President Cyril Ramaphosa is hard-pressed to arrest those involved in corruption, as the ANC prepares for a special meeting of its top brass over the weekend.
Cosatu said today that workers were not impressed by how Ramaphosa is handling corruption, saying he should stop negotiating with criminals.
The trade union federation said Ramaphosa would not win the fight against corruption if he continued to avoid confronting the perpetrators of graft and imprison them.
“Workers feel that the president who campaigned in poetry is governing in prose and they are not impressed. The president must stop negotiating with criminals and use the only language they will understand, which is prosecution and imprisonment,” Cosatu general secretary Bheki Ntshalintshali said.
“We have noted efforts from president Ramaphosa to push back against corruption, but we can only judge the results and not the intentions. Aggressive prosecution is the only dependable vaccine to cure the virus of corruption, not speeches, letters, or public proclamations,” he added.
The workers’ organisation held a meeting of its central executive committee (CEC) between Monday and Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Nelson Mandela Bay councilor Andile Lungisa has written to the ANC top six officials, demanding that Ramaphosa be hauled before the party’s integrity commission in connection with the funds that his presidential campaign received.
The former deputy president of the ANC Youth League said it had never happened in the history of the ANC for a candidate to raise money from business people to contest the leadership of the organisation.
Lungisa’s letter came days before a special meeting of the party’s national executive committee (NEC) over the weekend, which is expected to discuss corruption.
“There is an affidavit to the Public Protector wherein comrade president Cyril Ramaphosa in his own words admitted to the fact that bank accounts were opened for the purposes of fundraising for his campaign to be ANC president. This happened whilst he was on record speaking against membership buying and using money to influence outcomes of conference,” he said.
