For argument’s sake let us leave aside all other allegations against Jacob Zuma, deputy president of the ANC. Let us accept that he was justly acquitted in the rape trial earlier this year and that the subsequent corruption case was struck off the roll as a result of monumental bungling by the state.
The fact remains that the most bizarre and troubling factor in South African politics today is the triumphant figure of Zuma who, thanks largely to Cosatu, is riding an unprecedented wave of naïve and misplaced populist support.
Cosatu’s unquestioning support, however, deserves scrutiny. The hard and undeniable fact is that Zuma has never offered support to Cosatu on any major policy issue — not on HIV/Aids, the Zimbabwe debacle, macroeconomic policy, the fight against the neoliberal restructuring of the public sector or privatisation. Where was this ”friend of the people” during those hard days? Not only was he silent in the often heated clashes between Cosatu and the government, but as the second-most senior leader of the ANC and government, he took major responsibility for those policies and their negative effects, including massive job losses.
The opportunism of Zuma’s recent pronouncements, particularly at the recent Cosatu congress and in his speeches to some Cosatu affiliates, is painfully obvious. But it seems that most of Cosatu’s leaders either fail to spot the contradiction of finding themselves as Zuma’s most fervent supporters or are simply obsessed with the fact that their hero is not Thabo Mbeki.
Cosatu has correctly criticised Mbeki for his neoliberal policy regime and haughty presidential style. But how credible is the notion that the trade unions can successfully persuade Zuma to adopt more worker-friendly policies, especially once he has secured the ANC presidency?
Despite the solemn pronouncements of ANC leaders, it is not their organisation that has determined key policies: the current macro- economic set-up was mainly determined by the president and some Cabinet ministers, in consultation with the World Bank and other domestic and international institutions. Even Parliament has largely rubber-stamped major policy decisions taken by the Cabinet. Cosatu has itself made this point many times.
This makes it very unlikely — if not impossible — that Zuma will have the space, power, ability or even willingness to initiate a radical shift in economic policy that is to the liking of Cosatu members.
Moreover, despite the left-wing tinge to some of his rhetoric, Zuma has often stated — and repeated last week — that he has no fundamental differences with ANC policy.
Cosatu has chosen to ignore these in-your-face contradictions. Of equal concern is the fact that the trade union federation has of late paid less attention to strengthening the labour movement after the setbacks of recent years. Instead, its leaders have been seized with building Zuma’s presidential image ahead of next year’s ANC conference. The concerted, but failed, attempt to unseat Cosatu’s allegedly pro-Mbeki president, Willie Madisha, is ample evidence of the serious internal divisions that have had a debilitating effect on South Africa’s largest union federation.
Because Cosatu’s leaders have failed to draw a distinction between their support for Zuma in his legal battles, and their support for his presidency of the ANC and the country — though they recently deny the latter — they are now on a course that virtually guarantees Zuma their unquestioning loyalty.
However, the historical facts do not support the fiction that Zuma is the working-class hero he is made out to be. Cosatu’s support for Zuma is a much more telling indication of the desperate state of the left, both inside and outside the ANC alliance, than it is about Zuma himself.
Ebrahim Harvey is a political commentator and former Cosatu unionist