FLINGING STONES AT TUCOSWA

Sir,

We read your article in the Times of Swaziland on October 10, 2014 with interest and noted that despite what you have written you appreciate that neither you nor government have any shred of evidence that we called for the loss of AGOA.

You are simply throwing stones because you can and have the facility to do so. Even as the government goes about lobbying for the return of AGOA in the US, we understand that they do not make this false accusation because they know they will be corrected there. It helps to be factual and not sensational.

What we did and are still doing now is to press for meeting the benchmarks as required by the relevant AGOA provisions for qualification for eligibility.

We will also deal with the wrong classification of ATUSWA which is also banned as if it is a federation, yet it is a trade union still fighting for its registration and further call for its registration.

 As regards the omission of a clause requiring the registration of federations, we cannot make much of that because for all the years the Industrial Relations Act has been in existence and amendments have been made, that has never been an issue and government only raised it because she did not wish to register Tucoswa, whatever the reason.

Correction of the status of federations is welcome but not through banning first.
Already the ILO has pronounced itself on the ban. It does not serve a thing, but only worsens the matter. If the Parliament portfolio committee dealing with the matter interacts with the federations, we hope it will not be stopped by a query as to whom will it be dealing with exactly with the ban in place.

We are presently studying the bill and hope that the glaring violations that it comes with will be dealt with by Parliament so that we do not have a repeat of the year 2000 case where an Act was passed with a certificate of urgency, only to have it being amended shortly thereafter with another certificate of urgency.

That is the problem of none consultation even with the ILO.
We call upon the government to lift the ban and let the work of normalising the situation get on. Time is not on our side.

Vincent Ncongwane,
TUCOSWA Secretary General

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