He spoke at the Zamokuhle community hall in Amersfoort.
Mpumalanga SACP leader Bonakele Majuba has told the hundreds who attended the party’s Bua Thursday on Freedom Day that the people who killed communist leader Chris Hani actually killed the future of South Africa.
Majuba said it was worrying that after 23 years of democracy the people of South Africa were still without jobs and slept on hungry stomachs but were made to believe that voting would bring them freedom.
The provincial firebrand leader was speaking in Amersfoort, south of Ermelo, during the party’s Bua Thursday talks on Thursday this week.
The Bua Thursday talks had been positioned by the party to be Hani memorial lectures across the province.
The whole month of April in the calendar of the SACP commemorates the assassination of Hani outside his home in Boksburg, east of Johannesburg, on the Saturday morning of 10 April 1993.
Majuba said if Hani was not killed on this day he would be the president of South Africa when the late Nelson Mandela stepped down in 1999.
“We’re saying if Chris Hani was allowed to live we believe that this suffering we’re seeing today wouldn’t be there, we see our people at public hospitals being given Panados and others dying in front of the gates of private hospitals just because they don’t have to enter as the hospital is private and is for those with medical aids and not for you because you have no money,” Majuba said to thunderous applause.
He said Hani was fighting for the equality of all people who lived in South Africa and not for the inequality, unemployment and poverty “that we’re seeing today”.
“Those people who killed Chris Hani they killed the future of our children,” Majuba said
“When we’re talking about freedom we’re not talking about voting only, that you should wake up in the morning and go to vote on an hungry stomach and when you return from the voting station you’re still hungry,” he said.
He said Hani would have made sure of proper freedom – freedom with education, food, water, electricity and land.
“The Boers knew that when we communists take over we’d take the land and give it to people,” Majuba said.
The Bua Thursday talks are organised by the Young Communist League every Thursday as part of reaching out to communities.
Majuba said that Hani was never a coward and “if you YCL, you want to be like Chris Hani but you’re a coward, you’re an insult to Chris Hani”.
The event was attended by provincial young communist leader Tinyiko Ntini, who also addressed the hall, Gert Sibande YCL’s Ayanda Mashaba and SACP’s Touch Ndlovu as well as Nkangala YCL leader Colile Dlamini and other regional communists.
“Now we’re asking ourselves whether this freedom means that when our people are able to vote it means freedom,” Majuba said, before taking a swipe at the Gupta family, President Jacob Zuma’s son and nephew, Duduzani and Khulubuse, saying that Hani didn’t die for the Gupta and for Khulubuse “to get all the tenders in the country”.
(edited by ZK)
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