Presentation by Lesotho Teachers’ Trade Union (LTTU) President, Comrade Mafokane Ramakhula on 20 December 2023
Theme: A New Cadre for the Insurrectionary Seizure of Power to Achieve Democracy Now
- Salutations and introduction
Comrade Chairperson of the session, Cde General Secretary of CPS, Cde Thokozane Keneth Kunene, the Provincial Secretary of the SACP, the collective leadership of the vanguard parties, distinguished guests and the august participants in this important party school, allow me to convey cordial greetings on behalf of our union LTTU leadership, gallant membership and on my behalf. The objective of my address is an attempt to engage the said theme from apparently a unique Lesotho albeit self-styled revolutionary union but finally trying to find meeting points between this party and our mass labour union. In this journey one encounters more relevance from this party school to our own trade union. Cde Chair, in my salutation allow me also to express our identity and solidarity with the great peoples of
- Swaziland for their momentous effort to roll back the excesses and impunity of Makhosetive who hold citizens at wanton poverty coupled with desperate terror campaigns since the 1973 decree;
- Zimbabwe for grappling with mulappropriated economy at the hands of an embourgeised heirs of decolonisation;
- Mozambique to manage their affairs in order to handle current insurgency and other related challenges;
- Western Sahara, The Sahrawi people, led by Polisario Front (1973) fighting for self-determination against the Spain, Mauritania and Kingdom of Morocco vile file;
- Cuban Republic enduring a heavy embargo since the eve of 1959 independence, by the diabolical United States administration against numerous decisions by the United Nations;
- Palestine in a severe anguish at the dirty hands of separatist miserable occopationist Israeli sadist Zionists since 1948, also against international law and nearly 200 UN resolutions;
- South Africa in their quest to pursue the National Democratic Revolution to hasten their economic transformation, guarding revolutionary morality;
- Lesotho for their illusive peace and development, sterile jubilees of independence and need for a coherent focused vanguard
- Background
Lesotho is a high-altitude small land locked comprador bourgeois constitutional democratic monarchy in Southern African. It is a remnant of feudalism in the periphery of capitalist mode of production; a country among the least developed, with a population of about 2.2 million, of whom 1.4million or 65% are able bodied and equivalence of their half live in South Africa. About 75% of the land is mountainous and 70% of its population is rural. Outside those who work in Lesotho and South Africa, 1/3 of the labour force are engaged in commerce or trade, mainly in the unserviced informal sector, with chronic difficulty in obtaining a trade licence. (Maliehe S, 2014, Thabane M). Lesotho ranks number 2 globally in HIV and TB prevalence, number 3 in homicide and number 5 in femicide, with life expectancy of 52 years – Africa’s 3rd lowest. Meanwhile mental health care facilities are overwhelmed with patients against scarce resources, space and experts. (Thabane M2021) Unemployment hovering at 35%, inequality above 46% Gini coefficient and abject poverty typically at 40%! The country endures temperate climate with four underexplored seasons characterised by extremes, lately worsened by excesses of climate change experienced as odd alternates of dry heat, recurring floods, biting colds and spring sand storms.
Arable land has been below 10% and mainly for subsistence farming contributing almost insignificantly to the economy. The farming sector has a long history of neglect due to great periods of male absenteeism as a result of several generations of colonial inspired migrant labour arrangement till the late 1980s, at times totalling 125 000+/- only in the mining industry. The land in the country “vests in the Basotho nation,” the king, and by extension the chieftaincy family, holds it in trust and presides over appropriation of large tracts of communal land. In these communal lands, the chiefs appropriated communal labour in the form of “matsema,” farming labour campaigns. (Kimble J). In due course, already after the first term of independence, in 1970, landlessness had become 12.5% and reached ¼ of the population by 1986, worsening the options for access to the said little arable land! Since the colonial 1903 “proclamation” of The laws of Lerotholi to around 2010, the skewed ownership of land parcels had favoured males and the aristocracy, even at the height of the migrant labour system. Not until in 1940 could females own a trading licence on account that they were not tax payers. Aristocracy also oversaw the collection of monetary tax from adult males. According to a known historian Cde Motlatsi Thabane, the aristocracy extended their hegemony by administering “mafisa”-patronage, a practise of “lending out” life stalk, to subjects, for a number of years. A dire for adaptive methods of agriculture had since become imperative therefore as land fortunes continue to dwindle. Soil erosion is also enormous in Lesotho. Recent land tenure interventions have though created a fear of further land dispossession, under the guise of attracting investors. The consequent commoditisation of land along the on-going urbanisation aggravated the insecurity of ownership, the homelessness and ill-health to the poor and uneasiness within chieftaincy.
- Working conditions
The public: private sector ratio of employment is almost at par, with intermittent variations, making the public sector the single major employer mainly in Agriculture and Education with relatively competitive salaries after the domestic Parastatal subsector. This issue would come to haunt unions at quasi bargaining fora, following a very heavy headed salary structure, signifying no semblance of sectoral parity but rather, stratification to generate pseudo inter labour contradictions. Trade union rights are generally denied in this sector. A public service union LUPE was smashed by the public service “aristocrats” in 1995 in a distain to social dialogue. The top public service deployees in alliance with the political and business classes have over a long period enrooted grave corruption while voter turnout has declined from 76% in 1993 to 36% in 2023. Despite ratification of several key ILO conventions, and a court case in that pursuit, the department has excuses against recognition of LEPSSA. Collective agreements have been signed twice between teacher unions and the MoET, covering 20 agreement items. In the main, the ministry has simply reneged in a mockery to industrial peace mechanisms.
The Taiwanese dominated manufacturing leads the private sector in the textile but is perhaps the most labour exploited sector. Wages may be quite meagre marking the beginning of poverty line next to the working poor, a clear basis of “alienation of labour.” It is administered under the widely known 2000 American so called African Growth and Opportunities Act, producing almost exclusively for American market. ILO standards provisions are hardly or faintly observed by both the public and the private sectors almost similarly. Social safety nets are virtually non-existent in the textile, populated by youthful female kingdom labour force, habitually under perturbing conditions.
There are other sectors too, such as mining, estate development, utility provisions and others. Working conditions are exposed to the effects of contemporary realities namely adjusting to technological race, adaptive resilience to climate, and responding to pandemics in the background of a rugged topography. Water, wool, diamonds, high altitude, wind, sun, scenery are but nearly mere latent resources. “But while it is true that water is abundant in rivers that flow out of the highlands, the country is plagued by regular droughts and spotty water access.” (Thabane M 2019). This example it is a reflection as to whether our education does deliver to the society the skills that assist us, especially at crucial times.
- Political alternative
The foregoing picture calls for more humane contrast, construct, framework and personnel. That configuration should be founded on a different type of social relations born equally of distinct property relations from the present ones. Borrowing from our fore bearers, we notice no shortage of such a vision across development of society as a result of unsustainable conflict between opposite social classes. In the present epoch since the industrial revolution, G W Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their peers, contributed a lot to our comprehension of this phenomenon and the need for an organisation of communists who avowed to their creed of progressive social change shall set out to consciously catalyse the objective prerequisite conditions for a revolutionary transition. We shall recall “A spectre is haunting Europe–the spectre of communism. Where is the opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponent in power?” (1848). Subsequently, VI Lenin stood for a disciplined vanguard party of communists to lead that revolution. Generations and traits of revolutionaries built usable ideas to guide their revolutionary practices, just to mention a few more: Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, Amilcar Cabral, Oliva Tambo and Moises Samora Machel. They continue to inspire us.
Since a revolutionary experiences first hand, day to day common depravation and the accompanying grief, they are in a position to lead their communities about an option to the status quo. Because of the distant position of our class in relation to ownership of elements and means of production, often we have to make do with scarce resources and perhaps require a rare creativity and ability to mobilise them. A cadre therefore shall need to meet some minimum prerequisites to facilitate their selection for schooling, or organised training. In this context, LTTU must see their routine shop floor and bargaining forum issues as part of a greater attempt to shift the balance of social forces to the side of the revolutionary milieu. Any endeavour by a union to dwell solely on industrial relation issues, averting the efforts towards ultimate change in relations of production, renders itself a pessimistic workerist organisation that preserves the antagonistic status quo.
In this vein the sectoral unions must see the need to unite organised workers into one i.e. large national centre such as LFTU, our Federation, in mutual collaboration with a Communist Party vanguard. A radical trade union Federation should develop the alternative policies that articulate a better envisaged land tenure, resource development and management, corresponding superstructures and their services, devaluation of aloof central power structures in favour of intimate public accountability and attuned to capacity of popular power structures consistent with traditional structures of a trade union; resisting and denouncing values and cultures of the opponent social enemy including privatisation of social amenities; promoting regional and global solidarity and identity in the face of a well-orchestrated global onslaught on the working class and the rest of the deprived groups, and the upholding of organisational discipline. Above all a union must be able to put together a strategy as how it shall seek to realise its broader or ultimate objective. An alliance of labour with broader civil society formations forms a grand front for a common minimum national priority but it also broadens the basis for societal consensus around sub-themes or various peculiarities. A multilateral revolutionary aggregate together with an all-rounded leader is required.
That is the ecosystem for a new cadre for the insurrectionary seizure of power to achieve democracy now.
Matla! Amandla! Venceremos!
- Maliehe Sean
- Kimble Jufith
- Marx Karl
- Thabane Motlatsi
Communist Party of Swaziland 