Glenda Daniels
Communists and trade unionists are ambivalent about the possible tie-up between the New National Party and the African National Congress, endorsing it as a strategic compromise but also seeing it a potential a boost for ANC rightwingers.
A Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) statement this week attacked the NNP as “a force hostile to the interests of trade unions and workers”, but argued that the ANC should form a “temporary tactical bloc” with the party in the Western Cape legislature.
Some left-wing analysts and unionists fear a consolidation of the centre-right and a strengthening of “union-bashing” tendencies already evident in the ANC. There is also a view that President Thabo Mbeki may be looking beyond short-term gains of ANC dominance in the Western Cape government and Cape Town unicity, to a point where the ruling party sheds its left-wing allies.
Mbeki is on record as posing the eventual fragmentation of the tripartite alliance. With tensions heightening in the alliance over economic policy, the argument goes, he may be looking to consolidate a new consensus of the centre, including coloured voters.
National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) general secretary Gwede Mantashe says there is a possibility of a right-wing consolidation that “might mean a shift to centrist politics. But it will be up to the working class to ensure the national democratic revolution is not derailed.”
Mantashe neither condemns nor supports the ANC’s courtship of the NNP. “It is a standing principle to mobilise those forces who are not with you,” he says. However, there is “ambivalence” in NUM because of the danger of consolidating the right.
South African Communist Party secretary general Blade Nzimande says he “not too perturbed” about the possibility of an ANC-NNP alliance and that SACP has not met to formulate a position on the issue. “We’ve got to take the expedient route if it means delivery,” he says.
“I don’t believe this requires a reconfiguration of the left. The centre of gravity has to be the tripartite alliance. Don’t forget we did cooperate with the NP in the government of national unity.”
Most strongly in favour of a strategic tie-up is Cosatu’s Western Cape provincial secretary, Tony Ehrenreich, who argues that “being on the inside” holds major advantages for the ANC in the Western Cape.
Left-wing political commentators disagree, arguing that official hostility to the unions will intensify if a centre-right coalition runs South Africa.
Ravi Naidoo, head of Cosatu’s research arm, the National Labour and Economic Development Institute, argues that an alliance will inevitably affect ANC policies. “It will strengthen ANC conservatives and play into the recent [national executive committee] briefing document on ultra-left tendencies in the unions. With a growing absorption of the right, there will be policy confusion especially in relation to poverty.”
Wits university academic Eddie Webster agrees that an alliance between the architects of apartheid and the ANC would be “awkward” and “cynicism at its worst”. He adds that it is too early in South Africa’s democratic experiment to follow the Western democratic practice of forming alliances of convenience at the drop of a hat. “These undignified and self-seeking manoeuvres send the wrong message to citizens. It’s very dangerous when we are trying to consolidate democracy.”
Wits’s head of political studies, Tom Lodge, views the rapprochement as “bad news for the left. Saying that it will be in the interests of eradicating poverty is a silly argument, and comes at a time when the left is under attack from the ANC. This move will probably strengthen anti-union sentiments.”
Lodge says he cannot take an ANC-NNP alliance seriously because of the “opportunism” it would involve. “Surely, it will be even more difficult for the ANC to have an alliance with the NNP than it was for the Democratic Alliance.”
Lodge blames Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon for the debacle. “As much as I can’t stand [former Cape Town mayor] Peter Marais, did the street-naming fiasco warrant this behaviour on Leon’s part? “For the NNP-Democratic Party alliance to have worked you needed a different style of leadership from Leon’s imperial style.”