Joe Mcgluwa, ID National Organiser and Member of Parliament has accused leaders of the Tripartite Alliance - the ANC, SACP and Cosatu - of using the current public sector strike ‘for their own selfish purposes.

‘This is very confusing for South Africans, because leaders that were just a few weeks ago speaking so highly of each other, are now suddenly behaving like arch rivals,’ Mr Mcgluwa says.

‘It is deeply disturbing to see how little the interests of our people actually mean when we are faced with personal jockeying for positions in particular Alliance factions. This circus continues to play itself out not only during strikes, but also in many public-owned corporations, like the SABC.

‘While the warring parties use the media they want to censure to deliver their verbal onslaughts, it is ordinary South Africans and the poorest of the poor that suffer most - it is they that are being turned away from hospitals and schools and experiencing a further onslaught on their already undignified lives,’ says Mcgluwa.

‘Meanwhile, we see certain South African Communist Party leaders forgetting the workers’ struggle from one day to the next, an ANC Youth League leader taking a brief respite from his bling shopping spree and having another of his laughable revolutionary moments and we witness the most noble players in all of this, the thousands of volunteers that have flocked to our hospitals and classrooms to keep patients and education alive, coming in for attack from Cosatu.

‘The ID is deeply disturbed that in this whole debacle the interests of ordinary South Africans and even workers are nowhere to be found,’ Mcgluwa says.

For media enquiries, please call Joe Mcgluwa on 084 2133 811