If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck

COSATU’s Jobs and Poverty Campaign Questionnaire is for everybody, and not just union members. It is a way to give feedback on the single most critical question of the times – how to put everybody to work in this country. It also carries a very good, short summary of the general situation and recent history of this campaign. Don’t ever say nobody told you about it. Follow the link below to the two-page, 40 KB MS-Word file download, fill in the questionnaire, and e-mail it to the address given on the form.

Barry Sergeant’s Moneyweb summary of the Danisa Baloyi scandal is like the proverbial bikini. What remains concealed is more important than what is revealed. For example, the Baloyi affair is described as being “on the outskirts of the Fidentia meltdown”. Yet even the incomplete rehearsal of the facts given in the article show very clearly that it was Baloyi who was right at the centre, and not, for example, J Arthur Brown, the punk gangster and man of straw who now cannot even manage to raise his bail.

What game is Sergeant playing? Not only does the chronicle he lays down have obvious loose ends (Follow the link below and read the article carefully). But also, there are glaring facts in the foreground of the picture that Sergeant has not yet pursued or followed to their logical conclusion. That conclusion must be that Baloyi is a bigger crook than Brown, by far, and that there are many other crooks in this affair, big and small, who need to be taken in and dealt with in the full rigour of the law, very soon.

Judging by this and other reports in other outlets, journalists, although no longer scared of Brown, are still scared of Baloyi. Or, it may be that the journalists are somewhat complicit, or under instruction. Their bosses may have told them to sell Brown as the fall guy, and not to take too many shots at the bigger game, like Baloyi. But such a plan cannot work. Baloyi is just too obvious.

The ANC National Executive Committee met last week and issued a statement on Saturday. It includes a list of the discussion documents that will be issued prior to the ANC Policy Conference in June. In effect, it is the agenda of that conference. See the link below.

SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande made a speech last week at a FAWU-organised seminar in Johannesburg, which is still making ripples a week later. The reactionaries of the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU) are so upset by the speech that they are inventing a fantasy of land invasions led by proletarian infiltrators from the cities, masterminded by the SACP. This was reported in yesterday’s “Citizen”. Unlike The Citizen’s readers, you have the advantage of being able to read the full, original speech just by clicking on the link below. And by the way, it is well worth the small trouble. This is a major, defining speech on the state of, and remedies for, rural South Africa.

Finally, for DITSELA in general and Gino Govender in particular, see the last link for V I Lenin’s “Speech Delivered At An All-Russia Conference Of Political Education Workers Of Gubernia and Uyezd Education Departments” on November 3, 1920. This is a yardstick by which to judge DITSELA’s “Worker Education and Culture Festival”. If Comrade Gino should still be suffering under the delusion that culture is possible without criticism, then Lenin’s statement that: “Any attempt to avoid taking sides in this issue must end in fiasco” may give him pause. Remaining doubts about the matter may be cleared up tomorrow, when we will run Lenin’s short piece on “Proletkult”. Should that still not do the trick, we would refer the DITSELA comrades to the Communist University’s very full section on Critical Pedagogy, in the sincere hope that they have not forgotten how to read, or why they have to read.

Click on these links:

COSATU Jobs and Poverty Campaign Questionnaire (questionnaire, download)

Baloyi sheds her velvet gloves, Barry Sergeant, Moneyweb (1312 words)

Statement of ANC National Executive Committee, 17 March 2007 (1228 words)

SACP GS B Nzimande to FAWU, building class power in countryside (3081 words)

1920, Lenin, to Political Education Workers Conference (4019 words)