Follow this link to listen to Liv Shange on Radio 702.
The Workers’ and Socialist Party (WASP) is outraged at the accusations against ‘white foreign nationals’ out to ‘destabilise South Africa’ which have, again, been thrown out by the African National Congress’ Gwede Mantashe in an obvious attempt to deflect attention from his government’s failure to address the needs of mineworkers and the working class in general.
After the ANC’s NEC meeting ended Sunday, Mantashe said that the ruling party is concerned that the strike in the platinum mines, led by the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), is as a matter of fact not driven by workers’ issues over pay and conditions but by ‘politics’, more specifically fuelled by ‘white foreign nationals’ who are ‘out to destabilise South Africa and its economy’. This echoes almost word-for-word the allegations he levelled a year ago against leading WASP member Liv Shange, a Swedish national resident in SA for the past ten years, who through the Democratic Socialist Movement, a founding member of WASP, played a role in coordinating the 2012 mineworkers’ strike for R12 500 which followed the Marikana massacre. Mantashe’s accusations last year were linked to claims of Shange being investigated by state intelligence as well as by the Department of Home Affairs, and she was threatened with deportation and separation from her family in SA.
We condemn this attempt by the ANC to again play a racist, xenophobic card to draw attention away from how its government and the capitalist economy it presides over is failing to address the needs of mineworkers and the working class in general.
Of course the ongoing platinum strike is political, for both workers and employers, in the sense that it is a struggle for power over the wealth of society, but the mineworkers don’t need ‘foreigner’ to come and tell them that. There is no need for any ‘third force’ to come and destabilise SA and its economy – instability is built into this system by the huge gap between the capitalist haves and the working class have-nots, which forces workers to struggle for the most modest share of the wealth that they create, like the mineworkers are doing at the moment.
