If Cosatu leaves alliance, ANC should kiss political power goodbye

When trade union federation Cosatu threatened to abandon the governing ANC with a view to stand alone in future elections, you would be excused for not taking that seriously, because the threat has been uttered many times before.

But if Cosatu were to actually leave the ANC-led tripartite alliance, then that should worry the already deteriorating governing party.

Presuming that Cosatu would establish a workers’ party to challenge the ANC – something that we should consider with a measure of scepticism until that chicken actually hatches – then the ANC could lose some support.

But that does not mean the new party would immediately win power and replace the ANC – it’s not so easy in the real world.

With local government elections around the corner, Cosatu feels serious pressure from the workers to excuse itself from its long stroll with the ANC.

Its members gave an ultimatum that the planned special central executive committee meeting must deliberate and take a final decision whether to support the ANC in the 2021 local government elections.

In Cosatu’s own words, problems facing the workers on the ground made it hard for it to convince them to support the ANC in the local government elections – to be scheduled for a date between 4 August and 1 November.

“Some of these challenges have left many workers feeling they are being asked to vote against their own interests,” Cosatu said in a statement last week, adding its decision would be informed by political reality on the ground.

This as if Cosatu didn’t know the marriage with the ANC was on the rocks anyway.

It would be hard for it to admit that it was warned by its former affiliate, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), that the ANC long broke its contract with the poor and the working class.

But at the time, ironically, instead of listening, Cosatu leadership expelled Numsa for raising this problem and also for refusing to campaign for the ANC.

Cosatu should first confess that it erred and apologise to Numsa, which accused the ruling party of failing to implement pro-poor and pro-worker conference resolutions since the Polokwane elective conference of 2007.

Without Cosatu, the ANC’s political fortunes are doomed. It needs Cosatu more than the federation needs it.

Cosatu’s situation is different to that of the SA Communist Party (SACP), which depends on Cosatu for economic livelihood and the ANC for its political survival and, therefore, desperately needs both in its life.

Their marriage has not benefitted the ordinary workers, but the federation’s leadership.

Demonstrably, the leaders got rewarded with positions of power and lucrative deployments into Cabinet posts, as premiers and MECs, parliamentarians, mayors and in other state institutions.

Cosatu has been weakened since Numsa’s expulsion and Zwelinzima Vavi formed the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu), which poached many of its industrial affiliates.

Presently, Cosatu is a federation of mainly public sector unions while its main industrial union, the National Union of Mineworkers, lost massive membership to Joseph Mathunjwa’s Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union in the mining sector.

Most remaining industrial unions under the federation have been embroiled in factional leadership squabbles and alleged embezzlement of workers’ funds.

However, Cosatu’s gesture to express solidarity with Saftu during its recent budget day stayaway was an interesting change of heart, perhaps because Cosatu realised the new federation is not an enemy but a counterpart it will need in future to fight the ANC.

The move also points to a strong desire by Cosatu to break away from the ANC to truly pursue workers’ interests at a political level.

Should Cosatu contest the ANC as a workers’ party, the governing party should be ready to kiss political power goodbye.

It would be a terrible mistake for Cosatu or its new party, after having left the ANC alliance, to still want to be the ANC like Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters, which mimicked it in every aspect.

While it was understandable that the SACP would simply die without being an appendage of the governing party, the Cosatu-aligned party should develop its own sectoral focused policies away from ANC’s Freedom Charter and its neo-liberal economic policy approach.

Otherwise, what would make it different to the ANC it separated from?

ericn@citizen.co.za

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