Always an unconditional supporter of the African National Congress, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has for the first time publicly mooted an independent future and a different political mate. In a path-breaking document released last week, the organised working class is presented with five visions of its political future.
The African National Congress has embarked on its most sweeping recovery plan since it took power in 1994, aimed at winning back the hearts and minds of members pushed to the brink of rebellion by the party’s leadership divisions. The party is on an all-out charm offensive to rejuvenate policy and ideological debate at the level of branches to break down the obsession about personalities that has gripped the party.
Service delivery in one of the Eastern Cape’s largest municipalities has been paralysed by a scramble for power among councillors, prompting the intervention of the African National Congress’s provincial structures. If disciplinary procedures instituted by the provincial ANC fail to arrest the growing crisis in the municipality, Luthuli House will be asked to step in.
Former National Intelligence Agency (NIA) director general Billy Masetlha has told the African National Congress probe into the ”hoax e-mails” that he possesses a separate set of e-mails intercepted by his agency — and that they are different from the messages judged to be fraudulent by Intelligence Inspector General Zolile Ngcakani.
The South African Communist Party (SACP) has established a formal commission to review the proposal that it should contest elections — a move that could be the first formal step toward the restructuring of the "tripartite alliance". The establishment of the body is a clear signal that a split between the SACP, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the African National Congress may finally be taking shape.
A "hoax" e-mail campaign similar to the one that implicated top government officials in an alleged plot to smear African National Congress deputy president Jacob Zuma has surfaced in Namibia, strengthening suspicions that the e-mails are the work of an "outside force".
President Thabo Mbeki will reinforce the message of clean, morally unquestionable leadership, dispel concerns about a centralised Presidency and bank on his urban, middle-class support in countering damaging attacks on him in the presidential succession battle.
A Muslim-owned travel agency is suing an Old Mutual employee after forensic investigators traced an e-mail accusing the agency of exploiting the Muslim hajj pilgrimage to her computer. The e-mail, which accused Cape Town-based Sure Flywell Travel of amassing a net profit of R10-million on air-ticket sales alone during last year’s hajj, has shaken the Muslim community.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has launched a stinging attack on President Thabo Mbeki that appears to reiterate what was contained in the hard-hitting South African Communist Party discussion document released last week. On Thursday Cosatu said it was primarily concerned that the ANC leadership was "drifting towards dictatorship".
Divisions in the African National Congress are being galvanised by a crisis of self-definition and have created a vacuum in the party — a vacuum that the South African Communist Party has moved to fill by suggesting that unless the SACP decisively intervenes, the needs of the poor will never be met.