Speech delivered by COSATU President Sidumo Dlamini to the 6th World Congress of the Education International held from 22nd - 26th July 2011, July 22 2011

Deputy President of SA, who is also the Deputy President of the ANC comrade Kgalema Motlanthe,
Minister of Higher Education who is also the General Secretary of the SACP comrade Blade Nzimande,
Minister of Basic Education who is also the President of the ANC women's league,
President of Education International, comrade Suzan Hopgood 
General Secretary of Education International comrade Fred van Leeuwen,
General Secretary of ITUC comrade Sharon Barron
The Entire leadership and delegates of affiliates from all the 402 member organisations in the 173 countries

I greet you in the name of the more than 2 million fighting members of COSATU.

We welcome you in this great country which is the cradle of humankind. You are not visitors but you have returned to reconnect with your human roots. 

We invite you to ensure that you enjoy the beauty of our country whose majestic historical and modern buildings that continue to catch your sight bear testimony to the work of slaves who constructed them with their bare hands and the sweat of our workers who continue to give the endless beauty you see in this province.

Enjoy the beauty of the Cape Floral Region which produces 3% of the world's plant species, with a total size of 553 000-hectares and comprises eight protected areas. It cannot be compared to anything in the world except Eden!

Here we have one of the world's biodiversity hotspots which offers habitat to 11,000 species of marine animal, which includes 142 reptile species.  This is our country. We love it; enjoy it!

We welcome you in this land of the great heroes of our revolution. These grounds on which we stand and walk are where the heroic wars of early resistance against settlers and slavery were bravely fought by our forefathers. 

Every grain of soil on these grounds can tell a story of our heroes whose brave deeds delivered freedom for our people. 

We welcome you in the land of Hintsa, Sekhukhune, Cetshwayo, Umbambatha, kaMancinza, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani, Vuyisile Mini, Moses Kotane, Ruth First, Basil February, Joe Slovo, Oliver Tambo and many of our sung and unsung heroes and heroines!

Comrade delegates you have not come here to represent the exclusive interest of the 30 million teachers who have sent you to this congress but you have come to discuss about how best you can advance the struggle to ensure that the international working class receives quality education and uses such education to build their own future.   

You have come to discuss how our youth can have access to quality education without any hindrance. You have come here to re-affirm that a teacher is an irreplaceable tool in the classroom.

You have come here to make a statement that education is not a commodity that can be subjected to the calculus of profit maximisation. Education is right, and all our people, particularly the children of the working class must access at whatever level without any financial hindrance.

You have come to make a statement that it is possible to have free and compulsory education for the children of the working class. 

All of us gathered here today are driven by our commitment to promote the right to education for all persons in the world, without discrimination. I know that your mission is to promote the political, social and economic conditions that are required for the realisation of the right to education in all nations.

It is painful to know that all these good intentions cannot be realised in a world that consciously creates inconducive conditions for education to take place.  These cannot be achieved under conditions of man-made economic crises, man-made wars and man-made poverty that continue to engulf the world.

These cannot be achieved if teachers and education institutions continue to be made target of wars. In the recent past we have witnessed an increased aggression against teachers and teacher trade unionists.

 The world which values and understands the importance of a teacher in the development of a nation and society in general cannot keep quiet when shooting of peaceful protestors including teachers, students and unionists has become law in Yemen. It is unacceptable that 20 teachers can just be killed and nothing happens.

For the 31 Public servants in Turkey who are being subjected to physical and psychological pressure including salary cuts, dismissals and banning from public services we say they are not guilty, please give back their freedom of association.   They are supposed to be here with us in the congress. Allow them to participate in union activities. These are the rights we fought for and for which many lives have been sacrificed and for which blood of nations continues to stain the soil so that these freedoms could be realised.

We demand an end to police brutality against trade unionists now! We are not criminals but workers!

Our people and our countries will remain underdeveloped and the world cannot achieve peace if schools are made targets of war. We must not keep quiet when this happens.

I could not believe my eyes when I read the Education for All Global Monitoring Report released in March this year, which revealed that over the last decade, 35 countries experienced armed conflict. It says that the average duration of violent conflict episodes in low=-income countries was 12 years.

It tells us that in conflict-affected poor countries, children face major barriers to education:  

(a) 28 million children of primary school age are out of school; that is 42% of the world total 

(b) Children in conflict-affected poor countries are twice as likely to die before their fifth birthday as children in other poor countries

(c) Only 79% of young people are literate in conflict-affected poor countries

(d) Schools, schoolchildren and teachers are being deliberately targeted in conflict ridden areas. For example in Afghanistan, at least 613 attacks on schools were recorded in 2009, up from 347 in 2008.

The report also shows that armed conflict is diverting public funds from education into military spending. Twenty-one developing countries are currently spending more on arms than on primary schools. If they were to cut military spending by 10%, they could put an additional 9.5 million children in school.

It also shows that military spending is also diverting aid resources. It would take just six days of military spending by rich countries to close the 16 billion US dollar Education for All external financing gaps.

In other words the amount of financial resources being used by the NATO and some European forces to fight a colonial war of regime change in Africa such as we have seen in Libya can take hundreds of our youth to school even up to a junior degree level for free. But this cannot happen because of the obsession to continue accessing our resources including oil for free.

As if this is not enough, the impact of economic crisis in education has been devastating and it appears as if we are still far from real recovery from this man made economic crisis.

The main reason for this continued trap into the economic crisis is that capitalism thinks that it can save itself from its own crisis by intensifying implementation of the much failed policies. Capital wants to multiply profits even during the crisis and they want to do this at the expense of workers.

If workers take action, they are threatened with closure of companies or with possibility of transfer of production sites.

Labour law gets amended to permit for more flexibility. This includes openly undermining internationally recognised labour standards, leading to more workers facing insecurity and vulnerability, with some 50% of the global workforce now in precarious jobs. 

Capital continues to use the economic crisis as an excuse to force government to cut on special spending, including on education, particularly on salaries for public servants.

They employ all tactics including the use of brute force. For example, according to ITUC report in Turkey, about 350 trade unionists were dismissed in 2010 because of their union activities, in the same country public sector unionists were harassed by the authorities, arrested and incarcerated.  

In Moldova, union leaders who claimed unpaid wages were arrested, charged with criminal offences and placed under house arrest for weeks.

This means that we have a war on a global scale between capital and workers, where capital is prepared to kill and maim to defend their profits, even during the recession, even when people are dying of hunger, even if their own countries go bankrupt.

Capital is prepared to die holding a gun on one side and bags of profits in a pool of dead corpses who have died of man-made hunger and man-made war.

The reality is that the global economic crisis, intersected with higher food prices, leaves 64 million people in abject poverty and more malnutrioned and this has a direct bearing to education. This has led to stress in many household budgets, leading to children being withdrawn from school.

The combination of global food crisis and financial crisis has worsened the environment for achieving the Education for All goals. From 2003 to 2008, corn and wheat prices roughly doubled and rice prices tripled. This has resulted in poor households eating fewer and less nutritious meals, and reducing expenditure on health and education.

Rising malnutrition and deteriorating prospects for poverty reduction have far-reaching consequences for education, because hunger undermines cognitive development, causing irreversible losses in opportunities for learning. Malnutrition affects around 175 million young children each year and is a health and an education emergency.

According to the research it was established that as a result of the economic crisis seven low income countries, including Chad, Ghana, the Niger and Senegal, made cuts in education spending in 2009. Countries reporting cuts have some 3.7 million children out of school.

In five of these seven low income countries, planned spending in 2010 left the education budget below its 2008 level. While seven lower middle income countries maintained or increased spending in 2009, six affected cuts to their education budgets in 2010.

As a result of all these intersecting conditions of impact of global economic crisis, poverty and wars there is a general trend that many children drop out of school before completing a full primary cycle.

In sub-Saharan Africa alone, 10 million children drop out of primary school every year. About 17% of the world's adults - 796 million people - still lack basic literacy skills. Nearly two-thirds are women. This means that another 1.9 million teachers will be needed by 2015 to achieve universal primary education, more than half of them in sub-Saharan Africa. 

This is telling us that everybody agree that we need teachers if we are to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. But very few are prepared to do what is required.

This includes paying educators a decent salary, building schools with all the required infrastructure, and providing quality education for free. Thanks to our government for making the commitment and we know they will live up to it.

Further Education and Training intuitions must ensure free further education and training for the poor and turn loans into bursaries for those students who succeed in Higher Education Institutions. This is a step in the right direction.

We are looking forward to a day when children and youth from the working class can access basic education and higher education for free!

The task we have as this gathering is to act in unity as global trade unions and the day we learn to fight and act together no enemy can stand us.

The day we learn to respond to the clarion made by Karl Marx many years ago that "Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose except your chains" will be the day which will mark an end of capital trampling on us even when there is glaring failure on their policies.

That will be the day when we will have enough confidence to put before the world our own alternatives and have such implemented by the state constructed in our own image.

That will be the day the child of the working class will be guaranteed free education up to any level of education and that will be the day when education and a teacher will be respected by society not in words but in deeds!

We wish this congress all the success!

Issued by COSATU, July 22 2011

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