As everybody in our country knows, the Congress of South African Trade Unions has been at the forefront of the campaign to create jobs and eradicate poverty. For years we have fought to ensure that this struggle is taken seriously and remains at the centre of the national agenda.

COSATU has done everything in its power to give a voice to the voiceless and speak out against the intolerable levels of unemployment and poverty in South Africa, and to explain the historical reasons for them and the policies we need to deal with the problem.

It is therefore shocking and disturbing to see that some workers and residents of poor communities believe that these problems are caused by foreign nationals and that they are attacking, robbing and killing those foreigners they believe to be responsible, who are themselves victims of the same unemployment, poverty and crime.

They are totally wrong. The problems they face are rooted in years of apartheid which kept the majority of South Africans in desperate poverty and denied them any democratic means to improve their plight.

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