Johannesburg – Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi on Wednesday hit back at critics unhappy with his support for the ANC by saying he speaks as a representative of his organisation.

“I am not an individual but a general secretary of all 19 Cosatu-affiliated unions and must be bound by the decisions taken by the collective even if I was not present,” Vavi said during a memorial lecture in tribute to former Congress of the SA Trade Unions president John Gomomo in Port Elizabeth.

“If I was to do the opposite then I would no longer be a general secretary whose role must be to unite all Cosatu unions.”

He dismissed his critics, suggesting “those calling me a sell-out for stating this may just as well continue to call me names”.

Vavi said that Gomomo would “be appalled” at the inequality of South Africa today.

“Our attempts to make the second 10 years of democracy a decade for the working class and the poor has largely failed.”

Gomomo would have said that advances had been made to ensure that the post-1994 South Africa was “far better” than pre-1994.

“He would have praised the ANC-led government for these advances.”
However, Vavi said Gomomo would also want historical documents such as the Freedom Charter and Reconstruction and Development Policy to be used as measures of progress.

Vavi said that the “biggest task” leaders in the country faced was to ensure “radical economic transformation under the leadership of a reconfigured tripartite alliance”.

Vavi also made mention of Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s report into the spending at President Jacob Zuma’s homestead in Nkandla.

“The… Nkandla report is just the latest exposure of outrageous profiteering by service providers and gross maladministration by state officials and lack of oversight by political representatives.”

He said that while Cosatu continued to support its allies, “Cosatu should never stop speaking honestly about the state of the working class 20 years into our celebrated democracy…

“We must never be threatened into silence when we see the triumph of individualism and selfishness amongst the leadership and membership of our formations.”

The Sunday Times last week published a report that Vavi had said he would abide by his federation’s decision to campaign for the ruling party ahead of the general elections, but that his support would not be unconditional.

Cosatu has announced it would back the African National Congress manifesto, largely based on the National Development Plan which Vavi opposed.

Vavi told the paper he was bound by Cosatu’s central executive committee decision to back the ANC even though he believed that supporting the party’s election manifesto amounted to the labour movement “committing class suicide.

“I have said there has to be a condition. Please don’t expect me to say unemployment of 34.1% is a good story to tell, I will refuse…No one must ask us to lie,” Vavi was quoted as saying at the time.

Vavi returned to work at Cosatu House this month after eight months of being on suspension, following the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg’s ruling setting aside his suspension.

Cosatu’s biggest affiliate and Vavi’s staunchest backer, the National Union of Metalworkers of SA, has called on its members not to support the ANC in the 7 May elections.

The Star last week reported that Vavi had told a group of shop stewards in Cape Town that he did not owe Numsa for having made calls for him to be reinstated.

“It is wrong to say the resolution of Numsa must bind Vavi… and Numsa is not arrogant to tell me I must abandon Cosatu,” he was quoted as saying.

“It does not work like that.”

San Francisco – Mark Zuckerberg, like Facebook, is maturing. The soon-to-be 30-year-old CEO of the 10-year-old social networking company grew reflective as he stood in front of hundreds of developers to announce a host of mobile features designed to put “people first”.

“We used to have this famous mantra, ‘move fast and break things,” Zuckerberg said at Facebook’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco.

But moving quickly was sometimes so important that Facebook’s engineers would tolerate a few bugs, or push out products that were not always fully baked. Fixing the bugs, Zuckerberg said, “was slowing us down.” Back-pedalling on features that didn’t work – or that users didn’t like – slowed things, too, though Zuckerberg did not mention that.

Facebook’s new mantra may not be as sexy. Zuckerberg pointed to a new sign that read “Move fast with stable infra,” as in infrastructure, and the audience laughed.

The last time Facebook held a developer conference was in 2011. That was before the company went public in 2012, before it began showing mobile advertisements and before it paid eye-popping amounts of money to acquire small, popular apps like Instagram and WhatsApp.

In the tech world, three years can be a lifetime. Facebook’s focus is now squarely on the mobile world, not just its own applications but those built by outside developers.

As part of its mobile, people-first focus, Facebook says it will let users log in to apps anonymously, without sharing their identities and personal information with mobile applications they don’t trust.

Facebook’s 1.28 billion users can already use a “log in with Facebook” button to sign up for apps that let them listen to music, play games, read the news and monitor fitness activities. But using the button allows apps to access information related to the Facebook user’s identity.

With the anonymous login, Facebook will have information about users but the apps won’t. Facebook says the feature will let more people to try out new apps.

The company is also launching more granular controls that let people determine the types of information they share with apps when they want to use their Facebook identity to log in.

Facebook also took the wraps off its long-awaited mobile advertising network, called “Audience Network”, which allows it to serve ads to outside mobile applications, not just its own. This will increase its competition with Google, which currently dominates the mobile advertising market.

AP

Johannesburg – A man accused of raping a woman during a robbery was afraid he would be poisoned in jail, the Nelspruit Magistrate’s Court heard on Wednesday.

Siboniso Sithole, 25, told magistrate Willie Wilkens his former friend, Sipho Mkhabela, 31, who was in the same prison, was threatening him.

“He is also in the kitchen and I am afraid that he can poison my food because he’s always making threats,” Sithole said.

Sithole was facing charges of rape, attempted murder, robbery, armed robbery and housebreaking.

He has pleaded not guilty.

“I will write to the warrant officer investigating your case that you are afraid. I will write it in the report so that they can move you to another section,” Wilkens said.

Mkhabela opened an attempted murder case against Sithole after he was shot in the back.

SAPA

Johannesburg – Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe congratulated over a hundred imams who were accredited as marriage officers in Cape Town on Wednesday.

Their accreditation in terms of the 1961 Marriage Act would enable Muslim marriages to be legally recognised for the first time officially, Motlanthe said in a speech prepared for delivery.

Previously, Muslim couples needed to have civil unions to convert their traditional marriages to legally recognised unions.

“As a result of the imams being designated as Marriage Officers… the registration of Muslim unions will accord Muslim marriages legal status and with that, the protective instruments of the secular state may be accessed to ensure that these Qur’anic values are realised and complied with, within the Constitutional state.”

This would help to conquer the exclusion historically experienced by the Muslim community.

In order to qualify as marriage officers, the imams had to sit a two-hour examination and achieve a mark of at least 70%.

SAPA