Gaye Davis
MOVES to convene a summit between the African National Congress and its alliance partners, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), have been given fresh impetus by a call for such a parley from one of the country’s most powerful trade unions.
The call – part of a resolution passed at last week’s congress of the 232 000-strong National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa) – will be tabled at the next meeting of Cosatu’s central executive committee.
Numsa general secretary Enoch Godongwana is not expecting any opposition to the notion, not even within the ANC itself. “We have been talking about the need for such a summit for a long time,” he said this week.
The resolution also gave the union’s central executive committee the power to decide whether belonging to the alliance is still worthwhile. This was the compromise that saw delegates, after heated debate, turn back from a 1993 decision that the alliance should end once the ANC was in power and that a workers’ party should be formed. In itself, however, the decision sends the ANC a strong signal about members’ unhappiness with the way things are going.
During the debate, three Numsa regions argued for the alliance to end. But KwaZulu- Natal, the Western Cape and Wits Central were defeated by the union’s other six regions, which felt the alliance should continue and be strengthened.
The nature of the alliance has been undergoing continual redefinition since the 1994 elections. But increasingly, the government has been taking significant policy decisions on its own, rather than as the ANC acting in concert with its alliance partners.
Predictably, this has not sat well with organised labour. While it is clear that Cosatu has made significant political gains through being in the alliance, the ANC also needs the unions for electoral campaigning and support on policy issues.
But times have changed. As Numsa national president Mtutuzeli Tom pointed out, the union’s members found themselves in a world of “hard choices”, where “progress” meant no strikes or wage demands, accepting job insecurity and privatisation.
What swung the debate against opting out of the alliance was that staying in it was seen to offer labour its best chance of impacting on government policy, particularly economic policy.
SACP deputy chairman Blade Nzimande spelt it out: “The political strength of the broad liberation movement, the tripartite alliance in particular, will determine the course of economic development that we follow.”
Nzimande identified as “perhaps the most serious and practical challenge” facing the working class in the post-1994 era as organisational: what drove the alliance was the acceptance that the working class led it. “The challenge is how to translate this into reality and take it beyond conference resolutions.”
Factory struggles had to be linked to broader politics. “This means that we need to increase our political propaganda on socialism as the ultimate solution to workers’ problems.”
Workers had to strengthen their role in all the political formations of the alliance. “We must not make the error, as some of our comrades do, of adopting a cynical attitude towards the ANC in particular,” he said. The ANC remained the vehicle for attaining working-class goals at this stage; the working-class orientation of the ANC could be realised if organised workers, in particular, played their role.