CWU’S RESPONSE TO THE DA’S CALL TO BREAK UP AND SELL THE SABC The Communication Workers Union (CWU), wishes to dismiss with the contempt it deserves the policy position of the Democratic Alliance released to the media wherein a sinister and neo-liberal call is made for the SABC to be dismantled and or privatized wholesale. The DA further calls for government to sell its stake in Telkom as well as the privatization of signal distributor Sentech and Broadband Infraco. Indeed South Africa needs a diversity of ownership and voices to articulate their aspirations, however there is already a plethora and multiplicity of private ownership and control of the media landscape in this country. To ask for the broadcasting regulator ICASA and the Competition Commission to oversee the sale of such public entities like SABC, Sentech and Infraco is like asking for these statutory bodies to preside over the slaughter and liquidation of part of their own. As organized labour, we are not apologetic in our position that public sector broadcasting must be protected against the narrow commercial interests, market domination and private corporate culture. The continued existence of the SABC is in the best interest of the South African public and these should never be subjected to the bourgeois interests of the private sector as advocated by the DA. It is quite bizarre and incongruent for the DA to tell the nation as part of their election ploy that they will break up and sell the public broadcaster to the highest bidder whilst on the other hand they intend to gauge the opinion of the South African people via public hearings on whether the country needs a public broadcaster or not. Since the DA is has no meaningful popular appeal, it boggles the mind to even begin imagining the form and content of these so-called public hearings unless such are a mere illusion on their part. The call to privatize Broadband Infraco clearly illustrates the DA’s lack of confidence in the state’s capacity to develop, manage and expand universal access to broadband infrastructure which is so critical to the developmental needs of our country. Typical of the logic of capitalism to increase production and profits for a few, their call for stiffer market-regulated competition in the IT sector is not part of the agenda to meet social needs. The DA is still obsessed with the capitalist myth and falsehood that points to the ‘free-market” as the panacea to all the socio-economic ills facing the global society. These policy positions would never benefit ordinary South Africans in general and the working class in particular. Ridiculous as they are, it is not entirely surprising since the DA has always championed the narrow class interests of capital and its hangers-on. While we in the broad progressive camp advocates for the expansion of the public sector and the state’s capacity to drive a radical second phase of our democratic transition, the counter-revolutionary forces coalesced around the DA are conspiring somewhere in a dark corner to reverse both the gains and the prospect for an uninterrupted advance of the national democratic revolution whose logical conclusion must of necessity result in the creation of a socialist state of workers power and the ultimate resolution of class contradictions in society. CWU stands firm and unrelenting in its opposition to any further privatization of state and parastatal entities which are of strategic value to service delivery, especially the promotion of access to information, communication, educational programming and entertainment. Privatization will result in the loss of more jobs and the downgrading of wages and service conditions of workers. Our workers in Telkom and elsewhere have already suffered heavily as a result of the jobs bloodbath from the partial privatization and listing of Telkom in the 1990s. The DA’s proposals must be rejected outrightly by the ANC-led government and the people of South Africa as they constitute a backward step for our country and the economy. Issued by Communication Workers Union. For more information, please contact Thabo Mogalane, Acting General Secretary, 0827105666
Posted on: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 17:55:04 +0000
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