Cosatu is a bit like an abused wife who constantly wrings her hands at the disgrace she must suffer in her chosen alliance, but never leaves.
The trade unions’ poster boy Zwelinzima Vavi made that clearer than ever on Sunday, in his tortured reprisals of being invited to “walk out” by the ANC in their last meeting.
Poor Vavi. I may make some T-shirts saying just that: “Poor Vavi.” Middle class South Africans love that sort of thing. Slogan T-shirts, I mean, not endearing unionists, although they’re pretty partial to those too of late, believe it or not.
I love the fact that the firebrand leader of the revolutionary left has become the voice of reason that most middle class South Africans cling to. You know things are bad when the head of the trade unions is the only politician your average yuppie can listen to without flinching.
So, Vavi made the front page of the Sunday papers for saying South Africa is becoming a banana republic. This made a lot of people angry — particularly resentful white “refugees” in developed countries who had been saying this for years and never made so much as a Hayibo satirical article.
But that’s not all Vavi said. He also let us into Cosatu’s last meeting with the ruling party, way back in September 2010. Yep, that’s when last the supposed partners have spoken.
In the meeting, Vavi had a heated exchange with once-upon-a-time leftie turned ANC acolyte Gwede Mantashe, who told the trade union where to get off if it didn’t like the corruption permeating the party.
Mantashe apparently said the ANC wouldn’t be “frogmarched and won’t be blackmailed — Cosatu may walk if that is what it wants to do”.
What a bad, bad husband the ANC is to Cosatu. Like a thuggish bully who knows he can get away with murder, the ANC have long neglected and sidelined Cosatu, a partner of the tripartite alliance whose members form a core part of the ANC’s support.
The abused wife
But Cosatu is loyal to a fault, and just like that annoying friend who constantly complains about her boyfriend but never leaves him, so, too, has the organisation put up with multiple forms of abuse since Thabo Mbeki took the reins of the ANC in 1996. They thought things would get better when Jacob Zuma was ushered into power, and championed his cause in that hope, but it has just been more of the same, if less obvious.
However, in keeping with the lifestyle choices of its leader, the ANC doesn’t truck with any monogamy. It’s a husband for all seasons to its various alliance partners and other bodies.
The gold-digger
Cosatu wouldn’t recognise the ANC in its slavish devotion to the young and brash mistress of the ANC Youth League. Suddenly the bully turns into a lovelorn and naïve fool, oblivious to the fact that their partnership is mostly about that bling thing. Like a slightly more sophisticated Khanyi Mbau, the league strings the party along with threats of leaving and taking its “king-making” skills elsewhere, all the while making loads of dosh out of the relationship.
Marie Antoinette
The third member of the tripartite alliance, the South African Communist Party, probably laughs into her champagne every night at the antics of the other wife, Cosatu. The SACP is having none of that principled nonsense. This is the wife that pulls on her red socks in the morning, and steps into the R1.2-million luxury car waiting downstairs. The SACP’s leaders have eagerly lapped up all sorts of lucrative government positions, to the detriment of running its own household. Its general secretary is minister of education, its deputy general-secretary the deputy minister of transport, and its chairperson the ANC’s secretary-general. No wonder the only thing they find time to do is echo Cosatu every now and then, and distribute cake to assure the proletariat that they, you know, care and stuff.
Old faithful
You think two wives and a mistress are enough? Not so. The ruling party still needs someone at the homestead to keep things ticking over when Cosatu is in acrimonious tears, the ANCYL off on a shopping spree and the SACP gorging itself at the trough. And that wife is the ANC Women’s League. The who? Exactly. Never critical and always behind the scenes. Now there’s a good wife.
- You can read Verashni’s column every week here, and follow her on Twitter here.