Solidarity has just launched a huge new work platform. The entire platform was designed and built from scratch, and in Afrikaans. Here is dr. Dirk Hermann, managing director of Solidarity, speech during the launch event.
It is 1997 and Flip Buys is elected general secretary of the Miners’ Union. It is a difficult time and the Miners’ Union is bankrupt. A professional from the Rand Afrikaans University writes about the tragic death of the Miners’ Union. There is euphoria in the country. The picture of Mandela with his rugby jersey is still at the forefront of everyone’s mind. A new Constitution was adopted and South Africa is the wonderland of the world.
At his first congress, Flip delivers a speech. The Miners’ Union must become a labor movement. Flip could see that the ANC’s ideology cannot govern and that the state will eventually collapse. The old bankrupt organization must offer an answer to that. We need to build institutions. Our answer is: we will ourselves.
Then we built institutions to create an answer beyond the state. This liberating idea created unprecedented energy – a whole Movement with the aim of helping the Afrikaans language community and the Afrikaner cultural community build a future where we can be free, safe and prosperous.
Within the great Solidarity Movement, Solidarity’s task has always been work. It was already like this during its foundation in 1902. Today, our reason for existence is still that our members should be able to work well and reach their full potential.
The state then weakened, is racially insane, plunders and wants to centralize everything.
Solidarity then became stronger and focused especially on work and training.
On the training side, we help build Akademia, Sol-Tech, Bo-Karoo Training, the Solidarity School Support Center, the Solidarity Helping Hand Study Trust and the Solidarity Helping Hand Training Institute.
On the work side, we help children to make career choices and students to be career ready. We start with job facilitation, offer protection in the workplace and form professional communities that help each other and our young people.
But our task is great. How do we accelerate our task which is much bigger than just Solidarity? The answer is through the community – a community that helps each other on a large scale. Help to learn, help to work, help to grow, help with a future.
Platform technology is then introduced to the world. With smart technology, transactions are facilitated.
Peter Wesseloo and the Propay team and Dawid Durie and the Solidarity team then did something with platform technology, in Afrikaans, that the world had not seen before. Everything is original and newly built. Even the registration button is built in Afrikaans. A huge project.
We use smart technology to facilitate interaction between the community – a community platform that is unprecedented.
It is a large arena – not with thousands of spectators, but with thousands of participants. It’s almost like the Farmer’s Market that brings the community together.
The platform will mobilize the youth on an even larger scale, facilitate training, facilitate work, protect work and bind professionals together.
Everything we have built in recent years binds us together and takes it to a new level. It is a community that takes responsibility for itself. We help build another dispensation; a dispensation where we are free from the state’s coercive centralization and racial madness; a dispensation of a community that helps each other. This platform is a gigantic political statement: enough, we will ourselves!
Julius Malema holds a rally at the FNB Stadium. There are 95,000 people. It’s red everywhere you look. With hydraulic technology, Malema rises, almost like a savior. He makes promises: an end to unemployment and load shedding, and he promises more grants. He sings that the Boers must be killed. But what happens after he takes off? He descends. People go home, still without power, work and food.
No one is taking off today, but we are using technology to connect the community together. When they leave the arena, they are stronger, work better and build a future.
This is “we will ourselves” in high gear.
