Zwelinzima Vavi
@Zwelinzima1 • 609,662 subscribers
There can be no greater honour than to serve the working class. If you can't handle the truth don't follow me. Retweeting is not an endorsement
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A country as rich as ours cannot keep tolerating political elites who defend policies that have failed so dismally: policies that have entrenched mass unemployment, with the expanded rate nearing 50%, while poverty and inequality reach record levels. Then they act surprised when crime and social breakdown reach the levels we see today. Yesterday, at 18:00 in Sandton, while it was still daylight, these thugs robbed an Uber driver and his passengers of their phones and a Rolex watch in a matter of seconds. Crime must be condemned and confronted. But we cannot ignore the conditions in which it flourishes or the leaders who keep defending the policies that helped create them.
Zwelinzima Vavi288,936 Aufrufe • vor 10 Tagen
Thank you Mr Songezo Zibi for this video! Unendlebe nje unetyala
Zwelinzima Vavi149,475 Aufrufe • vor 10 Tagen
This is the fundamental difference between SAFTU and COSATU. SAFTU does not regard the ANC as a shield for workers or the SACP as a vanguard simply by virtue of its name or history. The ANC is a capitalist movement implementing neoliberal policies and austerity. The consequences are visible in cuts to public services, from border management and crime prevention to schools, hospitals, land reform and agricultural support. The scale of the squeeze is measurable. By 2022/23, real non-interest spending per person had fallen back to around its 2008/09 level. The Institute for Economic Justice estimates that it will fall by a further 23% between 2019/20 and 2026/27, from R34,607 to R26,496 per person in 2024/25 rands. ( This means fewer real resources, on average, for the public services people depend on. When schools and hospitals are underfunded, staff and infrastructure are stretched, and families must pay privately for services they cannot afford, living standards fall and poverty deepens. Manufacturing’s share of GDP has fallen from about 22% in 1994 to just over 11%. One published estimate says that more than a million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 1994 when jobs that would have been created through continued growth are included. That is a counterfactual estimate, not a count of measured job losses. ( Eskom has been unbundled and the electricity market opened further to private capital, while the average Eskom tariff rose by 1,722% in nominal terms between 1994 and 2024. Privatisation and commercialisation have also made essential public services increasingly unaffordable. A government that makes people pay more while providing less cannot be a shield for workers. It is deepening the pressures on the working class. The capitalist class has more reason than workers to call the ANC a shield: its policies protect and advance their interests. A workers’ movement that cannot identify its class adversaries risks being co-opted into managing class conflict on behalf of the system. SAFTU believes no organisation can simply declare itself the vanguard. A vanguard earns that standing through struggle for the socialist transformation of society - not by title, nor by implementing the government’s anti-worker, pro-business policies. However, that does not prevent SAFTU from working with COSATU. We will pursue unity in action and take forward the four federations’ common declaration towards a confederation and a shared programme against austerity, job losses and attacks on public services.
Zwelinzima Vavi19,745 Aufrufe • vor 4 Tagen
Don’t take the rights you enjoy for granted. This 1996 workers’ march, led by Mbhazima Shilowa, was part of the struggle to improve basic conditions of employment and win stronger protections for workers. Those rights did not fall from the sky. Workers organised and fought for them - including the 45-hour working week, meal breaks, maternity leave and limits on working hours and overtime, later protected in the Basic Conditions of Employment Act. The next time someone says unions are useless, remind them: workers had to fight hard for every one of those rights.
Zwelinzima Vavi30,063 Aufrufe • vor 11 Tagen
Another world exists parallel to the planet we live on
Zwelinzima Vavi332,637 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten
Nelson Mandela, one of the few not afraid to speak out against US imperialism
Zwelinzima Vavi391,984 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten
My sincere apologies in advance to Tsonga/Shangaan-speaking workers whose nationality is being abused in the video. This moment reinforces the need to strengthen our resolve and uphold our principles against mob justice, street justice, regionalism, and xenophobia
Zwelinzima Vavi279,213 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
Listen to Mike Mabuyakhulu’s articulation. I have known Mike since my COSATU days, when he was a NUMSA educator and later Secretary of the Northern Natal Region. He was an exceptional political educator, writer, organiser and serious thinker. His clarity reminds me of the calibre of leadership the ANC once produced. The ANC was a broad, mass movement rooted in the working class. The National Democratic Revolution was understood as a transformative project: one that dismantles the structures of racial supremacy, redistributes power and wealth, and advances the working class towards an egalitarian society. It was never meant to be managing the existing order, making limited adjustments, and endlessly postponing fundamental change. Reforms may be necessary, but they must strengthen the capacity of the working class and advance the revolutionary project, not substitute for it; worse of all, hand every lever a development state should use to the private sector. Show me 100 cadres of this intellectual, political and organisational clarity with no skeletons of mass looting in their closet, and I might just “go back home”
Zwelinzima Vavi23,611 Aufrufe • vor 15 Tagen
Look carefully at these pictures. On 30 June there will be no march to the mansions. There will be no march to the luxury estates. There will be no march to the golf courses. There will be no march to the beachfront suburbs. Migrants — documented or undocumented — living in those wealthy suburbs have nothing to fear. Nobody will be knocking on their gates. Nobody will be dragging them from their homes. Nobody will be demanding to see their papers. The rich will sleep peacefully on 29 June. They will sleep peacefully on 30 June. And they will wake up on 1 July exactly as they did before. But in the townships and informal settlements there will be fear. The targets will not be the rich. The targets will be the poorest of the poor. The migrant living in a shack. The refugee running a spaza shop. The domestic worker. The gardener. The security guard. The construction worker. The unemployed young person trying to survive. And when it is all over: No jobs will have been created. No factory will have reopened. No mine will have reopened. No pothole will have been repaired. No school still using pit toilets will have been fixed. No hospital will have been repaired. No clinic will have received more nurses. No municipality will suddenly work. No family will escape poverty. No inequality will disappear. The rich will remain rich. The poor will remain poor. And once again, the victims will be people living in shacks while those living behind high walls, electric fences and private security watch from a safe distance. The anger is real. The unemployment is real. The poverty is real. The inequality is real. But the targets are wrong. The poor are being mobilised against the poor while the real causes of the crisis remain untouched.
Zwelinzima Vavi111,678 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
