THE PEOPLE'S PROGRAMME

STATEMENT BY ANC SECRETARY GENERAL ALFRED NZO TO THE JUNE 26TH 1980 FREEDOM DAY MEETING, CAMDEN CENTRE, LONDON

London, 26 June 1980

Dear Friends,
Dear Comrades,

On behalf of the entire membership of the African National Congress, the whole revolutionary movement and the fighting people of South Africa, the working people, the rural masses, the gallant youth and students, our heroic People's Army Umkhonto we Sizwe, we convey warm revolutionary greetings to all the participants at this meeting and through you to the democratic freedom-loving forces of the United Kingdom.

We are gathered here today to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the adoption of the Freedom Charter, the beacon and guiding light of our revolutionary movement.

June 26th, 1980, the 25th Anniversary of the Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter, is an important highlight of this first year of the new decade of the 80s. It is an occasion which challenges all patriotic South Africans to reassess the current phase of the liberation struggle in the light of the ideas of the Freedom Charter and the revolutionary programme of our movement.

It is indeed an occasion to cast our minds back over the past quarter of a century to how and why the Freedom Charter has been and is a 'beacon to the Congress Movement and an inspiration to the people of South Africa' as Mandela put it in his memorable words.

Dear Friends, this assessment is currently the main activity within the ranks of the broad masses of our people through a campaign calling for the release of Nelson Mandela through regional committees that have been formed throughout South Africa whose main tasks have been set along the following lines:

  1. To launch a national leaflet campaign to press for the release of Nelson Mandela
  2. To call for appropriate activities on June 26th to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the Freedom Charter.
  3. To print commemorative stamps for June 26th.
  4. To stress that the Free Mandela campaign implies a call for the release of all the political prisoners.

This wide campaign has been supported by various black political and community leaders, trade unionists, all major churches excluding the 3 white Dutch Reformed Churches, academics, student groups at English and Afrikaans universities, black and white cultural organisations, many English-language newspapers, the Institute of Race Relations, the South African Council of Churches and so on. This wide participation was already a subject of comment by such newspapers as the Rand Daily Mail as early as the beginning of June.

It is salutary to recall that the Congress of the People which adopted the Freedom Charter was held at a time when the political strength and the organisational capacity of the African National Congress was already beginning to shake the foundations of the fascist order in our country; when a peaceful road to freedom still seemed to lie open, some six years before the birth of the People's Army, Umkhonto we Sizwe; when the fighting unity of the oppressed was still in its infancy and the independent movement of the workers firmly committed to the political and economic emancipation of all workers had moved into a new stage with the formation of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) only a few months previously.

The Congress of the People was held at a time when the number of independent African states could be counted on the fingers of one hand and the formation of the Organisation of African Unity was still eight years distant.

It was at a time when the progressive movement uniting the Afro-Asian peoples had just had its foundations laid at the historic Bandung Conference; when French colonialism had been freshly defeated by heroic Vietnam, but the long war against US aggression in Vietnam and other countries of the Indo-Chinese peninsula still lay in the future, and People's Cuba was no more than a dream in the hearts of Fidel Castro and the militants who rallied to the call of revolution.

The clarity and correctness of the ideas of the Freedom Charter testify to the revolutionary maturity of those responsible for drawing up the Charter - the people of South Africa. That the Charter has stood the test of time, outlived its critics and defeated every attempt of the enemy to brand it as 'treason' demonstrates the rich heritage of the struggle of our people, the justness of our cause and the necessity of the Charter as the definitive expression of the goals of our national liberation struggle - the only democratic alternative before the entire people of South Africa and the future guarantor of peaceful development and the happiness of the people of our region and of Africa as a whole.

The Freedom Charter proclaims that our country-South Africa- belongs to all who live in it, regardless of colour or national origin. This reflects the anti-racial and non-racial ideology of the African National Congress. The Charter claims for all the right to govern, to take part in making and administering the laws; to enjoy equal national rights; to share in the country's wealth; equal rights of all to housing, security, education and opportunity; of peasants to land; of the workers to skills; protection of workers' conditions and trade unions.

The Freedom Charter underlines that our future democratic South Africa will firmly uphold the principle and cause of African independence and unity and on a wider international scale we shall stand on the side of those who struggle for peace and friendship of all peoples. In other words it is an absolute negation of Apartheid and racism and all that they stand for. It is permeated with a spirit of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism.

These demands are not 'election manifestos' ambiguously worded to entrap and confuse the 'voter' only to be evaded and forgotten the moment the successful politicians gain office. These are bread and butter issues. They are embodied and crystallised in our slogans and salutations. 'Amandla Ngawethu'; 'Maatla ke a Rona'; 'Power to the People' is an ANC slogan that emerged in the early sixties and became a call that was heard in Soweto during the uprising; it spread and was echoed across our country. This salute can be heard in Botha's jails and also in fascist courts when our leaders and cadres, who, after having suffered the most barbarous torture, react to vicious sentences, sometimes imprisonment for life, sometimes the death sentence, and also in the long sentences that take away the best years of their lives. 'Amandla Ngawethu' simply means 'Mayibuye i Afrika' - we are determined to seize power. This is a declaration of confidence in our just cause and at the same time, contempt for the minority white fascists and their ideology of apartheid.

Dear Comrades, if the Freedom Charter was born as it was in the heat of the revolutionary upheavals in our country during the 50s, we are commemorating its 25th Anniversary at a time when the struggles of our people in South Africa have reached new higher levels, when the decolonisation forces have virtually swept throughout the whole continent of Africa, and indeed when the forces of peace and progress throughout the world have gained and keep gaining the strength necessary to permanently cool the hot heads of aggressive circles in the capitalist world, especially the United States.

We have just celebrated the independence of Zimbabwe. The extent to which this development further changed the balance of forces in Southern Africa in favour of the revolutionary movement of the peoples of the region was reflected in PW Botha's assessment that this development has changed the strategic situation in South Africa. This assessment has been emphasised by the new mood of confidence and revolutionary enthusiasm sweeping throughout the ranks of the oppressed masses of South Africa and Namibia.

South Africa is in political turmoil. Vast sections of the oppressed population are up in arms against the regime of terror in our country. South Africa is in the grips of a countrywide campaign demanding the release of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, our people's leader. This broad activity is closely linked with the Freedom Charter.

The current campaign inside South Africa for the unconditional release of Nelson Mandela and all other political prisoners is indicative of the fact that the present regime has no legitimacy to govern South Africa - hence the demand for genuine leaders of the people to be released to lead the country in accordance with the wishes of all its people. This demand was articulated in the Freedom Charter 25 years ago when we stated that: 'no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people'. This campaign also shows that the people know their true leaders and therefore reject the puppets imposed upon them by the murderous apartheid regime. This is an act against and a complete rejection of the Bantustans and all other apartheid institutions - a deadly blow to the Schlebush Commission proposals envisaging a constitutional arrangement involving the Coloureds, Indians and Chinese (who in any case will have an inferior status to the Whites) to the exclusion of the Africans-the majority of the population and the most oppressed and exploited section of the community.

This demand for the release of Nelson Mandela is also a complete rejection of all reformism and in particular the regime's blind vision of a 'national convention' based on the ill-fated illusion of the concept of the constellation of states based on anti- communism and racism.

There is another aspect to this campaign. The South African racist regime has learnt nothing from the recent developments in Zimbabwe. Indeed the racist Whites in Southern Africa have a 'reputation' of misreading black attitudes and aspirations.

The Zimbabwean elections, against most white expectations, have shown that black 'leaders' who are picked out by Whites as suitable people to lead, will be political destroyed by precisely that recognition and replaced by a people's choice. We have Gatsha Buthelezi in mind.

At periods such as the one through which our struggle is going, when the enemy begins to sense his impending demise, it has often been the strategy of reactionary forces to find spokesmen from among the oppressed people to intercede between the oppressed and the oppressor in favour of the latter. We are now seeing the implementation of this strategy in South Africa also.

The African National Congress was born as an instrument in the hands of our people to unite them and all the democratic forces of our country into one force of struggle for a democratic South Africa. To this day this remains a principal objective that we pursue. It has been in pursuit of this goal that we have, over many years, worked to bring even the Bantustan leaders back to the fold of the mass army for the genuine liberation of our people. As educators and organisers of all our people we have avoided public condemnation of those whom we felt were proceeding in wrong directions from genuinely mistaken positions.

But the conduct of one such as Chief Buthelezi of the KwaZulu Bantustan, especially over the recent past, can no longer be seen as proceeding in wrong directions from genuinely mistaken positions. Rather, it has become clear that Buthelezi has placed himself in the position of an interlocutor between the oppressed and the oppressor in favour of the oppressor. To organise bands of armed men to terrorise the striking school children back to school and to an inferior and racist system of education as Buthelezi has done, is openly to join the enemy's forces of repression. To denounce this or that patriot as a member of the African National Congress, knowing that mere membership of the ANC carries obligatory sentences of long imprisonment is to act out the vile role of a police agent. To seek to turn the anger of the people away from the apartheid regime and direct it against other sections of the black people, for example the 'Indian' people, as Buthelezi has done, is to participate in the commission of the crime of apartheid. To call for the formation of black vigilante groups to fight against our people's army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, as Buthelezi has done, is to assume the mantle of collaborator. To urge the masses of our people to desist from struggling for the release of Nelson Mandela and all other leaders, as Buthelezi has done, is to place oneself among the ranks of the jail warders who keep not only these leaders and other patriots in bondage but also the millions of our people.

Those who place themselves in the path of the struggling masses shall inevitably be swept away together with their racist master whom they serve. In our region that is a lesson which has been confirmed in the recent past by the victories of Frelimo, the MPLA and the Patriotic Front alliance in Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe respectively. South Africa will be no exception! Indeed the very same lesson is being confirmed in Namibia today.

Zimbabwe has also shown the folly of believing that a white minority can enjoy power and privilege indefinitely at the cost of a black majority. The courageous people of Zimbabwe have shown that neither money nor repression and bombardment will move them away from the path of struggle and justice. Enemy propaganda proved to be counter-productive. And what is more, the outcome of the struggle proved that it is virtually in1possible to talk of struggle and liberation without a tested vanguard rooted in the masses of the people and articulating their aspirations. This is the role the ANC is playing in our situation and under our conditions.

What are these conditions and situation? It is not our task tonight to bore the listeners with statistics and figures. But perhaps it is worth remembering that every year, half a million Africans are arrested and imprisoned in accordance with pass laws and 100,000 prisoners are permanently detained in prisons throughout the country where two capital hangings take place weekly.

But the reality of the South African situation is characterised not by arrests or police brutality; the characteristic feature of our situation is the struggle of our people.

The root cause of the recurrent school boycotts by the Coloured, Indian and African students is the racist policy of separate education for the different nationalities. For the Black people education is not only separate but inferior: it prepares them for an inferior role in life; irrelevant subjects are taught; they are not free to do skilled work; education is neither universal nor compulsory. In short, education is intended to keep our people as perpetual servants of their white masters.

The education imparted to the Blacks is so irrelevant that it makes a mockery of the term 'education'. For instance, the emphasis in teaching Agriculture is on 'soil erosion' and nothing is said about the fact that l 3 per cent of the land belongs to Blacks who comprise 80 per cent of the population.

The closure of Fort Hare and sit-ins by students of the University of the North (Turfloop), Westville and University of Western Cape, shows that the students are up in arms. There have been clashes with the police-student bodies are not recognised as channels for negotiation - and students have been politically and academically victimised. The discontent against the administration's use of security guards and police on the campus, the low quality of food and the use of conservative and racist Afrikaans lecturers-these are some of the grievances that lie behind the current school boycott.

On the workers' front the struggle continues unabated. In the Cape Town area we have seen successive strike actions, in Johannesburg and Durban there is no peace and now in Uitenhage in the Eastern Cape, the strikers are demanding an increase of about 90 per cent in their minimum wage but the management of the Volkswagen factory has offered the workers the equivalent of a 20 per cent wage increase in an attempt to prevent the nine-day strike from spreading to other plants such as Ford and General Motors. There are also hair-raising reports about the frightening shortage of housing in the black communities around the country.

The demands put forward by the students, namely a non-racial education policy, equal pay for all teachers and the reinstatement of those teachers unfairly dismissed; the question of higher wages, trade union rights and better housing, the problems affecting the religious community and the land question are all enshrined in the Freedom Charter. Until these demands are met (which can happen only in a free South Africa) these boycotts, strikes, demonstrations and petitions will continue at a heightened level.

This brings us to yet another important aspect of the Freedom Charter, namely how to bring these changes about. The Freedom Charter is explicit on this question. It states: 'And therefore, we, the people of South Africa, black and white together - equals, countrymen and brothers - adopt this Freedom Charter. And we pledge ourselves to strive together, sparing neither strength nor courage, until the democratic changes here set out have been won'. And repeats for the sake of emphasis: 'Let all who love their people and their country now say, as we say here: "These freedoms we will fight for, side by side, throughout our lives, until we have won our liberty".'

In the light of the growing barbarity and intransigence of the racist regime, the ANC and its revolutionary allies decided to form Umkhonto we Sizwe as a core of the future people's army. The main strategic objective of the ANC and its allies is the armed seizure of political power for the establishment of a people's government in South Africa. The recent attacks by the ANC guerillas on two of South Africa's huge Sasol oil-from-coal plants (Sasol l and 2) as well as on the oil refinery have underlined not only South Africa's continuing vulnerability to an oil embargo but even more significantly, for the future development of the revolutionary armed struggle of our people. The SASOL operation demonstrated the growing skill and sophistication of the actions of our people's army-the staunchness of its cadres.

In the last few years we have seen a number of armed actions by the militants of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC. These armed operations within the country have a psychological impact. They instil self-confidence in the people and transform the latent hostility of the people to the regime into open mass confrontation; they intensify the sense of unease and insecurity among the enemy forces, they increase the conviction among the struggling people that victory is certain, and popularise armed struggle. In other words, the establishment of a properly functioning network will depend mainly on the extent to which we have been able to inflict serious blows on the enemy over a fairly considerable period of time. These armed operations therefore are solving the tasks of creating the appropriate psychological and political climate with the intention of building and consolidating the political army of our revolution and swelling the ranks of our people's army, Umkhonto we Sizwe.

What about the question of investments and international solidarity? When we talk of foreign investments we think of the political, economic, military and cultural relations of racist South Africa with the Western world. These investments started with the discovery of diamonds and gold about a hundred years ago and were confined to the manufacturing sector. Now they have entered the military industrial complex via the selling of licences for local production of arms.

Foreign companies play a leading role in fuelling and buttressing the apartheid system; they actively participate in the deliberate exclusion of Blacks from skilled jobs; maintaining the vast and growing average wage differentials between black and white workers, denial of trade union rights to Blacks, race classification, pass laws, preventing free movement of Africans in the land of their birth; strengthening of racism and deliberate exclusion of Blacks from skilled jobs which are filled by white immigrants.

The inflow of foreign capital results in a high standard of living for Whites and increases the gap between Blacks and Whites. Foreign investments enable the South African economy to absorb new white immigrants each year from the rest of the world who fill big managerial and professional posts .

The other disturbing aspect of foreign investments is that they bring new technology which is used in the repression and manipulation of our people, e.g. computerised technology takes white propaganda to black ghettoes and increases the efficiency of the political police in their surveillance of the Black people and their organisations.

Investments boost South Africa's military capacity, because South Africa's balance of trade runs at a deficit but investments bail the South African regime out and this enables South Africa to stockpile essential commodities such as oil and collaboration with that regime is reflected in this great meeting of solidarity with the fighting people of our country. But we recognise that in this decisive period of the struggle in Southern Africa - a period which has witnessed frantic attempts by the Apartheid regime and its western allies to stem the revolutionary tide-the tasks facing all of us are even more urgent. The British Government's intent to bring South Africa 'out of the cold' is being starkly demonstrated in practice as they condone the brutal killings of our people with a blanket of silence; as they allow the British Lions to continue their tour while massive repression intensifies throughout the country.

As the united mass and the armed struggle intensifies in South Africa, the need for all-out action to isolate the regime economically, militarily, by breaking all sporting links; through fighting to enforce the vital oil embargo; by effecting the total isolation of the racist regime-has never been greater. Our people make these demands on you, conscious of the role you have played in the past and in the knowledge that the world's anti-imperialist and democratic forces are united in common struggle. The African National Congress is confident that you will, on this historic occasion, determine to redouble your efforts on all fronts and respond to the challenge ahead.

We, for our part, pledge persistent action which will culminate in the punishment of those who have set themselves up as hangmen of our people. Power will belong to the People-the ANC will punish these criminals. In the words of Comrade Nelson Mandela:

'Between the anvil of united mass action and the hammer of the armed struggle, we shall crush apartheid and white minority racist rule!'

In the face of the present situation-which is fraught with danger-and the fact that our people are up in arms against the South African racist regime, the need has never been greater for all democratic and anti-racist forces, at the national level, at the level of the OAU, non-aligned movements, and at the level of support groups and organisations throughout the world to unite in militant solidarity for the cutting of political, economic, military and cultural links and for the complete overthrow of the Pretoria fascist regime.

Dear Comrades and Friends,

We are proud and happy to announce that by resolution of the National Executive Committee of our organisation it was decided to award two heroes of our revolutionary struggle - Bishop Ambrose Reeves and Govan Mbeki - with the title of ISITWALANDWE on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the FREEDOM CHARTER.

Do we have to go into details of why they deserve this high award of our people? Both of hem have contributed and continue to contribute at different sectors of our revolutionary struggle for the achievement of our strategic goal - seizure of political power. Both of them have held their heads very high refusing to be daunted by the savage barbarity of the reign of terror in our country.

Govan Mbeki is on Robben Island, serving a life sentence, together with Mandela, Sisulu, Kathrada and other leaders of our movement. Throughout the almost two decades of his incarceration, Govan Mbeki has remained true and firmly committed to his revolutionary ideals. The small men who daily taunt and persecute him during all the years he has been in prison have not daunted his revolutionary character. He, together with his imprisoned comrades, continue to serve as a source of inspiration to all the generations of freedom fighters in our country. This inspiration has continued to fuel the flames of our revolution.

Bishop Ambrose Reeves is well known not only to our people, among whom he had lived and worked until the regime of terror could no longer tolerate his presence in South Africa, but we are certain that the progressive and democratic forces in the United Kingdom amongst whom he has continued to work for our cause ever since he left South Africa, hold him in very high esteem indeed. We highly value his contribution as one of the architects of the powerful solidarity movement that has been built in this country in support of the heroic struggle of our people. Both these heroes richly deserve the high award of ISITWALANDWE which is a symbol of the undaunted heroes of our struggle and people.

AMANDLA NGAWETHU!

MAATLA KE A RONA!

FORWARD TO FREEDOM IN SOUTH AFRICA!

VICTORY IS CERTAIN!