Business Day
*The ANC will soon have to do without Vavi’s wisdom* *Anthony Butler, Business Day, Johannesburg, 21 September 2012*THE 11th national congress of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) drew to an unhappy close in Midrand on Thursday. A divided Cosatu leadership was re-elected unopposed in order to prevent an open rupture. The price paid is policy indecision and three more years of conflict between general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi and president S’dumo Dlamini.
It is probably just as well that frontal confrontation was averted. Tensions between Vavi and Dlamini are not primarily personal but rather reflect deeper underlying conflicts between the interests and affiliations of activists. Cosatu data indicate that 25% of its members are active in African National Congress (ANC) branches and that a big majority of South African Communist Party (SACP) members also belong to Cosatu. It is, therefore, potentially highly influential in the alliance, but it also imports wider political divisions into its structures.
Vavi’s secretariat report papered over some of the cracks in the union movement’s facade of unity. But he launched attacks on ANC president Jacob Zuma and implicitly condemned Zuma’s allies in Cosatu.
The full report details a "multiple crisis" with "the potential to result in an organisational implosion and social explosion". The ANC is "wracked by factionalism, patronage and corruption". There has been "constant political zigzagging between different positions", nepotism, and "declining political morality". Meanwhile, the state is "increasingly ineffective or even dysfunctional" as a result of fiscal constraints, endemic corruption and failures of leadership. The result has been an "emerging crisis of political legitimacy" in which the poor and dispossessed are turning to "right-wing populist alternatives", to xenophobia or to "tribalism".
To avert disaster, the government must introduce anticorruption measures and "strategic" state interventions of the kind pioneered (on Vavi’s account) by former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Such a decisive advance, however, requires a "leadership collective with the necessary political will to challenge entrenched interests in the movement, state and capital" — in other words, the hopeless Zuma must go. By condemning "slate voting" on two occasions, Vavi signals his support for Kgalema Motlanthe’s campaign.
Two obstacles have blocked Vavi’s path. First, public-sector unions such as the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu) and the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) have enjoyed patronage under Zuma in the form of unsustainable pay rises, immunity for poorly performing public servants, and high office distributed to union barons. Second, what Vavi calls the "demon of tribalism" is resurgent in national and trade-union politics. Unfortunately the two factors reinforce each other in internal Cosatu politics because public-sector unions broadly reflect national ethnic demographics.
Vavi’s words found a crude echo in Julius Malema’s simultaneous claim that Zuma "is a proud proponent of tribalism and tribalist politics". A recent online treatise by fellow economic freedom fighter Floyd Shivambu argues that Cosatu and the SACP in KwaZulu-Natal have jettisoned "correct Marxist-Leninist analysis" and instead support "the disaster Zuma" on the basis of "tribal loyalty" and "the language he speaks and sings".
The pro-Zuma National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is a special case, organising mainly in the private sector and lacking a significant membership in KwaZulu-Natal. But the actions of the NUM can be explained in other ways: as the outcome of its penetration by a faction of the SACP; and by the political ambitions of its previous general secretaries.
Union politics is multidimensional and there is little prospect of persistent ethnic blocs or a decisive public-private rupture. The course of Vavi’s career, however, must nearly be run. Leaders from public-sector unions represent the future of the federation. In years to come, the ANC will no longer be able to draw upon the corrective moral and political wisdom that Cosatu has hitherto expressed and that Vavi has personally exemplified.
* Butler teaches politics at the University of Cape Town*From: http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/columnists/2012/09/21/the-anc-will-soon-have-to-do-without-vavis-wisdom*
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