Johannesburg - Cosatu and the SACP have accused big businesses of fomenting black-on-black violence in Durban and other areas experiencing attacks on foreigners.
The organisations said “white monopoly capital” in the hospitality and retail industry had deliberately chosen to employ foreigners over their South Africans counterparts in order to exploit foreigners.
Like their counterparts in the ANC, Cosatu president S’dumo Dlamini and SACP second deputy secretary Solly Mapaila insisted the attacks were afrophobic in nature.
“The peculiarity of these attacks is that they are targeting Africans… They should come to a stop,” Dlamini said.
Mapaila described the latest attacks as “extremely worrying”. He said: “The attacks show that we do not value ourselves. It can be described as narrow nationalism.”
The two leaders said the attacks on Pakistanis and Bangladeshis also fell under their definition of afrophobic attacks.
“Whether we call it afrophobic or xenophobic attacks, the reality is that they are targeting a particular skin colour, a particular race, which is largely African. Pakistanis and Bangladeshi also fall within that category,” Dlamini said.
The parties called on the government to act decisively against sectors of the economy that “super-exploit foreign nationals”.
In their statement, read out by Cosatu’s acting general secretary Bheki Ntshalintshali, the parties said: “The perpetuation of imperialist exploitation involving new methods is reproducing and worsening these problems.
“Yet those who are primarily responsible for these problems are basking in the luxury of accumulated surplus wealth.”
The parties expressed concern that the continuation of the violence would adversely affect South Africa’s relations with other African countries.
“Together we have suffered from the historical injustices of displacement, colonial oppression and imperialist exploitation, driven in the main by European colonisers and the imperialist powers of the north.”
Yesterday, the PAC also condemned the “barbaric attacks… directed exclusively at African people”.
The Star