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The Congress of South African Trade Unions is looking forward to the upcoming African National Congress (ANC) 111th Anniversary celebrations and the accompanying ANC NEC Statement to mark this significant milestone for the organization over the weekend in Free State Province. This Anniversary comes immediately after the 55th ANC NASREC Conference that showed that the ANC problems are deep-rooted.

South African workers expect a solid political and economic programme to kickstart the economy and accelerate economic transformation. The ANC 2023 January 8th statement should take forward the progressive policy elements that came out of the Policy Conference. We expect the ANC NEC to come out with urgent solutions to address the scourge of poverty and degradation that exist side by side with lavish wealth.

We hope that the ANC will reflect on its government’s growing inability to grow the economy, fix electricity loadshedding and reduce unemployment and poverty. The ANC is increasingly presiding over a nation that is politically unstable, that experiences periodical rioting, suffers from rampant crime levels and is hungrier with a high disease burden.

The report released by the World Bank on Inequality in Southern Africa, last year, that showed that South Africa is still the world’s most unequal country in the world is scandalous. It is the triumph of the Verwoerdean model of isolating blacks from any meaningful economic participation and keeping them impoverished and enslaved to their white counterparts.

The ANC also needs to be worried by its failure to mobilise and unite our people, particularly the black majority around the project of non-racialism and non-sexism, and more precisely around the project of nation-building.

The 2021 local government elections results showed that our movement is becoming more and more African, losing support of Indians, coloureds and progressively minded white South Africans.  There is an urgent need to defeat and eradicate tribal and racial divisions that deny us our common identity as South Africans.

This strategic mission of regaining the unity of South Africans will not be possible without the ANC advancing a more radical economic transformation programme to overcome systematic features of growing unemployment, obscene inequality, and mass poverty.

The only proven solution is a solid programme aimed at ending monopoly capitalism, accelerating state-led industrialisation, overcoming apartheid spatial inequality, and advancing a massive education and training programme.

The South African workers want an ANC that can demonstrate its commitment, preparedness and ability to confront monopoly capital. Recently, we have seen an increased integration of domestic capital with global imperial capital. At the heart of this is the continuous pattern of the relocation of some key South African monopolies to imperialist centres and the takeover of the domestic productive resources by foreign capital.

The dominance of monopoly capital means that many of the socio-economic gains of our revolution that we have achieved since 1994, stands a danger of being overwhelmed by the continuously declining share of the workers in the national income because of intensified mechanisation of work, casualisation and retrenchments amidst the persistence of the triple-crises of unemployment, poverty, and inequality.

The ANC needs to build a progressive momentum that will be created by some major policy shifts in government starting with the abandonment of austerity measures. This will be achieved by developing a political process of dealing with the conservatives in the ANC and the old Neoliberal bureaucracy in government who continue to derail the NASREC Policy agenda.

Within government the conservative bureaucrats, particularly in the National Treasury drive old policies and block new ones supported by some leaders in Cabinet; Treasury continues to use the budget to impose its conservative economic policies and to frustrate the mandate of the ANC in aligning economic policies with the manifesto.

Workers also expect to hear of the ANC and its government's commitment to building a developmental state in the face of collapsing SOEs and the weakening of the public service through austerity measures, including retrenchments.

Never has this need to defend the public sector been so critical than in this period we are now in after the lessons of COVID-19 that showed the catastrophic human price of a weak and an incapable state. 

The ANC needs to prove that it remains committed not only to defending the public sector, but also to ensuring that the public sector through hundreds of thousands of workers it employs plays an appropriate transformative role for a radical social and economic change in favour of the poor. This means exposing and confronting without fear or favour the forces of corruption and self-enrichment in the state.

The NEC message should also focus on creating a conducive environment for cohesion in the Alliance. The important elements of this should include significant policy convergence amongst Alliance partners; better and more functioning of Alliance structures, including an Alliance summit this year. The reconfiguration of the Alliance cannot be deferred anymore. 

We also want measures to fight the developing political paralysis that has seen major fundamental differences not being addressed, especially an ongoing major mobilisation of workers in public service for a strike and the collapse of the Post Office and other state institutions.

We expect to see various measures being introduced to crack down on corruption and defeat the predatory elite. The Federation remains concerned about tenderpreneurs using access to state to drive their accumulation agenda.

The NEC needs to decisively deal with the escalation of ill-discipline and the entrenchment of alien organisational practices, crass materialism, and the politics of patronage in provinces.

The ANC NEC needs to tackle, arrest, and reverse the negative tendencies that have eroded and threaten to erode the political integrity and moral standing of the ANC in the eyes of society.

The threats and strategic tasks identified above need to be understood within context of immediate threats facing our revolution, here and now. Failure to appreciate these immediate dangers could open the prospect of defeat of our revolution. This is because we are faced with a crisis which must be dealt with without delay.

Issued by COSATU