Cope members 'honorary whites'
2009-05-11 16:32
Johannesburg - National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) leaders launched a scathing attack against the Congress of the People on Monday, saying its founders had inferiority complexes and were "honorary whites".
Numsa general-secretary Irvin Jim warned members against "selling out" to the breakaway ANC party.
"The elections process exposed the fact that Terror Lekota, [Mbhazima] Shilowa and their friends, although they had been members of the ANC, they had a serious problem of inferiority complex and that they never understood the meaning of the national democratic revolution.
"Their noise about the 'rule of law' qualifies them to be 'honorary whites' as it is mainly white people who own the real means of production in this country and control the economy," said Jim.
New union
Both Shilowa and another Cope member, Willie Madisha, are former union leaders. Madisha has since started a new union movement.
"What has [gone] wrong in our federation?" asked Jim.
"Madisha was our president. Shilowa was our national general-secretary. How can our federation present such people?"
Jim was speaking at the union's mini-national congress in Boksburg, east of Johannesburg.
Union members should not "cross the picket line and sell out", he said.
Jim said members needed to be educated on political awareness.
"So that we will be able to differentiate between water, paraffin and petrol," said Jim, in an apparent reference to so-called sell-outs within the union's ranks.
"Cope has taught us a lesson in the liberation to be vigilant and to always remember that it is not everybody around us who is actually with us."
DA 'hate Zuma'
Jim also took a swipe at the official opposition, saying the Democratic Alliance clearly "hate Comrade Jacob Zuma".
"They fear him because they have failed to brainwash him and they fail to corrupt his mind," said Jim.
Numsa president Cedric Gina, whose union claims some 260 000 members and is an affiliate of the ANC's partner, the Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu), described Cope as the "enemy".
"Cope is an enemy of the workers and the poor and we must defend our factories and communities from them. It is indeed unfortunate that some of their leaders were once leaders of the trade union movement," said Gina.
- SAPA