Trade union leaders are increasingly talking of transferring their allegiance to African National Congress general secretary Kgalema Motlanthe as a compromise candidate for the country’s next presidency.
A senior Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) leader, who asked not to be named, told the Mail & Guardian this week that there was a growing recognition on the left that Jacob Zuma might not succeed to the presidency, because he was ”tainted”.
Said another Cosatu official: ”Our compromise candidate would be Kgalema.”
However, a senior unionist said the discussion on labour’s shifting preference was ”at an early stage”.
The M&G has learnt that KwaZulu-Natal finance minister Zweli Mkhize is heading an informal ANC lobby group which aims to persuade Zuma to withdraw from the leadership race and instead choose a compromise candidate.
Zuma is known to want Motlanthe to serve as his deputy if he emerges as the ANC’s choice of president in 2007.
Also part of the Mkhize group’s strategy is to call for an early ANC conference to avert further damage to the party. A senior Eastern Cape party leader had met Zuma to discuss the strategy.
The emergence of Motlanthe as a fall-back labour candidate coincided with a veiled Cosatu warning that it is fed up with Mbeki’s autocratic leadership style.
At a media conference in Johannesburg on Thursday, Cosatu’s deputy general secretary, Bheki Ntshalintshali, said the federation would not accept a commission of inquiry unless it interrogated the failures of the democratic movement as a whole.
Cosatu’s central executive committee (CEC) met on Wednesday to discuss Mbeki’s suggestion, contained in a letter to the tripartite alliance 10-a-side meeting last week, that a commission of inquiry be set up to investigate claims that he was spearheading a political conspiracy designed to sabotage Zuma’s presidential ambitions.
This week Cosatu accepted the principle of the commission but lashed Mbeki for his individualistic leadership style.
”The president should lobby for the acceptance of his views within the ANC structures, so that this becomes the official ANC view, rather than his personal proposal,” said Ntshalintshali.
Mbeki irked alliance leaders by publishing the letter, which they considered part of an internal debate, on the ANC Today website last Friday.
Willie Madisha, Cosatu’s president, added that Cosatu would agree to an inquiry only if it shifted from political conspiracy theories to examining ”what it is that is causing the alliance to malfunction”.
The CEC meeting suggested that Mbeki’s proposal for a commission would amount to a cosmetic exercise because it would not be able to ”subpoena any witness, seize documents held by the state institutions, or allow witnesses to be subjected to rigorous questioning by the lawyers”.
Furthermore, ”the CEC is opposed to dealing with deep-seated political problems in the [tripartite] alliance and in society through technocratic processes. Political crises require political interventions, not commissions of inquiry,” said Ntshalintshali.
He added that at Wednesday’s CEC meeting, it was suggested that the political conspiracy theories were being stoked by ”feelings of marginalisation [in the alliance], concerns about concentration of power, and the widespread perception that the working class and the poor were not the main beneficiaries of the economic transformation in the first decade of freedom.”
In a related development, the M&G understands that another task team, grouped around Mbeki, is managing the conflict over Zuma in the tripartite alliance.
It is understood that Charles Nqakula, Minister of Safety and Security; Sydney Mufamadi, Minister of Provincial and Local Government; Joel Netshitenzhe, head of government communications; and Mosiuoa Lekota, chairperson of the ANC, are among those advising Mbeki on how to control the damage to both the party and to Mbeki himself.
The M&G understands that part of the strategy is to convey Mbeki’s perspective to provincial premiers and business.