Finally the elections are over and workers and the poor have given a clear mandate to the African National Congress government: they want much stronger efforts to address unemployment, HIV and Aids, inequality, corruption, crime and homelessness. For its part, the ANC has committed to maintaining a bias toward the poor in all its policies.
Over the next five years the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) must ensure that the working class takes a lead as we put into practice the concept of a people’s contract to create work and fight poverty. The working class and the poor secured the ANC victory and the benefits must mostly go to those who worked for this victory. Workers cannot allow other groups to snatch our successes and use them to our detriment.
This mandate reflects the plan toward 2015 from Cosatu’s congress last year, which defines our priorities, benchmarks and core strategies. The two central pillars are building working-class power and ensuring quality jobs. In that context we have to define strategies to make the tripartite alliance — the ANC, Cosatu and the South African Communist Party — work, and ensure that policy engagements reinforce our organisational efforts.
In the 2015 plan we aimed to play a critical role in the 2004 elections — we achieved that goal. We are proud of this contribution. Now, the real work must begin to achieve our longer-term aims.
Organised workers, as a leading component of the working class, have to use their power to give a voice to the majority. We must position ourselves as leaders and help provide strategic clarity around challenges.
Those self-appointed critics who doubted Cosatu’s ability to lead the working class have had to eat humble pie. Those who doubted our loyalty to the congress movement, and wanted to treat us as stepdaughters or stepsons of it, cannot ignore our role in this victory. The ANC is and must remain the workers’ movement.
As an integral part of the movement Cosatu will be treated with the respect we deserve. In the campaign, we saw close collaboration at all levels — that spirit and practice should continue beyond elections. In particular, we expect to continue and deepen consultation on key policies and their deployment, including the appointment of the executive and premiers.
More broadly, the alliance as a whole must drive transformation. We want space for political engagement about key challenges and how we can tilt the balance of forces.
Cosatu accepts responsibility for weaknesses in the alliance. Only when Cosatu and the working class as a whole have been strengthened will we see greater coherence and direction from the alliance. Our 2015 programme, therefore, seeks to build Cosatu and to strengthen the alliance by getting workers to join the ANC and the SACP en masse. It also calls on workers to lead organs of people’s power like ward committees and school governing bodies.
Like any other campaign, the elections campaign should end with greater membership, stronger structures and a better grasp by members of the challenges we face. It would be a complete tragedy if the alliance disappeared after the elections and only emerged again for the local government campaign and then again for the 2009 elections. That would be tantamount to betrayal of the trust our people have in what President Thabo Mbeki correctly called the people’s congress.
We need to sustain our mobilisation and channel it to implement our commitments. The election campaign closed the gap between the leadership and the base, and we must not allow it to re-open. We need to keep on listening by continuing our door-to-door factory and branch visits and our people’s forums.
The election campaign showed our leadership the extraordinary strength we have on the ground as well as some glaring weaknesses. In some workplaces we visited staff complained bitterly about poor union service. Similarly, some communities told us about corrupt or unresponsive councillors. This should not be allowed to happen especially as it is our members themselves who decide who represents them. We must empower workers and communities to act decisively when they get a raw deal.
We will develop a strategy to deal with these organisational weaknesses. We expect our allies to do the same. The people’s contract must be propelled from below, which can only happen if our structures are strengthened to deal with local and national challenges.
Finally, the easy talk of a social partnership at last year’s Growth and Development Summit should not underplay the role of the state. The government’s function is not just to allocate resources to anti-poverty programmes. Its most important task is to set a policy framework that encourages all of us, including big business, to transform the economy to benefit the majority.
We can engage with the terms of the people’s contract, but the state needs to lead the way with a strong position on how we should unite to fight poverty and create jobs. This position, in turn, must arise from an engagement with the alliance.
The biggest policy challenges for the new government are joblessness and the HIV/Aids epidemic.
The ANC and its allies have committed to halving the unemployment rate by 2014. To monitor its progress, this long-term objective must be broken into annual targets. As the Presidency’s Ten Year Review noted, every government agency, without exception, must do much more to prioritise job creation and programmes for the poor.
In the past 10 years some economic policies have focused too narrowly on exports and free markets. That encouraged mineral and heavy-chemicals production and the auto industry, none of which can create jobs on a large scale. In contrast, light manufacturing, most services, retail and agriculture — which can generate employment and create opportunities for smaller enterprises — have largely stagnated.
In the next few years the government must engage more actively to ensure that the process of developing sector strategies — agreed at the Growth and Development Summit — really focuses on job creation and equity, and not just on exports. It should act vigorously on import-parity pricing of basic chemicals, steel and food, and urgently do something about the overvaluation of the rand.
To overcome the marginalisation of most of our people we must also do more to ensure that access to infrastructure, land and other productive assets, as well as basic services and finance, improves quantitively.
The new government must,therefore, maintain the expansionary fiscal stance of recent years. Last year’s real increase of 8% in government spending should set the tone for the next five years.
On the issues of HIV and Aids, the government’s comprehensive strategy, including the roll out of anti-retrovirals in the public health system, provides the basis for a stronger partnership. We must guarantee that the strategy becomes a living reality for the millions affected and infected. Besides supporting the treatment plan we must all do more to end stigmatisation and support prevention.
Addressing these challenges requires that all of our human, financial and governance resources are mobilised. This will only happen if workers and poor communities are allowed to express their demands and influence national decisions. Cosatu will work tirelessly to achieve this ultimate objective. In the coming 10 years of our liberation we must indeed ensure that the working class takes the lead.
Zwelinzima Vavi is the general secretary of Cosatu