Co-operative initiatives could soon be launched in Grahamstown, following a proposal from the Co-operative and Policy Alternative Centre (COPAC), a group that has established more than 200 self-sufficient groups around the country in the past 10 years.
Co-operative initiatives could soon be launched in Grahamstown, following a proposal from the Co-operative and Policy Alternative Centre (COPAC), a group that has established more than 200 self-sufficient groups around the country in the past 10 years.
COPAC is a non-governmental organisation based in Johannesburg, that helps township and rural communities to establish co-operatives and aims to show them how these can make them self-reliant, to establish what they term a solidarity economy.
COPAC held a workshop at Rhodes University last week, attended by elderly women from various parts of the township, who wanted to run community projects, such as crèches or soup kitchens, but felt they lacked the skills.
COPAC director, Vishwa Satgar, a former Gauteng provincial secretary of the South African Communist Party and now a professor at Wits University, said their role was to help community groups develop business plans and equip them with the skills to run projects sustainably.
A solidarity economy, he explained, was one in which community businesses or co-operatives depended only on each other for goods and services and had no need of outside suppliers.
Satgar said that the centre had done research on co-operatives and had helped communities and retrenched workers develop co-operatives around the country for the past 10 years – most of them in Gauteng.
He described their model as “anti-capitalist”. People should break their dependence on factories that produced food, he said. Instead, the community could produce food to sell to local outlets.
Among the steps to be taken to set up co-operatives in Makana Municipality, the centre proposed that it pilots a co-operative project in Phaphamani, and that UPM change from being an oppositional social movement, to a transformative one.
The movement's leader, Ayanda Kota, said, “We welcome the suggestion so long as we continue to retain our identity as the movement that fights the community struggles for the poor and working class. This will is not contrary to what we have been doing over the past few years.”
