While reading Editor’s Notebook by Editor-In-Chief of the Nation newspaper, Mr Eric Smith, on March 28, 2018, it made me recall the turbulent years in South African student politics in the 1980s and the recent changing of the guard in the African National Congress (ANC).
One may wonder why such parallels are drawn, but a closer inspection
of our local trade union scene and South African youth politics will provide an answer.
In June 1976 the youth of South Africa, frustrated with the cowardice of the older folk, revolted against an educational system and a racist government that was oppressive and stifled their attempts to be who they should be.
The momentum from the Soweto Uprising against the introduction of the dreaded Afrikaans language as a means of instruction in many subjects in South African schools, fed into the unrest of the 1980s with calls for South Africa to be made “ungovernable”. The youth answered this call and paved the way for the installation of South Africa’s first African President, Nelson Mandela
in 1994.
Within the past few years, we again are seeing a resurgence of youthfulness against cowardice and inaction with the growing influence of Julius Malema and his youthful Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) Party, calling for economic justice for black South Africans.
A monumental achievement by them not too long ago, saw Malema’s party joining with a rebranded African National Congress to change the South African Constitution to allow expropriation of land from Whites without compensation, presumably to resettle many land-starved African families.
In Barbados one cannot deny that those people offering themselves for leadership positions in the four major unions – National Union of Public Workers, Barbados Workers’ Union, Barbados Union of Teachers and Barbados Secondary Teachers’ Union – are generally younger people. Like their brothers and sisters in South Africa, they have become fed up and disenchanted with the gradualism of the old guard and are seeking to change the way business is done in the context of trade unionism.
Young leaders today want meaningful change and it must come, as Mr Eric Smith rightly said, and when it comes, there must be freedom for everybody.
– IAN A. MARSHALL
