Amid the gathering of a "small" group of protesters outside the Sandton Convention Centre, former British prime minister Tony Blair said that the most successful countries in the world are those with open-minded people who accept innovation. "Those countries who are open to people who are different, those who are open to nations who are different, those who are open to ideas and innovation create successful economies and societies," he said at the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit in Johannesburg.
"This globalised world offers huge opportunities if people are open-minded. I feel that right now that it is very important in terms of leadership... you have to take responsibility for difficult and often profound long-term decisions." Blair joked about Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu's decision to pull out of the summit in protest at his attendance. "It's amazing how nice people are to you when you stop being prime minister -- except archbishops of course," he said. "He [Tutu] is perfectly entitled to do what he wants to do. The essence of democracy is that sometimes you are faced with very difficult positions."
Tutu withdrew from the conference because of Blair's decision to back the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003. Blair said removing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from power had been difficult. "We are faced with the same types of decisions now with Syria. Do we intervene or not intervene? With Iran, do we allow them to get nuclear capability? Are we prepared to intervene and stop them?"
Tutu's office said earlier in the week that the summit had leadership as its theme, and this could not be separated from ideas of morality. Tutu believed Blair's support of the US's military invasion was morally indefensible. Blair fielded questions from the audience about his decision to invade Iraq. "I took the decision in good faith... I knew it was a highly controversial and difficult thing, but I believed it was right. "The one thing that I have learnt about leadership is that in the end, that is my responsibility. I have to stand by that [decision]. In the end that is what you will elect leaders to do. I will never regret removing a brutal dictatorship."
Blair, flanked by bodyguards, spoke about the attempts that had been made to place him under citizen's arrest for crimes against humanity. "Why don't they actually go protest against the people doing the killing and the bombing and the suicide attacks?" He said the threat of Islamic fundamentalism was still an important issue the world had to overcome.
"Extremism is still there, but we are not going to [see it end]... until we tackle it for what it is. It is based on a perversion of religion and it has to be stood up to," Blair said. "They [extremists] are funded and financed by people with a very warped view of the world and who will take away a lot of the freedoms that we have."
Protest
A member of the audience heckled Blair during his speech. "Thank you... a little bit of protest to make me feel at home," he said. The heckler was escorted out of the hall. He heckler told Talk Radio 702 he had said: "Tony Blair, you are a war criminal and I'd rather listen to Tutu". Meanwhile, outside the convention centre protesters gathered because of his role in the deployment of soldiers in Iraq in 2003. .
The Society of the Protection of our Constitution is seeking a warrant of arrest for Blair. The society's secretary Muhammed Vawda says they've filed a 'crimes against the state' complaint with the police, who've opened a docket. He says the case will now go to the National Director of Public Prosecutions for a decision. The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal - an alternative to the International Criminal Court with no UN recognition or authority - found Blair and former US President George W. Bush guilty in absentia last year of crimes against humanity and genocide in the 2003 Iraq war.
Muslim political party Al Jama-ah earlier said it plans to affect a citizen’s arrest on Blair outside the convention centre. "We hope that Mr Blair will do the right thing and try and clear his name at the International Court of Justice in the Haque. However, our dossier indicates that there is overwhelming evidence that he is guilty of crimes against humanity," said party leader, Ganief Hendricks."
He said in spite of the heavy security at the conference - which led to the conference being delayed - the party had hoped that "one of the delegates will get to Mr Blair so he realizes the charges against him will never be buried and be top of mind until he has his day in court. When this happens, it is then up to the law enforcement authorities to take the matter forward."
The police had cornered off the area and closely monitoring the situation where protesters could be seen carrying poster that read "Tony u phony" and "Blair is a war criminal". Among them was the national secretary of the Young Communist league (YCL) Buti Manamela who also addressed the protestors. The protest was broken up shortly after Blair's address. VOC/AGENCIES
Source: The Voice of the Cape
Showing posts with label Buti Manamela. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Buti Manamela. Show all posts
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Monday, August 6, 2012
Young Communist League - firing Angie Motshekga won't help
The cheapest political point for any youth formation to score at this time is to jump onto the bandwagon of hatred for Angie Motshekga. The minister of basic education, as the foremost educator in the government, is taking a lot of heat for the mess that is the Limpopo education department. Having failed to deliver textbooks for schools for Grades 1 – 3 and 10 for more than half a year, the department has become a mockery and even the intervention of a provincial task team and the national department has not cleared the mess up. This has become so big that alliance members of the ruling African National Congress have started to voice their concerns. Very loudly and publicly.
When it emerged that national treasury would have to fork out additional funds to support a catch-up programme and pay teachers overtime, the Congress of South African Students president Bongani Mani said, “We reiterate our call to Mama Angie to stop playing games and embarrassing the ANC-led government any further and resign immediately [to] spare President Jacob Zuma the pain of having to fire her… Minister Angie must not force the National Treasury to waste taxpayers’ money; rather she must take [it] from her salary and all those found responsible [should] pay for all that needs to be paid to remedy the crisis that has emerged on her watch.”
For its part, the ANC Youth League threatened action if Motshekga did not go. The deputy secretary general Kenetswe Mosenogi said, “Minister Motshekga is herself an obstacle to education; she cannot take responsibility for the most basic of challenges. She must resign within two weeks or we will mobilise our members and occupy the basic education department in Pretoria.”
Yet at the 91st birthday rally of the South African Communist Party on Sunday, the secretary of the Young Communist League Buti Manamela said that firing Motshekga may not be a smart move since the rot actually lies deep in her department.
In an interview with Daily Maverick, he said that he did not specifically call for the DoBE minister to be fired because this was really the prerogative of the president. “[Zuma] has commissioned a report on the matter and he will decide what action to take based on that report, whether it is a rap on the knuckles, or redeploying [Motshekga], or whatever,” Manamela said.
He continued: “Whether the president decides to fire her or not, there are people in the department who are responsible for this. Even if you fire her, you have to clear out these people as well. You can call for Angie’s head, but it won’t help the situation.”
The YCL secretary directed most of his ire at EduSolutions, the company that won the tender to deliver textbooks in Limpopo. He said, “The people who were given business by government – they should not have been working with the government in the first place if they cannot do something as simple as taking a textbook from A to B. This goes to the heart of the crisis in the system. It goes to our call to ban tenders in crucial services in government.”
At the birthday rally, communist party general secretary Blade Nzimande said that the government should not be outsourcing services in ‘priority services’ as identified by the ANC, like education and health, but the state should build capacity to deliver these services itself.
Manamela said that there were stories emerging that suggested the EduSolutions problem was not limited to Limpopo, but that the company was overcharging the government in other provinces, and delivering the wrong textbooks all over the country where it has tenders.
He said that they were not excluding the possibility that someone or some people in Limpopo were deliberately sabotaging this task so as to interfere with the Section 100 administrative action taken by the national government in several departments in Limpopo.
At the end of last year, the Cabinet took a decision to enact a provision of the Constitution which allows it to inject itself unilaterally into a provincial government. Since the same document is very strict about separation of powers between the different tiers of government, a lot has to go wrong before the uppermost echelon can take such an action. Unfortunately for the people of that province, premier Cassel Mathale and several of his key people chose to interpret this as a hostile political move (perhaps aimed at punishing Mathale for his longstanding support for Zuma’s enemy, Julius Malema).
Whether the textbook crisis could have been sparked deliberately is a question we may never be able to answer, but we do already know that several suspects in the department have tried to silence one of the key whistle-blowers.
Ironically, the YCL stance brings it in line with that of the opposition party Democratic Alliance, which has said that Motshekga is perhaps not the one person to blame in this.
Party leader Helen Zille wrote, “…we in the Western Cape have experienced Minister Angie Motshekga as one of the few – perhaps the only – education ministers since the dawn of democracy 18 years ago who genuinely understands the needs of the school system and is prepared to take some tough decisions to fix it. She stands virtually alone, in the wasteland of education's ‘shell state’, where many incompetent cadres masquerade as top officials with fancy titles, but have little understanding of and even less commitment to the needs of education.”
Despite this stance, the party has since called for her to resign.
Meanwhile, the outcomes of a report commissioned by Zuma, and another by the Limpopo premier, are still to be announced or released publicly. An independent auditor sent out by the DoBE found that many schools still hadn’t received textbooks despite a court order compelling the department to clear the mess up by June 27.
Perhaps calls for Motshekga to resign are not that misplaced. The buck ought to, after all, stop with her. Sipho Hlongwane
Source: Daily Maverick
When it emerged that national treasury would have to fork out additional funds to support a catch-up programme and pay teachers overtime, the Congress of South African Students president Bongani Mani said, “We reiterate our call to Mama Angie to stop playing games and embarrassing the ANC-led government any further and resign immediately [to] spare President Jacob Zuma the pain of having to fire her… Minister Angie must not force the National Treasury to waste taxpayers’ money; rather she must take [it] from her salary and all those found responsible [should] pay for all that needs to be paid to remedy the crisis that has emerged on her watch.”
For its part, the ANC Youth League threatened action if Motshekga did not go. The deputy secretary general Kenetswe Mosenogi said, “Minister Motshekga is herself an obstacle to education; she cannot take responsibility for the most basic of challenges. She must resign within two weeks or we will mobilise our members and occupy the basic education department in Pretoria.”
Yet at the 91st birthday rally of the South African Communist Party on Sunday, the secretary of the Young Communist League Buti Manamela said that firing Motshekga may not be a smart move since the rot actually lies deep in her department.
In an interview with Daily Maverick, he said that he did not specifically call for the DoBE minister to be fired because this was really the prerogative of the president. “[Zuma] has commissioned a report on the matter and he will decide what action to take based on that report, whether it is a rap on the knuckles, or redeploying [Motshekga], or whatever,” Manamela said.
He continued: “Whether the president decides to fire her or not, there are people in the department who are responsible for this. Even if you fire her, you have to clear out these people as well. You can call for Angie’s head, but it won’t help the situation.”
The YCL secretary directed most of his ire at EduSolutions, the company that won the tender to deliver textbooks in Limpopo. He said, “The people who were given business by government – they should not have been working with the government in the first place if they cannot do something as simple as taking a textbook from A to B. This goes to the heart of the crisis in the system. It goes to our call to ban tenders in crucial services in government.”
At the birthday rally, communist party general secretary Blade Nzimande said that the government should not be outsourcing services in ‘priority services’ as identified by the ANC, like education and health, but the state should build capacity to deliver these services itself.
Manamela said that there were stories emerging that suggested the EduSolutions problem was not limited to Limpopo, but that the company was overcharging the government in other provinces, and delivering the wrong textbooks all over the country where it has tenders.
He said that they were not excluding the possibility that someone or some people in Limpopo were deliberately sabotaging this task so as to interfere with the Section 100 administrative action taken by the national government in several departments in Limpopo.
At the end of last year, the Cabinet took a decision to enact a provision of the Constitution which allows it to inject itself unilaterally into a provincial government. Since the same document is very strict about separation of powers between the different tiers of government, a lot has to go wrong before the uppermost echelon can take such an action. Unfortunately for the people of that province, premier Cassel Mathale and several of his key people chose to interpret this as a hostile political move (perhaps aimed at punishing Mathale for his longstanding support for Zuma’s enemy, Julius Malema).
Whether the textbook crisis could have been sparked deliberately is a question we may never be able to answer, but we do already know that several suspects in the department have tried to silence one of the key whistle-blowers.
Ironically, the YCL stance brings it in line with that of the opposition party Democratic Alliance, which has said that Motshekga is perhaps not the one person to blame in this.
Party leader Helen Zille wrote, “…we in the Western Cape have experienced Minister Angie Motshekga as one of the few – perhaps the only – education ministers since the dawn of democracy 18 years ago who genuinely understands the needs of the school system and is prepared to take some tough decisions to fix it. She stands virtually alone, in the wasteland of education's ‘shell state’, where many incompetent cadres masquerade as top officials with fancy titles, but have little understanding of and even less commitment to the needs of education.”
Despite this stance, the party has since called for her to resign.
Meanwhile, the outcomes of a report commissioned by Zuma, and another by the Limpopo premier, are still to be announced or released publicly. An independent auditor sent out by the DoBE found that many schools still hadn’t received textbooks despite a court order compelling the department to clear the mess up by June 27.
Perhaps calls for Motshekga to resign are not that misplaced. The buck ought to, after all, stop with her. Sipho Hlongwane
Source: Daily Maverick
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Manamela re-elected at violent YCL congress
Young Communist League's Buti Manamela was on Saturday re-elected unopposed as the organisation's national secretary. Manamela survived the much talked about contest for the position at a chaotic and violent congress of the South African Communist Party's youth wing.
Four delegates from Mpumalanga were taken to hospital after they were injured by chairs allegedly thrown by disgruntled KwaZulu-Natal delegates. They supported Khaye Nkwanyane, the former deputy general secretary who was contesting Manamela for the national secretary position. KwaZulu-Natal is his home province.
Police fired teargas inside the Great Hall of the University of the North West's Mafikeng campus to disperse the violent crowd. On Saturday the congress was dominated by disagreements ranging from credentials to electoral rules. The Mail & Guardian had earlier learnt from delegates close to the process that the outgoing national committee had reached a deal whereby Manamela would retain his national secretary position and Nkwanyane would be guaranteed the national chairperson position in the name of "unity and ensuring that this process goes on".
The newly-elected top five leadership of the YCL are:
* Chairperson: Yershen Pillay
* Deputy chairperson: Mawethu Rune
* Treasurer: Joyce Tsipa
* National Secretary: Buti Manamela
* Deputy Secretary: Mike Mofutsane
A delegate from KwaZulu-Natal told the M&G that the province appreciated the contribution that Manamela made to the YCL, but did not want him to serve another term in office. "We are the ones who went to Polokwane and said Thabo Mbeki should not serve the third time. Why should we now allow it in the YCL?" asked the delegate. "He has served his time. We cannot reduce the organisation to one person". Aggrieved delegates said that Manamela and his supporters "stole" the conference. "They told us that we are breaking for dinner and once some people left the hall they decided to continue with the nominations," said a delegate from Limpopo.
The congress was so chaotic that delegates did not break into commissions, which normally discuss the state of the organisation and constitutional amendments should they be needed. It was expected that the YCL's Mafikeng congress would amend the constitution to allow Manamela to serve as both an ANC MP and the young communists' national secretary without being full-time at the SACP's head office. "Nothing was done since Thursday," a delegate from KwaZulu-Natal said, who added that the province would not recognize the leadership elected on Saturday. He and other delegates, who were outside the congress venue, were prevented from entering the hall by armed police who stood guard after calm was restored. "There is YCL BM (Young Communist League Buti Manamela) inside that hall and then there is YCL SA (Young Communist League South Africa) outside," the angry delegate said.
Source: Mail & Guardian
Four delegates from Mpumalanga were taken to hospital after they were injured by chairs allegedly thrown by disgruntled KwaZulu-Natal delegates. They supported Khaye Nkwanyane, the former deputy general secretary who was contesting Manamela for the national secretary position. KwaZulu-Natal is his home province.
Police fired teargas inside the Great Hall of the University of the North West's Mafikeng campus to disperse the violent crowd. On Saturday the congress was dominated by disagreements ranging from credentials to electoral rules. The Mail & Guardian had earlier learnt from delegates close to the process that the outgoing national committee had reached a deal whereby Manamela would retain his national secretary position and Nkwanyane would be guaranteed the national chairperson position in the name of "unity and ensuring that this process goes on".
The newly-elected top five leadership of the YCL are:
* Chairperson: Yershen Pillay
* Deputy chairperson: Mawethu Rune
* Treasurer: Joyce Tsipa
* National Secretary: Buti Manamela
* Deputy Secretary: Mike Mofutsane
A delegate from KwaZulu-Natal told the M&G that the province appreciated the contribution that Manamela made to the YCL, but did not want him to serve another term in office. "We are the ones who went to Polokwane and said Thabo Mbeki should not serve the third time. Why should we now allow it in the YCL?" asked the delegate. "He has served his time. We cannot reduce the organisation to one person". Aggrieved delegates said that Manamela and his supporters "stole" the conference. "They told us that we are breaking for dinner and once some people left the hall they decided to continue with the nominations," said a delegate from Limpopo.
The congress was so chaotic that delegates did not break into commissions, which normally discuss the state of the organisation and constitutional amendments should they be needed. It was expected that the YCL's Mafikeng congress would amend the constitution to allow Manamela to serve as both an ANC MP and the young communists' national secretary without being full-time at the SACP's head office. "Nothing was done since Thursday," a delegate from KwaZulu-Natal said, who added that the province would not recognize the leadership elected on Saturday. He and other delegates, who were outside the congress venue, were prevented from entering the hall by armed police who stood guard after calm was restored. "There is YCL BM (Young Communist League Buti Manamela) inside that hall and then there is YCL SA (Young Communist League South Africa) outside," the angry delegate said.
Source: Mail & Guardian
Thursday, July 17, 2008
COSATU on arrest of David Masondo
The Congress of South African Trade Unions has learned with anger of the bloody assault by officers from Sandringham Police Station on David Masondo, National Chairperson of the Young Communist League of South Africa, and a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party, both organisations which are among COSATU's working-class allies within the tripartite alliance.
Cde Masondo was stopped at a roadblock while jogging in his tracksuit in the suburb where he lives. When addressed by two police officers he answered in his first language, Shangaan (a language spoken both in South Africa and in Mozambique), whereupon the officers called him a "(swearword) foreigner". While the first two officers were harassing him in this way, a third more senior one intervened to say that they should calm down and search Cde David.
As one was searching him, and while Cde David consequently had his hands up in the air, the other one suddenly and without any provocation punched him in the face, starting a fracas during which several other officers assaulted him. They then took him to the police station, trumped up a charge against him, and continued to mistreat him until eventually, later, and with the assistance of his fellow SACP Central Committee members, Solly Mapaila and YCL National Secretary Buti Manamela, he was released from custody. In the process, Cdes Mapaila and Manamela were also threatened with arrest.
David Masondo is a distinguished and respected South African national leader who is also a renowned university lecturer, who will shortly be going to work at New York University for a year with the internationally famous academic David Harvey and others. He was prominent among those who spoke on public platforms condemning the xenophobic pogroms that began on 11 May 2008 in Alexandra Township, not more than two kilometres from where he lives, and where he has now himself been beaten up in a xenophobic attack - by the police!
COSATU is particularly shocked that this should have happened to a gentle person whom we know and love, and who is a valued part of the national leadership of the movement. We are determined to defend our leaders. The federation has consistently denounced xenophobia and are well aware that it most often affects the most vulnerable people in our country, including members of our affiliated unions and others who have few friends at all to defend them.
COSATU therefore backs the YCL's demand that the xenophobic officers who assaulted Cde David Masondo should be subjected to an exemplary, rigorous, and speedy disciplinary process to demonstrate to the country that the South African Police Service intends to mend its ways and purge xenophobia from its own ranks, not just in Sandringham and Alexandra, but everywhere in South Africa.
It is intolerable to COSATU that the very force that is supposed to protect everyone in the country, of whatever origin, should be continuing to prove in incidents like this, of which we believe there are many every single day, that it is itself riddled with xenophobia.
Source: Politicsweb
Cde Masondo was stopped at a roadblock while jogging in his tracksuit in the suburb where he lives. When addressed by two police officers he answered in his first language, Shangaan (a language spoken both in South Africa and in Mozambique), whereupon the officers called him a "(swearword) foreigner". While the first two officers were harassing him in this way, a third more senior one intervened to say that they should calm down and search Cde David.
As one was searching him, and while Cde David consequently had his hands up in the air, the other one suddenly and without any provocation punched him in the face, starting a fracas during which several other officers assaulted him. They then took him to the police station, trumped up a charge against him, and continued to mistreat him until eventually, later, and with the assistance of his fellow SACP Central Committee members, Solly Mapaila and YCL National Secretary Buti Manamela, he was released from custody. In the process, Cdes Mapaila and Manamela were also threatened with arrest.
David Masondo is a distinguished and respected South African national leader who is also a renowned university lecturer, who will shortly be going to work at New York University for a year with the internationally famous academic David Harvey and others. He was prominent among those who spoke on public platforms condemning the xenophobic pogroms that began on 11 May 2008 in Alexandra Township, not more than two kilometres from where he lives, and where he has now himself been beaten up in a xenophobic attack - by the police!
COSATU is particularly shocked that this should have happened to a gentle person whom we know and love, and who is a valued part of the national leadership of the movement. We are determined to defend our leaders. The federation has consistently denounced xenophobia and are well aware that it most often affects the most vulnerable people in our country, including members of our affiliated unions and others who have few friends at all to defend them.
COSATU therefore backs the YCL's demand that the xenophobic officers who assaulted Cde David Masondo should be subjected to an exemplary, rigorous, and speedy disciplinary process to demonstrate to the country that the South African Police Service intends to mend its ways and purge xenophobia from its own ranks, not just in Sandringham and Alexandra, but everywhere in South Africa.
It is intolerable to COSATU that the very force that is supposed to protect everyone in the country, of whatever origin, should be continuing to prove in incidents like this, of which we believe there are many every single day, that it is itself riddled with xenophobia.
Source: Politicsweb
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