President Thabo Mbeki and sections of the African National Congress this week repeatedly lashed out at the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu),
labelling its trip to Zimbabwe last week “adventurism”.
But Cosatu and the South African Communist Party are refusing to buckle, insisting that there is space for a different tactical approach, and warning that the government’s analysis of the situation in Zimbabwe is fundamentally flawed.
Mbeki is reliably understood to have angrily attacked the mission both in the ANC caucus at Parliament, in Cabinet and at a tripartite alliance secretariat meeting.
A Cabinet statement this week rebuked Cosatu for straying from the path of quiet diplomacy: “Government remains firmly convinced that these and other issues are best handled by Zimbabweans themselves, and that our role in the SADC [Southern African Development Community] is to lend a hand. In this regard, our own conduct as government and civil society in South Africa should be informed by the desire to promote, rather than undermine, the attainment of these objectives,” said the Cabinet this week.
The statement seemed to resonate closely with remarks by Zimbabwean high commissioner Simon Moyo, who told Parliament’s portfolio committee earlier this week that the delegation should have worked through Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana and approved intergovernmental channels.
“To say besides President Mbeki’s thing we are going to do our own — I don’t know if it helps, it only brings confusion,” he said. But an even more hardline approach to Cosatu was in evidence from some committee members. One ANC MP described the Cosatu mission as a “fishing expedition [which] was never going to achieve anything but titles of heroism” for its members.
“You don’t go and express solidarity with people who are not in a political crisis. You can express solidarity with Cubans, with Western Sahara, with Palestinians — but there is no problem of human rights in Zimbabwe,” Rueben Mohlaloga said. He went on to argue that Zimbabwe was a functioning democracy that was being subjected to inconsistent standards of judgement.
Mohlaloga is a junior member of Parliament, and his views may not represent mainstream opinion in his party, but concerns persist that there are fundamental problems with Mbeki’s approach.
The view of the SACP, expressed in a recent working paper and shared by a number of ruling party MPs and ANC national executive committee members with whom the Mail & Guardian has spoken, is that “Zanu-PF is less and less a liberation movement confidently fostering a progressive hegemony in its own country and in the region, and more and more a repressive machine focused narrowly on holding on to power”.
While the schism will play out as one between Cosatu and the SACP, on the one hand, and the ANC on the other, the criss-crossing nature of alliance membership speaks to a division within the ruling party.
None of these sources wanted to be named, but more than one echoed the concern that: “The worst possible option we could take as the Alliance in South Africa would be a ‘pragmatic’ acceptance of Zanu-PF’s unilaterally declared March 2005 election date, and a ‘pragmatic’ making the best of a bad deal in the hope that somehow, after a flawed election, a victorious Zanu-PF would be more magnanimous and a reduced MDC would be more realistic. In a way, this would be to re-play the illusions of the 2002 presidential election.”
The concern within the tripartite alliance is that this analysis of the last election continues to inform thinking on the issue in the Cabinet and the Presidency, and may lead to acceptance of another fundamentally flawed election process which
consolidates Mugabe’s grip on power.
Asked how the ANC planned to resolve differences over the issue, Obed Bapela, also a member of the foreign affairs committee, said secretary general of the ANC, Kgalema Motlanthe, and secretary general of Cosatu, Zwe-linzima Vavi, would meet to discuss it.
“Cosatu was within its rights,” he said. “But this is a meeting to discuss whether it was the right route to take.”
This attempt to rap the federation over the knuckles while offering the face-saving suggestion that it was within its rights is unlikely to be accepted, however.
Unions should not be expected to behave like governments, and direct contacts at all levels are required to address the crisis, alliance members argue.
Meanwhile, the government’s line on the issue seems to have cheered Zimbabwean government representatives. Apparently buoyed by Mo-hlaloga’s remarks, Moyo really hit his stride in the committee when asked about alternatives to quiet diplomacy: “The alternative is a war, and we are saying, come! If you have got an army somewhere, come, but don’t cry afterwards.”
It was left to Freedom Front leader Pieter Mulder to remind the committee that if Cosatu had stuck to labour issues during the 1970s and 1980s as the apartheid government insisted, democracy would have been a lot slower to come to South Africa.