The Battle for Cosatu: An Insider's View

By Patrick Craven

From his early start as a passionate pro-labour and anti-apartheid campaigner in Britain in the 1960s, to championing and defending the rights of workers in South Africa for the last 30 years, Patrick Craven first served as the editor of the Congress of South African Trade Union's magazine, then rose through the ranks of the Congress to become National Spokesperson. Craven has become the go-to person for labour-related commentary. In this, Craven’s first book, we are given insight into one of the most tumultuous times for trade unions in post-apartheid South Africa. Beginning with the run-up to Cosatu’s 11th National Congress in 2012, to the expulsion from Cosatu of both Numsa (the National Union of Metalworkers of SA) in 2014, and its own General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi in 2015, Craven tracks events as they unfolded. Drawing strongly on personal recollections, media interpretations and official documents, Craven exposes the breakdown of the tripartite alliance – and the implications of this for South Africa’s labour movement and the country as a whole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookstorm
• Release date: Jun 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781928257202

Patrick Craven

Patrick Craven moved to South Africa after having studied at the University of Sussex, where he was involved in the anti-apartheid movement. Craven was variously the Director of the Workers’ Library and Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, the editor of The Shopsteward magazine, and Congress of South African Trade Unions' National Spokesperson from 2006 to 2015.

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2016

1

BACKGROUND TO THE BATTLES TO COME

Cosatu National Congress, 2012

Cosatu was launched in December 1985 after four years of unity talks between unions opposed to apartheid and committed to a non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa. According to its website, www.cosatu.org.za, at its launch it represented less than half a million workers organised in 33 unions. ‘We currently have more than two million workers, of whom at least 1,8 million are paid up,’ the website states, making it among the fastest-growing trade-union movements in the world.

Cosatu’s main broad strategic objectives were to improve the material conditions of its members and of the working people as a whole, to organise the unorganised, and to ensure worker participation in the struggle for peace and democracy.

Its core principles included non-racialism; worker control in order to keep the organisation vibrant and dynamic, and to maintain close links with the shop floor; paid-up membership in a bid for self-sufficiency; international worker solidarity, ‘the lifeblood of trade unionism, particularly in the era of multinational companies’; and ‘one industry, one union; one country, one federation’.

Regarding this last, the website states, ‘In order to unite workers across sectors, we have grouped our unions into industries. Our 6th National Congress resolved to merge unions into cartels or broad sectors, such as ‘‘public sector’’ and ‘‘manufacturing’’ … At the same time, for as long as there is no single federation, we have no choice but to recruit even those workers who belong to other unions and federations.’

Tragically, however, in 2015, 15 years after I started work for Cosatu as the editor of the federation’s magazine, The Shopsteward, there was a split within this mighty workers’ movement, which led to its total paralysis. It was the conclusion of a long and bitter series of battles.

It’s vital to analyse what happened, why it happened and who was responsible, so that we may start to rebuild a strong trade-union federation and strive to prevent any similar developments in the future. I hope that the analysis in this book, by someone who was on the inside, will also help trade unions around the world so that they can learn lessons and prevent similar divisions.

There were, of course, fundamental reasons for the split; but there were also issues that arose from time to time which were not the reasons for the schism. These included numerous conspiracy theories, fake intelligence reports, ‘third force’ allegations, people in the pockets of imperialists, counter-revolutionary alliances with civil society – all invariably without any evidence. I shall mention these only to illustrate the depths to which some of the participants were prepared to go to discredit their opponents. They should never have been taken seriously then, nor should they now.

There were also allegations that were based on real and important facts, but which in my view were not central to the dispute, which broke out openly in mid-2012. The most important were the sale and purchase of the Cosatu buildings in 2011 and allegations of some unions poaching members from others; as well as issues around a sexual act between the general-secretary Zwelinzima Vavi and a Cosatu staff member, during 2013.

All these issues cropped up during the course of this story, but none was raised when the dispute first erupted; nor were any of them central to the underlying conflict, which was always a fundamental political rift, or ‘rupture’, not just between individual people or unions, but, as always in such disputes, between representatives of contending economic class forces in society as a whole.

What sets this conflict apart from other disputes in which Cosatu was involved is that capitalist employers were largely spectators. This doesn’t mean that Cosatu wasn’t in dispute with them – with the Democratic Alliance (DA), Business Unity South Africa (Busa), the Free Market Foundation and many pro-business academics and commentators – during this time, over other issues such as collective bargaining, violence during strikes, over-restrictive labour laws and ‘excessive’ wage claims. But the federation was united on all these issues against a common enemy, so these issues never featured in the internal debates.

Perhaps the oddest feature of this battle was that it was waged between people who were supposed to be on the same side – ‘comrades’ who expressed very similar answers to many questions. Both sides used Marxist-Leninist language to justify their views and quoted from the same Cosatu resolutions and statements to make their points. Both insisted that they were fighting for a united trade-union movement and a socialist South Africa, and did not want a split. Three different groups who were engaged as facilitators also shared these views, and all insisted that they wanted to reconcile the conflicting parties.

Why, then, when on the surface there appeared to be so much political consensus at such a high level within the alliance which was formed in the early 1990s between Cosatu, the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP)¹, did the split in Cosatu nevertheless take place?

The reason, I’m convinced, is the SACP. From start to finish, there was a core of anti-Vavi and anti-Numsa hardliners within the SACP who never had any intention of compromising, and who steadfastly ignored all the facilitators’ appeals to back down.

The common feature in this group was their leadership positions in the SACP. The key players included Sidumo Dlamini, Cosatu president and member of the SACP central committee and politburo (executive committee); Fikile ‘Slovo’ Majola, former general-secretary of the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu) and member of the SACP central committee and politburo, now in Parliament; Senzeni Zokwana, former president of NUM, SACP national chairperson and now Minister of Agriculture; and Frans Baleni, general-secretary of NUM and member of the SACP central committee.

And always behind the scenes was Blade Nzimande, the SACP general-secretary and Minister of Higher Education, who was the very first to raise the political arguments that came to dominate the dispute.

It can’t be coincidental that these SACP heavyweights were always among the initiators and intransigent advocates of the campaign to purge the federation of its ‘elephant in the room’, Zwelinzima Vavi, and what the party referred to as the ‘Numsa clique’.

Much of the SACP’s work was, I’m sure, done behind the scenes. The Mail & Guardian reported that after the February 2013 divisions in Cosatu, there were indications that the SACP was involved in caucuses with those spearheading the campaign against the 2012 congress decisions.

The role of the SACP in the split only came into the open quite late in the dispute, in an exchange of views between Vavi and Jeremy Cronin, the SACP’s first deputy secretary-general, in an article in the SACP publication Umsebenzi on 27 November 2014. Called ‘What lies behind the current turmoil within Cosatu?’ it was a response to a speech Zwelinzima Vavi had given at the 40th anniversary celebration of the South African Labour Bulletin on 21 November 2014.

Vavi’s response to Cronin, ‘An open letter to members of the SACP’, published in Umsebenzi on 17 December 2014, was, I believe, by far the most important political contribution to the entire debate, but it received negligible media coverage, perhaps because it came out as the holiday season was beginning. (Vavi’s full speech, Cronin’s response and Vavi’s reply are contained in the Annexure to this book.)

Vavi’s response not only placed the SACP in the central role in this story – as I have just done – but also explained how the behaviour of the party wasn’t an aberration but was entirely consistent with a pattern established over many years. Vavi’s article documented this pattern in meticulous detail.

In essence, the SACP had evolved a strategy of talking left while acting right. (This explains my earlier reference to Cosatu’s internal dispute reflecting the wider class struggle in society, as I hope will become clear.) The SACP, while talking about revolution and Marxism, had in effect become the main defender of the right-wing, pro-capitalist policies of the ANC Government, and were the most loyal supporters of a president who was by then firmly in the right-wing camp led by the Treasury and its advisors in global financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

To achieve this, the SACP leaders had built up a base of support, especially among trade-union and ANC activists and the youth, for revolutionary socialist policies, using traditional Marxist-Leninist language, and tried to convince workers that they were the revolutionary vanguard of the workers’ movement, although of course none of them had ever been elected as such by any workers.

During the struggle against apartheid, up until 1994, this strategy worked well, because we were indeed in a revolutionary situation. In those circumstances, the SACP’s concept of a national democratic revolution became very popular among workers and the poor African majority. The alliance with the ANC made sense then, when apartheid was being brought to its knees and workers recognised that it wasn’t just a national struggle, but that they were being exploited threefold – as black South Africans, as workers and as women.

After the 1994 breakthrough, many SACP leaders put themselves forward as candidates for Government office, including some of the top people, like Joe Slovo. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Communists aren’t armchair theoreticians; they have to be prepared to get involved in public office. The crucial question is, however, on what conditions do they take office, so as to ensure that they don’t betray any of their fundamental principles?

The ANC was not, and had never claimed to be, a socialist or communist party. It was merely, as stated by Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe on 10 November 2014, ‘biased in favour of the workers and the poor’, but it had always contained a powerful pro-capitalist wing within its leadership. This inevitably led to the Government’s adoption of positions that were at odds with those of the SACP.

The big dilemma for some SACP members, therefore, was that the only way they could be elected to Government positions was as ANC candidates, bound by a mandate from the ANC, not the SACP. This led to the extremely confusing and ultimately iniquitous ‘two hats’ concept: when speaking in Parliament or as ministers, SACP members would wear their ANC hats and support ANC and Government positions; but at weekends they would wear their SACP hats and advocate SACP policies.

Occasionally, SACP members seemed to forget which hat they were wearing. When Thulas Nxesi, SACP deputy national chairperson and Minister of Public Works, was answering questions in July 2015 at a meeting of a Parliamentary subcommittee about excessive expenditure using public funds on President Zuma’s Nkandla residence, he should have been wearing his ANC hat as the minister. But he said, ‘The problem with Public Works projects like hospitals and prisons lies with outsourcing work to the private sector. Part of the problem is because a lot of qualified built-environment officials are allowed to go out with the outsourcing and minimise the [role of the] State. It’s neoliberalism; the State must focus on its core function. But that’s part of the problem – the outsourcing and the downsizing of the public service. The debate should be around reconstructing the Public Works Department and bringing back the skilled people that have left.’

These words, which doubtless were in line with SACP policy, came from the very Minister who, when wearing his ANC hat, was in charge of the Government department that had been doing all the outsourcing and downsizing of the public service – or that had, at best, totally failed to prevent it. This resulted in a politician being condemned by his alter-ego in his SACP hat.

1  When political organisations were unbanned in early 1990, the ANC, SACP and Cosatu agreed to work together. This revolutionary tripartite alliance is centred around the short-term, medium-term and long-term goals of the national democratic revolution: the establishment of a democratic and non-racial South Africa, economic transformation, and a continued process of political and economic democratisation.

2

ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS

Ready to govern? ANC National Conference, Polokwane, 2009

After 1994 Cosatu had to adapt to its new role in a constitutional democracy and face new challenges, which were to lead inexorably towards the problems of later years. Crucial was the issue of how the national democratic revolution – the central plank of the alliance that had been forged between Cosatu, the ANC and the SACP in the early 1990s – would be taken forward in the democratic era.

For Cosatu, the national democratic revolution was particularly important, as it enshrined the concept of not just a fight against apartheid but the interrelated fight against racial, class and gender oppression, to build a new, socialist society. This is why Cosatu so often quoted this passage from the ANC’s Strategy and Tactics document of the 1969 Morogoro conference, held on 25 April 1969 in Tanzania, to bring about organisational changes and a new framework and structure:

‘Our nationalism must not be confused with chauvinism or narrow nationalism of a previous epoch. It must not be confused with the classical drive by an elitist group among the oppressed people to gain ascendancy so that they can replace the oppressor in the exploitation of the mass … In our country – more than in any other part of the oppressed world – it is inconceivable for liberation to have meaning without a return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole. It is therefore a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact is to feed the root of racial supremacy and does not represent even the shadow of liberation.’

By 1994 the main ANC economic policy leaders were already committed to neoliberal (free-market, laissez-faire) policies – privatisation (selling public enterprises to private owners) rather than nationalisation (public ownership); compelling international competitiveness through trade liberalisation (for example, cutting tariffs and Government regulation); and curtailing Government spending through no tax increases and small budget deficits.

There had already been warning signs of the battles to come at the ANC’s June 1992 Policy Conference, where the document Ready to Govern was adopted. Its first draft recognised the ‘concentration of power in the hands of a few conglomerates’ and called for greater control over the financial sector, but contained no mention of earlier policies for ‘growth through redistribution’, nor ‘taxation directed to redistribute income’. The role of the State was reduced and the conference rejected the idea of privatisation only after a big debate.

Meanwhile, the more left-wing ANC leaders, supported by Cosatu, put forward policies that posed alternatives to neoliberalism. These had found expression in the ANC’s 1994 election manifesto and the Government’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), which was originally Cosatu’s initiative, based on an agenda for radical transformation not just to reverse the crimes of apartheid but to transform the economy. This, in turn, was based on the principles of the Morogoro resolution and the Freedom Charter, the radical document adopted in 1955 in Kliptown by the Congress of the People which set out the core principles of the movement.

The RDP gained widespread support within the alliance, and after much negotiation with business and labour – which inevitably involved compromises – it was adopted by Government. The federation celebrated as its founding general-secretary, Jay Naidoo, was appointed as the RDP Minister.

While not a socialist programme, the RDP contained many non-market policies for the provision of basic goods and services, decommodification (running industries and services for the public benefit rather than for profit, the basis for Cosatu’s opposition to e-tolls², for instance) and democratising access to economic resources, such as workers’ control and management of companies.

The question I have often asked was whether the RDP was ever likely to be implemented, or whether it was always doomed to failure because of all its compromises with business and Government, and because it didn’t threaten the underlying capitalist basis of the economy. Its political stance was like those of social-democratic parties – committed, in words at least, to quite radical-sounding reforms but with no programme for changing the underlying capitalist basis of society, and for that reason likely to succumb to the dictates of business.

The early signs weren’t at all encouraging. Jay Naidoo’s RDP Ministry was allocated almost no budget and isolated from other ministries, which were packed with World Bank advisors.

In November 1994, my old university friend and then Deputy President Thabo Mbeki announced a set of policies that were to be the forerunner to the grossly misnamed Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) strategy, called the ‘six-pack of measures’, which included proposals for privatisation of state assets and ‘downsizing’ in the public service. The SACP sent out confusing and mixed signals on this issue. Most significantly, three prominent SACP leaders were entrusted with spearheading the implementation of this neoliberal package: Alec Erwin, Deputy Minister of Finance; Jeff Radebe, Public Enterprises Minister; and Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, Public Services Minister – another example of the ‘two-hats’ problem.

In 1995, after just over a year in power, the ANC Government unilaterally replaced the RDP with Gear. Gear abandoned all those elements of the RDP that had been intended to lead to growth, employment and redistribution, and replaced them with a programme designed to create a climate to attract private investment: public-spending cuts and austerity for the workers and the poor, and for the rich a neoliberal programme of privatisation of major state enterprises such as Telkom and Eskom, the adoption of conservative free-market policies on exchange control and inflation, and a rapid reduction of protective trade tariffs to below even what the World Trade Organization (WTO) was demanding at the time.

Right-wing ANC leaders such as Mbeki (who, while in exile, were meeting new friends in business, including Frederik van Zyl Slabbert and Gavin Relly of Anglo-American, with whom they had secret talks in Zambia in the 1980s) had succeeded in getting rid of the more radical elements of the RDP and imposing the conservative, free-market capitalist policies that were increasingly being implemented across the world, in line with the Washington Consensus.³

The Gear strategy became the basis for Government policy, a strategy to promote the interests of both existing and emerging capital, but always mainly to defend the interests of the still overwhelmingly white-owned monopoly capital, which was restructuring and rationalising in order to maximise profits. The formation of Absa bank through a merger of several smaller banks in the 1990s, for example, created a cartel of just four huge banks – Standard, First National Bank, Nedbank and Absa (which was then itself taken over by Barclays in 2005).

The Gear strategy included restructuring the working class through a direct attack on decent jobs (Telkom, for instance, got rid of 2 374 jobs in one go in 2000), widespread casualisation of labour (the replacement of permanent, relatively secure employment with temporary and insecure jobs), and the introduction of the concept of labour brokering, under which workers were employed by a company which then hired them out to ‘client’ companies, which could dismiss them at any time because they were not ‘employers’.

This, together with the rapid lowering of trade tariffs, resulted in a calamitous loss of one million largely private-sector jobs between 1996 and 1999.

The new economic and political Gear project was strongly opposed by Cosatu, which described it as ‘the 1996 Class Project’⁴.

The SACP claimed credit for coining this term, but they didn’t deserve the credit, because when Gear was first announced, they welcomed it: an SACP-issued press statement on 14 June 1996 announced, ‘We fully back the objectives of this macroeconomic strategy,’ and went on to say, ‘Contrary to certain attempts to use the macroeconomic debate to shift Government away from its electoral mandate, the strategy announced today firmly and explicitly situates itself as a framework for the RDP … On labour markets, the new macroeconomic strategy envisages the extension of a regulated market and it introduces an innovative approach to flexibility. It rejects laissez-faire market-driven flexibility and instead calls for negotiated regional and sectoral flexibility …’

In defending this right-wing neoliberal programme, the SACP leaders were clearly wearing their ANC hats.

In his open letter to Jeremy Cronin, SACP deputy general-secretary, on 17 December 2014, Zwelinzima Vavi wrote, ‘History will record that, on this critical issue of Gear, which was to divide the movement for many years to come, virtually every line of this [above] statement proved to be incorrect and problematic, and the SACP itself subsequently came to realise this fact. This is important because it raises the question as to how such a fundamental error of judgment could be made, on such a vital question for the working class. The only explanation which makes any sense is that a decision had been made to give political cover to a policy which the ANC and SACP leadership knew at the time would be highly controversial and unacceptable to the working class.’

In response the implementation of Gear, and more generally in defence of jobs, on 30 April 1996 Cosatu called its first post-1994 major general strike in protest against these policies and their impact on the working class. Four years later, on 12 April 2000, I joined another enormous march for jobs in Johannesburg, just days before I was due to start working for Cosatu.

This campaign in 2000 produced tensions with the ANC, with some leaders labelling Cosatu populist, economistic, ultra-left or agents of imperialism. Nonetheless, a still-united and powerful Cosatu was able to win some concessions. There was some loosening of the conservative macroeconomic policies, and poverty alleviation (though not inequality) was put at the centre of the 2004 ANC election manifesto. For example, privatisation of Telkom and Eskom was halted. (While Cosatu succeeded in persuading Government to stop the privatisation of most major state-owned enterprises, massive privatisation at municipal level proceeded, mainly by outsourcing tenders to private companies.)

Others in the alliance were starting to oppose the leadership of President Mbeki, though certainly not all for the same reasons that Cosatu opposed his macroeconomic policies. The 52nd conference of the ANC at Polokwane in 2007 produced a ‘coalition of the walking wounded’ to remove Mbeki from the presidency of the ANC and replace him with Jacob Zuma. This succeeded, but more importantly, the conference adopted a number of resolutions in favour of a more developmental strategy which Cosatu hoped would chart the way forward to a new radical economic agenda.

As Cosatu President Sidumo Dlamini said on 16 December 2008, ‘Almost exactly a year ago the historic ANC National Conference in Polokwane set in motion a train of events which has changed the South African political landscape. Polokwane was a grass-roots revolt by the ANC’s mass constituency of the workers and the poor, the very same people represented by [the South African National Civic Organisation] Sanco and Cosatu.

‘The ANC delegates denounced economic policies that