Sona: groups make their voices heard

Protesters including members of the Walking Bus initiative and those calling for food security, are demonstrating outside the Cape Town City Hall ahead of State of the Nation Address Picture: Ayanda Ndamane/ African News Agency

Protesters including members of the Walking Bus initiative and those calling for food security, are demonstrating outside the Cape Town City Hall ahead of State of the Nation Address Picture: Ayanda Ndamane/ African News Agency

Published Feb 11, 2022

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CAPE TOWN - Civil society made their voices heard in the CBD in the lead-up to Thursday’s State of the Nation Address (Sona), with demands stretching from the continuation of funding for community projects to the end of capitalism as it is in South Africa.

The area surrounding the Cape Town City Hall was abuzz with journalists and various groupings, including union representatives and social advocacy groups.

Members of the Cape Flats’s Walking Bus initiative were among those who demonstrated on the sidelines, after they recently threatened mass action at Sona if Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis did not respond to a list of demands.

The initiative was started by mothers in gang-ridden communities to protect their children from gangsters while walking to school, but it was disbanded and funding diverted to a protection force to guard municipal workers providing services in the communities.

Walking Bus chairperson Vanessa Adriaanse said they would continue with their picket until their demands were met by the City.

“We gave a document to the mayor on February 4.

“One of the demands was that he must come back to us before the Sona which is today, so we were waiting for his communication.

“Clearly, he has undermined us, our demands are just simple: It's just ’Hands off our Walking Bus’, and we want our stipends back which the City has taken away,” said Adriaanse.

The City was unable to respond to questions by deadline on Thursday.

Members of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) held a picket on Thursday, demanding an increase in basic income grants, clearer fiscal framework and social services.

Saftu spokesperson Trevor Shaku said: “Saftu reiterates its call for the monthly basic income grant of R1 500. President Ramaphosa must listen to the cries of anguish and feel the plight of our people, not take ersatz advice from a group of privileged neoliberal economists.

“The advisory council, unlike the panel of experts that investigated the feasibility of the Basic Income Grant, issued a stern warning against the introduction of a basic income grant, citing in an unsubstantiated manner, the risks to damage economic growth and job creation.”

Shaku said the inability of South African capitalism to create jobs had been demonstrated by employment shedding across all sectors of the economy.

“As illustrated so clearly in the case of Israeli-owned Clover, SA’s oldest dairy manufacturer, there is an unnecessary jobs and wages bloodbath under way leaving thousands on a desperate strike.

“Besides, South African capitalism has always been characterised by structural unemployment insofar as the colonial land theft, the apartheid Bantustans, and the capitalist's migracy system created a reserve army of labour, one that regrettably continued after 1994.

“This fact alone justifies the necessity of a basic income grant, contrary to the wisdom of high-powered experts whose disreputable profession of an economist, so rarely corresponds to possessing knowledge about the actual economy,” he said

Cape Times

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