Michael Mabuyakhulu
We head into the elections after quite an intense COSATU Congress. For the first time, COSATU held a congress ahead of an election in which both the ANC and the SACP were on the ballot. It was also the first congress where, at least for some, workers were actively lobbied to choose one Alliance partner over the other at the polls. After adjourning in September, the Congress reconvened at Emperors Palace from 12 to 14 October and ultimately resolved to call on workers to support and vote for both the ANC and the SACP as components of the Alliance.
As the Alliance’s leader, the ANC has historically understood that the Alliance, or any partner within it, is not a prize to be won. This stems from the understanding that the Alliance, and its revolutionary task of executing the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), can achieve its mission only when partners work in unison and do not compete among themselves. This worldview rests on the understanding that the NDR can succeed only if the motive forces are united. In this regard, the past COSATU Congress was a congress of firsts. The delegates’ refusal to be drawn into choosing between the two partners speaks to the federation’s maturity, and it is a decision the ANC welcomes.
But even then, it is worth reflecting on recent developments within the Alliance, particularly as they relate to the posture of our ally, the South African Communist Party (SACP), the workers and the upcoming local government elections.
A bit of history is apt
In 2014, when some in the leadership of NUMSA began to speak of a Workers’ Party, we warned publicly against the spectre of opportunistic radicalism. We argued that a party built in opposition to the national liberation movement would fragment the voice of labour, weaken the Alliance and leave the workers poorer in organisation and weaker in influence. We were told then, as some are telling us now, that the movement had abandoned its revolutionary principles and that only a clean break could restore them.
History has since delivered its verdict. NUMSA was expelled from COSATU in November 2014. The labour movement split, and a second federation was formed in 2017. The Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party was launched in December 2018 with great fanfare and the full vocabulary of revolution. In the May 2019 general election, it received a paltry 24 439 votes (0.14% of the total) and won no seats. By 2024, it did not contest at all. The workers in whose name the break was made did not follow it. Capital lost nothing. The working class lost a united federation.
Obviously, the SACP is not NUMSA, and its decision is not a carbon copy of the 2014 adventure. It has a century of struggle behind it and a presence in every province. That is precisely why its choice carries greater consequence, and why the warning of the 1993 document applies to it with greater force.
We cannot forget that the SACP has tested this road before. In the Metsimaholo by-election of November 2017, it stood in its own name and won three seats. The ANC fell from nineteen seats to sixteen. The Democratic Alliance (DA) lost one. The gains of the SACP came from the ANC’s losses, meaning votes moved within the progressive camp, not from our opponents. After the count, the SACP could take office only in partnership with the ANC. Metsimaholo did not prove that the SACP could stand alone. It proved that the Alliance remains the unit of progressive power even when its partners contest one another.
The pertinent question
The pertinent question that all of us need to ask is therefore this: is a separate SACP electoral contest a solution to the problems of the South African working class, or is it the latest form of an old temptation, the temptation of the radical short-cut?
In his 1920 polemic on trade unions and Trotsky’s mistakes, Lenin placed the unions between the party and the government. They are not organs of the state, and they are not designed for coercion. They are designed to draw in and to train. In his words, they are a school of administration, a school of economic management and a school of communism. That is the federation the founders built. When a federation is drawn into an electoral contest between its own allies, the school becomes a battlefield, and the shield of the workers is rendered potent.
This is no longer a theory, but a lived reality. The genius of the federation has always been its capacity to unite workers on the shop floor around their class interests, while the Alliance carried those interests into the political arena. To ask the federation to choose between its allies is to import into every shop steward council the very division that the bosses have always tried to plant there. Who, then, will stand as the buffer between the owners of the means of production, the government and the party?
In its message to Congress, the SACP raised pertinent points. It presented them as seven theses. They are not new points. They are the very challenges the Congress movement has grappled with over the past couple of years. High unemployment is a serious challenge that affects workers and undermines the democratic project. The rise in electricity prices is a reality the poorest of the poor must bear. The high cost of living has become unbearable for millions of working-class households. Malfeasance and corruption have also eroded people’s trust in our ability to build a national democratic society. These are not new issues, but we must address them, and we are.
Then there is a long-running SACP complaint that, at times, it felt it was seen more as a rubber stamp for decisions taken by the ANC, with no meaningful consultation. We can only acknowledge what the SACP, as an Alliance partner, raises and work to address it.
None of this, however, makes the SACP’s theses correct, and none of it makes its conclusion wise. We look at each thesis in turn.
On the first thesis: political liberation without economic liberation
The SACP argues that 1994 transferred political power without transforming property relations, so that the country “remains politically democratic but economically undemocratic”. We agree that the revolution is incomplete. Our difference lies in how the thesis handles the structure it describes. The message has not abandoned the national question. It refers to “the colonial apartheid economic structure” in its first thesis and to an unresolved African national question in its seventh. But it has separated the national question from its class analysis. The national question appears at the beginning as an inheritance and at the end as an unfinished task, but it does not organise the analysis of class forces in between.
The theory of Colonialism of a Special Type, which the Party itself formulated in The Road to South African Freedom in 1962, does the opposite. It holds that national, class and gender oppression are fused in a single structure, so that the national question is the form in which the class question presents itself to the oppressed majority.
The strategic consequence is decisive. If the contradiction is posed principally as one of class, then the black professional, the black-owned small enterprise, the rural poor outside wage employment and the communities on communal land become bystanders or obstacles. If the contradiction is Colonialism of a Special Type, they are allies whose advance is blocked by the same racialised structure of ownership that blocks the workers. The first reading isolates the working class. The second builds a bloc around it, with the working class as its leading motive force. The ANC’s Strategy and Tactics, adopted at Morogoro in 1969, stands on this ground, and the Freedom Charter joins the national and class questions in its demand that the mineral wealth, the banks and monopoly industry be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.
The NDR is therefore incomplete, contested and imperfect, but it has not been betrayed. Two tests determine whether it is under way: the class direction in which state power and public resources are being driven, and whether the terrain on which property relations can be transformed is opening or closing. The record on the first test is contradictory, but the direction is clear.
In 2026/27, about 60.2% of non-interest spending goes to the social wage, and social grants reach about 26.5 million beneficiaries. Since 1 January 2019, a national minimum wage has protected workers in this country, a demand COSATU carried for decades. On the second test, the terrain has opened. The National Health Insurance Act was signed in May 2024. The Expropriation Act was signed in January 2025 and provides for expropriation in the public interest, including at nil compensation where that is just and equitable. The forces whose property and privilege these laws challenge are contesting them in court.
We do not claim that the social wage overturns the property relations on which Colonialism of a Special Type rests. Redistribution through the fiscus defends the living conditions of the motive forces and keeps them able to fight. It does not change who owns the mines, the land, the banks and monopoly industry. Nor do we claim that the state is free of neoliberal pressure. Fiscal consolidation coexists with a redistributive budget, and that coexistence is exactly what makes the democratic state a site of struggle rather than the settled instrument of either side. A revolution is betrayed when its leading forces abandon the terrain of struggle. Ours is incomplete because the terrain is still being fought over, and the class forces that oppose transformation know it. That is why they are in court.
The SACP’s own practice confirms this reading. Its leaders have served in the national democratic state since 1994. A party that deploys its cadres into the state cannot coherently treat that state as having lost its national democratic character. Either the state is a site of the NDR, in which case the Alliance must defend and deepen it together, or it is not, in which case the Party owes its members an account of its presence there. We hold the first position. The Party’s conduct shows that, in practice, it holds it too.
On the second thesis: the nature of the crisis
The SACP locates the crisis in an unchanged capitalist mode of production: deindustrialisation, financialisation, casualisation and a cost-of-living crisis passed on to workers and the state. Its account of what capital has done is accurate. Domestic monopoly capital has retreated from manufacturing into finance, importing and offshore investment, and foreign capital has restructured production through casualisation and digital platforms. Cadres of this province who organised in the metal and engineering plants of Durban and Pinetown in the 1980s have watched many of those factories close.
The thesis is nonetheless one-sided. It treats the democratic state only as the recipient of a crisis produced elsewhere, not as a place that might also be a source of the crisis. The decline of the network industries on which production depends (electricity, freight rail, ports and municipal water) directly damaged the productive economy. Load-shedding in 2022 and 2023 constrained output and employment across the economy. The various inquiries have documented how networks of private interest captured public institutions and redirected their resources. An analysis that omits this disarms the working class, because its own remedy, public ownership of the commanding heights, presupposes a capable state, and the thesis says nothing about how such a state is to be built.
The crisis is one crisis with two expressions. The first is the withdrawal of capital from productive investment. The second is the emergence of a predatory stratum that accumulates through the state because it cannot accumulate through production. These are two forms of the same crisis of accumulation in an economy shaped by Colonialism of a Special Type, in which black entry into the ownership of productive capital has been blocked and the state has become, for some, the substitute route.
Over 32 years the democratic state has made missteps. Some institutions expanded faster than the capacity to run them. Some grew without the discipline needed to manage them. Into some crept networks of private interest that treated public resources as a route to private accumulation and were prepared to wear any political colour to get there. These are shortcomings of the democratic state as a whole, in all three spheres of government and under every administration and coalition that has held public office, shaped by a state machinery inherited from apartheid and never fully transformed. At times the fiscus has had to rescue public institutions from their own decay, redirecting resources that could have built clinics, schools and houses. The ANC named this danger in Through the Eye of a Needle in 2001.
None of this absolves monopoly capital, and none of it pretends that fiscal restraint has been painless. Restraint has fallen hardest on the provinces and municipalities that serve the poor, and the movement must fight for a fiscal framework that serves the motive forces of the revolution. The revolutionary answer is a struggle on two fronts at once, against the withdrawal of capital from production and against the parasitic capture of the state. Building a capable, ethical and developmental state is a precondition of the socialist project. That state will not be built by denouncing it from outside. It will be built from within, by cadres armed with discipline, accountability and revolutionary morality.
On the third thesis: who leads the working class, and how
The SACP holds that the working class, expanded and changed in form, remains the leading revolutionary force and needs its own political instrument with its own electoral expression. Its broad definition of the class, embracing the employed, the unemployed and informal, platform and precarious workers, is correct. The diagnosis is sound. However, the prescription does not follow.
The Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the second quarter of 2026 counts 16.7 million employed, 8.5 million unemployed, an official unemployment rate of 33.6%, and a further 4.6 million people in the potential labour force, among them 3.7 million discouraged work-seekers. Only a minority of this class is organised, and since the expulsion of NUMSA from COSATU in 2014 and the formation of SAFTU in 2017, that minority has been divided between federations.
The decisive question is where workers go when they leave the ANC. The evidence of 2024 is clear. Turnout fell to about 58.6% of registered voters. Those who stayed away and those who moved to other formations did not move toward a socialist programme. They moved towards mobilisation around personality, grievance and identity, or they withdrew from politics altogether. The SACP’s one independent electoral experience points the same way. In Metsimaholo in 2017, the Party contested in its own name; the council was hung, and the Party could govern only by recombining with the ANC, in a coalition that faced a motion of no confidence within a year. Separation did not unite the working class. It produced instability, followed by reunification on weaker terms.
A vanguard does not earn its name by proclaiming it or by standing apart to show the class the way. It earns it by winning the confidence of the masses in struggle. As Lenin warned in 1920, “victory cannot be won with a vanguard alone”. The history of the SACP confirms the point. Its greatest influence on the course of our history came not when it stood apart, but when its cadres worked inside the Congress movement. Moses Kotane and J.B. Marks served in ANC leadership. Communists contributed to the drafting of the Freedom Charter. Umkhonto we Sizwe was founded in 1961 as a joint undertaking of the ANC and the Party. The vanguard led by influence over the mass movement, not by separation from it.
We accept the substance of one SACP complaint. The message argues that “an Alliance cannot function through unilateral decisions followed by instructions to other components”. That criticism is fair, and our movement may at times have given cause for it. The remedy is a reconfigured Alliance, not a contest at the ballot box. The tasks that follow are concrete. The unorganised must be organised. The unity of the trade union movement must be rebuilt. The Alliance must be reconfigured so that the organised working class shapes its programme, its policies and its deployments, through structures that consult and decide jointly. That is how the working class leads the national democratic struggle: through the mass movement, not outside it.
On the fourth thesis: where the real danger lies
The SACP identifies the principal danger as a neoliberal bloc of domestic and international capital that seeks to turn the democratic state into a facilitator of private accumulation, and it calls on the ANC to abandon neoliberalism. The thesis is right that a neoliberal offensive is under way. Its weakness is one of method. It identifies friends and enemies by their programmes and self-descriptions rather than by their material practice and the actual balance of forces. It assumes that parties that describe themselves as left would, in power, show the same responsibility for the sustainability of the democratic state that the ANC has shown. That is a judgement from labels, which is idealism, not materialism. It also omits the second form in which the right is consolidating in our province: the politics of ethnicity and region.
We must confront the outcomes of June 2024 honestly. The ANC won 159 of the 400 seats in the National Assembly, and the EFF won 39. Together they held 198, short of the 201 needed for a majority. With the 58 seats of the MK Party, the three parties held 256 seats. Arithmetically, a government of those three was possible. Politically, it was not. The MK Party was in the Electoral Court seeking to have the election results set aside, and it boycotted the first sitting of the National Assembly on 14 June 2024. A party that rejects the legitimacy of the Parliament in which it must be elected cannot form a government. The fragmented vote left the ANC with a choice between a broad government and no stable government.
The Government of National Unity (GNU) is not a neutral vessel. It is a contested and tactical site of class struggle, and the balance of forces inside it is decided by the balance of forces outside it. Within it, the ANC signed the Expropriation Act into law in January 2025 despite a formal dispute declared by the DA, which is now challenging the Act in the Western Cape High Court. The ANC is defending the National Health Insurance Act in the Constitutional Court against the Board of Healthcare Funders and the Western Cape government. The 5th National General Council, which concluded on 11 December 2025, declared that it would not allow any party to undo the transformation policies of the democratic state and reaffirmed, in its words, “its commitment to a broad-based structural transformation and all socio-economic redress policies”.
We do not claim that neoliberal pressure acts only from outside the state or outside the movement. A Treasury under ANC leadership administers fiscal consolidation, and the contest over the fiscal framework runs through our own ranks. The point is that this contest is real, and that in the decisive legislative battles of this administration the ANC has stood on the side of transformation against the parties of capital. Demanding that the ANC abandon neoliberalism while campaigning to reduce its vote, at the very moment it resists neoliberal parties in Parliament and in court, is a contradiction in the thesis’s own terms. Every percentage point the ANC loses on 4 November to a division in its own camp transfers bargaining power to the right.
In KwaZulu-Natal the danger has a second face. Where liberation stalls, the politics of ethnicity and region rush in to fill the vacuum. In this province, where our movement buried many comrades in the political violence of the 1980s and early 1990s, that is not a theory. In the 2024 provincial election the ANC fell to about 17%, and an IFP-led coalition now governs the province. The progressive vote here is already fractured. Further division between the ANC and the SACP in the province’s metros and secondary towns will not deliver councils to the working class. It will deliver them to forces that have never stood for the Freedom Charter.
The history of the international workers’ movement carries the same warning. When a workers’ party designates its nearest ally as its principal adversary, the principal enemy of both is the beneficiary. In this phase the principal danger is not a faction inside the movement. It is the right consolidating, in both its liberal and its ethnic forms, on the ground that a divided democratic camp leaves behind. The task is to unite all who can be united against that danger, to contest every policy inside government, and to go to the polls on 4 November as one progressive bloc.
On the fifth thesis: the settlement of 1994 and the question of privatisation
The SACP argues that the 1994 social contract has collapsed, that “capital duped the liberation movement” into delaying property reforms such as the nationalisation of the mines, and that Operation Vulindlela amounts to giving away the public economy to the private sector. On the first point, we agree in substance. Capital did not deliver the investment, inclusion and transformation it promised. From the late 1990s, several of the largest conglomerates moved their primary listings offshore, and much capital used democracy as an opportunity to export itself.
But the movement was not duped. The word denies the liberation movement agency and misreads the settlement as deception rather than a strategic choice based on the balance of forces at the time. It was made after the collapse of the socialist bloc had deprived the liberation movement of its strategic rear, and while the apartheid state retained its army intact. Cde Joe Slovo, then National Chairperson of the SACP, proposed the sunset clauses in 1992 because he read the balance of forces correctly. That was not capitulation. It belongs to the revolutionary tradition of tactical retreat in order to preserve and advance the revolution, a tradition the Bolsheviks themselves followed at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 and in the New Economic Policy of 1921.
We also acknowledge what remains undone. The Freedom Charter’s clause on mineral wealth, banks and monopoly industry remains unfulfilled. And we know we can always do better.
On Vulindlela, the thesis conflates concession with privatisation, and the distinction is material. The National Transmission Company South Africa is a state-owned entity. The rail network remains public, and private operators pay for access to it. The Transnet National Ports Authority is being corporatised within the state. Terminal concessions are concessions, not sales, and the assets remain public. We do not dismiss the danger. A long concession written on capital terms can transfer operational control and a share of the surplus to private hands and, in function if not in title, become privatisation. That is exactly why the Alliance must keep a close eye on these transactions. Organised workers can win that struggle inside the Alliance, at Nedlac.
Our position is therefore clear. Strategic public assets are not for sale. The networks remain in public hands. Concessions are granted only on terms that secure jobs, local industrialisation, skills and community benefit, under the oversight of organised labour. This is a retreat in order to advance, carried out under the control of the democratic state, not a surrender of the commanding heights.
On the sixth thesis: the corrosion of incumbency
The SACP warns that compradorial forces have captured the liberation movement and seek to co-opt the trade unions, and it identifies an aristocratic tendency across the leadership stratum, including within its own ranks. We share the diagnosis. The ANC named the danger in Through the Eye of a Needle in 2001, long before the SACP made it a reason for electoral separation. What does not survive scrutiny is the claim that renewal from within has failed, and the assumption that separation escapes the danger.
The record of renewal is real. The ANC’s 54th National Conference adopted the principle that members facing serious charges must step aside. The State Capture Commission was established and its findings were referred to the law enforcement agencies. The Madlanga Commission, established in 2025, is examining the capture of policing and justice institutions. Renewal has been slower and more uneven than our members demand, but slow renewal is not abandoned renewal.
The SACP’s own candour answers the rest. It has acknowledged that an aristocratic tendency has taken root within its own ranks. That acknowledgement deserves respect, and it also exposes the flaw in the thesis. Corruption is a class phenomenon. It is the conduct of an emergent stratum that seeks to accumulate through the state because it cannot accumulate through production. Its material base is proximity to state power and access to public resources, wherever they are found. Leaving the Alliance does not escape that base.
The SACP has chosen to enter local government in its own name, the sphere where candidate lists, tenders and municipal appointments make the pressure of patronage most intense. The experience of the formations that broke from the ANC in 2008, 2013 and 2023 shows that a break presented as a return to principle does not by itself alter the material relations that produce corrosion.
Moral appeals alone will not defeat this stratum, and neither will organisational separation. It will be defeated by attacking its material base. That means placing candidate lists under the scrutiny of branches and communities, insulating the public service from factional deployment, enforcing collective accountability without fear or favour, and waging relentless political education in the values of the Freedom Charter. Renewal is a common revolutionary task, and it is best waged together.
On the seventh thesis: socialism as a present necessity
The SACP argues that the NDR must consciously bridge radical democratic transformation and socialist transition, and that it has not achieved its principal task because the African national question remains unresolved. The bridge is common ground. The Alliance has always understood the NDR as the road towards socialism in South African conditions, and the Party’s own programme, The South African Road to Socialism, characterises the NDR as the most direct route to socialism in our reality. The disagreement is not about the destination. It is about whether the bridge is built by dividing those who must cross it. It is the Party’s present tactic, not the ANC’s position, that departs from that programme.
The thesis’s own premise is the strongest argument against the Party’s tactic. If the national question is the principal unfinished task of the NDR, then it is resolved by the broadest national bloc of the oppressed. It is not resolved by a class party standing alone against the national liberation movement. On its own terms, the seventh thesis leads to unity.
The objective of the present phase is a national democratic society: united, non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous, with a mixed economy that combines state, private, cooperative and social forms of ownership. The experience of the world communist movement since 1989 points the same way. Vietnam’s renovation, adopted at the Sixth National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam in December 1986, built a socialist-oriented market economy. Cuba’s Constitution of 2019 recognises private and cooperative property alongside socialist property.
Cde Joe Slovo drew the deepest lesson in Has Socialism Failed? in 1990, when he argued that the socialist model of Eastern Europe failed above all where it separated the party from the people and replaced persuasion with command. Socialism, if it is to come, must be built with the consent of the majority.
The elements of a socialist future are planted in the soil of the NDR. The SACP is right that municipalities can be schools of that struggle, through free basic services, municipal cooperatives and community participation. But a municipality can be such a school only where a progressive majority governs it. Every Alliance council can and must become a school of that struggle. On that ground we can build together today. On the final destination we can continue the debate as the Alliance always has, through ideological struggle within the movement, without making agreement on it a condition of unity in action in the present.
Concluding synthesis: Alliance unity and the class logic of the worker vote
The seven theses and our responses converge on a common description of the period. The NDR is incomplete. Ownership remains concentrated and racialised. The working class is large, fragmented and under attack. The right is consolidating in liberal and ethnic forms. Corrosion threatens every organisation that holds public power. Where we differ is on the tactic that follows. Each of the SACP’s sound premises leads, on its own logic, to a united Alliance, and the decision to contest against its ally contradicts the Party’s own theoretical inheritance, from The Road to South African Freedom to The South African Road to Socialism.
The class logic of the worker vote must be stated precisely. Municipal councils are elected under a mixed system. Ward seats are won by plurality, but the total seats of each party are allocated in proportion to its vote on the proportional representation ballot. A divided progressive vote therefore does not simply hand seats to opponents, and we do not claim that it does. Its effects are different and more serious. Votes cast for a list that falls short of the quota for a seat in a given council are lost to the progressive camp altogether. Councils that a united camp would govern by majority become hung councils. The largest progressive party becomes one bargainer among many, and smaller parties hostile to workers become kingmakers who extract mayoralties and committee chairs as the price of their votes. The experience of hung councils since 2016, including repeated changes of mayor in our metros, shows what that instability costs the working class in services, jobs and accountability.
The working class has three material interests in this election. The first is stable municipal government that delivers water, electricity, sanitation, refuse removal and indigent support, which together form the part of the social wage that reaches workers’ households directly. The second is the strength of the formation through which the organised working class reaches state power, through deployment, through the Alliance and through Nedlac. The third is the defeat of the right in both its liberal and its ethnic forms. In the present balance of forces, the ANC is the only progressive formation able to secure majorities across many councils, and the only one whose strength or weakness determines whether the right gains bargaining power in the GNU and in hung councils. The worker vote for the ANC is therefore not a vote of sentiment or habit. It is the vote that most enlarges the power of the working class in the institutions where its daily conditions are decided.
That vote carries obligations for the ANC. It obliges us to renew the movement, to place our candidate lists under the scrutiny of branches and communities, to defend the gains of the revolution inside government, and to reconfigure the Alliance so that the organised working class shapes its programme and its deployments. Unity is not the absence of struggle within the movement. It is the condition under which that struggle can be won.
The Alliance is the organisational form of the historic bloc of the motive forces of the NDR. It was built by communists and nationalists together, it defeated apartheid together, and it remains the only instrument capable of completing the revolution. On 4 November the task is to keep the progressive bloc united at the ballot box, to deny the right the ground a divided camp would leave it, and to carry the struggle for the reconfiguration of the Alliance into the period that follows. The debate on the final destination will continue, as it always has, within the movement. The unity of action that the present demands cannot wait.
Conclusion
We do not ask the SACP to abandon its socialist convictions. We ask it to test its theses against the concrete conditions of our time, and to weigh honestly whether the road it has chosen will unite the working class or divide it at the very moment unity is most needed.
Those of us who stood in Durban in 1985 did not imagine that we would one day be asked to choose between the ANC and the SACP. We built COSATU so that the workers would never again face their enemies alone. History will judge us harshly if we fold our hands while the legacy built on that sacrifice is divided for the sake of a short-cut that leads nowhere.
We believe, for the sake of our people and of the national democratic revolution, that those who are tempted to strike out on their own should re-acquaint themselves with the concluding observation of the Alliance’s 1993 discussion document: “In alliance, each one of our formations has a powerful contribution to make, and each is able to carve out a more effective role for itself. As an alliance, we are more than the sum of our parts. Alone, each one of us is diminished.”
Our people demand, and deserve, a better life. Only a united Alliance, focused on what is at hand, can bring into physical reality the national democratic society that our people expect. In this regard, the workers, as a motive force, are not a prize but a determinant of the success of our revolution.
* Michael Mabuyakhulu is the ANC KZN provincial coordinator and a founding member of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).
** The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of IOL