When the African National Congress’s exiled top brass returned to South Africa in 1990, Essop Pahad is said to have peremptorily instructed leaders of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) that from now on they should take their political direction from the ANC. The unionists were speechless. They thought their mandates came from their members.
Like Pahad, his boss and close friend President Thabo Mbeki has never understood the mass participatory culture that arose in the townships in the 1980s and still survives — particularly in the labour movement. Indeed, he has read it as a challenge to his authority and tried to stamp on it.
He is paying the price now, as his rival, Jacob Zuma, cashes in on widespread disillusionment with his autocratic political style.
A remote man by temperament, Mbeki was further shaped by the top-down, security-obsessed, Byzantine politics of London and Lusaka in the exile years, the polar opposite of the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM).
With its national leaders on the run or in detention, the MDM was highly decentralised and reliant on local decision-making. It was the movement’s hydra-headed character that finally defeated the Nationalist government and its security apparatus — it could not be disabled by simple decapitation, like the ANC and the South African Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu) 20 years earlier.
The Cosatu unions, too, had developed their own bottom-up traditions, with strong factory organisation and an independent, worker-centred political line. Sactu, by contrast, was little more than the ANC’s labour auxiliary.
Fast forward to 2002, and the ANC national executive committee’s infamous†‘briefing notes†and attempt to ‘isolate and defeat†alleged ultra-left labour leaders. A climactic response to protracted differences over the growth, employment and redistribution (Gear) policy and Cosatu’s anti-privatisation strike, the document had Mbeki, and the exile mentality, stamped all over it.
Central to it was the strident demand that the unions submit to the ANC’s political leadership — worse, that they should confine themselves to workplace issues — and the claim that they had been misled by elements ‘alien to the congress traditionâ€. Absolute political submission was also demanded from the South African Communist Party, described as ‘nothing other than the ANCâ€.
Significantly, the document’s intimidatory tone and bizarre conspiracy theories — among them that the union ultra-left and the right were in ‘counter-revolutionary†league — appeared to puzzle and embarrass, rather than outrage, the ANC regions it was used to ‘briefâ€. As on other questions, Mbeki had deluded himself that the party’s rank and file thinks as he does.
The conflict in the ‘tripartite alliance†has been only partly between macro-economic perspectives. For example, the unions have not demanded nationalisation — an odd stance for ‘ultra-leftists†— while the government has repeatedly insisted that parastatals supplying basic services must stay in state hands. The two sides are not unbridgeably distant.
The real flashpoint has been the management of what differences there are, stemming from the president’s firm belief that the alliance left must do and think as it is told.
What did the offensive against the ultra-left achieve, other than to alienate unionists and persuade them that ANC leaders do not take their concerns seriously? Why the huge song and dance, drawing in half the Cabinet, over Cosatu’s rather ineffectual one-day anti-privatisation strike? When Gear was debated in the National Economic and Development Labour Council, did the government really have to slap labour in the face by sending junior functionaries to represent it? Why the uproar over SACP leader Jeremy Cronin’s mildly heterodox Internet interview, and his public savaging by presidential rottweiler Dumisani Makhaye?
The fact is that Mbeki has systematically shut down opposition and debate in both the alliance and the country at large. He has accused perceived ANC rivals of plotting against his life. He has even had the effrontery to tell towering figures such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu to shut up.
Crowning all was his two-year HIV/Aids bender, which only the imminence of last year’s election seems to have curbed. Buffoons such as denialist campaigner Anthony Brink imagine the pressure on the president over Aids came from white journalists. The real heat came from ordinary people whose family members were dying while an ideologically perverse and stiff-necked administration continued to withhold drug treatment.
Zuma has neither the character nor the personal habits to match his presidential ambitions, as the Schabir Shaik trial made clear. He is a spendthrift and scrounger who writes rubber cheques and forges sleazy relationships with crooked businessmen willing to bankroll his appetite for the good life he cannot afford.
For those reasons — and because he has no known economic reform agenda — he is also not a credible candidate of the left. Significantly, opinion surveys show he is not much admired by the broad South African public.
But he apparently commands the almost blind support of broad swathes of alliance members, particularly the youth.
Some may be counting on him to advance their fortunes. But his warm and engaging personality, and the fact that he has both the organisational weight and daring to stand up to the president, seem much larger factors. Around him has crystallised the longing for the sympathetic, inclusive, tolerant and consultative leadership style President Mbeki so signally lacks.