Delivered by the General Secretary ~ Cde Zola Sapetha
Cde. President and the entire National Executive Committee of SASCO, comrades from the Progressive Youth Alliance and the Mass Democratic Movement as a whole, Leadership the ANC, the SACP, COSATU and SANCO present here; comrades and friends. I bring revolutionary greetings and good wishes of workers under the leadership of NEHAWU. We wish success as NEHAWU for this National General Council of the revolutionary student movement because we are conscious of the critical connection between our two organisations and the commonality of our revolutionary programme.
The higher education space is a critical space for the progressive movement and our collective agenda for fundamental transformation; the transformation of education in particular and of society in general.
The higher education and TVET sectors are critical because the totality of the history of our revolution contains numerous examples of significant political action that changed the course of history many of which developed initially out of common action between workers and students. These are examples of alliance that furthers progressive and transformative aims, and they ought to be sustained by the present generation of activists. Our continued comradely cooperation is premised on this particular understanding.
The higher education space in general and the higher education institutions in particular serve as a field where both SASCO and NEHAWU execute their objectives. For the both these organisations unity and cooperation is necessary and unavoidable, for if they fail to solidify that unity on the basis of common programme both are putting their long-term programme in jeopardy. When they fail to build, with hard work and principle, practical forms of unity the obvious outcome is the weakening of these forces individually causing the demise of our collective agenda.
However, we need to consistently need to remind one another of this programme that makes our unity necessary and crucial; its essence core characteristics, lest we assume commonality of strategy and tactics when in actual fact we sing from different hymnbooks.
For us as NEHAWU the institutions of learning are a workplace for our members and all workers who ply their trade in them and those workers have the standing demand of a living wage, decent working conditions and security from the threats that are inherent in capitalism as a system of production.
Organising workers is to create our union as a fortress for workers: a fortress that belongs to them in order to serve the purposes that are highlighted above. In that sense the union is the property of the workers in the workers in the workplace.
However as a revolutionary and progressive trade union we recognise that the workplace, the institutions of learning in this case, is not the beginning and the end of the struggle in itself as is but part of society and a creation of society, therefore the struggle that the workers pursue does not begin and end in the institutions but extends to society in general as those institutions are a microcosm of that society.
Therefore the consciousness we seek to build in our daily work is the consciousness that emphasises the common interests among workers on the basis of the commonality of their class interests as well as the understanding that the workplace is a cumulative component and element in a system of capitalism that commonly exploits them as a class.
In this manner the struggle they pursue as a class constitutes an element in the wider struggles of the masses against injustice and exploitation and as such it takes place simultaneously inside as well as outside of the workplace.
It is that consciousness that allows workers in particular and the working people in general as a social class (working class) to chart their own future, in their own interests. The union requires to create alliances with classes and strata, both tactical and strategic, in order to win the quantitative struggles that must be won in order to win the revolutionary war against its class enemy, the bourgeoisie.
In the context of the education terrain the student-worker alliance arises in this particular context between SASCO and NEHAWU. The student movement, SASCO, struggles to defend and advance student interests that continue to be hampered by the untransformed and the exclusionary nature of the South African education system and education institutions in particular.
As a revolutionary student movement, SASCO has the full consciousness to realise that the struggles that students are but part of the struggles of the underclasses in society in general hence the historic slogan of SASCO: “we are members of the community before we are students”.
The struggle therefore for SASCO, although initially is for access and success inside higher education institutions, is ultimately about the fundamental transformation of the system in its totality and in its fundamental aspects as part of transformation of society in general. It is from this understanding that the strategic vision of SASCO is the transformation of higher education in particular and transformation of society in general.
The struggle to transform higher education is part of the national struggle of all progressive forces in South Africa and that struggle draws its theoretical and political foundation from the National Democratic Revolution and its organisational / institutional framework from the mass democratic movement, the revolutionary alliance as led by the national liberation movement the African National Congress.
It is the strategic goals as encapsulated in the NDR as the programme that is the basis of the student-worker alliance. It is from this background that we must continue to grow and defend the student-worker alliance as an alliance that reinforces our ability to success in out revolutionary tasks as the revolutionary trade union and the revolutionary student movement.
It is the revolutionary duty of both NEHAWU and SASCO to defend and protect the organisational integrity of the other wherever it is attacked, to do the opposite would betray, from whoever does so, limited understanding of progressive politics. To defend NEHAWU as SASCO is revolutionary and to defend SASCO as NEHAWU is also equally revolutionary.
To succeed in this regard we need to create from the leaders the correct understanding of this logic. Our leadership structures must utilise this understanding as the foundation of all our interaction and programmes. Our need to build strong organisations is a mutual concern.
We need to build strong organisations with consistent and solid leadership structures that are capable of functioning on the basis of a sound political and organisational programme from which we can effectively defend the interests of our constituency. In a branch it is critical to have a fully functioning BEC of SASCO and a fully functioning BEC of NEHAWU. In a region, it is important to have a fully functioning REC of SASCO as it is critical to have that of NEHAWU. In a province it is important to have a fully functioning PEC of SASCO and a fully functioning PEC of NEHAWU. This applies nationally as well.
When the opposite becomes a reality the structures of the movement need to engage in introspection, criticism and self criticism because when these structures that are so critical are either non-functional or weak the course of the struggle is under threat. The measure of the value of those structures is to run campaigns in our daily programmes to change the material conditions or workers and students. When we fail to run these quality campaigns we inevitably open space for counter revolutionary forces to do so in our space. When this happens we will lose our majorities in the SRCs and bargaining platforms. The most fundamental task is that of making sure that student-worker alliance is vibrant by building and developing their ideological capacity so that they understand their task ahead.
To be precisely, Higher Education has expanded even further to meet capital needs for a skilled workforce and advanced technology. To fulfil that labour need both capital and state intervention in order to shape our higher education. Even still, under neoliberal economy, the financial costs of training a new generation of workers increasingly falls onto these prospective worker themselves. Ballooning college or university enrolment has coincided with slashes in public higher education funding, grants as well as family incomes.
This has affected students adversely because it means that the students are susceptible to the pressures facing the workers under the economic crisis. So more students are organically connected to the working class, both because they come from and their direct connection to a workplace.
The nature of today`s student population means that it will, as it already has across the globe in recent years, be driven into struggles and those struggles will feed into larger, more explosive struggles of the working class and the oppressed, as they did in Paris in the late 60s. The unity of workers and students remains very strategic in our endeavour to fight for change at all cost.
Having said above, the students must be careful to maintain their independence and not get co-opted by the more conservative labour movement. This is critical because the students are more likely to take a radical perspective on political and economic matters, and their independence might allow them to assist more organised workers in a radical direction.
Some of the authors argued that the student-worker alliance is the left wing of the revolution even Marx recognised that in one of his writings that there was a positive role for the intellectuals and students in the advancing the revolution of the oppressed. In our country students were having number of demands ranging from the standardisation of tuition fees, curriculum overhaul, failure to accept walk-in applications, overcrowding that include the struggle for free education.
Cde President, as I earlier said, we here wish you the best in this NGC and hope that the outcomes will take us all one step forward in the struggle for transformation of our country and our sector.
Amandla!