Amandla
Amandla
Awethu
Matla

Long Live the undying legacy of OR Tambo Long Live

Long live the undying legacy of President Oliver Reginald Tambo Long Live

Comrades I did not know OR Tambo personally, for the 24th of April 1993 almost a month before I was born, the great leader OR Tambo was taken from us.

At his Funeral President Mandela said the following “I say that Oliver Tambo has not died, because the ideals for which he sacrificed his life can never die.”

In writing about OR Tambo the Nigerian Emika Anyaoku furthur quotes Voltaire and says “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.” In Life OR Compelled respect and in death he would insist on nothing but the truth.

Now what would OR Tambo expect from a young person at a platform like this.

Perhaps he would not want a young person to pursue being liked but to pursue telling the truth. The truth is like surgery, it hurts but it also has the potential to heal.

What is needed is an honest conversation.

Although I did not personally know President OR, I have lived to experience him through the South Africa we have today.

In South Africa today access to basic education is a right.

In South Africa today access to healthcare is a right.

In South Africa today freedom of association, and freedom of movement are basic rights.

These rights which were once inaccessible to our people removed the basic essence of being human.

Through our transition we have removed the knife but we have not healed, we have failed to fully nurse our wounds and because of this our transition remains incomplete.

Whilst basic education is a right the quality of our basic education is amongst the lowest in the world.

Whilst access to healthcare is a right, how many deaths are from preventable conditions?

Whilst freedom of movement is a right, South Africa is dubbed as the rape capital of the world.

Why is it that we have not been able to nurse these wounds and fully transition?
OR Tambo once said "Beware of the wedge-driver, the man who creeps from ear to ear, carrying a bag full of wedges, driving them in between you and the next man, between a group and another, a man who goes round creating splits and divisions. Beware of the wedge-driver, comrades. Watch his poisonous tongue".

Comrades if I am given the poetic license to contextualize this quote of our great OR Tambo to the ANC in 2017, it would read like this.
“Beware of the wedge-driver, the man who creeps from delegate to delegate, carrying a bag full of cash, driving them in between you and the next comrade, between a group and another, a man who goes round creating splits and divisions to continue looting. Beware of the wedge-driver, comrades. Watch his poisonous intentions."

There is a timeless relevance to the words that OR has used in his analysis of the wedge driver and whilst it starts with one person as it grows the wedge driver ceases to be a person and becomes systemic, it enters the DNA of an organization, and this poisons the entire body politic.

After a year of talking about OR Tambo through many speeches, lectures and events have we fully exhausted the lessons that OR can give to save our ailing organization.

OR Tambo was referred to as South Africa’s gateway to the world. We cannot understand what progressive internationalism means without understanding OR’s role in the struggle. As the head of the external mission of the ANC, he showed us how states should extend their solidarity to the will of oppressed people throughout the world. This is best observed through critically studying the work OR did in Tanzania, in the UK, in India in Sweden and beyond. Throughout the world people and governments knew about how oppressive Aparthied was and what the will of the people was.

OR Tambo was a visionary, a leader who had foresight and understanding of the future. Has the ANC in government been consistent with what OR proposed on the international stage. Perhaps in building this international movement, OR gave us guidelines as to how the ANC should conduct its diplomatic engagements whilst in government.

Instead over the democratic period, our stance on issues around the globe has been to either adopt a strategy of quiet diplomacy or an often confusing approach that seeks to advance narrow interests. Today, in Zimbabwe and the Central African Republic our quiet diplomacy could not be louder, in Palestine we say that we support their struggle for self-determination but have not taken a stance on their call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

Yemen has been totally destroyed yet the first comment our diplomats have given on this has been one that sides with the Saudi-Israeli-US bloc that is guilty of perpetrating what has been referred to as one of the most devastating conflicts of the century.

On the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people our government released a statement 3 weeks after the start of the killings and fell embarrassingly short of outrightly condemning the violence of Myanmar’s military. It urged “all parties” to stop the violence despite reports clearly proving that the Rohingya people are one of the most persecuted people in the world.

We position ourselves as having an anti-imperial agenda but show time and time again, that we are unwilling to STAND WITH people who are at the heart of fighting an empire.

This dichotomous nature of how the ANC says things in the party and how it conducts itself in government further extends to how it has interacted with the youth.

Although the challenges we face now are very different to those faced by the ANC fighting apartheid, I believe that we can still learn from the life of OR Tambo. At the ANC’s Conference on Children in Zimbabwe in September 1987 President OR Tambo eloquently expressed that his own life and the lives of those in the struggle only had meaning to the extent that they are used to create a social condition which will make the lives of the children happy, full and meaningful.

His tenderness to the wounded children and the distraught mothers has been described by journalists as unstinting. What a painful contrast this is to the attitude of the ANC towards the youth today.

When the youth of our country stood up and said that our institutions of higher learning are inaccessible because being intelligent is not good enough if you are poor and we demanded that the ANC deliver on its own promises;

We were clear that we seek free quality and decolonized education.

Free because education should not be a debt sentence.

Quality because we need education that is globally competitive.
Decolonized because our Unviersity system is still not one that is open and welcoming to poor black bodies.
This means that there is exploitative labour practices on campuses.

The apartheid structure of historically white and black universities still exist.  For example Yesterday the accreditation for LLB degrees was removed from UCT and WSU for two completely different reasons. WSU because the infrastructure and academic staff were of poor quality. Where as at UCT (rated the 40th best Law school in the world) it was because they do not create enough black law graduates. These contrasting reasons can be put down to the failure to uplift historically black universities and the failure to decolonize historically white universities.

Finally the kind of knowledge produced by our institutions must geared towards African solutions to African problems. This becomes even more important in a globalized context.

The response to this demand of free quality decolonized education  of the ANC led government was
rubber bullets,
tear gas,
arrests,
brutality;

and two years later there is no political will to solve the crisis beyond task teams and commissions that have come with nothing new to the table.

Young people across the country have become despondent and are fast losing hope with more and more being classified as not in education, employment or training, the situation is chronic. If our country is to have any hope at a future our youth need to be more than victims of poverty; we need to be agents of change. Just a quick scan of the youth unemployment rates illustrates this, currently sitting at 38.6%. Surely this is must be seen, as it has been characterized, as a ticking time bomb?

To escape poverty and to be agents of change the pursuit of knowledge is the most valuable asset.
And, while tertiary students fight for free education and various sectors raise the challenge of youth unemployment, the state of basic education also begs of us to do better. Just this week we were called to focus on 5 year old Michael Komape who left home to go to school on that fateful morning, and he did not make it home. 

Rosina Komape stood up in front of a court this week and recounted the harrowing experience of seeing her son Michael’s lifeless arm sticking out of the bottom of a toilet pit that had collapsed.

Michael left home that morning in the pursuit of knowledge and we should all hang our heads in shame that he did not make it home.
We should be even more ashamed of the arrogance and cowardice from state in response to Michael’s death. The attitude of the ANC and its leaders in response to this has been shocking, with everyone attempting to pass the buck once more.

The state’s advocate argued in court yesterday that the Komape family was trying to get rich off of their child’s death by taking the battle for decent sanitation to court. This attitude is a tragic reflection of our uncaring and dismissive government.

OR Tambo is quoted as saying “For the ability of the country to develop and hold its own, in the face of heavy international economic competition, will largely depend on the quality of education we provide to the majority of our citizens.”

We must also question how the ANC responding to the needs of the majority of citizens in the new digital age, in an age of automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, and block chain technology has the ANC critically thought about how to use technology to improve the lives of our people and leapfrog in the global economy and how the youth are to be a crucial part of this future?

The 4th industrial revolution will fundamentally change how we co-exist. Before we even try to understand how to react to it, we must fully grasp what it means for our reality, to our people in an African context.

We should be introducing robotics into schools but robotics requires coding which requires maths and we are in a situation where only 1 in 4 schools even offers maths. Young people of South Africa deserve better.

Oliver Tambo was one of the founders of the ANC Youth League if we look at the state of the Youth League today it is difficult to not see the deterioration in its inability to challenge its mother body and play the role that the youth of OR’s generation played in rejuvenating the movement. Receiving financial benefit and promise of political office has dictated the role and direction of many of our youth structures, this has meant that other players have had to take up the radical agenda of the youth.

Contradictions between the ANC’s attitude then and now are most vividly apparent in its attitude towards death.
Time and again we have witnessed an ANC government that is uncaring in the extreme. Let us contrast this to when OR found out about the killing of 27 comrades by the apartheid regime in Lesotho. He was warned not to attend for his own safety but insisted that he had a responsibility to go and bury these comrades. How far is this attitude from the attitude of comrade OR even though the deaths of these 27 people were not to any fault of his own.

The belief of OR Tambo and the ANC was that human life is sacrosanct. In exile in London he was once heckled whilst relating the skillful victory of the Luthuli detachment of the MK who outmaneuvered Ian Smith’s soldiers and left five of them dead. The heckler had shouted that this was murder and the crowd looked to OR as to how he would react. He paused for a moment taken aback then said in a troubled voice, “yes we have become killers. This is what the situation in our country has led us to.

We believe in peace and yet we are becoming killers.”

So sacrosanct was his value for human life that he even felt troubled by the thought of killing his oppressors; contrast this to the attitude of the state that is unperturbed by the killing of miners at Marikana, the loss of life in the Life Esidimeni tragedy, even the death of Michael Komape.

The attitude towards life inside the ANC has deteriorated to such a low level that comrades have pulled the trigger on one another in a pursuit of power.

What history shows us is that a national consultative conference of the ANC is a moment to pause and reflect about the state of the organization but more importantly the state of our people. If at any point the state of the ANC is independent to that of the country then the organization has fundamentally lost its way.

Women in the struggle did not just fight apartheid they also fought a patriarchal society and patriarchy within the ANC.
Perhaps the most glaring example of our society having lost its way is the normalization of rape- rape culture and abuse against women and members of the LGBTI community. Women throughout South Africa do not feel safe; and historically have never been safe. Girls miss school because they do not have access to sanitary pads, part of completing our transition is the full liberation of the most marginalized.

Did we ever consider that part of not completing our transition would in part be due to our doing like state capture.

What’s been trending at the moment is state capture. It is important to understand that state capture is not a new concept. The very nature of a democratic government in a neoliberal capitalist reality is always susceptible to being captured. However the extent to which corruption has been exposed in our government is deeply disturbing for when a liberation party is tainted as and proven to be corrupt it ceases to be a liberation party as it no longer represents the most marginalized but steals from them. 

If this has now become the DNA of the organization can we confidently affirm that this organization will be capable of completing the transition. And if not how do we return the ANC to the ideals of Tambo?

As OR said we are not fighting a person we are fighting a system.

It is important to reiterate that the problems in the ANC did not start in the last 10 years. The ANC government has often operated within a particular model of governance that has deepened inequality and social hardship. This ultimately undermines the gains that the ANC in government has made.

The ANC has historically provided contributions to intellectual discourse, but in the pursuit of the politics of the stomach the ANC has lost its credible intellectual voice. At a time when even the most conservative spaces we could go as far as even referring to them as gatekeepers of neoliberalism like the World Bank and the IMF –are starting to question the logic of a  capitalist system; where is our intellectual thought going into criticizing the neoliberal capitalist patriarchal reality we find ourselves in?

What system was OR talking about, the system was one where the majority of people were politically disenfranchised in the land of their birth, freedom of movement and association was restricted, they were not seen as valued or human.

This system was also one of exploitative labour and concentrated ownership over the land and economy. Freedom is not an event, it is what lies at the end of a difficult road of social struggle.

The attitude that will get us where we need to be is one defined not by greed, corruption and a hunger for power, but by a generosity of spirit and an imagination that is capable of building alternative means or paths that directly challenge the neoliberal anthem that there is no alternative.

We should not have to choose between heightened neoliberalism and predatory capitalism. Political doctrines, social philosophies and economic systems should not be regarded as anything else but “means” placed at the disposal of society for fulfilling our aspirations, our future, our happiness. (Ahmed Sékou Touré) And our happiness is best measured by the happiness of the most marginalized in our society. It is for this reason that at this moment and this very important conference we realize that we have nothing to celebrate and a lot of work to do.

Whilst this gathering is a historic one it will not change the country- only a strategic plan of action can do that.

However this plan of action must be inter-generational in nature.

Knowledge and experience must be shared but in way that is contextualized to the realities we face today to pass on the lessons and to make sure mistakes are not repeated so that our responsibility to be better than what came before is realized; for it is the reality that to a child like Michael Komape we are no better than what we fought against.

We can
and we must
be better.
Amandla!