What's Goin' On?

When newspapers write about people and things that you know, they always look stupid. A reporter who has only had a short time to learn the facts is bound look superficial from the point of view of an insider. That is understandable. It is different matter when the writer is obviously attempting to mislead. Such is the article of Matuma Letsoalo in this week’s edition of the Johannesburg Mail and Guardian, linked below. So as to invent an imaginary stampede heading out of the doors of COSATU House, Letsoalo has totted up all the people who have left in the past eighteen months, pretending that they have all left at once. Then Letsoalo carefully avoids mentioning that NALEDI, where three of the people have gone to, is COSATU’s own think tank (it is located right inside COSATU House). One of the latter three is Neva Makgetla. If asked, Neva tells people that she does not regard it as a move at all. At NALEDI she is still working for COSATU. Yet her picture appears in the hard-copy M&G under the heading “Senior officials quit Cosatu” and next to the caption “Zwelinzima Vavi is losing his left-hand woman”. This is gutter journalism. It gets worse. Tanya van Meelis has gone to Standard Bank. This is not mentioned – only that Tanya moved “for personal reasons”. So she needed more money? So what? That is neither grounds for condemning COSATU nor Tanya van Meelis, who has done tremendous research work for the movement, especially on the WTO issue. Both these comrades have addressed the Communist University in the past, by the way, for which we are grateful and which we do not forget. Yolanda Mokhantso, whose name the M&G manages to mis-spell in two different ways in the same article, has recently had a child and her husband has been sent by his employer to another province. All of these normal movements of people in and out of a large organisation are put down by Letsoalo to one imaginary detrimental thing or another. What for? One of the quoted anonymous sources gives the game away a few lines before the end, by referring to the upcoming 9th COSATU Congress, which is scheduled for September. Once again, the Mail and Guardian is scrounging around for tittle-tattle in the hopes of being able to interfere in somebody else’s business. How pathetic. A better example of journalism is the veteran Allan Greenblo. This is the person whose book on Sol Kersner was banned following aggressive legal action by Kersner, a far richer man. Greenblo lost that battle, but honourably. He concludes this (linked) article by saying that South Africa “needs broad-based BEE that is broad-based BEE, which can help finance ownership equity, skills development and social upliftment, not a huge transfer of wealth as an end in itself.” True enough. Last week’s Mail and Guardian carried an article by Zehir Omar, the lawyer for the family of Khalid Mahmood Rashid. Rashid is the man who (as this week’s paper has it from a government statement) was “deported as an illegal immigrant with the help of Pakistani authorities because of his terrorist connections”. As Prof. Shadrack Gutto pointed out on the radio yesterday, this statement alone is enough to cook the government’s goose. Pakistan has a death sentence for “terrorism” and our government is not supposed to send people under these circumstances without a guarantee that the death sentence will not be applied. The government has also threatened the lawyer Omar himself with imprisonment. Joel Netshitenzhe has said that the government can’t be expected to know about individual cases when there are so many deportations all the time. But the SA government did know all about Rashid’s so-called “terrorist connections”. The government seems to be digging a bigger hole for itself with each passing day. Omar’s article eventually appeared on the Internet. Here it is, linked below. You will sometimes read, from miserable Imperialist outlets, that Che Guevara made no impression in Bolivia, where he was murdered by the CIA and their paid local thugs. The linked article from Granma shows what a lie that is. President Evo Morales of Bolivia honoured Che Guevara’s memory in the village of La Higuera, to popular acclaim, in a remarkable and moving event. Lenin’s “What is to be Done” is the clearest exposition of the dialectical relationship between vanguard and mass. Without an understanding of this relationship it is not possible to organise effectively beyond the level of “economism” (reformist trade unionism). See the linked text below, which the Communist University will discuss next Friday. Click on these links: Senior officials quit Cosatu, Matuma Letsoalo, Mail and Guardian (626 words) Broad-based BEE a synonym for elitism, Greenblo, Business Report (743 words) Minister hides behind state security, Zehir Omar, Mail and Guardian (853 words) Following the path of Comandante Guevara, Evo Morales, Granma (629 words) ‘What is to be Done’, Chapter 4, C., V. I. Lenin, 1902 (5767 words)