Ebrahim Harvey Left field President Thabo Mbeki is finding it difficult to manage the crisis in relations between his African National Congress-led government and its alliance partner, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). Forced to strike a balancing act between the two, Mbeki has to draw on all his resources to try and pacify Cosatu. At the heart of the crisis stands the most fundamental questions of economic power in South Africa. This difficulty becomes evident when one studies his speech, following that of Cosatu president,Willie Madisha, at Cosatu’s national congress last week. Whereas Madisha was militant about Cosatu’s opposition to the government’s growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear), Mbeki was carefully poised to make reconciliatory response which avoided responding to the attack made by Madisha on the government’s policies. The only statement Mbeki made about the economy was his agreement with Madisha that it needed to be restructured. But this means different things for the government and Cosatu. For the government “restructuring” is largely a euphemism for privatisation and other neo- liberal measures. Mbeki’s low-key, mild and diversionary speech was tailored to suit the occasion: a Cosatu congress of close to 3E000 delegates who were angry with the government’s proposed labour law amendments, the damage Gear has inflicted upon the federation. Therefore he dared not antagonise Cosatu. It would be hard to resist the conclusion that this soft-treading towards Cosatu was strategically related to the upcoming local government elections. However, the fact is that the divide is growing and the partners know that at bottom there are fundamental differences over economic policy. These are serious enough to make the alliance difficult to sustain. Why? Gear, the essence of the crisis in the alliance, will certainly not be changed by the ruling party in the foreseeable future. Unlike Madisha, Blade Nzimande, general secretary of the South African Communist Party, made no direct reference to the government’s Gear strategy or its privatisation plan for local government. Except for a general critique of capitalism, globalisation and economic restructuring, he, not surprisingly, gave the ANC unconditional support in the local government elections. The problem with Nzimande is that he wants to wield a multi-class national democratic revolution, in which the working class is subordinate to a capitalist-oriented ANC, to achieve socialism. This has happened nowhere in the world. This approach was argued to be necessary for the overthrow of apartheid. Having achieved that, and in the face of the sharpening of class struggles and the attacks by the undeclared state- capital alliance on labour, Nzimande goes on falsely preaching the virtues of a multi-class alliance. Despite a non-racial democracy, capitalism is firmly in the saddle and has reduced more than half the population to abject poverty. This is tearing a multi-class alliance apart. When the SACP does sound revolutionary it is due to the militancy of the Cosatu rank and file.
Cosatu and the SACP are ignoring the logic and history of alliances worldwide in its insistence that its alliance with the ANC is vitally important. The more the ANC weakens them where it matters most – economic and labour policy – the more they clamour for a stronger alliance. Any alliance must have a programme which serves the interests of the parties to it. In the light of the ANC-led government essentially dropping the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in 1995/1996, and instead adopting a programme diametrically opposed to the RDP, namely Gear, there is currently no programme upon which the alliance is based. So other than rhetoric about the RDP what is the alliance based on? The much-touted national democratic revolution has no clear programme which unites the parties in action. Not even the ANC’s 1999 election manifesto provides such a basis as Cosatu and the SACP have said that the ANC has failed to honour much of it and other agreements. This is the critical question which activists in the alliance and analysts must ask themselves. If there is no common and concrete programme which the alliance is implementing, on what basis can it continue?
No amount of “dialectical” rhetoric, which is often invoked to answer contradictions, will work. Why? It is worsening material conditions which define the crisis in the alliance? Tactical and strategic manoeuvring are all short-term machinations. These measures will postpone the crisis briefly, but because of worsening conditions an explosion is inevitable.
ENDS