Latest news with #MbusoNgubane
IOL News
16-06-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
Organise or Starve: Youth Mobilisation Key to Overcoming Poverty, Unemployment and Inequality
Members of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA) marched through the streets of Durban, March 19, 2014 to highlight youth unemployment in the country. Image: Independent Media Archives Mbuso Ngubane This Youth Day, we must speak the truth without the varnish of liberal sentiment. The truth is this: South African youth are under siege. They are not free. They live under the dictatorship of hunger, unemployment, crime, and hopelessness. This is not a democracy for the working class. It is a capitalist nightmare, run by the same comprador elite who inherited the whip from the apartheid bosses, and now wield it in the name of profit. The Young Lions of 1976 rose against Bantu Education and the racist capitalist state. They had no illusions. They understood that the struggle for education could not be separated from the fight for freedom and dignity. Today, our youth face a different, but no less brutal enemy: neoliberalism, austerity, and a corrupt ruling class that has sold out the dreams of liberation. We must remember that the youth who marched in Soweto in 1976 were not just reacting to Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. They were rejecting a system designed to make them hewers of wood and drawers of water — cheap labour for white capital. The apartheid bosses, like the ANC's current neo-liberal government, feared nothing more than a politically educated and organised youth. Steve Biko said, 'The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.' That is why we must centre political education. Without it, the youth are led like lambs into the slaughterhouse of TikTok distraction, and fake entrepreneurship, and are dying for sneakers and status. The revolution must begin in the mind, and move into action. The youth of today must not be reduced to hashtags and handouts. You must organise. You must take power into your own hands. The capitalist system has nothing to offer you but casualised labour, surveillance, poverty, and mental collapse. The gig economy is not freedom — it is wage slavery without the dignity of a contract. We must return to the principle Lenin taught us: "Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement." That means building youth structures rooted in class struggle. NUMSA's youth structures are not built on empty slogans but on political education, shop-floor militancy, and international solidarity. We must build unity among the unemployed, the precarious, the students, and the exploited. In Cuba, the youth were not bystanders in the revolution. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were in their twenties when they picked up arms and overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista regime. Today, because of that struggle, Cuban youth have universal education, healthcare, and a future not dictated by private profit. Video Player is loading. 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Next Stay Close ✕ In Burkina Faso, the revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara placed young people at the heart of nation-building. He trained them in agro-ecology, literacy, and defence. He built schools and clinics. He fought against corruption, privilege, and the domination of international finance. He said: 'While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.' And today, in the same country, young Captain Ibrahim Traoré has become a symbol of defiance against the old order. Whether his government can remain on a revolutionary path is not guaranteed. But what is clear is this: young people in Burkina Faso have rejected the old elite and are demanding that their country serve the people, not foreign powers. It is a lesson for us here. We too must reject leaders who have long passed their sell-by date, men who cling to office while the country burns; men who were once comrades and have become tyrants. The revolution must be renewed by the youth or it will rot in the hands of the old. Even in the belly of the beast, in the United States, we have seen young people rise. From the Black Panthers to today's movements like Black Lives Matter, young people have resisted imperialism and racial capitalism. However, we must also be clear: without structure and class analysis, movements can be co-opted and destroyed. In South Africa, the reality is stark. Youth unemployment sits above 60% for those under 25. But the capitalist state has no solution. The ANC government implements budget cuts, not jobs. They militarise communities instead of building schools. They worship private capital and destroy public institutions. The solution is not individual hustle, nor is it waiting for handouts from ministers living in luxury. The solution is organisation. We must build revolutionary youth brigades, trained in Marxist theory, linked to working-class struggles and rooted in the community. We must revive the spirit of the Young Communist League, of COSAS in its militant days, and of youth who linked their liberation to the overthrow of capitalism. Youth must return to the factory gates, to community halls, to classrooms and campuses with one message: We are not commodities. We will not be sacrificed so that the rich can live in Sandton while we rot in townships.
IOL News
16-06-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
Organise or Starve: Youth Mobilisation Key to Overcoming Poverty, Unemployment and Inequality
Members of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA) marched through the streets of Durban, March 19, 2014 to highlight youth unemployment in the country. Image: Independent Media Archives Mbuso Ngubane This Youth Day, we must speak the truth without the varnish of liberal sentiment. The truth is this: South African youth are under siege. They are not free. They live under the dictatorship of hunger, unemployment, crime, and hopelessness. This is not a democracy for the working class. It is a capitalist nightmare, run by the same comprador elite who inherited the whip from the apartheid bosses, and now wield it in the name of profit. The Young Lions of 1976 rose against Bantu Education and the racist capitalist state. They had no illusions. They understood that the struggle for education could not be separated from the fight for freedom and dignity. Today, our youth face a different, but no less brutal enemy: neoliberalism, austerity, and a corrupt ruling class that has sold out the dreams of liberation. We must remember that the youth who marched in Soweto in 1976 were not just reacting to Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. They were rejecting a system designed to make them hewers of wood and drawers of water — cheap labour for white capital. The apartheid bosses, like the ANC's current neo-liberal government, feared nothing more than a politically educated and organised youth. Steve Biko said, 'The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.' That is why we must centre political education. Without it, the youth are led like lambs into the slaughterhouse of TikTok distraction, and fake entrepreneurship, and are dying for sneakers and status. The revolution must begin in the mind, and move into action. The youth of today must not be reduced to hashtags and handouts. You must organise. You must take power into your own hands. The capitalist system has nothing to offer you but casualised labour, surveillance, poverty, and mental collapse. The gig economy is not freedom — it is wage slavery without the dignity of a contract. We must return to the principle Lenin taught us: "Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement." That means building youth structures rooted in class struggle. NUMSA's youth structures are not built on empty slogans but on political education, shop-floor militancy, and international solidarity. We must build unity among the unemployed, the precarious, the students, and the exploited. In Cuba, the youth were not bystanders in the revolution. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were in their twenties when they picked up arms and overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista regime. Today, because of that struggle, Cuban youth have universal education, healthcare, and a future not dictated by private profit. In Burkina Faso, the revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara placed young people at the heart of nation-building. He trained them in agro-ecology, literacy, and defence. He built schools and clinics. He fought against corruption, privilege, and the domination of international finance. He said: 'While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.' And today, in the same country, young Captain Ibrahim Traoré has become a symbol of defiance against the old order. Whether his government can remain on a revolutionary path is not guaranteed. But what is clear is this: young people in Burkina Faso have rejected the old elite and are demanding that their country serve the people, not foreign powers. It is a lesson for us here. We too must reject leaders who have long passed their sell-by date, men who cling to office while the country burns; men who were once comrades and have become tyrants. The revolution must be renewed by the youth or it will rot in the hands of the old. Even in the belly of the beast, in the United States, we have seen young people rise. From the Black Panthers to today's movements like Black Lives Matter, young people have resisted imperialism and racial capitalism. However, we must also be clear: without structure and class analysis, movements can be co-opted and destroyed. In South Africa, the reality is stark. Youth unemployment sits above 60% for those under 25. But the capitalist state has no solution. The ANC government implements budget cuts, not jobs. They militarise communities instead of building schools. They worship private capital and destroy public institutions. The solution is not individual hustle, nor is it waiting for handouts from ministers living in luxury. The solution is organisation. We must build revolutionary youth brigades, trained in Marxist theory, linked to working-class struggles and rooted in the community. We must revive the spirit of the Young Communist League, of COSAS in its militant days, and of youth who linked their liberation to the overthrow of capitalism. Youth must return to the factory gates, to community halls, to classrooms and campuses with one message: We are not commodities. We will not be sacrificed so that the rich can live in Sandton while we rot in townships.
IOL News
25-05-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
Workers of Africa: The Unfinished Struggle for Liberation
Kenyan Nairobi, 2024-06-24. Protesters confronting a police officer during a protest against Kenya's new Finance Bill in Nairobi on June 24, 2024. Africa's workers face a coordinated attack by capital, both local and global, backed by the IMF, the World Bank, and complicit elites who have abandoned the very people they once claimed to serve, says the writer. Image: AFP Mbuso Ngubane AFRICA Day is not a day for celebration in the narrow sense. It is a day of remembrance, reflection, and recommitment. We do not mark the birth of the Organisation of African Unity on the 25th of May 1963 with song and dance alone. We mark it with struggle. The very idea of Africa's unity, and its promise of liberation, has always rested on the backs, and in the hands, of its workers. Not just those who labour in mines and factories, but also those who clean homes, till the soil, sew clothes, raise children, and build roads. It is working-class men and women, those who carry the continent's burdens daily, who have borne the cost of empire, and it is they who have carried the fight for freedom across generations. Africa's liberation has never been the product of state declarations or elite negotiation. It has always been forged in protest, in strike, in sweat, and often in blood. When Ghana rose under Nkrumah, it was the strikes of railway and cocoa workers that shook the colonial economy. In South Africa, it was not the ballot box alone that broke apartheid. It was the power of the organised working class, from the 1973 Durban strikes to the formation of militant unions like the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa. The same can be said of Guinea-Bissau under Amílcar Cabral, where the peasantry and rural workers were central to building a people's war. Cabral was clear: 'Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.' And we must now also be clear. Africa is not yet free. The great betrayal of African independence was that while flags changed and national anthems were composed, the economic system remained intact. The colonial economy, rooted in extraction and exploitation, continued to thrive. This time under African managers, but still under the same logic of capital. Workers remained landless, poor, and expendable. Their voices were marginalised in the very nations they had helped to liberate. As Thomas Sankara warned, political independence without economic justice is merely the illusion of freedom. Sankara, a revolutionary of rare honesty and vision, called for a break with neo-colonialism, for land redistribution, for women's emancipation, for a new economic order rooted in self-reliance. He was murdered by the very forces that feared what might happen if workers truly led. And today, we must ask: what has changed? In South Africa, nearly 50% of young people are unemployed. Women continue to carry the burden of unpaid reproductive labour, while also surviving on precarious wages in the care and retail sectors. Miners die underground, farm workers live in shacks, domestic workers are denied basic protections, and informal traders are harassed and criminalised. The economy remains colonial in structure. It exports raw materials, imports manufactured goods and services for the profits of capitalists while communities go hungry. This is not transformation. It is continued dispossession. The same conditions exist across much of the continent. In Nigeria, oil workers face mass retrenchments while the profits are repatriated to multinational giants. In the DRC, children dig for cobalt with their bare hands, fuelling a so-called green economy that has no place for them. In Kenya and Uganda, trade union leaders are imprisoned or assassinated. In Morocco and Tunisia, workers organising for dignity are crushed under anti-terror laws. From the Sahel to the Cape, Africa's workers face a coordinated attack by capital, both local and global, backed by the IMF, the World Bank, and complicit elites who have abandoned the very people they once claimed to serve. But this is not just a story of defeat. New fires are burning on the continent. In Mali and Burkina Faso, led by figures like Assimi Goïta and Ibrahim Traoré, there is a rebellion against the dominance of France and the plunder of our resources. These processes are complex, often contradictory, and we must watch them with both hope and clarity. But what cannot be denied is that something long suppressed, is now stirring. A Pan-African consciousness is resurfacing. Not from orchestrated summits or high-level dialogues, but from the lived experiences of those whose hands sustain our economies. It is returning through the organised defiance of farmworkers resisting landlessness, through the daily calculations of informal traders navigating criminalisation and debt, and through the collective frustration of unemployed youth with no future promised to them. It is shaped not in abstractions, but in concrete material struggle. What we are seeing is not a spectacle. It is a substance, and it cannot be ignored. On this Africa Day, we must reject the empty symbolism of liberation without transformation. We must say clearly that the project of African unity is meaningless if it does not speak to the daily struggles of working people. Africa will not be saved by billion-dollar infrastructure deals, or by a new scramble for lithium and rare earths. It will be saved by the transformation of our societies along the lines of justice, equity, and people's power. That re-organisation begins with workers. Those who produce value, who build nations, who raise the next generation. The trade union movement on the continent must rise to this occasion. We must rebuild our solidarity across borders. We must reject the legal straightjackets imposed on our organising. We must stop relying on state patronage and return to the grassroots, to the workplaces, to the streets. Unions cannot be junior partners in capitalist development. We must be the voice of an alternative future. We must also be honest about our failures: where we have been co-opted, where we have ignored women's struggles, where we have failed to adapt to the realities of the informal and unemployed. A movement that cannot renew itself cannot lead.
