NUMSA SUPPORTS ANCYL MARCHES TO DEMAND JOBS FOR YOUTH, FIGHT POVERTY AND INEQUALITIES!

The support for the ANCYL struggle for economic freedom in our life time is perfectly consistent with support for the ANC and for the ANC government and it's president - Comrade Jacob Zuma. 

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) fully supports the countrywide marches that will be organised by the African National Youth League (ANC YL) to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), Chamber of Mines and Union Building.

Our support for the ANCYL country-wide marches is informed by the National Liberation Movement's historical mission to attain the strategic goals of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) as encapsulated in the Freedom Charter, the Freedom Charter which is the over-arching policy document of the ANC, and supposedly of its government as a governing party.

Our support is also guided by the resolve of the ANC in its Strategy and Tactics adopted in 1969, Morogoro, Tanzania, which aptly said, "...it is inconceivable for liberation to have meaning without a return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole. It is therefore a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact is to feed the root of racial supremacy and does not represent even the shadow of liberation.

Our drive towards national emancipation is therefore in a very real way bound up with economic emancipation. We have suffered more than just national humiliation. Our people are deprived of their due in the country's wealth; their skills have been suppressed and poverty and starvation has been their life experience. The correction of these centuries-old economic injustices lies at the very core of our national aspirations. We do not understand the complexities which will face a people's government during the transformation period nor the enormity of the problems of meeting economic needs of the mass of the oppressed people. But one thing is certain - in our land this cannot be effectively tackled unless the basic wealth and the basic resources are at the disposal of the people as a whole and are not manipulated by sections or individuals be they White or Black."

These marches by the ANCYL feed quite correctly to the analyses made by COSATU and the SACP that our democratic breakthrough of 1994, white monopoly capital became the main beneficiary of the first decade of freedom, and that this economic tirade must be reversed so that the workers and the poor benefits.

Therefore these struggles by the ANCYL to demand nationalisation and socialization of the means of production, a New Growth Path that is not embedded in the failed neo-liberal and market fundamentalism, the total ban of labour brokers, the creation of decent jobs for the youth, provision of free, quality public education for the poor are genuine struggles to be waged in order to reverse the triple crisis of poverty, unemployment and deepening inequalities as perpetuated by Capitalism and Washington Consensus.

There is no better powerful, militant and radical force to rally the working class youth of our country, which is at the receiving end of Capitalist greed and barbarity, except the ANCYL, acting together with the Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA) to advance popular interests and aspirations of the urban and the rural poor youth. The bulk majority of the working class youth of our country is living in squalor and is brutally exploited at the point of production through casualisation and labour brokering.

A spectre of popular youth militancy is haunting both the developed and underdeveloped world bosses and their lackeys given the crisis of Capitalism and its failure to respond to youth interests and aspirations. These waves of popular protests or revolts have confirmed that Capitalism is being rejected by the youth of the world, including our own youth in South Africa as led by the ANCYL and the Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA). Its confirms the scientific analysis by greatest thinker of working class struggles Karl Marx that Capitalism is its own grave-digger.

As NUMSA we fully support the ANCYL in its struggles without contradicting our ideological clarity or posture. We call on young metalworkers and working class youth in general to join en masse these marches as led by the ANCYL.

Together with all the workers and progressive formations of the world we shall defeat the evil global system of capitalism.

Statement issued by Castro Ngobese, NUMSA National spokesperson, October 19 2011

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