UNCLE SAM IS OUR ALLY NOT ENEMY: LEON.

South Africans should stop declaring war on the United States as they needed Washington as an ally to turn their own and the continent's situation around, Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said on Wednesday. Addressing a Workers' Day rally in Rabie Ridge, Midrand, he said the US had the most powerful economy in the world and was the originator of the biggest-job creating companies globally. "The fact is that while Cosatu (the Congress of South African Trade Unions) designs posters calling the US the 'axis of evil', the US designs systems that create employment and opportunity. "It is from those whom Cosatu calls the 'axis of evil' that job creation will be stimulated, that Nepad (the New Partnership for Africa's Development) will be funded, that Africa will be traded," he said. How President Thabo Mbeki reconciled his pitch to the G8 group of industrialised nations and the western world with Cosatu's anti-western fundamentalism and hate-speech was for him to explain, Leon said. "But the nett consequence of this violent language and political defamation is the alienation of the very allies we need to turn our own situation - and Africa's - around." In a speech focusing on the country's high unemployment rate, Leon said the climate for job creation was the greatest political gift the government could and should give South Africa's jobless. The problem with the government was that it had a whole range of different priorities, uncosted goals and often unfunded mandates. "Its reach way exceeds its grasp. It is not possible to fix ...