Ferial Haffajee
Zwelinzima Vavi is the man who will step into Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) general secretary Mbhazima Shilowa’s red socks next year.
Shilowa, Cosatu president John Gomomo and vice-president Connie September are likely to join a labour throng to Parliament.
Vavi, who currently serves as Cosatu’s assistant general secretary, is redder than Shilowa and less showy. The bespectacled unionist also has more hair.
A communist, he wears a guyabera – the Cuban national shirt – and favours a photograph of Che Guevara on his wall. But his desk sports a laptop and a load of papers on social democracy collected during his visit to Germany last week.
Is he searching for a new ideology? No, it’s just the sign of a workaholic who has increasingly taken over the ropes at the two-million member labour federation. This year, Vavi led negotiations with Cosatu’s alliance partners, the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress.
The lanky leader took centre stage in the gruelling four-month negotiation that preceded the Jobs Summit. At just 36 years, Vavi is a veteran negotiator. He joined the National Union of Mineworkers as an organiser 11 years ago and has been at the coalface of labour talks since.
“Vavi shows a willingness to sit down and talk,” says Frans Barker, chief negotiator at the Chamber of Mines, who adds that the labour leader is sometimes less willing to negotiate.
His firm ideological stance has earned him a reputation for hard-headedness. Vavi digs in his heels on a principle, and it is a stance that ANC thinkers have also encountered in this year’s negotiations on the growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear).
He has shored up his economics beliefs with an economics diploma from the University of London, although he had to defer exams because of Jobs Summit fervour.
Many trade unionists regard him as a leader for the times. The times are going to get more difficult for trade unions and ruptures with the government are likely. Under his hand, it is probable that Cosatu will more and more become a broad social movement.
He is planning, for example, a campaign against high commercial interest rates charged by the banks.
Says an SACP member: “Vavi needs to develop tactical flexibility. [Shilowa] was sometimes so flexible that he forgot principles. But one must ask, does he [Vavi] have the tactical sophistication to manage coalitions and to reach out to people?”
Successful trade unionists quickly hone an ability to interact with people. It’s necessary to swing a hostel of mineworkers, to lobby a position and to carry forward a mass campaign.
Vavi began work in Klerksdorp and Orkney in what is now the North-West province. In this hostile gold-mining territory, only the most hardy stick it out. He worked as a uranium plant clerk at Vaal Reefs mine and was Cosatu’s regional secretary for the Western Transvaal for four years before being despatched to the Johannesburg headquarters in 1992.
While the unionist with the easy laugh has developed a skill for the hard, high-level negotiations that characterise headquarters’ life, it is still the shop floor and the rally where he is most comfortable.
Cosatu’s leader-to-be had the quintessential apartheid history. He doesn’t know exactly how old he is – at his baptism, the priest took a guess and gave him the birth date of December 20. To this day, he doesn’t celebrate a birthday.
Vavi began life as the child of labour tenants and remembers trekking around Northern Cape farms with his parents, aunts and uncles as they looked for work. He remembers sleeping in the shelter of the family’s cart, while his mother and father slept in the open and shook off the frost of a cold Karoo morning when they woke up.
As he got older, the young boy didn’t attend school, but was made to tend the farmers’ cows without pay. “I saw how a farmer would beat up the children of other people. How sons were born and welcomed not as a family’s wealth, but as the farmer’s.”
He eventually did get the chance to go to school, but much later in his life.
“It’s when you take all these stories together that you realise I was bound to be a communist,” says Vavi, adding, “This wasn’t only my life. It’s the life of millions.”
Against the current of contemporary thinking, Vavi remains a communist, a belief that has led Barker to comment that: “We see the world in totally different ways. I sometimes think he lives in the past.”
But a senior Cosatu official has been impressed with Vavi’s ability to interrogate the present. He understands economics, knows Gear inside-out and helped craft many of the Jobs Summit proposals.
All of this has meant that Vavi has missed out on a lot of family life this year. When he can, he swims with his wife, Nikiwe, and his two daughters. They’re movie fundis and, consequently, he is too. Vavi’s other passion is soccer (he is a Chief’s supporter) though he grew up on a diet of rugby, being a native of the Northern Cape.
Minister of Posts, Telecommunications and Broadcasting Jay Naidoo, the incumbent before Shilowa, says that Vavi “brings a breath of fresh air into the political environment”.
He adds: “His greatest attribute is his great humility. He is a leader uninfluenced by power and position.”