The ANC, Cosatu and SACP like to tell us that the death of the tripartite alliance is greatly exaggerated. They boast that it is the longest enduring political relationship in South African history, having survived exile and infiltration by the apartheid government to flourish under democratic conditions.
Recently, ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe quipped that while the media interprets the endless spats within this ménage a trois as a prelude to divorce, the fights are, in fact, helpful to the ANC, acting as a kind of corrective discipline to stop it from drifting too far to the right.
The glue that unites the alliance is something called “national democratic revolution”, which can mean, depending how you interpret it, either hegemonic rule and control of all the levers of state and society, or a more benign vision of an equal and prosperous democracy.
A more modest and perhaps more broadly agreed role for the alliance is that it manages those parts of the social contract that involve the state and labour, keeping its contradictions in check, while providing sufficient play for diverging interests to be accommodated.
There was limited evidence this week for either proposition.
The public service strikes that are crippling hospitals and schools are closer to spousal abuse than they are to a dinner table argument. As ever, it is the kids that suffer. The working class and poor children are the ones missing classes and possibly crucial exams. The working class and poor people are the ones being sent home from state hospitals untreated or undertreated.
And the mechanisms for managing social conflict that the alliance has developed over the years and entrenched since the end of apartheid seem to have been forgotten or abandoned. Union leaders threaten more chaos and defiance of court orders, while the government hunkers down behind the economics of what it sees as a generous settlement offer.
President Jacob Zuma’s ticket to the presidency wasn’t via any policy platform so much as a promise to restore alliance unity and, had he achieved the balancing of social forces envisaged in its most noble imaginings, that may have been no bad thing. But he is, instead, presiding over a battle as fractious, perhaps more so, than anything faced by his predecessor.
Surely, if the strike were a mere matter of percentages, the alliance would have demonstrated its capacity for accommodation and arrived at a solution.
That it has not done so suggests that this is a test of power that is seriously overstraining the alliance’s capacity for containment. “Deliver on your mandate!” Cosatu insists. “Back off and let us govern,” Zuma’s ANC replies.
It seems trite to us that Cosatu often reminds the ANC of its connection to the interests of a broad, working-class constituency and of the values of openness and accountability. It seems similarly trite that it could get its members to accept an offer of twice inflation if it really wanted to. Certainly, popular sympathy for both sides is at a low ebb.
The question is at what point the relationship is tested to destruction, either internally, or in terms of public legitimacy. Whatever happens in the next few days, that point seems closer now.