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Fifty thousand people, and perhaps a few more than that, have been hit by a disaster. All their names and addresses are known. Yet in our present society, nobody can respond to their needs. The government will not take part of its ten million Rand “surplus” and help these poor widows and orphans. It is afraid that a “precedent” will be set and that it may become by this precedent the guardian of all such widows and orphans.
At least we can say that the bitter truth is being faced in some places. Glynnis Underhill of the Saturday Star “Personal Finance” section puts the situation in a sharp, strong light. So does her colleague Bruce Cameron, who concentrates his fire on the trustees, and quite rightly so. See the first two links below
Some people have been saying that the trustees were too simple, or needed more training. Others have said that trustees have been lazy, and only attend meetings for the stipend they receive. But all these speculations simply take the eye from the ball. It is certain that the problem here was none of these things.
The problem was that some of the trustees were themselves crooks, and were in league with other crooks. Other trustees who were conscientious, were victimised and suppressed, or pushed out. If the problem is not seen for what it is, there will be no proper remedy. The crooks must be sought, caught and charged, starting with those of them who were trustees first of all, because all of the trustees’ names are on record.
To find out who the crooked ones are, a spreadsheet needs to be made with all the trustees of the three main boards, that of Living Hands, Mineworkers Provident Fund, and Kopano Ke Matla, down all the years from their beginnings. Beside this chart should be placed a chronicle of the events, so that it can be seen who were trustees when those events occurred. Then those trustees should be found and interrogated, until we know everything.
In Nepal, a process similar to what happened in South Africa after 1990 is under way. The US Ambassador there is shamelessly lobbying all other parties to exclude the liberation movement, always referred to as “the Maoists”. According to the report below, which may not necessarily be true, the Indian Ambassador to Nepal is doing the same as the US one. He is none other than the hard-smoking, convivial and witty Shiv Shankar Mukherjee, formerly Indian High Commissioner in Pretoria.
The US tactic is the same as that used against the Irish Republican Army by the British. Once the peoples’ armed formations agree to disarm, with all the modalities that are put in place, the peoples’ enemies loudly start trying to undermine confidence, by accusing (in Nepal’s case) the communists of secretly evading the agreement.
This tactic is designed to make the communists fear that the agreement will be breached by the other side. In Nepal’s case the other side means the autocratic anti-popular monarchy, supported by the USA. In effect it is a threat of attack on the liberation movement at the vulnerable moment when they are disarming. It is a calculated attempt to destroy the process. This is typical of US tactics. Let us hope that the Indians have more sense.
Click on these links:
Widows and orphans go hungry, Glynnis Underhill Saturday Star (312 words)
Now you see it, now you don’t, Bruce Cameron, Saturday Star (738 words)
India, US envoys oppose Nepal Maoist entry IRNA (201 words)
There are no other statements quite like the COSATU Central Executive Committee’s. The CEC is the (usually) three-day high-level delegate gathering of COSATU’s 21 affiliates. These statements are like revolutionary bulletins from the Smolny Institute in 1917 (see also “Ten days that shook the world” by John Reed). They are full of detail and specificity, but also full of fundamental theoretical challenges. For example, are apparent “shifts” in government policy to be denounced as mere window-dressing and reformism that disguises the continuing vicious dictatorship of the bourgeoisie?
Or, is gradualism at last successfully materialising after more than a century since Eduard Bernstein published “Evolutionary Socialism” in 1899, triggering Rosa Luxemburg’s 1900 response in the form of “Reform or Revolution” and V I Lenin’s 1902 riposte in the form of “What is to be done”, the book sometimes regarded as the blueprint of the communist parties?
Or is it simply a matter of picking up the incidental gains of working-class pressure, the better to consolidate the revolutionary potential of the working class? Read this week's CEC statement via the link below, and make up your own mind.
The Financial Mail is playing a strange role in the Fidentia scandal. Two weeks ago when the furore around the billion-Rand rip-off from poor widows and orphans of deceased mineworkers and other workers was at its height, the FM had absolutely nothing to say about it. The next week they carried a full-page interview with chief crook J Arthur Brown, basically giving him a free platform to trot out his pork pies (lies).
But this week the FM comes out with an attempt by one Prakash Naidoo in which this reporter, wittingly or otherwise, misleads his readers into thinking that COSATU is somehow a perpetrator and not a victim of the Fidentia scam circus. He omits altogether to mention that COSATU’s savings management in Kopano Ke Matla is governed, just like Living Hands and the Mineworkers Provident Fund, by a board of overseeing trustees. It is high time these journalists investigated who all these trustees are and were in the past, and sorted the sheep from the goats. See COSATU's full response to the FM article via the link below.
In an otherwise brilliant article, Moneyweb’s Barry Sergeant also begins to lead off into the blue, instead of grilling the people who had been set to watch over these assets. These are the trustees, or former trustees. Sergeant is more interested in the “big wheels in the background” such as a man called Goodwin.
Well, fine, but as the liberated slave said: “I know who bought me, but what I want to know is: Who sold me?” Who sold the beneficiaries down the river? Who sold them away into the hands of the Browns and the Goodwins? See the link below for Sergeant’s nevertheless wonderful article.
In the hard-copy version of the Mail and Guardian there is a very good article by Tumi Makgetla, which does return to the question of the trustees. It is not yet on the Internet.
Finally, the reflector of labour in the columns of the bourgeois business press, Terry Bell, comes out clear in defence of the right to organise and nails the reactionary, backward nature of the employer Vodacom, in the face of the workers' efforts to organise there. What is Vodacom? Are they spies, that they can’t have a union? The union is the Communication Workers Union (CWU) by the way and it needs maximum worker solidarity right now. For shame that employers should flaunt this kind of arrogance in liberated South Africa! See Terry Bell’s article via the link below.
Click on these links:
COSATU CEC statement, 1 March 2007 (5589 words)
COSATU response to the Financial Mail (769 words)
From Kebble to Brown, Barry Sergeant, Moneyweb (778 words)
Vodacom shows unions need a voice, Terry Bell, B Report (805 words)
There will be tribute to the great John Perlman, the free minded broadcaster hounded from the SABC, printed as an advertisement in this coming Friday’s Mail and Guardian. If you would like your name to appear on it, please email your name to this address: fionagar@mweb.co.za or Robbiep@xsinet.co.za before 11h00 on Thursday, March 1st.
The Communist University, too, is under pressure right now. People are saying: if you don’t do so-and-so, it will turn out badly for you. Nothing is certain. Everything is relentlessly pushed towards the condition of absolute insecurity. Always, there is the diminishment of resources, the contempt for the question of resources, the denial of resources, the interception of resources, and even the outright destruction of resources.
The Communist University lives off “the smell of an oily rag”. Maybe there is no other way for revolutionaries. Let that not be John Perlman’s fate. Long live!
The USA is going to sit down with Iran and Syria. The first meeting, at the ambassadorial level, will be held next month. Then Rice will sit down at the table with the foreign ministers from Damascus and Tehran at a second meeting in April elsewhere in the region, possibly in Istanbul.
Unless the USA is planning treachery, this must be good news. Very good news.
Next week on Wednesday, March 7 at 17h00 in the SACP boardroom the Communist University will meet to discuss “Cooking the rice inside the pot” by the late “Comrade Mzala” (Jabulani Nxumalo). Comrade Castro Ngobese, ace spin-doctor of the YCL, will open the discussion. See the link below.
There is a great blogger called As’ad AbuKhalil. He blogs under the banner of The Angry Arab. As’ad’s blog featured a link to an obituary for a US academic called Frank Snowden (see the second link below). Snowden was a historian of blacks in antiquity, and especially the classical antiquity of ancient Greece and Rome. “Whites in the ancient world rarely equated blackness with subordination, Dr. Snowden argued, because the black people they encountered were rarely slaves. (Most slaves in the Roman Empire, for instance, were white.) Instead, they met blacks who were warriors, statesmen and mercenaries.” See the link below.
It is two hundred years since the abolition of the slave trade in England, and a film has been made to interpret the event for the gratification and self-congratulation of British people. To read just how exceptionally bad and insulting this film is, please click the last link below. Let us hope that this travesty is never presented in South Africa, or if it is, that huge demonstrations cause it to close.
Click on these links:
1985, Mzala, Cooking the rice inside the pot, Sechaba (3517 words)
Frank Snowden, historian of blacks in antiquity, dies, N Y Times (751 words)
Whitewashing the Slave Trade, Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch (1589 words)
The SACP Central Committee met this weekend (preceded by a Policy Dialogue with 180 delegates from around the country) and has issued its statement. See the link below. The entire document is a substantial rehearsal of communist principles with detailed reference to the specifics of the present situation in South Africa, and to the tasks of the other partners in the Alliance. This document will lift Party morale and help set the course for a successful and historic 12th National SACP Congress in July.
Here are some highlights of the document:
“…what is impeding substantial progress is the continued colonial character of the economic growth path within which we remained locked.
“This growth path… actively reproduces under-development.
“…policy development without mass mobilization and participation is bound to fail.
“The exact modalities of the SACP’s involvement within an ANC Alliance [election] campaign will… be a matter of intra-alliance discussion and agreement.
“The 12th Congress will consider, amongst other things, a range of proposals around the restructuring of the SACP, particularly to ensure that our elected structures are more firmly rooted in activity-based responsibilities, and also that our basic, branch-level structures are more compact and more rooted within localized communities.”
Needless to say, the document outrightly rejects any suggestion of “an SACP go-it-alone stance that simply plays into the hands of those who dream of break[ing] the alliance and marginalizing the SACP.”
The Communist University will convene on Wednesday, February 28 at 17h00 in the SACP boardroom, 3rd Floor, COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein, to discuss the draft of the document discussed at the Augmented CC in November 2006 called “The South African Road to Socialism”. That document in its final form is set to be published in a new “African Communist”, soon. It may be that comrades will think it better to wait for the definitive version. In any case, the current CC statement will also be made available.
Nearly a year ago Judge Mohamed Jajbhay told the Johannesburg Metro Council that it must not throw people on to the streets. The Johannesburg Council took the matter to the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) and the case was heard this week. The verdict is “reserved”, meaning that the SCA judges are thinking about it before giving their decision.
If the SCA reverses Jajbhay’s historic judgment, the Metro council will without doubt attempt an orgy of evictions in Johannesburg, and the evicted people will need organised support on a scale not yet seen.
But if the Jajbhay decision stands up as it should, then the Metro Council will just have to get down and do what it is supposed to do, and that is to accommodate the people who make their living in the Inner City, and stop trying to harass and hound them in the hope that they will disappear from the earth.
It seems that crooks have been helping themselves to peoples’ pension funds for years in this country. It also seems as if the law has as a rule taken a very long time to catch up with such crooks. Wiseman Khuzwayo, journalist and struggle veteran, writes up the low-down for the Business Report on a scandal involving at least two entities, Alexander Forbes and Lifecare (see the link below). It seems that the National Prosecutions Authority (NPA) is not keen to take this one on, and has had to be bolstered up by a “private prosecution” involving the Financial Services Board (FSB) and Business Against Crime, a business-oriented NGO (BONGO).
Comrade Wiseman does not quite make clear why the NPA is not stepping up to do its proper job by itself. A good guess would be that the NPA has blown its budget on its very expensive, failed, politically partisan pursuit of Jacob Zuma. This would also explain why we have not heard a peep out of the NPA yet in the matter of the 50,000 widows and orphans frauded of benefits paid for out of lonely mineworkers’ meagre wages, by J Arthur Brown, Danisa Baloyi and others in the “Fidentia” imbroglio.
Click on these links:
Yes to the sovereignty of the people, SACP post-CC Statement (1837 words)
Jajbay judgement appeal verdict soon, Russel Molefe, City Press (737 words)
FSB, BAC fund private prosecution, Wiseman Khuzwayo, B Report (863 words)
South Africa was and is still described as colonialism of a special type, where the colonisers cohabit in the same country as the colonised people. Although the colonisers live by exploiting the labour of the colonised they like to regard themselves as having an economy of their own (the “first” economy) while the poor majority have another one, the “second” economy. It South Africa this division was conceived in racial terms in the past, and the racial divide between rich and poor persists.
But if we are going to say that colonialism of a special type was a function of race, or that race was a necessary part of it, we may be wrong. The pattern of Indian “development” described in the linked article below by Aseem Shrivasta is very familiar to South Africans, yet it does not appear to depend on racial difference.
Meanwhile, according to the Weekender, the SACP commission that was appointed by the Special National Congress in 2005, which is in fact the same in composition to the SACP Political Bureau, is about to or has already delivered its recommendations. The Weekender treats these questions in a mundane fashion (funding, risk of humiliation et cetera) as if the SACP is a bourgeois party. Perhaps the report itself does so, too. We must wait and see. The questions put by the previous article on India do seem the more urgent ones at this stage. See the linked article by Vukani Mde and Karima Brown.
Raymond Suttner, with the help of Michael Schmidt’s editing, finds himself in territory half way between these two other articles, grappling with questions of mass and class together with electoral questions. The linked article appeared in the Saturday Star.
Finally, YCL National Secretary Buti Manamela uses the YCL’s on-line magazine “The Bottom Line” to comment on the recent case of former YCL Deputy National Secretary Mazibuko Jara’s ambitions concerning the SACP Western Cape Provincial leadership and the SACP’s 12th National Congress in July. In the same linked document you will also find an article by YCL National Organiser George Raphela on the YCL’s attitude to Burma.
Click on these links:
Developer Model of Development, Shrivastava, Counterpunch (3723 words)
Crossroads for communists, Mde and Brown, Weekender (1002 words)
Mass factor, Suttner and Schmidt, Saturday Star (2049 words)
Through the eye of the M and G, and Burma, YCL Bottom Line (3294 words)
The SACP General Secretary, Dr Blade Nzimande, writes every fortnight as a rule in Umsebenzi Online. English is his tenth language but he is a master craftsman in it. In the edition that came out yesterday Cde Blade writes frankly, humorously and humanely about language in a democratic South Africa, including Afrikaans. Please see the link below.
The Communist University’s attempted contribution to the language question in South Africa is our own gateway to the Wiktionaries. Wiktionary is a free, on-line facility whereby if there were enough people taking part, the ordinary speakers of our eleven official languages could probably build full dictionaries of each of those languages in a matter of days. Every language needs its own dictionary in the language itself. Yet many South African languages are deficient in this respect. The English wiktionary is of course huge, because there are contributors in many countries. But the Afrikaans wiktionary is also well advanced, bearing out Dr Blade’s suggestion that the Afrikaners have much to share with the other language groups about preserving and advancing the condition of a language. Laat ons praat! Asikhulume!
At last, other comrades are writing as well. Today we present, on the 16th anniversary of the death of “Comrade Mzala” (Jabulani Nxumalo), a tribute to this great intellectual, who died young in exile in London, by Seshupo Segole (see below). Build the Alliance, he writes. The Communist University Mzala Archive is here.
We also present Kaizer Mohau’s lively polemic contradicting Mazibuko Jara (see below).
There was more feedback in recent days, mostly very appreciative, but in one case quite angry. The irate comrade wrote concerning the new ANC discussion document:
“Aside from petty personal attacks on individuals, rhetorical flourishes and armchair accusations that other people are cowards it would be interesting to know if the CU has anything constructive to say about the ANC's debate on strategy and tactics.
“Is it all in vain unless we have a 'revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat'? If so, I don't see why you even bother to comment on the ANC and its debates. Why not refocus your energy on destroying the ANC, since 'for it the struggle ends with bourgeois democracy' and re-constituting an SACP, purged of all bourgeois elements and 'right wing deviationists' in preparation for the envisaged dictatorship. You'll find a good models in the CPSA of the 1930s!”
Let’s just say that it is early days. The ANC discussion document is only just out. It needs to be tested, thoroughly and hard, if it is going to prove strong enough to be a common basis for the continuing and necessary class alliance (which as yet hardly features in the draft). “Alliance” is actually mentioned only twice in the 13,000 words, the main occasion being on the page where the ANC is chillingly described as the “ultimate strategic centre of power” with the "Tripartite Alliance" being in support of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) “as commonly understood”. Of course this begs the question of the whole exercise. What exactly is that common understanding of the NDR, if it exists at all? And what should it be?
In testing this document, we test our own communist ideas too, and lay them open to dispute, as the comrade has noticed and taken full advantage of. We did call the document cowardly (but not any individuals). Perhaps that was rude in any case. But remember the words of Karl Marx at the end of Value Price and Profit: “By [the working class] cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.” For communists this is the basic class question of whether the working class is going to fulfill its historic destiny, or not.
The comrade is furiously defensive of the ANC, to the point where he sees discussion of the ANC’s own discussion document as evidence of a desire to “destroy” the ANC. Yet the original, 1969 “Strategy and Tactics“starts with two references to socialism in its very first sentence and concludes with a long and crucial section on the working class. The use of this famous title to sell a new document which is opposite in character to the original is actually intended to be destructive of the historical memory of the South African people. It is intended to write the communists out of history, just like a US Hollywood film would do. So who is destroying who, actually?
Also, nobody in the CU has ever advocated purges. In general, purges only re-locate, and do not solve problems. Liberals and social democrats are constantly being drawn towards the Party. They bring their politics with them. The solution is to put them to work and at the same time to educate them. Even ultra-left entryists, with their subterranean double life, can be tolerated up to a point. They should be constantly encouraged to contribute their ideas to the Party, openly. What becomes intolerable is unprincipled secret horse-trading between these fringe factions, against the elected leadership and outside the open constitutional process of the Party. In this connection, see the page on the SACP web site where answers are given to the recent questions of the Mail and Guardian newspaper concerning the ambitions of Mazibuko Jara and related issues.
The Bolivia Information Forum looks like a useful resource. Their bulletin (linked below) contains very interesting material that we have not been hearing about through the bourgeois media. See the link below. The contact is: Alex Tilley, Coordinator, Bolivia Information Forum, www.boliviainfoforum.org.uk, enquiries@boliviainfoforum.org.uk
Click on these links:
Language in a democratic SA, Blade Nzimande, Umsebenzi Online (2096 words)
Build the alliance, tribute to Mzala, 16 years on, Seshupo Segole (2015 words)
SACP for Socialism not socialitism, Kaizer Mohau on Mazibuko Jara (1387 words)
Bolivia Information Bulletin 5, February 2007 (109 KB PDF download)
Alas, time and again, the siren song called “End of History” seduces the imagination of every comrade who yearns for a permanent accommodation with capital. As Cheche Selepe’s letter on Mazibuko Jara says: “to him the struggle ends with bourgeois democracy”. The ANC’s new discussion document on Strategy and Tactics ossifies the National Democratic Revolution into a static, idealised National Democratic Society. The document’s long flights of fancy conceal a simple, cowardly wish for a quiet life: an undisturbed tranquillity of refinement and variation upon a fetishised theme called National Democracy.
In his letter to Bracke, later published with the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx wrote: Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes. And in the Critique itself Marx wrote:
“Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”
The SACP will hold a two-day National Policy Dialogue from tomorrow at Willow Park outside Johannesburg to discuss the new ANC Strategy and Tactics draft, the SACP’s own strategy and tactics in the current period, and five other items, including co-operatives. This is a topic that Marx also dealt with in the Critique of the Gotha Programme where he concluded:
“That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionize the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois. “
The ANC document, the SACP announcement, and Cde Cheche’s letter are linked below.
Concerning Danisa Baloyi, the ABSA Bank, of which she is a director, has said: "Absa respects the legal process and is awaiting the outcome of the investigation. As such, it is premature for Absa to comment further at this time." This will not do! The best Baloyi can probably hope for is that the NPA will declare her case “prima facie but unwinnable”, or give her a plea bargain like they gave Mark Thatcher, or make her a state witness in exchange for a confession. But directorships of banks are out for her now. ABSA Bank is playing for time, dangerously. See the two articles about Baloyi, linked below.
The gross vulgarity of Baloyi’s Fidentia gang is well caught by the grandiose Fidentia Top Empowerment Awards held barely three months ago. The “Honorary Laureate” was our old fiend, Bishop Tutu. See the link below. Finally, the sordid tale of Condoleezza Rice’s relationship with her home town of Birmingham, Alabama seems very relevant here, even though it appeared in Counterpunch a full year earlier. See the link.
The picture above is of Morogoro, Tanzania, where the original and great ANC "Strategy and Tactics" document was created in 1969.
Click on these links:
ANC, Strategy and Tactics discussion document - building an NDS (13247 words)
SACP Statement on National Policy Dialogue, 22-23 February 2007 (417 words)
To him the struggle ends with bourgeois democracy - Selepe on Jara (2619 words)
Heat on Baloyi over Fidentia stake, R8m loan, Rob Rose, B Day (565 words)
Press wrong re Baloyi loan - Fidentia, Wiseman Khuzwayo, B Rep (397 words)
Fidentia Top Empowerment Award winners 2006, BizCommunity (605 words)
Rice Disdain for Civil Rights Movement, J L Chestnut, Counterpunch (834 words)
US Professor, Queen of BEE, Chancellor of Fort Hare, Director of ABSA and Denel, Road Accident Fund, Transport SETA, you name it, this is Danisa Baloyi, the most connected person we have ever heard of. She is also connected, like to a concrete overcoat, to J Arthur Brown, the small-time punk who is going to take his friend Danisa straight to the bottom.
But Dr Baloyi is standing by her man for now, and is furious that the Financial Services Board Inspection Report into Fidentia Asset Management (Pty) Ltd was “leaked” to the media.
Here it is, folks. Follow the link below for our dowload icon, or download it from here or from here. It is amazing reading.
Let us give thanks to Alec Hogg, ace journalist of Moneyweb, for making available this very important public document, and for his blistering hot piece on Brown and Baloyi, the deceiving duo of the kleptomaniac clique centred on Fidentia, but spreading out who knows where? See the link below.
Also from Moneyweb, see the last link below concerning Eunice Komane, the serving High Commissioner for South Africa in Botswana, who has just been given a large amount of US dollars by the US stockbroking firm Merrill Lynch. What value she is to give back for all these dollars is not very easy to see. But the deal does not trouble Joel Neshitenzhe’s conscience. Nor do the lucky, happy people and their US sugar-daddies regard it as strange that their consortium Tselane Basadi is previously famous only for splashing out an over-the-odds amount of money to purchase a urinal making company.
As they say in England, this is taking the piss. For some great writing that (among other things) illuminates this characteristic British phrase very well, please click on this external link and go to Getting it right: the security agencies in modern society, a treat of an article by Robin Ramsay, from Lobster magazine.
Click on these links:
FSB Report on Fidentia (1630 KB PDF download)
Management Arthur Brown style, Alec Hogg, Moneyweb (1269 words)
SA diplomat in lucrative BEE deal, Cameron and Cobbett, Moneyweb (727 words)
NUM GS Frans Baleni was interviewed by Irene Louw in yesterday’s City Press concerning the Fidentia crash. See below.
Meanwhile Fidentia’s Danisa Baloyi, who is also a director of numerous other companies and the reputed “Queen of BEE”, spoke to the Business Report. She is defiant. See below.
The Alliance has rallied round to revive SANCO following its failed, aborted National Conference last December. See the ANC announcement linked below. There will be another National Conference in September 2007. In the mean time a National Interim Leadership Core has been created.
On April 21, 2006, the Communist University blogged as follows:
‘The ANC Progressive Business Forum has been launched (see link) with the slogan “Can you afford not to belong?” Class alliance (unity in action for a common goal) is good. Class collaboration (betrayal of the oppressed to the oppressor class) is bad. Which is this? Do the “policy team” and the “friendly consultants” know the difference?’
The Sunday Times has suddenly woken up to the existence of the PBF and doesn’t like it (see the link below). Nor does their favoured “analyst”, Richard Calland, who thinks the PBF is “plain wrong”. But why is it wrong? Is it wrong because it is a class alliance, or because it is a class collaboration?
From their point view, of course, they would not at all mind to have a State that is a pure executive committee of the bourgeois ruling class, and if the working class can be co-opted to come along without complaint, so much the better.
But unfortunately for them their own bourgeois class, at anything even slightly below State level, is a vicious cockpit of lethal conflict. What the individual bourgeois can’t abide is the idea of another bourgeois getting ahead of him. In this way the hypocritical idea of bourgeois “fairness” arises, and literally spoils the party.
None of which directly answers the CU’s original question about the ANC PBF. It would be nice to have an SACP view on the matter. Meanwhile the ANC has been quick to leap to the defence of its precious PBF. See below.
Click on these links:
Union counts cost of Fidentia fiasco, Irene Louw, City Press (788 words)
Danisa Baloyi stands behind Fidentia, Morris and Khuzwayo, B Rep (642 words)
SANCO national interim leadership core, ANC Press Release (642 words)
ANC ministers for sale, Ngobeni and Lubisi, Sunday Times (689 words)
ANC statement on S Times article re Progressive Business Forum (257 words)
The Communist University first featured what was then thought of as simply a Fidentia scandal on February 3rd 2007 with Rob Rose’s report from the Business Day (Millions missing at Fidentia, says FSB).
Fifteen days later it is clear that the scandal is eating through the credibility of the entire pensions and benefits industry like unstoppable acid. This affair is not going to go away in a hurry and it is going to get much, much bigger.
There may be arrests and criminal charges. In fact it is amazing that when people run off with something like R1.4 billion and are accused and named in public, no arrests are made by the NPA, which absorbed the former Serious Fraud Office and the Asset Forfeiture Unit. Mervyn Bennun wrote a very good critique of the NPA (Has the NPA lost its way?) for the Business Day last October. The NPA is only a sometimes, if-it-pleases, politically selective law enforcement agency.
So let us look at this matter for ourselves. First of all, from the CU point of view this is primarily about workers’ contributions and benefits and about the way their unions have protected their interests, or not. The question of the levy paid by employers to the SETAs (in this case TETA) is a far lesser matter from our point of view, even if the President of the Republic is making a fuss about it.
The principal trust in this case of missing workers’ money is the Mineworkers’ Provident Fund (MPF). This Fund has a web site and from the web site you can download a booklet (see the link below) explaining the Fund to its members. The booklet has a list of the trustees at the unstated date of publication. They included the former General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Gwede Mantashe, and the former Deputy President of COSATU, Joe Nkosi, who resigned his position in COSATU a few days before its 9th Congress in September, 2006, following allegations of spying.
The MPF Trustees at today’s date are given on another page of its web site, which is reproduced in the document linked below. Joe Nkosi is still a trustee. The new Deputy General Secretary of the NUM, elected at their National Congress in May 2006, Oupa Komane, is a now a trustee. The two whistle blowers are still there: Frans Mahlangu remains the Principal Officer and Collyn Manzana is still a trustee, according to the web site.
The MPF started another trust called Matco to adminster the benefits of the widows and orphans of deceased miners. The name was later changed to Living Hands Umbrella Trust (LHUT), at about the same time that this trust fell under the control of J Arthur Brown and Danisa Baloyi. Barry Sergeant records that:
“Since July 11 2006, LHUT has had three trustees, viz., Motsei Christine Komane, Danisa Baloyi, and Hjalmar Mulder. Until very recently, Baloyi was a director of Living Hands (which, most crucially, administers LHUT) and also a director of Fidentia Holdings.”
Prior to that date, Brown had been a trustee of LHUT. He was replaced by Komane.
More information on Baloyi and Komane can be found in the Moneyweb article “Brown’s Leading Ladies” linked below, together with some small details of Baloyi’s CV taken from the vast amount of information about this former US professor and BEE promoter and her huge number of directorships and business interests. Baloyi looks like a personification of the “class project” that the SACP writes about.
Moneyweb’s Barry Sergeant spells out clearly the danger to the whole pensions and benefits industry (which could collapse) and the cause, which is that shameless conflicts of interest have been permitted, not only in this case but across the board. See below. MPF Principal Officer Frans Mahlangu gave a frank and very revealing interview with the Weekender’s Gill Moodie yesterday. See below. Alec Hogg’s Moneyweb article shows that the Fidentia rip-off has not just affected NUM members, but also other workers’ families such as those of employee of South African Breweries. See below. Finally, the prodigious arrogance of the odious Brown continues. Julius Cobbett’s Moneyweb article shows up some of his lies. This guy Brown is poison. Yet he is only a punk. There are much bigger forces at play here than this embarrassing comedian.
Click on these links:
Mineworkers Provident Fund Member Booklet (107 KB PDF file)
Mineworkers Provident Fund, Trustees, 18 February 2007 (page, organogram and tables)
Brown’s leading ladies, Jackie Cameron, Moneyweb (1372 words)
Danisa Baloyi CV from Internet (extracts for Internet pages)
Fidentia success secret, Barry Sergeant, Moneyweb (842 words)
A raw deal, Frans Mahlangu interviewed by Gill Moodie, Weekender (1371 words)
SAB could not get its R80m, Alec Hogg, Moneyweb (615 words)
Lies, lies, lies, Julius Cobbett, Moneyweb (315 words)
Fifty thousand people, and perhaps a few more than that, have been hit by a disaster. All their names and addresses are known. Yet in our present society, nobody can respond to their needs. The government will not take part of its ten million Rand “surplus” and help these poor widows and orphans. It is afraid that a “precedent” will be set and that it may become by this precedent the guardian of all such widows and orphans.
