Wamkelikile | Welcome
This is the temporary home of the Zabalaza Pathways Institute
…catalysing people’s power and deepening democracy
for just, loving societies without poverty…
WHO WE ARE
We walk with social justice movements to foster transformative change.
We are a strategic hub partnering with grassroots movements. We facilitate the building of a conducive ecosystem to enable stronger, effective and more impactful social justice movements. We catalyse and hold spaces for movements to critically reflect, build strategies, work out ways to make an impact, define the bigger “we”, connect immediate struggles with visions of the longer-term, as well as enabling the building of solidarity, education, training and political development.
We believe that grassroots self-agency, organised popular power, and strategically effective movements are central to winning transformative social justice.
Vision
We envisage and work to achieve just, loving societies without poverty- based on zero carbon economies
… wherein ordinary people
are self-organised, with real social weight, voice and power… and are in democratic, emancipatory and sustainable control of their livelihoods, development, and the resources required for life.
The mass of ordinary people should have the ability to achieve universal well-being through the democratic and joint control of all ecological, social, economic, political, and cultural aspects of their lives.
Thoroughgoing Transformation of Society
Our vision means that we believe in the thoroughgoing transformation of society. This requires a long-term and integrated political programme based on the following components:
Sustained mass mobilisation;
From mobilisation to building sustained organisation;
Deep and direct popular democracy;
Deepening democracy in the formal political system;
Community transformation and cohesion – through collective healing and well-being, community power, and the rebuilding of a strong social fabric conducive to equitable and decent human development;
Ending racial oppression;
Ending gender oppression and hetero-patriarchy;
Radical feminist politics;
Decolonisation;
Pan-African and global south solidarity;
Advancing the solidarity economy alternative;
Democratising the economy as a whole; and
Climate justice based on a deep, just transition to a zero carbon economy.
Location
The Institute undertakes its primary work in South Africa whilst also collaborating and partnering with like-minded organisations throughout the region.
Beyond Southern Africa, the Institute is building relationships and partnerships with like-minded mass movements and strategic organisations in Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Tunisia, Bolivia, Brasil, Ecuador, India and the United States of America.
Pathways is one of very few strategic organisations to be located in, and operating from the impoverished, underdeveloped and poorly governed Eastern Cape province, while its work reaches across South Africa, and to other parts of the world.
OUR BOARD
Mazibuko Jara – Executive Director (man);
Gunnett Kaaf – Fiscal Policy Analyst at the Free State Provincial Treasury (man);
Itumeleng Motlhabane – Provincial Organiser of the Equal Education Campaign in the Eastern Cape (woman);
Ayanda Kota – Spokesperson of the Unemployed People’s Movement (man);
Dr. Ayanda Madyibi – youth activist in the 1980s, ICT expert and manager in the Eastern Cape Socio-Economic Consultative Council (man);
Siphokazi Magadla – Professor and Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies at Rhodes University (woman); and
Mzikazi Nkata – Local Secretary of the South African Federation of Trade Unions in Gqeberha, and state forensic pathologist in Gqeberha (woman)