OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Thursday 9.30pm
THE Congress of South African Trade Unions’s newly elected general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi has asked for an urgent meeting behind closed doors with the tripartite alliance after African National Congress chairman Patrick Lekota publicly rebuked Cosatu.
Speaking at Cosatu’s special congress in Midrand on Wednesday, Lekota warned Cosatu leaders not to raise their grievances with government’s labour and economic policies in public.
“The congress is an open platform and what happened [on Wednesday] created the impression that Cosatu is an ill-disciplined component of the alliance,” Vavi said.
He admitted that there are differences in policies between the Cosatu-ANC-South African Communist Party alliance, but denied a rift exists between the alliance partners.
He said that such a public rebuke deserves, however, to be addressed otherwise it “could lead to the perception that there is an imminent crisis in the alliance.” Despite Vavi’s assurances of common ground, the government and labour federation are in the midst of a standoff over public sector wages in which Cosatu has expressed its fury at the government’s “unilateral” wage implementation.
Earlier on Thursday SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande made a conciliatory address to the 2 200 delegates — calling for a firming of the tripartite bond.