Glenda Daniels
In a move that could heighten tensions between labour and the ruling African National Congress, the Congress of South African Trade Unions is to stage a national summit on economic reconstruction involving all elements of civil society.
The summit, which Cosatu wants to convene by the end of the year, but is more likely to happen early next year, is a follow-up to its anti-privatisation campaign and would focus on alternative economic strategies to the government’s growth, employment and redistribution policy (Gear).
Cosatu insists the intention is not to mobilise an anti-government political front. However, there are already murmurings within the ANC that the federation is looking to set up a counterpart to Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change, whose launch was preceded by a civil society indaba.
Cosatu’s plan has the backing of the NGO umbrella body Sangoco, whose president, Mercia Andrews, said: “It’s time for civil society to flex its muscles. This summit will be about how we address the needs of the poor.”
Cosatu plans to invite the churches, with whom its president, Willie Madisha, has recently had extensive contact, non-Cosatu unions who joined the recent anti-privatisation strike, civic organisations and business. It also plans to invite the ANC.
The move comes against the backdrop of a remarkable document drawn up by the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC), which accuses a “tendency” in Cosatu and the South African Communist Party of launching “a systematic assault on the ANC from the left”, seeking to transform Cosatu into an independent political formation and weakening links between the ANC and SACP.
The “ultra-leftists” targeted by the document are understood to be Madisha, Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, SACP secretary general Blade Nzimande, National Union of Mineworkers general secretary Gwede Mantashe and Cosatu’s public sector policy coordinator Neva Makgetla.
Significantly, the NEC document lists as one of the aims of the “tendency” to “alienate the mass democratic movement and the organisations of civil society from the ANC”, and to “group these formations around Cosatu”.
“Among the aims of the tendency are to force government to adopt a populist social and economic programme. By seeking to achieve an idealist ‘great leap forward’, this would ultimately result in the collapse of our economy and country and the political victory of the forces of the right.”
Asked how the ANC viewed Cosatu’s planned summit, ANC spokesman Smuts Ngonyama said he knew nothing about it. He did not know whether the ANC would attend.
Another senior ANC insider said Cosatu had a right to call any meeting it wanted. “But if, as our ally, it wants to mobilise civil society against the government, I would have a problem with that.”
Unionists say Cosatu still wants the planned “retreat” of the tripartite alliance scheduled for next month – if it happens.
The NEC document makes no reference to the alliance meeting. Instead, it suggests bilateral meetings between the ANC and its allies at which together, the ANC, SACP and Cosatu “should isolate and defeat this tendency which can easily create fertile ground for counter-revolution”.
Madisha would not comment on the NEC document or the summit, which was conceived by Cosatu’s central executive committee in the aftermath of the anti-privatisation strike.
However, a well-placed Cosatu source said its purpose was twofold: to challenge government’s free-market approach to the economy and articulate alternatives, and “to talk to people who have supported us on privatisation to see if we can forge a common front. It is a reaction to a crisis; and we have to get government to accept that there is a crisis. All of us… need to sit down and find a way forward.”
Central to the summit, the source said, was what Vavi had described as “the job-loss bloodbath” in South Africa. “This is having devastating effects on society. But labour has a specific interest – some unions have lost 20% of their members.”