Gauteng Province, South Africa—As COVID-19 spreads throughout the world, with numbers skyrocketing in many countries daily, the African People’s Socialist Party’s comrades on the ground in Occupied Azania recognize that the struggle we are waging against our colonial enemies is taking place in a fast-changing world where events change overnight.
Throughout all the panic over the threat of the Coronavirus in Occupied Azania, the response, or lack of one, by the neocolonial government has proved what Chairman Omali has said: “The African working class does not have a government, let alone a country!”
That is why our Party is taking power into our own hands through The People’s War strategy.
Throughout the colonized communities here during the current COVID-19 lockdown, we have not seen any activity by local neocolonial counselors or politicians to help our people protect themselves from the threat of the virus.
Instead, these sell-outs are preoccupied with protecting only themselves and their immediate families.
Even the preachers, who always require members to show up in their churches to pay tithe, have not made any suggestion that they will, as a moral duty, assist our people in preparing themselves in case the virus spreads into our neighborhoods.
From the outreach we have done with the residents in Fochville, Evaton West and Piannar in Mbombela just two days before the lockdown, we see the impact of the disorganization in our communities.
We are in Gauteng Province, which has the greatest wealth in the country, but where African workers are forced to live in townships made up of corrugated tin shacks on our own land with no running water and without the basic necessities of life.
Not far away, the white colonizer suburb of Sandton is said to be the richest per square mile in Africa, based on our stolen labor and land!
All of our colonized communities have been hit by surprise with the abrupt announcement of the lockdown that has far reaching implications on the ability of our people to ensure a means of subsistence during the 21 day period of shutting down small businesses in order to satisfy the interest of the big capitalists outlets.
Not only do we find ourselves with communities that are unprepared for the threat of the Coronavirus and hunger being imposed by the State, but we also see that our communities are not prepared for the aggression that naturally comes with the presence of the colonial police and military deployed to contain us.
As it was stated by the director of the Better Life Association (BLA) Asa Anpu on the WhatsApp platform, “The African working class inside South Africa is in two kinds of danger, the current one being the Coronavirus; the second being the South African State.”
Notwithstanding the lack of organization that characterizes our communities, it rests upon us as organizers to win our people to the understanding of what the State really is and the need to organize ourselves for the security and well-being of the whole colonized community.
We have already succeeded in initiating the process of building community COVID-19 Project Black Ankh direct response teams that use WhatsApp as a platform for communication.
We are building The People’s War campaign to take political and economic power into our own hands to show that we can solve our own problems and expose the neocolonial government as an empty shell of white power repression to African workers.
We are winning!
Uhuru!
