African Socialist International (ASI) Secretary General Luwezi Kinshasa and African People’s Socialist Party European leader Makda Yohannes have departed from London for Johannesburg, Azania to hold preliminary meetings, trainings and events with comrades there in preparation for the tour of Chairman Omali Yeshitela to Azania early next year.
SG Luwezi and Comrade Makda are working with a committee of Party-affiliated African workers and students on the ground in the Johannesburg area with plans to hold organizing events on the campus as well as in African townships and communities in Sibokeng and Soweto and to build and strengthen the African People’s Socialist Party in Azania.
The ASI trip is taking place during a time of renewed upheaval in Azania where the fierce resistance of African students and workers against the sell-out government of the African National Congress (ANC) has just won a powerful victory!
It was announced today that the struggle and might of millions of young African working class students and workers have forced the neocolonial ANC government to back down on their tuition fee increase of 11.5 percent for South Africa’s universities. The government was forced to agree to a 0 percent increase!
ASI comrades visit Azania in midst of victory of people’s movement!
Our comrades are arriving in an Azania that is experiencing a strong feeling of exuberance and people’s power following this victory over the ANC government and their lackeys for white power imperialism.
According to an article in CNN today the student victory was about more than just the tuition increase:
“The students have won their demand of a 0 percent increase in tuition fees, with planned fee increases of up to 11.5%, at the heart of the protests.
“However, as ongoing demonstrations prove, the students’ demands have been deeper than this. They have called for the ‘decolonization’ and ‘transformation’ of higher education institutions, the insourcing of outsourced workers (mostly cleaning, security and support staff, often the most vulnerable workers), and the release of their classmates arrested earlier in the week.”
Clearly, twenty years after the end of Apartheid, the contradictions of the vicious, U.S.-backed neocolonial ANC government, propped up to maintain the interests of white power at the expense of the African working class, have come to a head.
Uprisings by militant African students over the past year have forced the destruction and removal of statues of British colonizer and perpetrator of genocide Cecil Rhodes from Azania’s campuses.
They have also rekindled workers’ rebellions, confrontations with the police and the storming of the parliament building in Cape Town. They also follow on the heels of the powerful resistance of African miners at the Marikana platinum mines in 2012.
Today, after two decades of ANC leadership workers in Azania are subjected to colonial conditions that are more brutal than ever.
According to an article in South Africa’s City Press, “Out of the 54 million people in South Africa 35 000 white families, including white businesses, own more than 80 percent of the land.”
The article in CNN continues:
“South Africa, by many measures, is the most unequal society in the world. A quick look at national statistics from 2014 shows that on average the top 10 percent of wage earners take home 90 times more in wages than bottom 10 percent, the top 1 percent earn 393 times the bottom 10 percent…
“Disturbingly, inequality has increased since the fall of apartheid
“Working people cannot afford basic necessities. Recent research shows that a worker with an average of three dependents – all else remaining the same- will need to earn a wage of R4,125 (£200) a month to live above the poverty line.
A shocking 60 percent of black African workers earn less than that, confirming that poverty, inequality and race in South Africa go hand-in-hand…
“South Africa’s youth also face a broader crisis. A third of young people, aged 15 to 24, are not employed or in higher education and the unemployment rate for this group is 50 percent.”
Our Party organizes African youth to build the Azania front of the African Revolution
We salute this powerful victory against the hellish policies of neocolonialism, which have forced the petty bourgeoisie to back down. This victory is a huge inspiration to the African people in Azania, in our fight against settler colonialism with black faces.
The university fee is part of a program designed to exclude our African working class and poor peasant’s children from accessing higher education and skilled employment, keeping the education system as a privilege of the white settler’s population and ANC’s cadres.
We in the African Socialist International are proud to see a new generation of African workers renewing mass struggles that characterised not so long ago, the African resistance against imperialism in South Africa.
From Cape Town to Johannesburg, from Kinshasa to Brazzaville, from Dakar to Ouagadougou, from Ferguson to Baltimore, masses of young African workers fighting for the right to have a future free from colonial police brutality, unemployment and poverty are militantly renewing resistance not seen since the end of “Apartheid” or the sixties and seventies in most of the African nation.
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Today in many parts in the African nation, June 1976 is still remembered for the heroic struggle of the young workers in Soweto, South Africa. This latest round of struggle is another sign that the spirit of the Soweto Uprising will never die until settler neocolonialism is eradicated from the land of Azania and African workers seize and govern our African land and resources.
African students must join the Party of the African working class
We are calling on students to realise that the people of Azania need a real systemic change, which by definition requires a change of system; workers cannot transform our material conditions short of uprooting the core source of our problem: settler neo-colonialism, white power capitalism in blackface in Azania. The revolution must be completed.
Twenty plus years of neocolonial rule inside Azania and over fifty years of neocolonialism throughout the African nation proves beyond a doubt that the African nation is still dominated, fragmented and without real political power.
Our people continue to catch hell while the African petty bourgeoisie is busy repressing the workers and stealing our wealth.
We cannot afford to engage mainly and solely in a struggle for reforms to make neocolonial universities and education better for African students, while the vast majority of the African workers in Azania and the rest of 1.5 billion of African workers in the dispersed African nation continue to be the “wretched of the earth” under the same imperialist system.
We need to to build the African Socialist International, and organise throughout the world to win black people everywhere to join or support the historical building of the African international revolution.
We are calling on Azanian students and intellectuals to unite with the genuine aspirations of African people to be free, repossess our land and unite the African nation by building the African People’s Socialist Party of African workers as part of the African Socialist International in South Africa.
The world capitalist system, built on the theft of our land, our people, our labor and resources must go. The creation of this new world depends on all oppressed African people from every location organizing in the interests of the African workers to liberate, unite and govern our Africa, the birth right of every African on the planet.
That is why this African Socialist International trip in South Africa is so significant. It is a trip to combine all the organizational and philosophical experience of the world-wide African revolution with the brilliance, experience and indomitable spirit of resistance of the Africans on the ground in Azania to advance Azania front of the African Revolution!
It is the obligation of all African revolutionaries to participate in today’s struggle in Azania to allow the Azanian workers to develop to their fullest stature, which is only possible if they play their critical leading role in building the final offensive of the African revolution.
We are building for the Azania tour of Chairman Omali Yeshitela in February 2016—to electrify and unify the African Socialist International in South Africa!
Build to win
One Africa! One Revolution! One Organisation!
