/ 2 August 2013

Vavi’s woes mirror Cosatu’s

Vavi's Woes Mirror Cosatu's

If there was any doubt about the depth of trade union federation Cosatu's internal crisis, it was removed this week as its general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, in short order, was accused of rape, admitted to having consensual sex with a woman he had hired without ­following procedure, and was quickly un-accused again.

The claims came amid the process of investigating and seeking to resolve the divisions that have sprung up around the tripartite alliance's most important internal critic. Vavi was busily mounting a defence of his willingness to differ from the Zuma-camp line on the basis of a chapter-and-verse account of Cosatu's policy history when the story broke. This attempt to fight fire with textbooks will probably go down as spectacularly inadequate. He now faces a set of potential charges far more concrete than those brought by unionists paranoid about his perceived sympathy for civil society groups, for Mamphela Ramphele's Agang SA, or for Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters.

Meanwhile, Cosatu's relevance on the shop floor is ebbing away. The most important wage round in recent history is underway on the mines, and in both gold and platinum, it is the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union that is making more and more of the running, while the Cosatu-affiliated National Union of Mineworkers struggles for credibility.

If this trend continues, Cosatu will be a federation for the unions of petit-bourgeois government employees, capable only of protecting their narrow interests. That, not Agang SA, the Democratic Alliance or the Economic Freedom Fighters, poses the real threat to the ANC, and indeed to South Africa's workers. Sadly, their leaders show no sign of realising it.