Lisa Mabel shares a chilling story about how her aunt allegedly committed fraud by adding herself as a beneficiary on her mother’s Assupol policy and allocating herself 100% of the benefits.
Assupol allegedly admitted her as a beneficiary, awarding her 100% of the accidental cover, despite her failing the verification process.
Recent remarks by the Minister of Finance, Enoch Godongwana, suggesting that opposition to neoliberal macroeconomic policy reflects immaturity and that those who march today do so because they “have nothing to do” demand a principled response.
The Minister’s political formation took place within the organised working class. As General Secretary of NUMSA, a leading Marxist theoretician, and a member of the Central Committee of the SACP, he helped articulate one of the most rigorous critiques of neoliberal macroeconomics in the early democratic period.
He penned COSATU’s very first statement rejecting GEAR in June 1996.
That rejection was grounded in political economy. It was based on the understanding that macroeconomic frameworks are not neutral technical instruments; they embody class interests.
GEAR was opposed because it entrenched fiscal austerity in one of the most unequal societies on earth. It accelerated trade liberalisation before productive capacity was consolidated. It deepened financial integration without safeguarding industrial development. It imposed cost-recovery and market discipline on essential public services. It reduced the state into a referee whose role was limited to creating a conducive environment for capital.
The critique was principled: economic policy must serve social transformation, industrialisation and working-class advancement.
When workers marched and criticised the macroeconomic direction under Minister Trevor Manuel, it was never about personalities. It was about policy. It was about defending jobs, state capacity and redistribution. To march against a framework is not to attack a person; it is to contest a direction.
That position was not immature or boredom then. It is not immature now.
Neoliberalism is not simply a budgeting preference. It is a class project. It prioritises deficit reduction over employment creation. It subordinates democratic planning to market signals. It constrains public investment in the name of fiscal prudence. It disciplines labour to reassure capital.
To suggest that opposition to such a framework is youthful impatience is to dismiss the lived reality of millions confronting mass unemployment, precarity, collapsing municipalities and shrinking public services.
Activists, trade unionists and community organisations do not march because they lack purpose. They march because they confront a structural crisis. Expanded unemployment remains catastrophic. Hunger and good insecurity is a lived experience. Deindustrialisation has hollowed out working-class communities. Austerity has frozen critical public sector posts in health, education and local government. Inequality remains extreme including within the black majority.
If opposing these outcomes is boredom or immaturity, then consistency itself becomes suspect.
The real question is not whether protest demonstrates irresponsibility. The real question is whether three decades of macroeconomic continuity with their well-documented social consequences can continue without challenge.
The working class, under his leadership, was correct to oppose neoliberal orthodoxy when it was first introduced under his leadership. It is equally correct to challenge austerity today.
Critiquing policy is not a personal vendetta. It is not an act of idleness. It is an expression of class position.
Trivialising protest is deeply insulting to the poor who resort to marching because those they elected refuse to listen to their cries.
It was not wrong to march.
It is not wrong to march now.
Class struggle is not something one outgrows upon entering ministerial office. It is the terrain upon which history advances.
To dismiss those who hold views contrary to capital while receiving standing ovations in the gatherings of the wealthy is profoundly unfortunate. It signals not maturity, but political distance from the class that shaped one’s formation.
History will judge whether this moment reflects evolution or class betrayal
I feel sorry for a Black Person who celebrates Afriforum court Judgment, you might think it's about CIC Julius Malema because you hate him, soon racism will show it's true colours at your doorstep. I wonder if the EFF you're fighting hand in hand with racists will hear you when they come for you.
It is irresponsible to generate opinions on governance in Cape Town based on the prawns and oysters you had at The Bungalow.
The Joburg tourism of Seapoint, Clifton and Camps Bay every December is not the experience of governance in Cape Town.
Deeply irresponsible, and no one should be called a “race baiter” for pointing out how the experience of separate development in Cape Town has become the basis for calling it a world class City.