Ebrahim Harvey
The strikes, threats and demonstrations in the public and private sectors over the past few weeks have again placed the public spotlight on the government’s growth, employment and redistribution (Gear) policies.
South Africa has paid a terribly heavy price for Gear.
Whether it goes by the name of commercialisation, privatisation or restructuring, the source and purpose is the same: government commitment to the macro-economic policies of Gear.
The stringent and profit-driven constraints imposed upon the economy by Gear policies since 1996 have reached a critical point.
The events of recent weeks are probably a dress rehearsal of what is still to come, with both sides bracing themselves for the greater battles that lie ahead.
It is a foregone conclusion that the scars from these battles will only serve to deepen the growing rift within the African National Congress/South African Communist Party/ Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) alliance. Something big must give sooner or later.
Gear is the result of a steady neo-liberal capitalist shift in ANC economic policy since 1990.
Immediately after his release from prison, Nelson Mandela said the ANC unequivocally stood for nationalisation. The pendulum has swung from left to right to the extent that today the ANC openly espouses neo-liberal capitalist policies.
Gear is the ANC’s response to globalisation, not to the needs and interests of the millions who voted for it twice. ANC economic policy is much more in tune with the demands of globalisation than those of millions of desperately poor black people who put their trust in the party.
The real victims of Gear policies have been the most important mass support base of the ANC – the urban and rural poor.
In real terms, these people have not experienced any significant improvement in their material conditions and standards of living since 1994.
To the contrary, the right to vote in 1994 did not usher in a period of material prosperity for these people, but rather rising levels of poverty.
The tragedy is that this class of people, who always constituted the overwhelming majority of the population and who bore the brunt of racism and capitalism before 1994, have continued to suffer poverty more brutal than during the darkest days of apartheid.
This represents the single biggest problem and challenge of our present transformation.
Just what has been transformed? Certainly not the system of globalised profiteering.
Unlike earlier rounds, the current battles between the ANC government and its alliance partners have put considerably more at stake.
Having once more campaigned for an ANC vote in the recent elections, the unions are more adamant than they were in 1994 that now is payback time.
On the other hand, the ANC, having recommitted itself to Gear during the recent election campaigning and to accelerating the pace of privatisation, sees no alternative but to implement this policy, notwithstanding the huge human and social costs. The die is cast.
In this confrontation with the government, the unions are driven by a desperate need to fight for and save many thousands of jobs and, with that, the further loss of union membership, already decimated by massive retrenchments over the past few years. In many ways it is a fight for the survival of the unions.
The overwhelming victory of the ANC in the recent election has had two combined but contrasting effects.
On the one hand it appears to have encouraged an arrogant confidence in the ANC hierarchy to do as it sees fit regarding implementation of policy decisions.
On the other, it has given the ANC’s more left-inclined alliance partners, now affected by privatisation and retrenchments, a greater sense that they deserve to be treated better.
This confrontation brings to a head the dominating power of the ANC and globalisation, and the declining power of the unions and the left. The ANC knows full well that if this was the Eighties, it would hardly have dared take on the unions in a show of strength.
The deeper irony is that the ANC government is now in battle with largely the same union constituency that provided it in the Eighties with its most important organised mass support base inside the country, and who vigorously campaigned for an ANC vote in the recent elections. The tide has truly turned.
But today it is not so much the declining strength of the unions that eggs on the ANC, but rather the prescriptive power of globalisation, to which the ANC and the government are clearly shackled.
What is the answer of Cosatu and the SACP to this crisis?
For the left in the alliance, the time for fancy footwork on Gear has certainly passed. Decisively defining its position on economic policy is now right on top of the agenda.
With many important union leaders now co- opted into government structures, notably Mbhazima Shilowa and John Ngomo, the most important question is: “Will the remaining official leadership succumb to pressure from the government, or steadfastly represent the needs and demands of its membership?”
Only time will tell. But if the past three weeks are anything to go by, particularly the statements made by the Cosatu and SACP leadership, we have a gigantic battle on the horizon which will make what is happening now look like preliminary skirmishes.
While no party to this growing conflict will be unscathed, the ANC stands to lose most in the longer run.
Within the next year we are likely to see a fundamental realignment of political and social forces.
Many hope that Cosatu, though not quite as powerful as it was in the Eighties, will muster all its remaining strength and resources to wage a fight to the finish – and in so doing, receive the unstinting support of all progressive forces within civil society.
The critical question is: “Is Cosatu equal to the task?”
This will certainly be decided in the next few weeks and, most importantly, by the results of its special congress to be held next month.
That congress will go down in history as probably Cosatu’s most important. Either it blazes an independent path forward which is in keeping with the needs and interests of its members, or it succumbs once more to the tentacles of ANC control and sacrifices its membership at the altar of globalisation.
If Cosatu and the SACP fail to stop current moves to privatise and retrench, we are all going to pay an even heavier price in the next five years.
Once more it is the millions of poorest black people who will suffer most.
The ANC is on a collision course with its own support base and could suffer come the 2004 election.
Memory is a powerful weapon at election time. However, now is the time to stop the rot.
Ebrahim Harvey is a former Cosatu unionist and a political activist