With the ANC’s well-timed decisions and visible consistency in applying the step-aside policy to deal with members or leaders facing criminal charges of fraud, corruption and money laundering, that move alone stands to benefit the poor and the working class. This is long overdue, an important step to curb corruption in all spheres of government.
This could be one of the main reasons why the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) resolved to fully support the ANC campaigns leading to the local government elections on October 27.
The NUM national executive committee recently decided to make resources available to make sure that the ANC wins the elections by the biggest margin.
On several occasions, NUM appealed to the ANC to act decisively, consistently and firmly without looking at the position and faces of those found wanting pertaining to the step-aside policy. Inconsistency and lack of decision-making had the potential to demobilise the ANC while increasing tensions unnecessarily.
Twenty-seven years is a short time for our people to have forgotten the pain and suffering caused to South Africans and the diaspora by the apartheid government that seeks to come back in a disguised form.
Lest we forget, the damage ANC detractors expect the ANC to undo in just 27 years was done over more than 300 years. The ANC government has managed, in a short space of time, to remove race-based laws that saw a black person as subhuman.
It is a pity that today those who supported those laws need our vote, probably to repeat the evils of the past.
It is no doubt that the labour movement in the country played a pivotal role in ensuring that the ANC became the government of today. Workers in this country made sure that the apartheid regime was always on its toes, and many of those workers were tortured, detained and killed.
It is NUM’s long-standing resolution to support the ANC. It is a congress resolution. The union has aligned itself with the views of its own federation, Cosatu, that despite the challenges facing the working class and the current labour tensions, it will not boycott the elections.
The NUM resolution stems from the fact that there are so many attempts to hijack the revolutionary movement by reactionary and criminal elements who have been attempting to capture it since the 1994 democratic breakthrough.
NUM stated clearly that it will mobilises and urges its members to vote for the ANC come October 27.
• Chilwane is the National Union of Mineworkers' media officer
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.