Blade Nzimande – praag.org

SACP denies mounting attack on judiciary

A summit should be held to discuss the country’s judiciary in the light of recent court judgments involving the executive, SA Communist Party secretary Blade Nzimande told delegates at the party’s special national congress on Wednesday.

”We are not attacking the judiciary, but are saying there has been a deliberate overreach by the judiciary. It can’t be the mandate of the judiciary to rule on matters of the executive…it is against the spirit of the separation of powers,” said Nzimande.

”As the SACP we are going convene a summit on the judiciary and the issue of separation of powers, because we want to open a debate and not attack… we’ve been told we are attacking the judiciary whenever we raise this issue,” he said.

Nzimande added that the SACP was not friends with Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir, but agreed with government’s decision to not arrest him when he was in South Africa for the 25th African Union summit in Johannesburg in June.

”We are not friends with Bashir, he has committed serious atrocities…but South Africa is not a colony. This issue was a direct attack on our national sovereignty,” he explained. “Government was correct to not arrest Bashir.”

Bashir has been indicted by the ICC for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against some of the tribes of Sudan’s western Darfur region. Two warrants of arrest were issued against him in 2009 and 2010.

Source: ANA

Communist education minister rails against ‘old white professors’

South African professors are too old and too white, and the vandalism of colonial-era statues highlighted the need for a frank conversation on race and transformation.

This is according to Higher Education Minister and Communist Party leader Blade Nzimande , who described the continuing uproar over the statues as a “proxy” protest.

The statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, which sparked the protests, is finally on its way out. The decision was taken last night at a meeting of the UCT council that was disrupted by protesters. The statue will be moved temporarily, pending a final decision on its fate.

“The statue struggle is a proxy struggle. It’s time we confront the real issues of national reconciliation, transformation and economic empowerment because that is what lies at the heart of this. This is a deeper issue.”

Nzimande touched on the racial transformation of the academic profession, saying academics were too old and too white.

“We are concerned that our academics are ageing. We estimate that the average age of an academic is 55 years. If we don’t do anything about this, in 10 years’ time we will be in serious trouble. We want the majority [of recipients of the bursaries and posts] to be black and women, so that we are also able to confront this challenge that our professoriate is too white for a country like South Africa,” he said.

His department launched the “Staffing South Africa’s Universities Framework” earlier this year, which was aimed at funding junior academic posts and offering bursaries for students to study master’s and PhD courses, including overseas studies.

Yesterday, UKZN vice-chancellor Albert van Jaarsveld agreed that professorships needed to be transformed.

“I believe we need more African and more so African female academics. We need to ask ourselves as universities what we are doing to lubricate the process of transformation and more active transformation, to make sure it happens,” said Van Jaarsveld.

However, like Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mthethwa, Nzimande criticised the vandalism of the statues.

“We can’t destroy our history. Let’s remove them and take them to museums,” Nzimande said.

The call comes as Afrikaner groups yesterday petitioned the king of the Netherlands to step in and save the Jan van Riebeeck statue in Cape Town.

This followed an announcement that the Economic Freedom Fighters party was planning a march where it would call for its removal.

This prompted Action Forum’s Johan Willemse to chain himself to the statue.

“The EFF are hoodlums,” Willemse said.

Provincial co-ordinator for the party Front Nasionaal, Daniel Lotter, said the vandalism of the statues was an attack against the nation, which was brought on by earlier comments by President Jacob Zuma.

“He claimed all SA’s problems started with the arrival of Van Riebeeck,” he said.

Controversial Afrikaans singers Sunette Bridges and Steve Hofmeyr, along with about 100 others, rallied around the Paul Kruger statue in Pretoria yesterday.

Bridges said she was shocked at the inaction of the government in dealing with the illegal defacing of monuments across the country, but the vandalism of Kruger’s statue was the last straw.

Tshwane spokesman Lebogang Matji said: “We will not bow to the EFF nor to Sunette Bridges.” – Times Live

PRAAG to oppose ‘Ebola-like outbreak of Boerehaat in South Africa’

PRAAG, the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group, is meeting this week to consider the options in what it described as the “Ebola-like outbreak of Boerehaat in South Africa”.

“We’ve had it,” said Dr. Dan Roodt, leader of PRAAG. “In the latest incident a modelling agency down in Cape Town, Elite Models, told an Afrikaans girl of 16 that she was a ‘Nazi’ and should be ashamed of putting Afrikaans as a language on her CV. Hatred of Afrikaans and Afrikaners, tradionally known as ‘Boerehaat’, has reached boiling point.”

PRAAG is instructing its lawyers to sue both Iris Minier who made the remark to Anna Modler, 16, and Elite Models in the Equality Court. “This is like Germany in the 1930s,” Roodt continued. “Not only are we being massacred on the farms and being discriminated against by this sadistic English state, but there are now people who actually call us ‘Nazi’s’ when they are the real perpetrators of a crime against humanity by ethnically cleansing us from the country for which we trekked, fought and died.”

Reacting to reports that the Department of Higher Education under its communist minister was going to anglicise the NWU’s Potchefstroom campus, PRAAG declared: “According to an interview with Minister Blade Nzimande published today, he is the son of a foreigner, a Mozambican who also happened to be a criminal. We demand to know when Nzimande became a South African citizen, when and where his birth was registered and by what right he may impose his language, English, on our beautiful students on their pristine rural campus which was founded by our own people and which has existed in Potchefstroom since 1905.”

PRAAG called on Nzimande “to put a stop to his irrational hatred of Afrikaans and Afrikaners, even though he comes from Natal where the Union Jack once flew” and honour the commitment given by the ANC in 2000 that “at least two universities should retain their Afrikaans language and character”.

“However, we have become used to the very English duplicity of this government. Just like Tony Blair, that war criminal, lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, only to kill a million Iraqis, this equally hideous English government is reneging on its promises to at least accord a modicum of language rights to the indigenous Afrikaner people,” said Roodt.

The leader of PRAAG also expressed his fear that both the ANC and “the motley collection of Boerehaat fanatics thronging in Johannesburg and in Cape Town, especially in the British-oriented media, would start treating us like Palestinians and kill even more of our children than their sadistic freedom fighters are already doing on the farms and in the suburbs”.

“We reject your fake English state, with your fake PhDs, your fake British identity, your bad taste, your horrible SABMiller culture, your bad food, your ugly buildings, your corruption, your sewage in our rivers, your lies, your fake Marxist history, your fake everything. Just deliver us from this English-Kampuchean ‘democratic’ nightmare in which, to quote Mr. Steve Hofmeyr, our people are dying like flies,” the leader of PRAAG concluded.

He previously tweeted: “‘Democratic Kampuchea’ under Pol Pot lasted 4 years. ‘Democratic South Africa’ another tragic mistake. Scrap it now & give us cantons!”

Note: Roodt’s reference to “fake PhDs” comes after the recent revelation that Pallo Jordan, who had successively held three ministerial posts in South Africa, had lied for 30 years about having a doctoral degree when in fact he had not even graduated for a Bachelor’s degree. The head of the SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation), Hlaudi Motsoeneng, was equally embroiled in a scandal for lying about having a matric, or school-leaving certificate, which was exposed some weeks before Pallo Jordan’s fake qualifications.

Regarding “sewage in the rivers”, as a result of municipal corruption and profligacy, up to 47 megalitres of raw sewage per day are being released into the Vaal River, the main source of water for the country’s biggest urban concentration around Johannesburg and Pretoria. Municipal officials and petty local politicians are also stealing and spending funds by buying luxury cars and houses while not paying the national electricity utility, Eskom, leading to whole towns being cut off from the electricity grid.

South Africa is the rape capital of the world with more than a million women being raped annually. On average 45 people are also murdered every day, with Afrikaner farmers and suburban children often tortured to death for hours. 4000 farmers have already been killed in ethnic murders by marauding killers, some of whom have received military training in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

Blade says Nkandla is white people’s lies

Blade telling Nkwinti to take white farms, not mines

Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande and member of the SACP has described what is being written about President Jacob Zuma and his Nkandla residence as “white people’s lies”.

He has been the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party since 1998.

Nzimande was speaking at an event to honour President Zuma held at the University of Zululand, at KwaDlangezwa.

Nzimande has heaped praise on President Zuma, saying it is appropriate to honour him for his contribution to peace in KwaZulu-Natal and education in the country.

He’s dismissed as “lies perpetuated by white people” reports about Nkandla and Zuma.

In 2007 Malawian businessman Charles Modise claimed he made a R500,000 donation to the South African Communist Party in 2002.

He claimed he gave the money, packed in black plastic bags, to Willy Madisha, who in turn swore he transported the money in the boot of his car to SACP general secretary Nzimande. However, Nzimande denied ever receiving the money, also calling the allegations “lies perpetuated by white people”.

Despite being a Communist, Mzimande is against the nationalisation of mines, strangely stating that it is not “inherently progressive” as it depended on which class interests were being advanced.

Nzimande supports the accelerated transfer of white-owned land to blacks however and warned earlier that South Africa would become like Zimbabwe if whites continue to own land.

Nzimande said the people needed to know why banks were still financing farmers using the “same [free market] methods used during apartheid”.

“One of the biggest obstacles facing land reform is the willing buyer-willing seller principal,” he said.

He said with that principle, it was those who already owned the land—and not the landless—who benefited.

‘Reclaim Tlokwe from baases and madams’

Residents of Tlokwe, North West, should back the ANC in next year’s national elections, the SA Communist Party said on Sunday.

“The SACP calls upon all ANC members and SACP cadres, including Cosatu members to ensure that we mobilise the people of Tlokwe to vote for the ANC overwhelming [sic], so that we can rightly re-claim this municipality from the party of the baases and madams,” SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande said in a speech prepared for delivery.

He was speaking at the Ikageng Stadium in Potchefstroom ahead of the party’s 92nd birthday celebrations next month. The celebrations would be held in Tlokwe, the municipality which has its seat in the town.

Nzimande said they condemned those African National Congress members who had voted with the Democratic Alliance and other opposition parties to unseat ANC mayor Maphetle Maphetle.

He was replaced by DA councillor Annette Combrink in July, the second time since November. The North West ANC’s disciplinary committee expelled the councillors concerned, resulting in them losing their seats.

Nzimande said the ANC should fix the problems in the area.

“It is important that the ANC itself must act with speed to attend to whatever problems, including suspected corruption, against its own cadres. But, no matter what grievance any ANC cadre may have, this cannot be translated to the betrayal of the ANC,” he said. – Sapa

More back to apartheid education: teacher training colleges to reopen

groenkloof-aerial-large — Groenkloof teacher training college, one of many built by the Afrikaner government, but abolished by the ANC and their British Commonwealth education advisers, plunging South Africa into a teacher supply crisis

Plans to re-introduce teacher training colleges were underway with one former college scheduled to re-open next week, Minister of Higher Education Blade Nzimande said on Thursday.

Speaking at a New Age business briefing in Johannesburg, he said the first school to open would be the Ndebele College Campus in Siyabuswa, Mpumalanga.

Training at the college would be facilitated by the University of Johannesburg.

Three more colleges would be opened next year in KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and the Eastern Cape.

Between 1994 and 2000 the government shut down teacher training colleges and merged them with other institutions. The move was aimed at “overcoming the educational inequalities of apartheid and reducing an identified oversupply of primary [school] teachers”.

In 2012, Nzimande said the higher education department had noted an increase in the number of people enrolling for full-time education programmes. Almost 38,000 enrolled for teaching courses in 2009 and over 41,000 in 2010.

Nzimande said the new colleges needed to focus on the development of teachers for the foundation phase.

With scores of new tertiary entrants students failing to pass most of their first year subjects, Nzimande dismissed claims that the lowering of the matric pass mark had played a role.

He said those who qualified for university degrees had usually obtained very high marks.

Nzimande said the fact that South Africa had 12 years of lower education probably played a role in pupils’ lack of readiness for tertiary level.

“We are one of the few countries with 12 years of schooling and about three years needed for a degree… Other countries have 13 years of schooling and four-year degrees.”

More mentoring and tutoring programmes were needed to help first-year students deal with the pressure of tertiary education. He said some institutions offered a foundation year for students not quite ready to begin tertiary courses. – Sapa

SA Communist boss Nzimande attacks ‘liberals’

South African liberals were waging an “ideological offensive” at the tripartite alliance, SA Communist Party secretary-general Blade Nzimande said on Monday.

“Here we see a very clear convergence between the liberal ideological offensive and what we have characterised as the new tendency,” he told the Congress of SA Trade Unions’ 11th national congress in Midrand.

“Our leadership and movement is being judged… through a targeted attack on the movement as a whole, especially Cosatu and the ANC, with a particular focus on the president of the ANC and the republic, comrade Jacob Zuma.”

He said liberals, led by the Democratic Alliance, often “opportunistically” wanted to be seen as friends of the working class.

“They will stand up against e-tolling in Gauteng, not because they really care about the working class, but in opposition to the ANC government, and yet be completely silent about the fact that the DA has tolled Chapman’s Peak in Cape Town and seeks to build more physical structures there,” Nzimande said.

“They will take the ANC government to court over textbooks in Limpopo, but not go to court when the DA is unilaterally closing schools in the Western Cape.”

He said the offensive was being waged against the alliance to promote the idea that it was leaderless, and the print media was supporting it.

“The SACP has consistently raised this matter, and again warning that none within our ranks should be confused by this liberal agenda and be tempted to form alliances blindly.”

The DA was “flirting with anarchy” and would help form non-governmental organisations to oppose the government but not against the brutality against farm workers and labour brokers.

“They opportunistically seek alliances with the working class in order to advance elite interests, embarrass the ANC government, but tell the working class to go jump when it comes to challenging established capitalist interests,” Nzimande said.

“But, of course, not all NGOs are retrogressive either. We, the alliance as a whole, need to actively engage in this terrain of ‘civil society’ and contribute to the building of a progressive NGO movement.” – Sapa

South African Communist Party calls FW de Klerk an ‘apartheid dinosaur’

Iafrica.com reports that SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande lashed out at FW de Klerk on Thursday, branding the former president an “apartheid political dinosaur”.

On Wednesday, De Klerk spoke at a briefing discussing the outcomes of the ANC’s policy conference. De Klerk said the spirit of inclusiveness and reconciliation embodied by former president Nelson Mandela was no longer prevalent in the country.

He warned against the ruling party’s national democratic revolution.

“The NDR as a concept is dangerous. A revolution against who? Who is the enemy?”

De Klerk added that the SACP was one of the driving forces behind what he called radical ANC policies.

Nzimande has since hit back, calling De Klerk “a politician who has long reached his sell-by date”.

“All what De Klerk is saying about the SACP is nothing but an attempt at resuscitating the classical, but failed, apartheid ‘rooi gevaar’ tactic which was used by his now extinct National Party and its criminal apartheid regime not only to persecute communists but as part of the whole armoury to fight against the liberation movement,” Nzimande said.

“De Klerk’s latest anti-communist burst is nothing more than rehashing this nonsense, and in fact exposing that the likes of him no longer have any relevance in today’s South Africa, if they ever did at all. Not so long ago he let the cat out of the bag by clearly stating he still firmly believes that the bantustan policies were the correct ones for South Africa.”

Praag.org previously reported that in his concluding remarks on Wedenesday, “De Klerk urged South Africans to be active and engage the ruling party on its policies, because they would shape the country’s future”.