Lead or step aside, Mr President

DEAR Mr President, I write to you not as a political opponent, but as someone who stood alongside you during the struggle for our freedom and who respects the office you occupy.

- JAY NAIDOO

There was a time when you, as General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, and I, as General Secretary of Cosatu, occupied two of the most significant leadership positions in South Africa’s mass democratic movement. We organised workers, communities and students knowing that detention, torture or assassination were real possibilities. The difference between life and death was often measured in days.

Together with millions of ordinary South Africans, we entered into a covenant with our people. It was never simply to win elections or occupy government. It was to build a country where every South African could live with dignity, justice and opportunity.

That was the meaning of freedom in 1994. To deliver a better life to all our people. We understood that our struggle was never simply about replacing one government with another. It was about dismantling the economic foundations of apartheid itself. Apartheid was built on cheap Black labour, exclusion from ownership and the denial of opportunity to the overwhelming majority of our people.

We believed political freedom would be accompanied by economic freedom.

That was our covenant.

Thirty years later, we must ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: have we fundamentally transformed that economy, or have we simply created a new politically connected elite alongside the old concentrations of wealth and economic power while millions remain excluded?

That is not the vision that inspired our struggle.

The photograph from the early 1990s captures one moment in that journey. You had become the newly elected Secretary-General of the African National Congress after its unbanning. Chris Hani had returned from exile to lead the South African Communist Party. I remained General Secretary of Cosatu and Cde John Gomomo our Cosatu president. We represented different organisations, but we shared one purpose.

We did not inherit freedom.