost far too much money and we simply cannot afford them. Their voices should however be muted after the revelations in the Sunday Times last December that the number of South African billionaires nearly doubled, from 16 in 2009 to 31 in 2010 and that the country’s 20 richest men enjoyed a 45% increase in wealth.
Pine Pienaar, CEO of Mvelaphanda Resources, made R63 million in 2009, closely followed by Norbert Platt, CEO of Richement, who got R58 million, and Marius Kloppers, CEO of BHP Billiton who raked in R54 million.
At the other extreme, the median wage for all employees is just R2800 a month (R33 600 a year). So Mr Pienaar earns 1875 times as much as the average worker, and 1278 times the wages of the lowest paid worker at one of his own companies, Bauba Platinum.

On average the poorest 10% of earners get R1275 a month, which is 0.57% of total earnings, while the top 10% get R111 733, which is 49.2% of the total! South African remains the most unequal society in the world.

Yet this super-rich elite bemoan the damage done to the economy by ‘excessive’ wage claims by workers and ‘inflexible’ labour laws and warn us that we cannot afford the ANC’s reform policies like the NHI.
On the contrary, we cannot afford not to urgently bring down the levels of poverty, inequality and unemployment and the gross differences in the levels and quality of service in healthcare, education and delivery of basic services between the rich and the poor.
We are still sitting on a ticking bomb. If we do not act fast to respond to the increasingly desperate calls from our poor communities for houses, schools, clinics, better service delivery and a better quality of life, there will be uncontrollable social explosions.
The local government elections will provide the best possible way to engage with our people on the ground, listen to their complaints and formulate urgent policies to meet their demands.
COSATU members will be fully involved in this campaign, to make sure that ANC candidates sweep the board. We are delighted that the ANC has insisted that its prospective candidates face the communities they want to serve at open meetings to test their popularity with voters, and that alliance members will check their track records. This is fully in line with the federation’s insistence that corrupt or incompetent candidates will not be supported.
We wish the ANC a very happy 99th birthday and a successful year as it prepares for its historic centenary celebrations in 2012 and pledge the undying support of the federation’s two million members.