Johannesburg - The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) president Joseph Mathunjwa has become the latest high-profile leader to attack the country’s Constitution, describing it as a bible of oppression.
During his blistering attack on the country’s supreme law, Mathunjwa told thousands of Amcu members and relatives of the mineworkers killed in Marikana in August 2012 that it was time to tear apart the current Constitution and rewrite a new one.
”Until such time, we tear this Constitution and write our own Constitution that will embrace our culture, norms and values because this Constitution has turned us into zombies.
”Until such time we tear down this Constitution, this Constitution is enslaving us, this Constitution is making the same colonisers to have power over the people who are the majority in the country,” he said.
According to Mathunjwa, the Constitution is the bible of oppression.
”Even fathers have no say in their homes; the Constitution has become the real father. You beat up your child, they say the child has rights,” he complained.
Mathunjwa said God was removed in schools and replaced with the devil, and as a result, schoolchildren were killing each other.
He claimed that when there were still school assemblies, there were no acts of deadly violence and that this only started after the Constitution was enacted.
”It is the country’s Constitution that keeps old people who are due for retirement in Parliament. At the workplace, at the age of 63, you’re retrenched, or you go on pension. Why are 80, 85-year-olds still in Parliament, yet they are employed by us?” asked Mathunjwa.
He added: “We are their employers; we should put a threshold to say that once you’re above 65, you’re pensionable, go home and play with your grandchildren”.
Earlier this year, Tourism Minister Lindiwe Sisulu was heavily criticised for asking where the African value system in the Constitution and the rule of law was as it was Neo-liberal, among others.
President Cyril Ramaphosa later urged South Africans to protect the Constitution, the democratic state and electoral processes from anyone who wants to weaken the country’s democracy and deny people their hard-won freedom.
Mathunjwa also weighed on the raging debate on illegal mining following the brutal rape of women in Gauteng’s West Rand last month by a group of zama-zamas.
”They talk about zama-zamas. The first zama-zamas arrived in South Africa in 1652. They didn’t notice it was zama-zamas. The current ones are not zama-zamas. It’s just crime. The real zama-zamas are the ones that arrived in 1652; the real zama-zamas are those who claim to have discovered gold in the 1800s,” he said.
Mathunjwa also gave the current government’s service delivery record thumbs down, saying successive ANC-led administrations were thieves.
”Love or hate the Afrikaners, but they gave us a country, a functional state. Inasmuch as the Nationalist Party was cruel to humanity, but they left us with a functioning state, afika lamasela lawa (and then these thieves took over),” he said.
Mathunjwa asked: “Where is the railway today? Where is SAA today? Where is the healthcare system today?”