The Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC has written the President, Congress of South African Trade Unions, COSATU, Doar Gemrado Prosidont, extending what it calls “hand of solidarity and kinship” to the labour movements as co-travellers in the long and bitter struggle against exploitation, racial capitalism, and neoliberal savagery.
The letter signed by NLC President, Joe Ajaero said organised labour in Nigeria writes to the south African trade union, with the urgent alarm of a fellow labour centre
that is watching with horror as the ghosts of nativism and xenophobia once again stalk
the streets of South Africa.
The NLC stressed that it is compelled by the blood of fellow black workers;
Zimbabwean, Malawian, Mozambican, Somali, Nigerian, and others; who are being
murdered, not for any crime, but for the sin of being Africans in another African country.
Ajaero noted that it is appalled at the destruction of livelihoods of Africans built through years of sweat and blood on the streets of South African Towns, adding that the killings and destructions are a reactionary fever born of the same neoliberal crisis that is crushing workers and masses across the globe.
Ajaero added that the crisis of unemployment, housing, and social services in South Africa is real, and do not dismiss the pain of its South African comrades.
Labour qarried that the response of the ruling class has always been to turn the
oppressed against each other, like when the bourgeoisie fails, the foreign worker becomes the
scapegoat, explaining that workers common enemy is not the migrant worker hawking goods in Soweto or
mining in Rustenburg, but, neoliberalism, capitalism’s most vicious
mask, failed government policies that failed to address the needs of workers and people.
Organised labour in Nigeria used the letter to call upon COSATU to lend its
powerful voice without equivocation and condemn these xenophobic attacks in the
strongest terms, not as a mere press release but as a mass mobilization, so that every
trade union hall, every shop floor, and every picket line carries the message that an injury
to one is an injury to all.
Labour further demands that COSATU uses its immense weight to pressure the South African
government to take robust and immediate steps against these attacks.
( Editor: Nkoli Omhoudu)
