“He’s behaving like Cosatu belongs to him,” muttered one observer. It was a reference to Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi — the high-spirited, joke-cracking star of the show at the federation’s recent central committee (CC) meeting.
Everything was going Vavi’s way. His personal and ideological rival, Cosatu president Willie Madisha, was facing the axe after telling police he handed unaccounted-for cash to communist boss Blade Nzimande. And the CC was set to endorse Jacob Zuma for the ANC presidency.
It was hard not to share the unease over Vavi’s performance. Was the CC really an expression of worker control? Or was it “palace politics” — Nzimande’s description, in a speech to delegates, of the ANC’s current leadership style?
The previous week, Madisha’s enemies had tried to drive through a motion of no-confidence in his leadership, in an apparent move to keep him off the CC podium. Then the SACP weighed in by announcing — without the benefit of a forensic investigation — that no evidence had been found for his claims about the missing cash.
Both ploys miscarried, and Madisha, a sombre and isolated figure, was on stage throughout the four-day meeting.
It was a disgraceful piece of chicanery, using an unresolved factional dispute in another organisation as a weapon. Where was Cosatu’s vaunted independence?
A mark of factional struggles is the caricaturing of one’s opponents, and Vavi himself is a victim of this.
The Mbeki camp has portrayed Madisha as hostile to the ANC, when a recent Labour Bulletin interview revealed that he is a former Cosas militant and ardent admirer of Oliver Tambo. He believes Thabo Mbeki has betrayed the congress tradition.
But Madisha has also been parodied by his foes. He is not an Mbeki man; he appears, rather, to have grave doubts about Zuma’s credentials as a worker champion. The irony is that the embattled Cosatu president does not seem to share Vavi and Nzimande’s faith in a reformed ANC and tripartite alliance as the road to a socialist state.
Madisha may have lied about the money, but there is no hard proof of this. What is certain is that he has a track record as a “supporter of the working-class project”, as one observer put it.
Of equal concern is the CC’s list of favoured candidates for the ANC’s top six posts, to be decided at Polokwane in December. Apart from former mineworker leaders Kgalema Motlanthe and Gwede Mantashe, none has a union history or known worker sympathies.
Indeed, by naming such figures as parliamentary speaker Baleka Mbete and ex-premier Matthews Phosa, Cosatu largely echoed the ANC Youth League.
The unanimous and unconditional endorsement of Zuma for the ANC’s top job is particularly hard to fathom. The only whisper of dissent came from the shopworkers’ union Saccawu, which proposed an accounting mechanism to bind listed candidates to Cosatu’s political and economic demands.
Zuma’s rape trial, and what it said about his view of women, is known to have angered Cosatu’s gender activists, particularly in Saccawu.
And while CC documents urged a radical overhaul of fiscal and monetary policies, Zuma told the United States bank Citigroup last week that existing policies were correct. During the public service strike, he criticised both sides.
Then there is the small matter of corruption. Zuma’s long rearguard action against a trial may ultimately succeed — but that will not dispel the cloud over him.
He has never satisfactorily explained the “encrypted fax” in which a French arms firm allegedly offered him an annual bribe. And although Judge Hilary Squires may not have used the precise words “generally corrupt” to describe his relationship with Schabir Shaik, that is the clear thrust of his judgement.
Zuma told Cosatu’s 2002 congress, which gave him a hero’s welcome, that he is communist by inclination. In reality, his instincts appear to be those of a conservative rural patriarch.
The Shaik trial revealed that he was driven into Shaik’s sleazy embrace by huge debts incurred by spending on his extended family and Nkandla homestead. Like a feudal magnate, he apparently believed his Big Man status entitled him to certain benefits, whether or not he could not afford them.
Cosatu’s enthusiasm for Zuma may be partly strategic: it may calculate that he is the only realistic challenger to Mbeki, and that many suitable left candidates are not widely known.
And it is not wholly driven from the top. Senior communist Jeremy Cronin has remarked on his powerful “worker/peasant” magnetism. Disillusioned with Mbeki, many poor South Africans are clearly looking for a new deliverer.
But Cosatu, at least, could have tried to remain uncontaminated by the ruling party’s brutal power politics.
Its leaders could have punted a more principled option – Motlanthe, for example. Their single-minded advocacy of the ANC deputy president, and conspiracy of silence on his manifest faults, amounts to a misuse of leadership.