Speech delivered by COSATU Deputy General Secretary Bheki Ntshalintshali to the South African Democratic Teachers' Union Conference in the North West on Friday, 1 August 2014.

The chairperson of SADTU in the province

The leadership of COSATU present here today

The Alliance Leadership present in this meeting

Invited guests

1.Comrades please accept warm greetings from your federation the Congress of South African trade Union of Elijah Barayi, Violet Seboni, and John Gomomo

As COSATU we are happy to have been invited to address SADTU in the North West Province.

2. Comrades, we must never make a mistake of thinking that this meeting is simply just about elections. This is about developing strategies and programmes to provide solutions to the challenges confronting the world and our country in particular.  Elections are but a small component of the bigger programme we need to undertake .  The election of leaders is not a process which must be treated outside of developing appropriate strategies in advancing our struggle. In other words the leadership to be elected must have the qualities and capacities, which are required to advance the struggle in line with the task imposed by the obtaining material conditions which necessitated the struggle in the first place.

3. It is during elections where our organizational principles get tested. It is also during this period when we are heated up on getting our own to win elections that we opt for shortcuts and allow bourgeoisie ideology to creep in. It must be said that it is during congresses that we start to construct personality cults who later haunt the democratic life of our organizations.

4. We therefore want to urge this congress to ensure that in the process of electing leaders we must avoid creating our own monsters who in practice demand to be seen and worshipped as demi gods who stand above the organization and above anyone else. We must at all material times assert the supremacy of the organization above all even if that makes us to be unpopular.

5. The reason why we should avoid worshipping individuals in our organization and instead elevate the primacy of the organization is because the challenges confronting us as working class formations is too huge and requires our collective effort without anyone feeling less important to make a contribution.

Note: that you a teachers union. Your responsibility is to serve your members nothing more nothing less. The time you cease to represent your members you would cease to be trade union.

What are our challenges?

6. COSATU in the North West is better compared to other provinces controlled or governed by the ANC-led alliance however there are strange things that attracts one attention:

7- The executive here comprises of comrades from the alliance partners being the SACP, COSATU, SANCO. However the inability to address some of the challenges with the speed desired demonstrate the lack of both political will and capacities, the question is where are the COSATU comrades in the EXCO?

8 - This is a province with the richest mineral deposits in the world and yet it is the province with the highest levels of poverty where people choose to go and stay in other provinces rather than to die in poverty in their own province.

9 - The service delivery protest associated mainly with clean water shortages and related crisis suggests to this congress that we pay some attention.

10 - This province is regarded by many people as the most corrupt province, sooner people would not want to associated with it yet there is so much positive potential.

11. You may wonder as why then raise this with Sadtu? It because. Sadtu when resolute can make difference. Look at the Matric results in this province? Even though people would not mention Sadtu by name we all know that you made that difference.

Second crisis Ebola

12. Africa is currently experiencing one of the painful thing when people in Africa die helplessly because of yet another incurable disease called Ebola. The first outbreak of Ebola in West Africa has quickly grown to be the most severe in history, with more than 1,200 infected and 673 dead as of July this year. One Liberian doctor has died and two Americans have been infected in the course of treating patients. The disease has spread quickly since the beginning of the current outbreak in February and is now three times larger than the last major outbreak in Uganda in 2000. Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea all have confirmed cases.

Ebola is primarily a rural disease, where food gathered from hunting exposes people to infected animals and lack of clean water spreads infection. The isolated conditions in rural West Africa limit the numbers affected, but if the disease spread to one of Africa's large cities like Lagos, Nigeria, it could quickly overwhelm the limited health care infrastructure.

13. The disease is mainly affecting the peasants and the working class in countries whose capacity for health care has been ravaged by imperialist sponsored wars.

Under conditions of political instability and mass poverty, diseases like Ebola can reach epidemic proportions. We have a responsibility to elevate this epidemic and call on the world to intervene.

Third crisis Boko Haram

14. It has been reported that recently a suicide bomber targeted students at a technical college in Nigeria`s second city of Kano on Wednesday as the campus reopened following a Muslim holiday, witnesses said13 people were killed and 35 injured when two mosques in northern Nigeria were bombed,

Boko Haram militants kidnapped the wife of Cameroon's vice Prime Minister and killed at least three people on Sunday in a cross-border attack involving more than 200 assailants in the northern town of Kolofata.

It is also reported that five people were killed and eight were injured on Thursday in a bomb attack on a Catholic church in a mainly Christian area of Kano, the largest city in Nigeria's north. This like the bombing and killing of innocent people in Kenya raise sharp questions as to the role of the international community including our own governments.

Fourth crisis: US destruction to ordinary people.

15. The Israel Defense Force has attacked the Palestinian people and the entire neighbourhoods were reduced to rubble, with many hundreds of more homes destroyed. According to Gaza authorities, some 5,000 homes have been completely demolished in 22 days of Israeli attacks, while over 26,000 have been damaged.

By Tuesday night, the Palestinian Ministry of Health had recorded more than 130 new fatalities since the Israeli military resumed its merciless and deadly attacks on Gaza the night before, sending the death toll past the 1,200 mark.

This is the same mayhem and destruction we saw being unleashed in Afghanistan, and Iraq before Libya, which left all these countries erased to ashes.

16. Reports have emerged that the Iraqi regime set up under the 2003-2011 US occupation is nearing collapse. Like Libya, Iraq is devastated and divided into three sides in an escalating civil war: the Sunni west, a Shiite Arab rump state close to Iran, and a besieged Kurdish state in the north. This is the outcome of the policy of plunder and divide-and-rule employed by the US-led occupation.

17. All these are done with the assistance of propaganda machinery provided by the media.  The written word, which is the specialization of a teacher, is being used to direct the world on the route to destruction.

18. We are also being confronted with another disaster in the making.  The crisis provoked by American and European charges of Russian responsibility for the shooting down of flight MH17 has brought the world the closest it has been to global war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. This war like the waged by Israel against Palestinian people is being insulated through media propaganda.

It is clear that the US and Europe are s directing an incendiary propaganda campaign against Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, a campaign that seems intent on provoking a direct military confrontation with the country with the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world.  

They are mobilizing all the resources and assets they command within

Fourth crisis of unemployment, poverty and inequality

We continue to live in a world with worsening poverty and unemployment. According to the ILO report ILO an estimated 201.8 million people were jobless in 2013, up by nearly 5 million in one year. This is a new high, exceeding 2009's record of 198 million.

Youth were the biggest casualties, with 74.5 million people aged 15-24 unemployed in 2013, an increase of more than 700,000. There were a staggering 37.1 fewer young people in employment in 2013 than in 2007.

In our country the recent figures shows that 87 000 more people joined the ranks of the jobless and poor in the second quarter of 2014, bringing the total number out of work to an appalling 5.2 million.

The official unemployment rate - which takes into account only people actively looking for work - has risen to 25.5%, up by 0.3% from 25.2% in the first quarter, Statistics South Africa reported in its quarterly labour force survey which was released on 29 July 2014. This is the highest level since the first labour force survey in 2008, when the rate was four points lower, at 21.5%.

The more realistic expanded rate of unemployment - taking into account people who have given up looking for jobs - rose to 35.6% in the second quarter, up from 35.1%. The number of discouraged jobseekers increased by 64 000.

We are even more worried that these high levels of poverty and unemployment coexist with the painful reality that the   85 richest people in the world now control as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent. And the world's 1,645 billionaires, according to Forbes, possess a combined net worth of $6.4 trillion, an increase of $1 trillion over 2013. In the United States, the richest 400 people increased their wealth in 2013 to $2 trillion, up 17 percent from the year before.

Research shows that in our country's top 50 companies today when compared with those in 2005 reveal that they are now three time as high as "what were already sky-high salaries" nine years ago.

In 2005, chief executives were earning annual packages of approximately R15m including benefits, which was then about 700 times the minimum wage in some sectors. Today, the packages of the same chief executives have risen to an average of R49m. A survey of 296 executive directors in 83 companies across 14 sectors found the average remuneration of executives in 2012 at around R7.7m, while the earnings of chief executives climbed to an average of R11m.

This means that a low-wage earner would have to work 15 years to make what the average non-executive director would make in a year, but he would have to work 174 years to match the earnings of the executive director and 267 years to earn what the average chief executive is earning in a year. The research also found that while there was an average drop of 24% in profits, there was an average increase of 10% in executive pay, which shatters the myth that these excessive earnings are a reward for better results.

According to the norms and values of capitalism this must be accepted as normal when at the same time there are millions of children in the world who go to bed without food.

As if this is not enough the rich countries on earth are unleashing wars of mass

Where is counter action by teachers to provide an alternative written word and to use you skill of speaking to tell truth to the world, governments, the media, and among academics-in a carefully orchestrated campaign aimed at polluting public opinion with anti-Russian hysteria and against the Palestinian people. Today president Putin is on the receiving end of the same campaign

President Putin certainly knows the outcome of this propaganda campaigns. Serbia was bombed into political submission and Milosevic was carted off to The Hague, where he died, mysteriously, in prison. Iraq was invaded and Hussein executed.

All these comrades have the traces of the USA imperialist warfare, which is intended to increase the possibilities of accumulation and profit maximization for international capital. For example while Obama cynically laments the deaths in Gaza, Washington is moving rapidly to approve hundreds of millions of dollars more in emergency arms aid to Israel to ensure that the killing can continue without interruption.

In the United Nations it is the USA that casted a sole vote opposing the formation of a UN commission to investigate Israeli actions in Gaza.

We make all these examples to communicate a message that the current situation in the world represents a full-frontal attack of capital against the achievements of the working class, which is taking place at a global scale.

These must be understood as an effort to exit from the economic crisis by shifting the burden on the workers, prove that any achievements and gains of the economic struggle can only be defensive, temporary and in danger of being reversed, if they are not linked to the broader class struggle for a different power which will work exclusively in favour of the working class and its allies.

We therefore need to proceed from historical experience which has shown that only where the economic struggle of the working class in the trade unions was harmoniously combined with the political struggle for power, in coordination with the respective revolutionary parties, was it possible to abolish the exploitation of human by human.

Such a combination in the struggle, not only does not limit it, but it facilitates wider strata of the working class to overcome superstitions and illusions, to free themselves from bourgeois ideology, to help in the construction of a real United Front of the working class towards the promotion of its common interests. Such a unified movement cannot be built through artificial welding or high-level agreements, but only in a direction of revolutionary change of society. It is not despite of this understanding but it is because of this understanding that we are in Alliance with the ANC and the SACP.  

This perspective has been elaborated in various COSATU policy documents and got properly packaged in the 8th Congress through our Medium Term Vision called the 2015 Plan. This is based on Strategies to build the power of the organized working class in South Africa, in our region and continent as well as internationally, strategies to make our relationship with the Alliance work and identifies the priority areas for intervening on socio economic policy in the short term to stem the job loss bloodbath and fight for quality jobs

The 2015 Plan crystallizes the fact that the golden rule in a political struggle is always to isolate the most dangerous enemy, while at the same time strengthening to the maximum the progressive camp.  It captures an understanding that in South African conditions, the broad strategy of national democratic struggle is the route to the most far-reaching and rapid changes in our country. It is not an unfortunate or delaying tactic; it is a broad strategy that we consider with the utmost seriousness.

SADTU has a responsibility to firstly defend COSATU's 2015 Plan as part of the process to unify the liberation forces in the face of an onslaught by both domestic and international capital.

Secondly, within the same context SADTU must unleash its capabilities to of using the science and art of a written and spoken word to infuse in the minds our children and our people the real truth about the brutality of capitalism!

Every classroom must have teachings about the principles of Ubuntu, solidarity and the values of humanity over the value of money and profits.  Let us see SADTU occupying the front ranks of picket lines against Imperialism and against the destruction caused by capitalism in the world.

All these tasks comrades which range from the transformation of education to serve the interests of the working class to teaching against imperialism require that we all should prioritize the building of the organisation. Comrades our historical records show that this year marks 356 years since the first formal school in South Africa was established at the Cape on the 17th April 1658 to provide education for slaves. This was less than a month after the arrival of shipment with 170 slaves.

Our starting point when discussing matters, which touches on education, is that in a capitalist society the school has three principal tasks to fulfil. First, it inspires the coming generation of workers with devotion and respect for the capitalist regime. Secondly, it creates from the young of the ruling classes 'cultured' controllers of the working population. Thirdly, it assists capitalist production in the application of sciences to technique, thus increasing capacity to achieve capitalist profits.

Secondly in order to understand the role of education in a capitalist society it is important to internalize a Marxist Leninist understanding which is properly articulated by Athulsser when he said that" in order to exist, every social formation must reproduce the conditions of its production at the same time as it produces, and in order to be able to produce it must therefore reproduce the productive forces and the existing relations of production.

In this regard reproduction of labour power is ensured by giving labour power the material means with which to reproduce itself.  This is done through wages so that a worker can pay for housing, food and clothing, and so that the wage earner can present himself or herself again at the factory gate the next day including for raising and educating the children in whom the proletarian reproduces himself and herself.

But it is also not enough to ensure for labour power the material conditions of its reproduction if it is to be reproduced as labour power. Labour power must be suitable to be set to work in the complex system of the process of production and that is what we mean by being competent.  The productive forces at a given moment produce the result that the labour power has to be diversely skilled and therefore reproduced as such.

These diversified skills of labour power tends to be provided for ‘on the spot' through apprenticeship within production itself, but is achieved more and more outside production and that is through the capitalist education system, and by other instances and institutions. But our focus will be the school.

At school children   learn to read, to write and to add including a number of other things as well such as elements of ‘scientific' or ‘literary culture', which are directly useful in the different jobs in production.

But besides these techniques and knowledge, and in learning them, children at school also learn the ‘rules' of good behaviour, which in essence constitute the attitude that should be observed by every agent in the division of labour, according to the job he or she is ‘destined' for. These include the rules of morality, civic and professional conscience, which actually means rules of respect for the socio-technical division of labour and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination.

They also learn to ‘speak proper English and any of the language of the ruling class, how to ‘handle' the workers correctly, actually for the future capitalists and their servants to order and instruct them around.  ‘

It is during this process that the reproduction of labour power is not only reliant on the reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, which is the reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words'.

In other words, the school teaches the ‘know-how', but in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its ‘practice'.

The role of a teacher in the context of a capitalist society is to give instruction and to teach in accordance with a definite programme perfectly adapted for the breaking-in of the pupils to the capitalist system. All the textbooks are written in an appropriate spirit to achieve this central objective of coercion. The whole of bourgeois literature sub serves the same end, for it is written by persons who look upon the bourgeois social order as natural, perdurable, and as the best of all possible regimes.

In this way the learners are stuffed with bourgeois ideology; they are infected with enthusiasm for all bourgeois virtues; they are inspired with esteem for wealth, renown, titles and order; they aspire to get on in the world, they long for personal comfort, and wealth and on all the promises of capitalism whose central virtue is "me first for all the best". It is this virtue which gets assimilated by society as being correct and produces a society based on the principles of" Dog Eat Dog".

The communist Manifesto says that the Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

Paulo Frere, in his seminal work titled the Pedagogy of the Oppressed says that "education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."

It is in this context that when SADTU was formed it presented an opportunity to have an organization in South Africa which will put its all energies and make a qualitative contribution in the transformation of education and work to produce the type of a teacher whose preoccupation would be to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class proceeding from an understanding of revolutionary practice that   "philosophers have ... only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it" and that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated in the process.

In other words comrades, the South African educator lives with a burden of a serious responsibility put on his shoulders by expectations from the Society as a whole in particular from the working class. This responsibility is to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class by working to educate for a purpose of producing men and woman who will not accept the bourgeoisie social order as natural, as perdurable, and as being the best of all possible regimes. And not only analyze education but also instead provide workable alternatives to change it.

The educator cannot undertake this task without exerting himself or herself to understand the world and consciously developing the capacity of working with others or developing others to change the world.  

This means that before all else an educator must be an inspiring individual based on how he or she carries himself or herself in the society. All of this may also be expected from other professions and everybody but the burden, which is carried by an educator, is more.

The reason for this is based on the fact that society knows that an educator is responsible for shaping the minds of a future generation, which will be in charge of our country. An educator has received a special training to master human development, which involves how people think of themselves and meaning they attach to others and the surrounding environment.

A teacher is therefore an individual who always take calculated actions, make pronouncements based on properly considered and calculated words.  It can be argued that a teacher carries the most needed skills for a revolution, which is the art and science of using a spoken word and the art and science of using a written word.

It is a teacher more than anyone else who spent more time in direct contact with young people who carries with them the idealism , possess unlimited energy and have more time on their side which is an envy of many armies  and regimes in the world who would use this resource to further their aims.  

It is not a mistake that may terrorist organizations and cult organizations uses young people to further their aims. It was not by mistake that the Apartheid government had conscription, forcing white youth to go the army. It was not a mistake either that the turning point in the tempo of our struggle in South Africa was imposed by youth - the Young Lions. Recall when we said raw young lions raw!

It is also not a mistake that the best revolutionaries such as the first president of the ANC comrade John Langalibalele Dube who is described as "a great, if not the greatest, black man of the missionary epoch in South Africa"; Govan Mbeki a towering intellectual and leader of our movement, Harry Gwala a courageous and fearless leader of our movement, all had the teaching profession as their first choice career.

So today comrades we have come here to ask from SADTU to do an introspection if the members of SADTU who are also teachers have risen to the challenge of what society expects of them, are teachers carrying themselves in the society in a manner which inspires society that teachers have a capacity to provide alternatives to the challenges confronting our education and our country.

Are teachers having a revolutionary purpose when they enter in a class to teach?

We are throwing a challenge to SADTU to do an introspection on whether its members who are also teachers have a revolutionary perspective in changing the world to a point where they are concern about empowering themselves with knowledge which can help provide solutions to the challenges confronting human kind.  

SADTU cannot fold its arms and stand aloof when it has almost become fashionable to get, research reports being produced which cast a dark cloud on teachers as professionals who have no capacity, and who have no discipline.

We want SADTU to stand up and challenge this propaganda by producing counter researched information. We are inspired by the fact that SADTU has opened a TV channel we hope that it will be watched by all including the working class who do not have DSTVs and that it will be used as an instrument to advance class battles against capitalism.

One of the challenges confronting the labour movement today in particular COSATU and its affiliated unions are that we have over time taken for granted to a point of undermining the value of an organization.

In answering the question about the importance of an organization comrade Govan Mbeki who was affectionately known as Oom Gov, writing from Robben Island, in his book "learning from Robben Island he begins by reminding all of us that if we have to grapple with concrete socio-economic problems - problems of oppression and exploitation of man by man we have to adopt a more realistic approach to our problems. Oppression and exploitation are man-made by minority interests to the disadvantage of majority interests. What then must the oppressed and exploited majority do to turn things in their favour?  

He advises that our starting point is to direct our attention and efforts to the source of our strength by saying: 'Go to the masses of the oppressed and exploited peoples of our land. Work among them; work with them to prepare the way for a take-over of power.' Expressed briefly this is to say: 'Go. Organize.'

He continues and says that experience has taught, however, that a lot more requires to be known about organizing if the product of our efforts and activities, i.e. organization, is to be effective. And if the oppressed and exploited are to achieve their end, viz to take over power, they must build effective organizational machinery. And to have such organizational machinery there is no room for haphazard and half-hearted measures. The task has to be tackled seriously and systematically "

Oom Gov continues and penetrated through the central question of why organizations exist by asserting that organizations come into existence firstly as a response by a group of people confronted by similar challenges, seeking a solution to those challenges.

So organizations exist to answer to a question "how". He continues and argues that it is the ability and the extent to which an organization is able to, crystallize, break the problem into its component parts and to patiently articulate its complete manifestations to the people but does not only end with that and continues to endure the pain to provide practical expression to the question "how".

It is this ability to answer to a question "how" which determines the organization's ability to remain relevant and to attract as many people as possible in its ranks that saw it as providing practical solutions to their real and practical challenges.

It is for this reason that we should congratulate our unions who have taken up employers toe to toe and pound for pound

With all the challenges which SADTU is doing everything to ward off, at the centre of the answer to all these challenges is to remind ourselves about why SADTU was formed in the first place, why COSATU was formed in the first place and why do our organizations exist.

Our organizations do not exist to fight our personal battles, to rent a crowd so that members can go a shout demanding our re-instatement when we have done wrong in the organization. Our organizations do exist to be used as a scare crow or as a battering ram to business partners so that leaders can get tenders and be corrupt without being questioned because they have the support of members who will conveniently be mobilized at the service of an individual who has wronged the organization.

Our organizations were formed and they exist to provide practical solutions to a worker who has been unfairly dismissed, to challenge government policies and legislation such as on Labour brokers and employment Tax Incentives which deepen the exploitation of workers.

Our organizations exist to stand up against the injustices meted out against other workers and the working class all over the world. It is for this reason that we should never allow that these organizations can be abused for personal gain and for personal protection.

But the capacity of having an effective organization and the capacity of an organization to defend itself is not automatic. It is instilled in the actual day-to-day struggles and activities which the organization undertakes building and shaping the discipline of members and building the trade union and socialist consciousness of members and leaders alike. All these are not automatic but can only be instilled in the court of real struggles.

Let us build SADTU into a bulwark and fortification to which workers and society can run for protection from the capitalist and imperialist onslaught.  

Workers need a strong SADTU let us respond to them!

Amandla!

Issued by COSATU, August 1 2014

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