Johannesburg - Ordinary working people in South Africa had nothing to celebrate on Freedom Day, the SA Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) said.
On Tuesday the country celebrated Freedom Day which is the commemoration of South Africa’s first democratic elections on April 27, 1994.
These were the first post-apartheid national elections to be held in South African where anyone could vote regardless of race.
Saftu said the advent of democracy in 1994 brought hopes for the previously disadvantaged people and 27 years on, the Bill of Rights still existed.
“Despite this, ordinary people who rely on government still receive poor amenities, have their political freedoms curtailed by arrests and killings during protests, continue to live in squalor and poverty, cannot defend themselves in courts of law against rich people and corporates who have highly trained legal counsels,” Saftu said.
The union said it was against this background that Saftu held that there was nothing ordinary working people could celebrate about Freedom Day.
Saftu said the raging protests by working class organisations in campuses and communities represented growing “dissent to the poor level of service delivered and the commodification of provision of services”.
“The state cannot afford to deliver services because it is severed by the surge in prices of the resources required to deliver such goods and a crippling corruption,” Saftu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said.
Vavi added that the “parasitic bourgeois” had turned the public sector and state-owned enterprises such as Eskom, Prasa, Transnet, SAA, Denel, into a site of accumulation and the little resources have been looted.
“The Health Department has collapsed, resulting in more ‘horrors’ in hospitals that have led to permanent disabilities and deaths of many people,” Vavi said.
Saftu added that the commodification of higher education had seen students rising to fight back the exclusion that comes from this.
The Star