AZAPO NEW YEAR MESSAGE
31 December 2024
Nelvis Qekema
As is often the case, it seems as though the South African (our Azanian) citizens will crawl into the New Year 2025 with deaths, scars and amputations resulting from the festive season car crashes. A report by the Department of Transport on 20 December 2024 showed that there were 439 recorded fatal r crashes, which represented a 3.1% increase compared to the fatal crashes in the same period in 2023.
These crashes left 512 dead on the roads; and this number is growing. Of concern to AZAPO is that these crashes and deaths are almost exclusively affecting black people. This means that some black families have, yet again, lost breadwinners. The money that was collected to spend towards the rare happiness of these black families will now be spent on funerals. The lives of black people are, by design, those of “migrant labourers” who have to travel in their multitudes between the “work province” and the “home province” during every festive season.
It should worry policy makers that every festive season more than a thousand breadwinners will be lost to the black families. While there will be a bureaucratic refrain to explain that the road-users have a responsibility to ensure that no lives are lost on the roads, the authorities have an added responsibility to improve the quality of the roads and enforce the relevant laws and regulations on the roads.
As things stand, the nation is still grappling with the death of children after eating poisoned snacks sold by some of the spaza shops in the country. It took the taking of action by the residents before government felt compelled to raid the spaza shop and raid them for to check for compliance. The testing of some of the food items eaten by the dead children had traces of the chemical Terbufos. Illegal pesticides were also confiscated from the spaza shops during the raid. On the face of it, the government had failed the people. It failed to implement adequate food safety regulations. This could happen with ease because the mass killing of children was affecting the black people, whom are seldom regarded as human beings. Could this be some biological warfare directed at black people? Nobody cared to ask.
That notwithstanding, the year 2024 will go down in history as the year in which the citizens were reminded through a mass of ceremonies that the country had hit the 30th anniversary of democracy. Apart from a new flag, black President and Ministers, and liberty, there was not much the people could show in their lives for which to thank democracy. However, the Minister of Human Settlements revealed that, as of February 2023, there were 2.5 million households on the National Housing Needs Register. If these figures were anything to go by, it would mean that 2.5 million households were somehow homeless. It goes without saying that those are black families.
As the beautiful people of South Africa (our Azania) turn their backs on the year 2024, their chronic problems and troubles will run ahead and wait for them in the New Year 2025. Black people will remain jobless and poor. A considerable number of black people and their families will continue to live in shacks and be condemned to the bucket toilets, while their children will mimic that plight by learning on empty stomachs under trees and in mud schools. Some of the learners will have their lives cut shot by drowning in pit toilets. Unfortunately, the parents will struggle to buy stationery and uniform for their children. The hard-earned meagre resources of these parents shall have been absorbed in the desperate attempt to pretend to be happy during the festive season.
All this hopelessness and helplessness take place in the bosom of democracy. The tragedy of electoral democracy is that it overpromises, while it takes the initiative from the people. However, electoral democracy is aware of the danger of the failure to deliver on the promises made. That is why it moves with speed and demobilises and immobilises the people so that they would lack the capacity to embark on mass struggles to unleash the popular power. Stripped of their movement, the only initiative the people are left with is to vote at every election in order to return the politicians and political parties to power. Through the vote, the people hope to access the resources that seldom trickle down to the people. The politicians soon show their true colours through assembling and disassembling disruptive coalition governments based on the politicians’ selfish interests. These coalition governments are never based on any genuine political programme to develop the people and their country.
It is against this background that AZAPO seeks to change the relationship of the people with political power. The people must be reminded that the basis and source of state power is people’s power. They must be conscientised that their role as citizens goes beyond voting and waiting for favours. They have the power to choose their servants and get them to do what they, as principals, desire. The people must be reminded that they wield the power to hire and fire. At every election, they enjoy the power to remove bad politicians and their political parties and replace them with those that would toe the popular line.
More than being the voters that exercise their power through the ballot, we must know that the people are the masses that enjoy the inherent right to take to the streets to enforce the realisation of their aspirations. AZAPO raises its voice to alert the people that they are more powerful than the politicians and their political parties. The people should never find themselves at the mercy of the politicians and their political parties. It is not the people that are the instruments of political parties. On the contrary, the political parties should serve as the instruments of the people, while the politicians assume their role as the servants of the people.
We dare not forget that the people sacrificed their lives in the struggle for the repossession of the land and the attainment of liberation. Democracy was the low-lying fruit in that struggle, and never was the end of struggle because we also had to wrestle with the omnipresent white racism. This struggle against white supremacy was supposed to be intensified at all times. For once, it seemed as though the people had risen to reclaim their power in the 2024 Elections and ensured that no political party had an outright majority to govern by itself. The result of that move meant that the ruling ANC had its usual majority undercut. In that regard, it is not AZAPO’s understanding that the people meant to return white supremacy to power. Never!
AZAPO takes the line that the people desired that the progressive political forces to pool their political resources to form a progressive minority government in favour of the people. The ANC appears to have misread this political mandate, or simply decided to take the reactionary route. They took the struggle 100 years back by reinstating white supremacy and its racist arrogance into power. White supremacy grew a bushy tail as was evidenced by a “DA Minister” deciding to rudely defy President Ramaphosa and absent herself when her boss was signing the BELA Act into law in September 2024. As a sign of the presence of white supremacy, Ramaphosa had to make sure that he bows to it (white supremacy) by excluding the clauses 4 and 5 which white supremacy had demanded that they should not be part of the law. Ramaphosa dedicated 3 months during which white supremacy would be begged to accept the disputed clauses. Well, he did eventually sign the affected clauses into the rest of the BELA Law. But not before he was humiliated and shown to be a lame-duck President. Symbolically, that represented a victory of white supremacy over Black Power.
However, it is common knowledge that AZAPO stands for the nationalisation of the land and its ownership by the people. That nationalisation process would mean that the mines would also be wholly owned by the people with the positive establishment of companies to beneficiate the minerals in a move that would add value to the minerals and create jobs for the people. All we see now is the awarding of mining licences to the capitalists and the multinational companies to empty our mines of their minerals and dump the mines after exploiting them. That dumping goes against the terms of the licences, which stipulate that a mining company must establish a fund that will help in the rehabilitation of the mine after exploitation. The capitalists simply dump the disused mines, which end up attracting the so-called “illegal miners” or Zama-Zamas.
Ironically, investigative journalism was able to use its resources and establish that some of the criminal elements involved in “illegal mining” are doing so as functionaries of syndicates that operate under the direction of foreign political forces. AZAPO is worried that the government folds its big arms and allows the resources of the country to be usurped by local and foreign criminal syndicates. Government should intervene by strictly implementing the terms of the mining licences and punish the mining companies that at fault of dumping the mines.
In the New Year 2025, AZAPO calls on the people to be more vigilant and not allow themselves to be taken for a ride by greedy politicians and their political parties. The people must stand up and assume their active political position in deepening democracy in their favour. Democracy matures with the activism of the citizens. Through their positive political action, the people will determine the content and direction of democracy. The people must realise that Parliament is not the only site of struggle. There are many of those sites of struggle outside and beyond Parliament. The people should use the community struggles and set the political and development agenda for the public representatives and the legislatures.
Qekema is the President of AZAPO
