President Cyril Ramaphosa’s newly announced plan to tackle illegal immigration has intensified debate across South Africa, with labour unions welcoming the move, while opposition parties and civic groups argue it falls short of addressing growing public frustration over jobs and service delivery.
In an address to the nation on Sunday, Ramaphosa acknowledged mounting concerns from communities across the country over illegal immigration and outlined an intervention plan aimed at addressing migration challenges.
Among the key measures announced is the recruitment of 10,000 labour inspectors to crack down on employers who exploit undocumented workers.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) has backed the plan, pointing to economic growth, increased investments, infrastructure development and job creation as key solutions to the underlying issues.
COSATU spokesperson, Zanele Sabela, said employers who knowingly hire undocumented migrants to bypass labour laws must face serious consequences.
“Those employers who hire undocumented immigrants with the sole intention of exploiting their vulnerability, paying them a pittance while making them work extraordinarily long hours in unhealthy and unsafe conditions, will be harshly penalised and even imprisoned,” said Sabela.
The President’s announcement comes amid growing tensions over access to employment opportunities, healthcare services and housing, with many South Africans arguing that undocumented migrants place additional strain on already stretched public resources.
Ramaphosa said government would continue tightening immigration controls while strengthening cooperation with neighbouring countries.
“We will continue to crack down on the violation of our immigration, labour and other laws. We will continue to prevent people from entering the country irregularly and illegally. We are and will continue to stamp out corruption in our immigration system,” the President said.
However, the plan has already drawn criticism from some political and civic organisations.
ActionSA mayoral candidate, Herman Mashaba, accused government of responding to pressure from foreign governments instead of prioritising the concerns of South Africans.
Mashaba said government has failed to acknowledge what he described as the “social and economic burden” of illegal immigration, arguing that calls for reform are being unfairly dismissed.
The civil society movement, March and March also criticised the President’s approach. Speaking to our sister channel, eNCA, founder Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, said communities should play a greater role in addressing illegal immigration, arguing that government had failed to fully grasp the scale of the crisis.
The debate has also taken on a diplomatic dimension.
Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Ronald Lamola, recently rejected allegations made by Ghana’s Foreign Minister, Samuel Ablakwa, that several foreign nationals, including five Mozambicans and two Nigerians, were killed during anti-illegal immigration operations in South Africa.
Lamola said police are investigating the deaths of two Mozambican nationals in the Western Cape but dismissed broader claims circulating on social media, warning against what he described as “frivolous or baseless” accusations against South Africa.
A deeply disappointing interview, replete with misinformation.
First, the claim that two Nigerians have been killed during the current wave of attacks remains entirely unsubstantiated by available information.
— Minister: International Relations and Cooperation (@RonaldLamola) June 6, 2026
Meanwhile, migration pressures continue to play out across the region. The first group of 150 Malawian nationals is expected to arrive in Malawi on Monday as part of a voluntary repatriation programme after being displaced by a fire in Mossel Bay during an anti-illegal immigration protest that turned violent.
Cosatu House in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. Picture: (Sunday Times)
Sipho Sono faces contempt charges after refusing to vacate union post
Chartered accountant and senior business rescue practitioner Sipho Sono has approached the Constitutional Court to stop his removal by a lower court as administrator of the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers’ Union (Ceppwawu).
Sono was summoned to appear before the labour court on Monday to explain why he should not be held in contempt of court, jailed or fined for refusing to step down as administrator of the Cosatu affiliate.
Sono’s office said approaching the apex court was a “normal appeal process”, and would not comment further. Judgment on the matter had been reserved until Friday, it said.
Earlier in 2026 the court ordered his removal and appointed Gerhard Vosloo, whose term started on March 1.
“But to Cosatu’s and Ceppwawu’s shock, Sono didn’t pack his stationery and walk off into the sunset; instead, he appealed the ruling and continued as administrator,” Cosatu national spokesperson Zanele Sabela said.
Ceppwawu has about 50,000 members. It was put under administration by the labour registrar in June 2020, after failing to manage its affairs since 2018. Sabela said the first administrator appointed by the labour registrar was axed after union members expressed dissatisfaction with poor performance.
Sono was brought in as an interim administrator for six months before he was eventually appointed.
“His marching orders couldn’t have been simpler — appoint an experienced facilitator to convene Ceppwawu’s regional and national congresses as per its constitution and ultimately elect a new leadership for the union. For his part, Sono would be required to compile audited financial statements from the year ending 2018 onwards,” Sabela said.
The congresses were to be convened and concluded by September 30 2023, after which the control, management and affairs of the union would be handed over to the new union leadership on expiry of Sono’s term on December 12 2023. “But Sono repeatedly failed to deliver on his mandate, prompting the [labour] registrar to petition the court to have him removed,” Sabela said.
She said the labour registrar was concerned about Sono’s “inability to compile and finalise the union’s audited financial statements. Consequently, audited financial statements for the years ending 2018 [to] 2025 are still outstanding”.
For his part, Sono would be required to compile audited financial statements from the year ending 2018 onwards
— Zanele Sabela, Cosatu national spokesperson
“Sono has always maintained there were no funds to compile and finalise the financial statements. However, the labour court found this to be untrue because Ceppwawu Investments had offered him a loan with conditions meant to keep him accountable and transparent,” Sabela said.
“The registrar was also aggrieved by Sono’s failure to manage the union’s funds. A case in point is his refusal to recover union funds his predecessor had helped herself to by accessing Ceppwawu’s bank account, claiming it was monies owed to her from her tenure as administrator. By refusing to recoup the funds, Sono failed to act in the union’s best interests and thereby breached his fiduciary duties.”
In March, the labour appeals court affirmed the January ruling and ordered Sono to vacate his post as Ceppwawu administrator.
“After failing to appoint a facilitator to convene the congresses, not safeguarding the union’s funds, and failing to finalise the audited financial statements, it boggles the mind why Sono was fighting to stay on as Ceppwawu administrator. The one factor he never failed at, however, was paying himself an elaborate fee.”
Sabela said, “Vosloo was appointed by the court in January to replace Sono as Ceppwawu administrator. His term started on March 1 and will expire on December 30 2026.
“As per court order, Vosloo will finalise all outstanding audited financials and convene a national congress to elect national leadership for Ceppwawu, after which he must hand over control of the union to the national leadership.”
Acting always out of the narrowest and most venal of motives, former president Jacob Zuma has probably done more than any single individual in the last 30 years to damage the welfare and political prospects of working-class South Africans. (Gallo Images / Jeffrey Abrahams)
The South African left today is dominated by parties of patronage and corruption and small sectarian groupings. If the Left is to rebuild itself, it needs to break with these elements and forge a movement committed to emancipatory working-class politics.
If late May’s “Conference of the Left” was any indication of what progressive forces have to offer, the Democratic Alliance (or DA, South Africa’s main center-right opposition party) should rest easy. The scare quotes are needed because the biggest parties at the gathering cannot in any sensible way be defined as left-wing. Theirs were the loudest voices in the hall, and it gave a ringing hollowness to the entire proceeding.
For a party that can’t seem to retain any senior leader for longer than two months, the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) delegation appeared surprisingly well organized. MK was the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) during apartheid; the name was revived by former president Jacob Zuma in 2023 to launch his own breakaway party after the ANC moved to prosecute him for corruption. Tony “Mercedes” Yengeni — a former ANC chief whip jailed for fraud after accepting a discounted Mercedes-Benz from an arms company during a government procurement deal — addressed the gathering on its behalf on the first day. On the second, they tried to maneuver Jacob Zuma onto the podium, thankfully without success.
Zuma has probably done more than any single individual in the last thirty years to damage the welfare and political prospects of working-class South Africans. Acting always out of the narrowest and most venal of motives, he used his presidential power to hand over executive functions of government to a crime family and green-lit a statewide looting spree that gutted institutions across the board, collapsed service provision, and wiped out a decade’s worth of growth and jobs. Deposed by his own party and facing his comeuppance, he tried, with little success, to instigate a coup and then, with somewhat more success, a popular insurrection, which left hundreds dead and wiped out several billion rands more from the economy.
MK is his extended entourage, a party erected entirely in his own image and molded to his every impulse. It’s a clown car of gangsters and grifters who betray, cheat, and steal from each other with such rapaciousness it would be comic if it weren’t so tragic. Not even family members are safe from this — the most lurid of its unending scandals has involved Zuma’s daughter trafficking her own cousins to Russian mercenary groups.
MK represents the deepest moral degeneracy of the political class in South Africa. Nelson Mandela, Joe Slovo, and Walter Sisulu — the liberation movement figures who founded the original uMkhonto weSizwe in 1961 — would be doing tailspins in their graves if they knew even half of what was being carried out in the name of the organization they founded.
Several other caudillos of corruption were prominent on the first day. State-capture luminary and former Zuma lieutenant Ace Magashule — who ran the Free State provincial government as a personal patronage fiefdom for a decade before being suspended from the ANC — spoke for his African Congress for Transformation party, essentially the Free State chapter of MK.
Particularly ominous was Irvin Jim’s presence on the podium. Jim is the longtime general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), once the country’s largest and most militant union. Just over a decade ago, NUMSA spearheaded an earlier ill-fated attempt to unite the Left outside the ANC.
The early days of this initiative looked promising — the United Front brought together unions, community movements, and socialist parties long stranded in separate corners of the political landscape. But the sprouting of democratic self-activity that followed proved too much for the union leader. Funded by the American tech billionaire Neville Roy Singham, Jim stifled the United Front and replaced it with the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party, a toy vanguard built around his own authority, which duly collapsed in a few years. The voice of the international “left” was represented last weekend by his staunch ally in these endeavors: Singham agent Vijay Prashad.
We should be somewhat less strident in making the case against the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), South Africa’s third-largest party, but only somewhat. Unlike MK, the EFF’s official ideology colors more consistently within the lines of left-wing politics, albeit a version of it that belongs mostly to the early twentieth century. The rot starts from the head in the EFF but hasn’t reached all the way down. There is a not insignificant layer of grassroots activists in the organization whose commitments are more honest than anything its leadership is capable of representing.
But democracy is the weapon of the weak against the strong, and these comrades have none of its benefits. The EFF is, like all the others on this roster, a one-man party. And that man — Julius Malema, its founder and commander in chief — like all the others, is one who puts business before politics. He’s a captain of industry in the vast informal economies of patronage and rent-seeking that have been corroding South Africa’s political space for the last three decades.
Including these groupings in the event was a grave insult to every well-meaning delegate that attended the conference and to the proud traditions of emancipatory politics in South Africa on which they sought to build.
I have no good insights into what prompted the South African Communist Party (SACP) organizers to make that decision. The most generous reading would put it down to a naive desire to be ecumenical and not restrict the boundaries of the coalition before the fact of democratic input. The less generous interpretation is that the space between the SACP — itself not entirely untouched by corruption — and the patronage “left” has narrowed so much that the decision seemed natural.
I hope it was the former. And I suspect that, in making this call, SACP leaders might have been willing to shelve their reservations out of deference to the apparent strength of the patronage parties.
What We’ve Lost
But MK and the EFF are weak in all the things the Left needs and strong in all the ways it should fear. Their presence dragged down the level of discussion and drowned out the voices of the grassroots activists who were desperately trying to salvage something useful from the gathering.
I was asked to present framing remarks in one of those discussions — on economic strategy. I happened to have spent much of the previous week reading through old issues of the Shopsteward (the journal of the Congress of South African Trade Unions) and the South African Labour Bulletin for a research project. The period I was focused on — the late 1980s and early 1990s — was the apogee of the South African left.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) at the time was the organizational backbone of one of the most mobilized populations in the world — a millions-strong labor movement with robust shop-floor structures, deep ties to social and civic movements, and the confidence of a class that had vanquished a three-hundred-year-old system of oppression. These strengths are reflected fully in its intellectual life — the deep sophistication of the debate in those years emerged from a living confrontation with power, carried by organizations that had to think seriously because they were significant enough for their ideas to matter.
I used my remarks to urge comrades to revisit this moment in our history and to try to emulate its strategic seriousness. They were not well received. First to respond was a senior figure from the EFF. Why, he probed, had COSATU failed if it had been so strategically sophisticated? His answer was numbingly simple: labor strategists had forgotten the fundamentals, the need to seize land and means of production. That should be our economic strategy.
That set the tone for the subsequent debate. Numerous speakers questioned why, in the words of one, we weren’t “obsessed enough” with taking back the land. Riffing off this, another boldly ventured that the “main problem” facing black people in the country is the constitution (because land, presumably).
A few voices tried to guide the discussion back to reality — asking what sorts of concrete demands might actually improve lives and build support on the ground. But they were outnumbered — not just by members of the patronage groups but by representatives from the numerous Mickey Mouse parties that accounted for a substantial portion of the rest of the conference delegation.
These aren’t corrupt in the ways MK is. But they are similarly deracinated and deluded — filtering reality exclusively through Bolshevik texts written in a period before most workers had seen an assembly line.
The crudeness of this conversation, juxtaposed to the quality of the engagements I had read in the journals of the early 1990s, gave me one of the most sobering moments I’ve had in the almost two decades that I’ve been involved with the South African left.
The whole impetus for the conference suddenly seemed misguided to me. Our actual task, it was made clear, is not to unite the Left but to rebuild it.
The challenges we face in this regard go far beyond the influence of patronage. Thirty-odd years ago the South African left was bifurcated. One half of it was absorbed into the vast party-state apparatus being erected around the Alliance — the formal tripartite alliance between the ANC, SACP, and COSATU that governed the country after 1994. The other was shunted to the furthest margins of the political landscape by that growing juggernaut. Too close to power on the one side and too far from it on the other, each degenerated in its own way.
As just one marker of this, scarcely a single significant left-wing journal remains in print in 2026.
Every apparent opening seems to take us two steps back. The so-called NUMSA moments swallowed up the few coordinating structures the “independent left” possessed. Its only legacies were deeper divisions and a degraded union. Rhodes Must Fall injected US-style campus radicalism into South Africa’s political culture, leaving nothing but bad blood and bad poetry in its wake.
The pseudoradical sloganeering that the EFF and MK have perfected is now the common grammar of a much wider layer of self-proclaimed activists. Common is the student leader who has never tilled more than a pot plant in their life but will confidently proclaim that all problems of program and tactics can be reduced to reclaiming the land. Incidentally, what the datasay about that proposal is that big majorities still support land redistribution but virtually no one — outside of a few rural communities — thinks it’s a major priority.
By and large, working-class South Africans want the benefits of a modern industrial economy — jobs and secure incomes. They don’t want to go back to being peasants. That should be as obvious as day. But try saying it to a room full of lefties, and you won’t be allowed to finish the sentence. This singular obsession with the land question is the cleanest indicator of the Left’s detachment from mass politics and its drift into a stratosphere of symbolism and slogans.
What We’ll Lose
The tragedy of all of this is that the moves the SACP is making are well timed and, if better executed, could have had an entirely different outcome. As I’ve argued at length elsewhere, the ANC’s decline is leaving open a giant space in the political map, one that should look very inviting to an aspirant left.
The reasons we are seeing this are obvious. Millions of voters are deserting the ANC because of a flaccid economy, collapsing service delivery, and corruption. The EFF and MK — offshoots of the ruling party that embody the worst of its corrupt tendencies — are hardly likely to become the new political home for most of these.
But neither are they likely to gravitate toward a party of white privilege, which pigheadedly denies the political realities most obvious to ordinary South Africans: that the legacies of the past still confine our present. There’s more data to back this up: overwhelming numbers of black South Africans support the state intervening to reduce inequality and overcome historic disadvantages, policies the DA has consistently opposed.
This all might be changing. The latest figures here are several years old and are trending downward, perhaps reflecting the popular disaffection with state provision. There are early signs that the DA, for the first time, is breaking into majority-black voting districts in a substantial way and softening its liberal fundamentalism as it grows. But deep loyalties will take time to forge.
For now, the political field remains wide open. For the Left, the basic formula to to enter that field in a convincing way seems clear: we need a party that triangulates between the two currently dominant camps — matching the DA in its anti-corruption credentials but remaining committed to economic transformation and to a viable plan for jobs. The two sides of this platform are mutually conditional: only a party that can restore some credibility to the public sector can win with an economic agenda predicated on public power.
Formulas are easy to derive, of course; fulfilling them is much harder. I honestly have no idea whether the SACP is fit to play a meaningful role here. Its recent history has not exactly been inspiring. But with something of an organizational machinery still intact and some limited experience with elections and governance, it’s arguably better placed than any other going concern on the Left.
Not, however, if it continues to choose the pseudo-left over the working class. This is what I meant earlier when I said that patronage parties are weak in the things we need. Radical blather combined with flagrant corruption is not a recipe that will win the Council of the Left — the coordinating body formalized by the recent conference — mass support (see a decade of flatlining EFF electoral results for the evidence).
Yet these parties are strong in ways that we should fear. They have the organizational and financial muscle to dominate the new “left” front, as we saw last weekend.
That muscle does not derive from the places the Left has traditionally drawn strength. It’s not rooted in a highly activated and educated membership. It doesn’t come from powerful shop-floor or street-level structures. It’s not girded by ideological clarity or strategic sensibility. It derives, instead, from patronage and populism. It comes from the personal magnetism of strongmen and the machineries of distribution that gather around them.
That is the engine of MK and, to a lesser extent, the EFF. Whatever vestigial commitments these parties have to the principles of the Left are a hindrance rather than a help — witness the EFF’s anti-xenophobic stance, its one outstanding act of principle, which has cost it dearly.
Sooner or later, this will be recognized. Patronage groupings will start to appreciate that the traditional wellsprings of the right — God, family, and fatherland — marry better with systems of patronage than the emancipatory vocabulary of the Left ever could. Deference to authority, patriarchal order, and nationalist belonging — elements already well blended into MK’s ideological armature — are much more natural idioms for a politics built on personalist loyalty and favors from above.
The existing patronage leaders will either evolve naturally in their direction or be overtaken by others less encumbered by the pretenses of popular power.
Jumping into bed with them is not, therefore, a shortcut to reviving the left. It’s a surefire way to doom it. It will only prove the DA leader’s point: that left-right distinctions will quickly cease to have any real meaning in South African politics. The only relevant cleavage will be between a bloc that wants to govern in favor of the existing elite and a bloc that doesn’t want to govern at all — whose only ambition is to finish picking over the carcass of the South African state.
If the latter is what the public comes to associate with the Left, it will be catastrophic for our long-term project. The images from two weekends ago of Yengeni, Magashule, Malema, and company pontificating in front of a big “Conference of the Left” banner, flanked by SACP leaders, took us one step closer to that outcome. It was a sad sight. If the Left is to be rebuilt, it will not be through the people who helped destroy the conditions for working-class politics in the first place.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has refuted assertions that the departure of undocumented immigrants would not create immediate jobs for South Africans.
The labour federation says that there are sectors in the country’s labour sphere, that are exclusively manned by foreign nationals, and those are jobs that could improve the high youth unemployment rate in South Africa.
“There has been this narrative that even if all the migrants left tomorrow, it doesn’t mean there will be jobs for South Africans. I don’t think that’s necessarily true because in those sectors, you have retail, you have hospitality, those jobs would be for young people. We have a problem with youth unemployment in this country so I don’t see a young person who would turn up their nose at a job,” says Zanele Sabela, Cosatu’s spokesperson.
Video: Cracking down on illegal immigration, labour
The South African Municipal Workers’ Union in the Western Cape welcomes the recent court judgment declaring aspects of the City of Cape Town’s tariff structure unlawful. This judgment is an important victory for residents and communities who have consistently raised concerns about the affordability, legality and fairness of municipal charges imposed by the City. It reaffirms an important principle: municipalities are not above the law. They must exercise public power lawfully, fairly and in the interests of the communities they are constitutionally mandated to serve.
For SAMWU, this judgment raises serious questions about governance, decision-making and the use of public funds by the City of Cape Town. Residents and ratepayers are entitled to know how much public money was spent defending a tariff regime that has now been found to be unlawful. They are equally entitled to know what steps will be taken to ensure that similar unlawful decisions are not repeated in future.
While the City has every right to pursue legitimate legal remedies where genuine disputes exist, such rights must be exercised responsibly. Public resources cannot be treated as an unlimited litigation fund to defend decisions that may have been flawed from the outset. Every rand spent on avoidable and unsuccessful litigation is a rand taken away from service delivery, infrastructure, worker development and community support.
This matter does not affect residents alone. Municipal workers have for years experienced the consequences of a litigation culture in which arbitration awards, court orders and dispute resolution outcomes are routinely challenged by the City, even where workers have already succeeded in proving their cases. This approach delays justice, prolongs suffering and places workers and their families under unnecessary financial and emotional strain.
SAMWU is currently assisting members whose matters have remained before the courts for more than five years, while some workers have spent close to a decade awaiting finality despite having already secured favourable rulings. In other instances, employees who have obtained reinstatement orders continue to face further delays in receiving salaries and back pay legally due to them. Some are even forced to return to court simply to enforce judgments already granted in their favour. This is unacceptable. Justice delayed is justice denied.
Municipal workers are not separate from the communities they serve. They are residents, ratepayers, parents and breadwinners. They face the same rising cost of living, the same municipal charges and the same economic pressures confronting communities across Cape Town. When public funds are wasted on prolonged and unsuccessful litigation, both workers and communities carry the burden.
The Union therefore finds it difficult to understand how the City can publicly raise concerns about the financial implications of adverse judgments while, at the same time, spending significant public resources on litigation that often delays justice for workers and communities alike. Accountability cannot be demanded from residents and workers while being absent from those entrusted with making legal and administrative decisions on behalf of the City.
A municipality genuinely committed to justice should not force workers to spend years enforcing rights they have already won. Nor should it spend public money defending decisions that ultimately fail legal scrutiny.
SAMWU therefore calls on the City of Cape Town to urgently review its litigation strategy, particularly in labour matters. Appeals and review applications should only be pursued where there are genuine and reasonable prospects of success, not as a tactic to delay implementation or frustrate workers who have already won their cases.
The City must publicly account for expenditure incurred in unsuccessful litigation, implement arbitration awards and court orders without unnecessary delay, and strengthen alternative dispute resolution mechanisms where appropriate to avoid wasteful legal costs. Decision-makers must also be held accountable where public funds are repeatedly spent on litigation that ultimately fails.
In particular, SAMWU calls for accountability within Labour Relations Management where advice and decisions repeatedly result in unsuccessful litigation at significant cost to the public purse, while workers and their families are subjected to years of avoidable hardship.
The Union is not suggesting that the City should abandon its legal rights. We are calling for a responsible, balanced and accountable approach that recognises both the financial cost to taxpayers and the human cost to workers.
At a time when communities are struggling with rising living costs and municipal workers continue to provide essential services under difficult conditions, public funds must be used to improve lives, not to prolong disputes that could have been resolved fairly and lawfully.
SAMWU believes accountability must apply equally to all. Just as residents are entitled to demand accountability when public funds are spent defending policies later found to be unlawful, workers are entitled to demand accountability when prolonged legal battles delay justice, prolong suffering and consume scarce public resources.
The City of Cape Town must demonstrate its commitment not only to defending legal disputes, but to fairness, accountability, responsible governance and respect for the rights of both workers and communities.
Issued by SAMWU Western Cape Province
Mhle Dlamini
SAMWU Provincial Secretary
074 706 7943
The trade union federation believes fresh leadership can help return SAPO to sustainability and create new opportunities through courier services and an expanded Postbank. Image: Bhekikhaya Mabaso / Independent Newspapers
The federation said the appointment answers long standing calls from Cosatu, its affiliate the Communications Workers’ Union (CWU), and SAPO employees for “fresh, competent and committed leadership” capable of steering the struggling entity back to stability.
According to Cosatu, years of weak leadership and the organisation’s inability to adapt to changing trends in the postal and communications sectors have left the Post Office on the brink of collapse.
“For far too long SAPO has been allowed to deteriorate to a state of near collapse,” the federation said.
“The absence of dedicated and fit for purpose leadership has been at the centre of this painful decline in addition to SAPO’s failing to keep pace with structural shifts in the postal and communications sectors.”
The trade union federation was particularly critical of the business rescue process that began in 2023, arguing that it had failed to produce meaningful results while placing a heavy burden on workers.
Cosatu said the tenure of the Business Rescue Practitioners had delivered “nothing to show beyond retrenching thousands of SAPO employees and plunging their families into absolute poverty and despair, closing hundreds of branches and thus further shrinking its customer base and potential to recover.”
It further criticised the fact that workers had gone years without inflation linked wage adjustments, while alleging that the practitioners had ensured “to pay themselves sumptuous fees.”
Recent warnings that SAPO could face liquidation have heightened concerns over the future of the state owned enterprise. Cosatu, however, said liquidation was not an option.
“Cosatu will never agree to the liquidation of SAPO. The only liquidation that must take place is that of the BRPs,” the federation said.
“It is time that the Department approached court to remove the BRPs and provide the Board with the necessary space and support to ensure SAPO is stabilised and set back upon the path to sustainability.”
The federation believes there is precedent for a successful recovery, pointing to the turnaround efforts underway at other state owned enterprises such as Transnet and Metrorail.
“The turnaround of other embattled state owned enterprises from Transnet to Metro Rail proves that they can be fixed and once again contribute to stimulating economic growth and creating jobs with competent management, the removal of criminal and corrupt elements, filling frontline vacancies and recruiting critical skills, and investing in the company’s infrastructure and capacity.”
Cosatu also highlighted legislative changes that it believes could provide SAPO with new revenue streams. The SAPO and Postbank Amendment Acts, passed by the sixth Parliament, allow the Post Office to expand into the lucrative courier market while positioning it as a one stop centre for public services.
At the same time, the legislation enables Postbank to develop into a fully licensed state bank focused on serving working class and rural communities that often struggle to access mainstream banking services.
“The SAPO and Postbank Amendment Acts passed by the 6th Parliament provide a turnaround plan for both institutions, by allowing SAPO to enter the highly lucrative courier business and to become a one stop shop for citizens to access public services and enabling the Postbank to become a fully licensed state bank aimed at working class and rural residents all too often redlined by the private banking sector,” Cosatu said.
Looking ahead, the federation said it would seek urgent engagements with the Ministry and Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Communications and Digital Technologies to secure commitments around job protection, outstanding payments to workers and the implementation of a comprehensive recovery strategy.
“It is critical that Treasury provide the necessary financial support to enable such a turnaround to be implemented as a matter of the highest priority,” Cosatu said.
