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Cape Town - ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe was correct in describing the executive decision to sack Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi as “reckless”, says Terry Bell in his latest Labour Wrap.
However, Bell adds that the sacking was merely one further episode in a long-running war in which there are neither heroes nor villains, a war that has simmered and flared up from time to time over the past 30 years.
He notes that the opening shots were fired when Cosatu was formed in 1985, against initial opposition from both the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP). At the time the banned and exiled ANC and SACP classified themselves as the “the true representatives of the South African people” and “the vanguard party of the working class”.
The reason for this initial opposition to Cosatu, says Bell, was because the self-exiled and SACP-controlled South African Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu) was similarly categorised as “the true representative of South African workers”. Cosatu, which contained strong voices opposing the SACP calling for the formation of a “workers’ party”, was a challenge to these claims.
However, by 1987 Sactu was dissolved and the ANC, with the SACP as an integral part, emerged as the overwhelmingly dominant element to fill the political vaccuum in the absence of any workers’ party. But the arguments about whether the major trade union movement should remain allied with the ANC and SACP after the demise of apartheid continued, although these were often muted.
This, says Bell, was the political undercurrent. It was also confused by personal ambition, political manipulation and any variety of agendas, complicated by most of the Cosatu unions establishing investment companies. In the process, the servicing of workers often suffered.
All of this, notes Bell, adds to the background to what is now, apparently, the slow-motion implosion of the country’s premier labour federation.
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