Aug-Sept 2014 K.indd

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www.cosatu.org.za • AUG/SEPT 2014

Democratic Alliance where liberals stood shoulder to shoulder with the nationalists in the same organisation. This means that even the process of answering the question “how” is not a smooth one. It is contested by other forces in society which may appear good on the outside but who have completely different intentions on the inside. We can today through our own experience extend the thesis advanced by Oom Gov and say it is the ability of the organisation to not only articulate the nature of the problem and the solutions to the problem but also its ability to identify obstacles and expose the insincerity of other forces both from within and outside the organisation that will determine the extent to which the organisation is able to make qualitative advances in its struggle to answer the question “how”. This also means that the decisive factor in the life of an organisation is the presence at the helm of an organisation of a collective leadership which has the ability to, without any equivocation; demonstrate clarity of thought, the nobility of vision, the dedication to the cause as well as daring tenacity, courage and audacity in pursuit of solutions confronting the people. The challenges confronting our organisations today require that through the instructions given to us by Oom Gov we should begin from the beginning as to why do our organisations exist. It means that COSATU and its af fi liates should pause for a moment to answer to this question with all the honesty and frankness such a question deserves. The answer to this question is laid

had to respond to the insincerity of the white liberals of the Liberal Party which was the predecessor of the Democratic Alliance. The Liberal Party argued that the movement had to rely on fi ghting apartheid through constitutional means and not apply other methods such as mass mobilisation to assert people as their own liberators. This Party included Blacks on its inception, but once the apartheid government ruled that any party that included black people would not qualify to be in Parliament; the Liberal Party ejected all its black members out of the party. It later rebranded itself as the Progressive Federal Party and later rebranded itself to the Democratic Alliance. Comrade Mandela once again took the pain to write an article to expose the white liberals’ insincerity when he wrote in the article “The shifting sands of illusion” saying “the high-sounding principles enunciated by the Liberal Party, though apparently democratic and progressive in form, are essentially reactionary in content. They stand not for the freedom of the people but for the adoption of more subtle systems of oppression and exploitation. Though they talk of liberty and human dignity they are subordinate henchmen of the ruling circles. They stand for the retention of the cheap labour system and of the subordinate colonial status of the non European masses together with the Nationalist Government whose class interests are identical with theirs. In practice they acquiesce in the slavery of the people, low wages, mass unemployment, the squalid tenements in the locations and shanty-towns.”[1] This was to prove very insightful as this same Liberal Party later became the

to which an organisation is able to crystallise and break the problem into its component parts and also to patiently articulate its complete manifestations to the people but does not only end with that and continues to endure the pain to provide practical expression to the question “how” . It is this ability to answer to the question “how” which determines the organisation’s ability to remain relevant and to attract as many people as possible in its ranks who see it as providing practical solutions to their real and practical challenges. This explains why the ANC has been able to exist beyond a hundred years. It explains why the ANC could survive both the state harassment and the break away by the PAC; a new organisation which appeared to be having a militant programme whose war cry was driving whites to the sea, a call to grab land back for the African people by force and the establishment of an armed wing APLA or uPoqo as it was also known. Clearly the generation of that time had to deal with this phenomenon. The PAC programme was responding to the existing anger by the black and African mass which had from one generation to another endured brutal repression and exploitation by a white minority or the apartheid regime - so, in this context the PAC came in handy and the ANC was likely to be declared irrelevant, something to be put in the dustbin of history or become politically extinct like dinosaurs. But did this happen?

This was not the only challenge the movement had to confront but it also

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