Sources say that last weekend’s meeting between the ANC and Cosatu ”brought optimism”
Jaspreet Kindra
President Thabo Mbeki himself insisted on including HIV/Aids on the agenda at a high-level meeting between the African National Congress and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) last weekend.
And in a further sign of the thawing of relations between the ruling party and labour, the meeting also heard that Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel is to brief the Millennium Labour Council, which includes the union movement, on the budget next week.
Cosatu has long pressed for greater involvement in the budget process.
For its part, insiders said Cosatu had shelved its plans to hold a ”people’s summit” on the economy. The federation will instead join forces with the ANC in the growth and development summit suggested by Mbeki in his state of the nation address.
The summit is to be held in April, as is the long-awaited tripartite alliance meeting. Cosatu is to lobby businesses next week to participate in the growth summit.
Cosatu president Willy Madisha described the weekend meeting as ”extremely positive” and ”constructive”.
Although scheduled for discussion, HIV/Aids was not debated. A source said Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and other Cabinet ministers had left the meeting by the time it was raised.
However, Cosatu, Tshabalala-Msimang and other members of the ANC health secretariat are to meet this month to discuss HIV and Aids.
Cosatu has in the past pressed for the provision of nevirapine to all HIV-infected pregnant women. The labour federation has also publicly supported the Treatment Action Campaign’s court challenge to the government’s Aids policy.
The Cosatu Left expressed reservations about aspects of the meeting. One unionist described as ”pointless” Manuel’s planned presentation on the budget, as the budget had already been formulated. By the same token, it did not make sense to hold the growth summit in April after the budget had been presented.
However, senior alliance sources were buoyed by the atmosphere at the meeting, which ”brought optimism”.
”We felt that the ANC was willing to listen to and accommodate our views,” one said.
When Cosatu delegates raised Mbeki’s insistence, in his address in Parliament, that there would be no shift in macroeconomic policy, the ANC representatives said they were willing to debate the issue at the summit.
There are doubts in the alliance about the government’s privatisation policy, and many ANC members are said to favour a more active state role in the economy.
An index of the shifting mood was Mbeki’s remarks on privatisation in an interview on the SABC’s Newshour on Sunday night. He sounded a word of caution, citing problems with the privatisation of British Rail and a similar move in New Zealand as grounds for circumspection.
Labour feels the ANC has accommodated some of its suggestions in the recent past, the most prominent being the appointment of the multi-sectoral South African observer mission to Zimbabwe, which left for Harare this week.
Sources said the appointment of Sam Motsuenyane, the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, had also been proposed by Cosatu at a recent multi-sectoral meeting on Zimbabwe with Mbeki. Motsuenyane is also a former head of the National African Federated Chambers of Commerce.
A senior source who attended the meeting said: ”Now we have to see what happens [at the growth summit] in April.”