28/08/2026
Addressing the YNITU National Congress. Every leader, shop stewards, union official and activist must read and listen to this presentation
Address by SAFTU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi at the he YNITU National Congress 28 August 2026
Incoming President and National Office Bearers, Delegates to this historic National Congress, Shop stewards and worker leaders, Comrades,
We bring you revolutionary greetings on behalf of the South African Federation of Trade Unions(SAFTU).
Today we have not come merely to congratulate YNITU for convening another Congress.
We have come to say that the very fact that this Congress is sitting is itself a victory.
It is a victory for democracy.
It is a victory for worker control.
It is a victory against bureaucratisation and the hollowing-out of workers’ organisations.
Above everything else, it is a victory for the simple but revolutionary proposition that:
A trade union belongs to its members.
Not to its General Secretary.
Not to its President.
Not to officials.
Not to an administrator.
Not to lawyers.
Not to service providers.
Not to investment companies.
Not to political parties.
A union belongs to the workers who sacrifice part of their wages every month to build it.
That principle must become sacred again.
YNITU has walked through the fire!
Comrades,
SAFTU and YNITU have walked a difficult road together.
When YNITU was placed under administration, we did not regard this merely as an administrative or legal matter.
Something more fundamental was at stake: the right of workers to control their own organisation.
We raised concerns about governance, finances, constitutional processes and democratic functioning. But we also understood that administration could never be the permanent solution.
An administrator cannot permanently replace elected worker leadership.
A courtroom cannot replace a shop-floor meeting.
A lawyer cannot replace a shop steward.
A bureaucrat cannot replace a worker mandate.
Ultimately, only workers can save a workers’ organisation.
That is why this Congress is so important.
Today the workers of YNITU are taking back the steering wheel.
Do not surrender it again.
The crisis of the South African trade unionism
Comrades,
YNITU is rebuilding itself at a moment of profound crisis for the entire South African trade-union movement.
Only around 23% of workers are members of trade unions.
That should frighten every progressive trade unionist.
South Africa produced one of the most powerful trade-union movements in the developing world.
Our unions shook apartheid.
Workers occupied factories.
They organised underground.
They faced dismissal, detention, banning, police dogs, teargas and bullets.
Workers built organisations from their own cents.
The shop floor became a university of working-class politics.
From that experience came one of the greatest principles of our movement:
Workers must control their own organisations.
Yet today barely one worker in four belongs to a union.
What happened?
Capitalism changed.
Casualisation exploded.
Labour broking and outsourcing fragmented workplaces.
Deindustrialisation destroyed hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs.
Mass unemployment weakened bargaining power.
Platform work and new technologies are changing employment.
Employers remain hostile to organisation.
All of this is true.
But comrades, we will be dishonest if we blame only capitalism.
Some of the wounds of our trade-union movement are self-inflicted.
Two traditions are fighting for the soul of our movement
We must immediately make an important qualification.
We must never paint every trade unionist with the same brush.
There are thousands of extraordinary trade unionists across South Africa who continue to represent the finest traditions of our movement.
Shop stewards who receive no additional salary but sacrifice evenings and weekends defending fellow workers.
Organisers travelling enormous distances because somebody has been dismissed.
Officials who could earn more elsewhere but remain because they regard trade unionism as service.
Leaders who understand that leadership means sacrifice, responsibility and Ubuntu - not privilege.
They defend worker control.
They take mandates.
They report back.
They insist upon financial accountability.
They protect the independence of unions from employers, the state, political parties and service providers.
We salute these comrades.
Often nobody writes newspaper articles about them.
They are not celebrities.
But they are keeping the trade-union movement alive.
So the battle before us is not between a completely rotten trade-union movement and something pure outside it.
It is a battle inside our own movement between two traditions.
On one side stands:
worker control, sacrifice, solidarity, service, Ubuntu, independence and class struggle.
On the other:
bureaucratisation, careerism, corruption, business unionism, social distance, personal accumulationand purges of opponents to this agenda.
Our task is to ensure that the first defeats the second.
Business unionism – the enemy within
Comrades,
Something dangerous has happened inside sections of our movement.
Business unionism has eaten into the soul of sections of South African trade unionism.
Organisations created to fight capital established investment companies with all of the best intension and nobility.
Investment companies established subsidiaries.
Subsidiaries created boards.
Boards appointed executives.
Executives appointed consultants.
Consultants brought deals.
Deals generated commissions.
Service providers arrived.
And somewhere along this road, the worker who created the organisation sometimes disappeared from the picture.
A new creature emerged:
the trade-union capitalist.
Someone who speaks socialism at Congress and practises capitalism when Congress adjourns.
Someone who denounces capitalist accumulation while dreaming of becoming a capitalist himself.
Someone who raises a clenched fist before workers but extends an open hand when money is passing underneath the table.
That contradiction is destroying parts of our movement.
YNITU does not a textbook
When we speak about abuse of office and the conversion of workers’ power into private economic opportunity, YNITU does not need a textbook.
You have lived through its consequences.
And we must discuss this history openly.
Not for revenge.
Not to humiliate individuals.
But because an organisation that refuses to learn from its history is condemned to repeat it.
Let us stop hiding behind sanitised phrases such as “financial irregularities”.
Tell workers what actually happened to their money.
Tell the nurse paying her subscription every month about expenditure presented as recruitment.
Tell her about the expensive accommodation.
Tell her about stays in top hotels in Durban and Umhlanga.
Tell her about restaurant bills.
And yes - tell her about the liquor expenditure.
Because sometimes phrases such as “fruitless and wasteful expenditure” sanitise what workers need to understand politically.
A nurse does not experience her subscription as an accounting entry.
She earns that money with her body.
She wakes before sunrise.
She catches a taxi.
She works in an understaffed hospital.
She stands for hours.
She confronts disease, trauma and death.
Sometimes she works without adequate equipment.
She goes home exhausted.
Then from that salary she says:
“Here is my subscription. Build my union. Defend me.”
That money is not capital belonging to leaders.
It is not start-up capital for private businesses.
It is not a family investment fund.
It is not an entertainment budget.
It is workers’ money.
Follow the money!
What did the investigation expose?
Approximately R1.2 million of YNITU money was paid to a company belonging to the General Secretary’s son.
Approximately R66 000 was paid to a family-owned hotel.
Around half a million rand was reportedly paid to the union President.
There had also been a dispute over a R1 million transfer from YNITU into Nursepreneur, a private company controlled by the General Secretary herself.
Then there was expenditure associated with so-called recruitment activity, accommodation, travel, food and liquor.
That raises an elementary question:
What did the workers get in return?
If you spend workers’ money on recruitment, show us the members recruited.
How many membership forms?
How many organised workplaces?
How many shop stewards?
How many functioning structures?
How much new subscription income?
Because you cannot write “recruitment” on a requisition form and magically transform extravagance into organising.
Recruitment is not hotel hopping.
Recruitment is not drinking.
Recruitment is not an expense account.
A genuine organiser enters hostile workplaces, confronts management, persuades frightened workers, recruits them, develops shop stewards and leaves behind organisation.
Recruitment must leave organisation behind.
Every rand must therefore answer one question:
How did this rand strengthen workers?
If it recruited nobody, organised nobody, educated nobody, represented nobody and mobilised nobody, workers are entitled to ask why it was spent.
This was not just a social media gossip
And comrades, let us be clear.
There was a disciplinary process.
Evidence was led.
The former General Secretary, Lerato Mthunzi, was found guilty on eight disciplinary charges, including nepotism, conflict of interest, dishonesty and gross negligence.
She was dismissed.
We should understand politically what those words mean.
Nepotism means that power entrusted to you by workers becomes an economic opportunity for your family.
Conflict of interest means that the boundary between the organisation’s interests and your private interests has disappeared.
Dishonesty destroys the fundamental trust without which a workers’ organisation cannot exist.
Gross negligence represents a failure of custodianship.
That is why corruption inside a trade union carries such enormous moral weight.
When a capitalist exploits workers, we understand the class interests involved.
But when somebody stands before workers with a clenched fist, calls them “comrade”, receives their trust and then converts organisational power into personal or family economic opportunity, that is betrayal from inside the family.
Charism is not character
And here is another lesson that workers must never forget.
Some of the people who have betrayed workers have not been weak, unpopular leaders.
Sometimes they were precisely the opposite.
They were among the most trusted.
They had enormous charisma.
They could hold thousands of workers in the palm of their hands.
They knew the songs.
They knew the slogans.
They knew the language of socialism and class struggle.
They could make workers laugh.
They could make workers cry.
They could make workers angry.
They could leave a meeting surrounded by workers convinced that here stood a leader who would never betray them.
But comrades:
A revolutionary speech is not proof of revolutionary character.
A clenched fist is not an audited financial statement.
A revolutionary song is not proof of integrity.
Popularity is not accountability.
Sometimes the speech delivered in the afternoon and the activities taking place late at night tell two completely different stories.
The real test comes after the microphone has been switched off.
When nobody is watching.
When a service provider offers a favour.
When a relative wants a contract.
When workers’ money becomes accessible.
When an opportunity for personal enrichment presents itself.
That is where revolutionary character is tested.
Therefore, the more charismatic and powerful a leader becomes, the stronger the democratic controls around that leader must become.
Workers must be capable of saying:
“Comrade, we love you, but show us the books.”
“Comrade, you inspire us, but where is the mandate?”
“Comrade, thousands applaud you but who authorised this expenditure?”
That is not disrespect.
That is worker control.
Our movement needs leaders whose conduct remains revolutionary after the microphone has been switched off.
The corrupt recognise and support one another!
There is another bitter lesson.
Corruption rarely operates alone.
The corrupt recognise one another.
They find one another.
They protect one another.
They warn one another.
Eventually, they organise themselves politically.
Across a federation, people whose interests depend upon weak financial controls, compromised service providers, questionable investments or access to workers’ resources can begin building networks.
They may come from different unions.
They may claim different political traditions.
They may sing different revolutionary songs.
They may even publicly disagree.
But when their material interests are threatened, they recognise their common interest.
Then they form factions.
And we must distinguish between a legitimate political tendency and what I call:
a faction of accumulation.
A genuine political tendency organises around ideas.
A faction of accumulation organises around access.
Access to positions.
Access to contracts.
Access to investments.
Access to service providers.
Access to procurement.
Access to workers’ money.
It may carry a revolutionary name.
It may quote Marx.
It may invoke Lenin, Fanon, Biko or Chris Hani.
But beneath the revolutionary vocabulary lies a much simpler programme:
Protect our access to the resources.
And these networks understand something very important.
If you want to protect questionable activities, capture the leadership that is supposed to hold you accountable.
Elect those who will not ask questions.
Control committees scrutinising finances.
Remove those demanding investigations.
Discredit whistle-blowers.
Protect those who protect you.
Then Congress elections stop being primarily about political direction.
They become battles over:
Who controls the keys to the safe?
Who appoints service providers?
Who controls procurement?
Who sits on investment boards?
Who decides whether an investigation proceeds?
Who protects whom when questions are asked?
That is when corruption begins capturing democracy itself.
And because members of these networks depend upon one another, they love and defend one another fiercely.
When one is questioned, others shout:
“Political conspiracy!”
When somebody demands accountability:
“Factionalism!”
When somebody asks for the books:
“You are dividing the organisation!”
And when a whistle-blower exposes wrongdoing, instead of investigating the allegation, they investigate the whistle-blower.
Comrades, sometimes the real manifesto of a faction is not the political document distributed to delegates.
Its real manifesto is contained in the bank account.
This is why worker control is not merely a beautiful democratic slogan.
Worker control is an anti-corruption weapon.
Corruption and the crisis of the NDR
This degeneration must be located in a wider political context.
In my work examining the National Democratic Revolution after more than three decades of democracy, I have been forced to confront a painful reality.
Our crisis cannot be explained only by monopoly capital.
Of course monopoly capital remains enormously powerful.
Ownership and control of the economy remain grotesquely concentrated.
The economic foundations created by colonialism and apartheid have not been fundamentally dismantled.
Deindustrialisation has weakened organised labour.
Mass unemployment has fragmented the working class.
But another contradiction has developed.
A layer emerging from the liberation movement acquired material interests increasingly detached from those of the working class.
Politics became monetised.
Positions became careers.
Deployments became opportunities for accumulation.
Tender networks replaced political organisation.
Patronage displaced ideology.
And revolutionary language sometimes became camouflage for personal enrichment.
Trade unions have not escaped this degeneration.
We cannot understand state capture while pretending organisations of the working class are automatically immune from capture.
They are not.
That is why renewal must be political, organisational and moral.
Why workers are walking away
Then we ask why only around 23% of workers belong to unions.
Workers are watching us.
A young worker asks:
Why should I join?
Will anybody answer my telephone call?
Will the union defend me?
Where does my subscription go?
Why do leaders fight over positions?
Why do I hear about investment companies, hotels and service providers but never see an organiser in my workplace?
Why do the same people remain leaders forever?
These are legitimate questions.
We cannot lecture workers into joining unions.
We must earn their trust.
And trust is earned through conduct.
Leadership is not ownership
A union position is not property.
Nobody owns the office of General Secretary.
Nobody owns the Presidency.
Nobody owns a province or region.
Nobody owns a branch or local.
Nobody owns members.
We are temporary custodians of institutions built through generations of sacrifice.
The moment a leader begins saying “my union” and means ownership rather than affection, democracy is in danger.
Leaders must come and go.
Young workers must lead.
Women must lead.
Shop stewards must challenge national leaders without fear.
A General Secretary who cannot be questioned by a shop steward is becoming a boss.
Workers already have bosses.
They do not need another boss inside their union.
Rebuild YNITU on worker control
So what must this Congress do?
The answer cannot simply be to replace one set of corrupt leaders with another set of corrupt of leaders.
Changing personalities without changing systems merely postpones the next crisis.
This Congress must rebuild the institutional foundations of worker control.
Open the books.
Every rand must be accounted for.
Members must know what their union owns.
They must know where subscriptions go.
They must know what senior leaders and officials earn.
They must know which service providers receive contracts.
Conflicts of interest must be declared.
Procurement must be transparent.
Campaign expenditure must produce measurable outcomes.
Where credible evidence suggests unexplained accumulation, there must be no taboo around lifestyle audits.
No leader or close family member should secretly benefit from union procurement.
No service provider should finance internal factions.
No investment structure should become a parallel centre of power.
But financial controls alone are not enough.
Branches must meet.
Regions must function.
Constitutional structures must sit.
Political education must return.
Organisers must organise.
Officials must service members.
Mandates must travel upward.
Reports must travel downward.
And Congress must become the parliament of workers, not a coronation ceremony for leaders.
Organise the 77%
If union density is around 23%, our strategic challenge is obvious.
Organise the 77%.
Go to young workers.
Go to casual workers.
Go to labour-broker workers.
Go to outsourced workers.
Go to platform workers.
Go to workers in small workplaces.
Go to those who have never experienced a functioning trade union.
A union cannot organise only those workers who already understand unions.
It must organise those capitalism has made difficult to organise.
And YNITU occupies a particularly important terrain.
Healthcare workers are living every contradiction of our society.
Understaffed hospitals.
Burnout.
Low morale.
Poor infrastructure.
Violence.
Precarious work.
Austerity.
And a public health system struggling under enormous pressure.
YNITU must become known not because of scandals but because when a healthcare worker is in trouble, YNITU arrives.
That is how you rebuild trust.
SOCIAL TRADE UNIONISM, NOT BUSINESS UNIONISM
Workers can and should build economic institutions.
Cooperatives.
Housing initiatives.
Educational programmes.
Funeral and insurance arrangements.
Retirement support.
But the dividing line is simple:
Workers must own them.
Workers must control them.
Workers must benefit from them.
That is social trade unionism.
Business unionism is when institutions supposedly created for workers enrich leaders, relatives, consultants and service providers.
One builds worker power.
The other builds aspiring capitalists.
Never confuse the two.
NEVER AGAIN!!!!
Comrades of YNITU,
You have walked through administration.
You have experienced organisational conflict.
You have seen what happens when democratic institutions weaken.
You have seen what happens when power becomes concentrated.
You have seen what happens when the boundary between workers’ resources and private interests becomes blurred.
Do not waste those lessons.
And do not imagine that simply replacing Lerato Mthunzi with another General Secretary solves the problem.
The lesson must be institutional, not personal.
Teach this history.
Teach it to every incoming National Office Bearer.
Teach it to organisers.
Teach it to shop stewards.
Tell future generations:
This is what happened to YNITU.
This is what nearly destroyed our organisation.
And this is what we shall never permit again.
The purpose of remembering corruption is not revenge.
It is inoculation.
This Congress must therefore declare:
Never again must workers’ subscriptions become private capital.
Never again must union office become a route to family enrichment.
Never again must service providers control those who are supposed to control them.
Never again must charisma substitute for accountability.
Never again must factions of accumulation capture workers’ democracy.
Never again must workers surrender their union to anybody.
We must clean our house
The trade-union movement cannot regenerate society without regenerating itself.
We cannot condemn corruption in government while tolerating corruption in unions.
We cannot condemn corporate greed while practising personal accumulation through workers’ organisations.
We cannot demand accountability from CEOs while refusing accountability to shop stewards.
We cannot preach socialism while practising the morality of tenderpreneurs.
We must clean our own house.
And in doing so we must elevate the people who represent the finest traditions of our movement.
The honest shop steward.
The selfless organiser.
The principled official.
The leader who refuses the brown envelope.
The comrade who refuses to allow a service provider to purchase influence.
The leader who reports back even when the report is uncomfortable.
The trade unionist who understands that office is temporary but the working class is permanent.
These are the people upon whom renewal must be built.
The Union is the worker
Comrades,
A union is not its headquarters.
It is not its bank account.
It is not its investment company.
It is not its President.
It is not its General Secretary.
The union is the worker.
The nurse.
The cleaner.
The clerk.
The administrator.
The technician.
The driver.
The young worker on a temporary contract.
The shop steward confronting management while wondering whether her union will stand behind her.
That worker is YNITU.
Protect her organisation.
Protect her money.
Protect her democracy.
Protect her voice.
Never allow anybody to steal her union from her.
Capital is organised.
The state is organised.
The wealthy are organised.
The working class cannot afford to remain disorganised.
Let this Congress send a message throughout South Africa:
Workers are taking their organisations back!
No to corruption!
No to business unionism!
No to factions of accumulation!
No to personality cults!
No to trade-union tycoons!
Yes to worker control!
Yes to accountability!
Yes to service, sacrifice, selflessness and Ubuntu!
Yes to independent, militant and democratic trade unionism!
Yes to socialism!
Long live YNITU!
Long live SAFTU!
Long live worker control!
Amandla!
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