Business tycoon Kenny Kunene has told Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi to “go hang or go to hell” after the labour federation leader criticised Kunene’s R700 000 weekend birthday party.
An unapologetic Kunene replied in a two-and-a-half-page “open letter” to Vavi yesterday, saying Vavi had attacked him and his party because ANC Youth League president Julius Malema had been invited, and Vavi had not.
Kunene said Vavi would not be invited to the next party, either.
Malema “was there because he recognises excellence from black business people and, unlike you, he does not condemn wealth indiscriminately”, Kunene said. “He realises that the future greatness of this country lies in the hands of those of us willing to compete to be the best.”
But Kunene said Vavi was “only too happy” to attend the R50 million wedding of businessman Robert Gumede last month.
Vavi told a Cosatu and civil society conference on Wednesday that lavish parties like Kunene’s were “corrupting morality” and amounted to “spitting in the face of the poor”, which made him “sick”, Vavi said.
He also railed against sushi being served off the bodies of “half-naked ladies”, but Kunene did not address this in his reply.
Kunene said he wanted to “correct your misapprehension that my party cost R700 000. It cost more”.
He said he had made his money honestly and did not do business with the government.
Kunene added that Vavi himself had had a “lavish wedding two years ago, with horse-drawn carriages, no less”.
In his letter, he said he had been in prison in the 1980s for “supporting the Struggle so that no one would be able to tell me how to live my life”.
“If you care so much for the poor, then why don’t you stop wearing your high-collar designer shirts, sell your house and live in a shack, and stop meeting in top-class restaurants to hold court on the suffering of the masses?”
Kunene said he planned a “follow-up party” this weekend “for the underprivileged and poor, who are also part of my life, and always will be”.
Vavi, when showed the letter while attending the final day of the Cosatu civil society and labour conference yesterday, laughed at it, as well as the length of the reply. - The Mercury