31/05/2026
ADDRESS BY THE GENERAL SECRETARY OF SAFTU
NUPSAW NORTH WEST PROVINCIAL CONGRESS
Theme: “Fighting Workers’ Injustices and Economic Exploitation”
Programme Director,
Leadership of NUPSAW,
Delegates to this Provincial Congress,
Workers of the North West,
Comrades and friends,
I bring revolutionary greetings on behalf of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU). It is a great honour to address this Provincial Congress under the important and timely theme: “Fighting Workers’ Injustices and Economic Exploitation.”
This theme speaks directly to the painful reality confronting millions of workers and poor people in South Africa today.
Thirty-two years after the defeat of apartheid, the working class continues to carry the burden of unemployment, poverty, inequalities, hunger, economic exclusion, collapsing public services, corruption, and deepening social despair.
Yes, democracy brought important gains. Millions gained access to electricity, water, housing, education, social grants, labour rights, and constitutional freedoms. Black professionals and sections of the middle strata expanded significantly after 1994.
But political democracy without economic transformation has left the structure of apartheid capitalism largely intact.
Today South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world.
According to the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the first quarter of 2026, South Africa’s combined rate of unemployment and potential labour force stands at a catastrophic 43.7%. Nearly 5 million people have become part of the potential labour force because they have either become discouraged work-seekers or have given up hope of finding employment altogether. Youth unemployment for those between 15 and 24 years stands at a devastating 60.9%.
This is not merely an economic crisis. It is a humanitarian and social catastrophe.
Here in the North West Province, the crisis is even more brutal.
The combined rate of unemployment and potential labour force in the North West stands at a shocking 54.8%, the highest in South Africa. More than half of the province’s working-age population is either unemployed, discouraged from seeking work, or excluded from meaningful economic participation. Between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 alone, the province lost approximately 80 000 jobs.
This is a province sitting on enormous mineral wealth, yet drowning in poverty, unemployment, inequalities, and social collapse.
The tragedy of the North West is the tragedy of post-apartheid capitalism itself.
Platinum, gold, chrome and other minerals worth trillions of rand have been extracted from this province over generations. Mining corporations and shareholders have accumulated enormous profits from the sweat and blood of workers. Yet mining communities themselves remain trapped in poverty and underdevelopment.
Mining towns such as Stilfontein, Orkney, Klerksdorp and others increasingly resemble abandoned ghost towns. Roads are collapsing. Municipal infrastructure is decaying. Water systems are failing. Sewage spills into communities. Young people roam the streets without jobs, dignity, or hope.
The wealth leaves the province. The suffering remains behind.
Communities are left with poisoned land, polluted water, sinkholes, dangerous abandoned shafts, environmental destruction, and unrehabilitated mines.
Entire communities live daily with the dangers created by abandoned and unsealed mine shafts. Families live with the fear of collapsing ground and sinkholes caused by reckless mining activities and the failure of corporations to rehabilitate the land after extracting profits.
The mining bosses walk away with billions while workers and communities inherit destruction.
At the same time, comrades, we must speak honestly about the crisis of illegal mining and zama-zamas that has engulfed large parts of the North West and neighbouring regions.
This crisis did not emerge in a vacuum.
It is the direct product of mass unemployment, poverty, abandoned mines, state failure, corruption, and an economic system that has discarded millions of workers and young people as human waste.
Criminal syndicates and middlemen now recruit desperate workers — many from neighbouring countries devastated by poverty, instability, and underdevelopment — and force them into some of the most horrific and exploitative working conditions imaginable.
These workers descend into dangerous abandoned shafts without safety equipment, without legal protection, without healthcare, and without human dignity. Many die underground unknown and unmourned. Others are trapped in systems of debt, violence, extortion, and modern-day slavery controlled by heavily armed criminal syndicates.
At the same time, rival zama-zama gangs have turned parts of our communities into war zones. Violent conflicts over control of illegal mining operations have led to murders, shootings, kidnappings, extortion, and terror directed not only at rival gangs but also at innocent working-class communities.
We saw the horrifying consequences in places such as Krugersdorp and other communities across the West Rand, where innocent residents became victims of violent criminality linked to illegal mining networks and lawlessness.
Communities such as Khutsong in Carletonville, Kanana in Orkney have been devastated by unemployment, gangsterism, drugs, violence, and the recruitment of young people into criminal networks because the democratic state has failed to provide decent jobs, education, recreation facilities, and hope.
A generation of young people is being abandoned to criminal syndicates because capitalism has failed to provide them with a future.
But comrades, the crisis is not only illegal mining.
Even legal mining corporations continue to destroy working-class communities with impunity.
Blasting operations are taking place dangerously close to homes, schools, and communities. Working-class families live daily with cracking walls, collapsing houses, dust pollution, noise pollution, contaminated water, and environmental destruction.
Entire communities are becoming uninhabitable.
People are being slowly displaced from areas where their families have lived for generations because mining profits are placed above human life and community wellbeing.
This is environmental injustice.
This is class injustice.
This is economic exploitation in its rawest form.
Workers and poor communities are treated as disposable while corporations extract billions from the soil beneath their feet.
The same contradiction exists in agriculture.
South Africa possesses some of the best agricultural conditions in the world. The North West has enormous agricultural potential capable of creating jobs, ensuring food security, and building local industries through agro-processing and beneficiation. Yet farmworkers remain among the poorest and most exploited workers in society.
Comrades,
The crisis facing workers today is not accidental. It is the direct outcome of the neoliberal economic programme pursued by the democratic state over the last three decades.
Policies of austerity, privatisation, liberalisation, inflation targeting, and fiscal consolidation have devastated the working class.
SAFTU has repeatedly warned that austerity is class warfare against the poor.
Every Medium-Term Budget Policy Framework and every Budget Speech deepen attacks on the public sector and public services.
Government claims there is no money to employ nurses, teachers, doctors, police officers, social workers, cleaners, and community health workers. Yet there is always money for debt repayments, corporate incentives, luxury spending by elites, and corruption.
The result is devastating.
Public hospitals are collapsing because fewer nurses and doctors are expected to carry impossible workloads while serving growing populations. Schools are overcrowded because teaching posts are frozen. Police stations remain dangerously understaffed while crime escalates. Municipal workers are expected to deliver services without resources, equipment, or sufficient staffing.
The burden is continuously shifted onto fewer and fewer shoulders.
Workers are physically exhausted, emotionally drained, and increasingly demoralised.
At the same time, the working class suffers again as users of collapsing public services.
When hospitals collapse, it is workers who die in queues.
When schools collapse, it is working-class children whose futures are destroyed.
When municipalities collapse, it is workers who sit without water, sanitation, refuse removal, roads, and electricity.
This is why SAFTU rejects austerity completely.
South Africa is not a poor country. It is a country where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while millions go hungry.
Comrades,
We must also speak about the growing violence against activists and whistleblowers in this province and across the country.
SAFTU reiterates its strongest condemnation of the assassination of activist Letsie Mokoena, who was killed this very week in Potchefstroom. We send our deepest condolences to his family, comrades, and community.
We equally remember activist Thato Malosankwe, whose killing in Mahikeng shocked communities across the province and added to the growing list of activists whose lives have been cut short under deeply troubling circumstances.
@
These assassinations join a painful and growing list of unresolved political killings in the North West and across South Africa.
We remember Moss Phakoe, who exposed corruption and paid with his life. We remember many other activists, whistleblowers, community leaders, and ordinary people who have been targeted for standing against corruption, criminality, injustice, and the abuse of power.
A society where activists are assassinated for exposing corruption and wrongdoing cannot call itself healthy or democratic.
The continued failure to solve many of these killings sends a dangerous message that those who expose corruption and criminal networks can be eliminated with impunity.
We demand urgent investigations, arrests, prosecutions, and justice for Letsie Mokoena, Thato Malosankwe, Moss Phakoe, and all victims of political killings.
The blood of activists cannot become a normal feature of our democracy.
Comrades,
All of this brings us to an unavoidable conclusion:
We need more trade union consciousness and more class consciousness among workers now more than ever before.
One of the greatest weaknesses of the working-class movement today is that we have increasingly abandoned many of these broader social struggles to isolated community organisations, activists, and NGOs while unions focus narrowly only on workplace issues.
As a result, the working class fights fragmented and isolated battles while capital remains united and organised.
Mining-affected communities are often fighting alone.
Organisations such as the Mining Affected Communities United in Action (MACUA) have been at the forefront of resisting environmental destruction, land dispossession, abandoned mines, pollution, displacement, and exploitation by mining corporations. They are fighting courageous battles, often under dangerous conditions.
But the organised labour movement has not consistently stood shoulder to shoulder with these struggles.
Workers fight wage battles separately.
Communities fight environmental destruction separately.
Young people fight unemployment separately.
Women fight gender violence separately.
Communities fight corruption separately.
Meanwhile, the capitalist class, the mining corporations, and the political elites remain united in defence of profits and exploitation.
This fragmentation weakens working-class power.
The result is that our struggles do not generate sufficient pressure to force fundamental change. Capital can survive isolated strikes, isolated protests, isolated court cases, and isolated community uprisings.
But when workers, communities, youth formations, civic organisations, and mining-affected communities unite in struggle, the balance of forces changes fundamentally.
That is why SAFTU insists that unions must return to their historical role as organs of broader working-class struggle — not merely workplace grievance structures.
We need class-conscious workers who understand that the struggle does not end at the factory gate.
A worker whose house is cracking because of mining blasts cannot separate workplace struggles from community struggles.
A worker whose child sits in an overcrowded classroom cannot separate wage struggles from public sector struggles.
A worker living next to polluted water and abandoned mines cannot separate labour struggles from environmental justice struggles.
Everything is connected.
Capitalism exploits workers both at the point of production and in the communities where they live.
That is why we need stronger unions, deeper political education, and a militant, class-conscious working-class movement capable of uniting all these struggles into one powerful force.
Comrades, a speech can inspire. But organisation changes society.
The future of the working class depends on rebuilding unity, militancy, solidarity, and socialist consciousness.
That is the historic responsibility facing NUPSAW, SAFTU, and the entire labour movement today.
Workers are tired of carrying the burden of a crisis they did not create.
Workers demand dignity.
Workers demand justice.
Workers demand economic freedom.
Forward with working-class unity!
Forward with the struggle against exploitation!
Forward with socialism!
I thank you.
