This Letter to the Editor was submitted by Cosatu National Spokesperson Sizwe Pamla on behalf of Cosatu.

The article by Stephen Grootes (Cosatu, Cosatu, why hast thou forsaken us?, published 8 June) is typical of the new emerging and unsettling propensity by many social commentators of equating leaders to organisations. They also have a tendency of treating and suspecting that anyone with a different world view is motivated by the lowest possible reason, and if you have found the lowest possible motive you have found the right one. In his reflections, he concludes that the federation has abandoned its struggles and is soft on corruption because it shouts less, insults less and according to him is not doing enough to police the ANC. He contrasts the new leadership collective against what he believes was the old leadership of Cosatu and sighs with despair. It’s also interesting that by old leadership he means Zwelinzima Vavi.

The entire article is the regurgitation of old and tired clichés and propaganda that have been deployed by our critics, including in the media, long before even the Cosatu internal battles that saw Numsa’s expulsion. The French novelist and essayist, Marcel Proust, was right when he observed: “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”

The real truth is that Stephen attributes to Cosatu a mandate that the federation has never given to itself. He seems to have ignored the real Cosatu and settled for the headlines, and that is a reflection on him. The truth of the matter is that Cosatu has always had an uneasy historical relationship with the ANC and ANC processes, because it is an independent organisation with a uniquely working class world outlook. The most militantly Charterists of Cosatu’s affiliates were even more cynical of a future ANC government as far back as 1991.

The Cosatu leadership of the 1990s was forever frustrated by the ANC leadership’s lack of consultation with its own members and Cosatu, and about what they viewed as the ANC’s poor negotiating strategy. Workers felt that the ANC did not have an organising programme; it was prone to holding secretive negotiations and was willing to compromise on major issues. They were uneasy that the ANC leadership was dominated by exiles with an inadequate understanding of mass organization and democracy after spending so much time operating underground.

Cosatu was critical of the ANC’s negotiations over violence and the struggle for a Constituent Assembly that the federation favoured because of its openness. Even at that time, there was already an increasing concern within Cosatu over whether the working class had real influence within the ANC. There was disillusionment with regard to ANC’s conflicting statements from different leaders, the disjunction between negotiations and mass campaigns and the overall strategic perspective of the ANC. Most Cosatu leaders felt the ANC was no longer guided by either the Freedom Charter or the Harare Declaration during negotiations.

Despite these criticisms, the majority of trade unionists in Cosatu saw their task as supporting, strengthening and democratising the ANC, rather than distancing themselves from it. While others were not enthusiastic about the ANC, they agreed that the ANC was the only political organisation that had the potential to end apartheid, become a government and at the same time have at least some sympathy towards the interests of the working class. They all believed that the struggle within the organisation would ensure its mass character and orientation towards the working class.

This is what is puzzling about Stephen Groote’s critique because most people in Cosatu cannot identify with this old leadership that he is pining for. The Cosatu leadership we know and remember never cared about self exaltation and did not believe trash talking in the media was a solution. They knew that workers would not win their battles by throwing insults at their adversaries. They were popular without being populists and never subjected people to political lectures and revolutionary principles, but they practised them. They understood that unjust laws and oppression needed to be fought ideologically; and that they could not be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.

We can then conclude that Stephen is nostalgic for a period when elected leaders did not care about the mandate from the workers and elevated their own personal feelings into organisational positions. That was a painful period for workers but it was a bonanza for the media, it seems. Taking into consideration the institutionalised attitudes of corporate commercial media, it must have been good times to cover briefings where vitriolic and incendiary language accompanied by exhibitionism and exuberant nastiness was the norm.

Unfortunately, while that left the media satisfied and content, it was not the mandate of Cosatu and it actually weakened the federation and the alliance in the process. Workers were made to believe that it was not their responsibility to fix the alliance and take ownership of the revolution. The 8th National Congress of Cosatu in 2003 adopted a medium-term plan titled, Consolidating Working Class Power for Quality Jobs – Towards 2015. That plan was adopted at a time when the state had adopted the Gear policy seven years earlier. It admitted that the gains that the workers had achieved had been offset by rising unemployment and the resulting fall in incomes for poor households. There was slow growth and low investment resulting in decline in the quality of work. There was frustration that, while the ANC was the leading party in government, old-style bureaucrats, reactionary consultants, and advisers from the IMF and World Bank had usurped policy formulation in critical areas.

In response to all of this, Cosatu adopted a political strategy whose sole objective was to reassert working class hegemony over society to counteract the entrenched power of capital. The federation wanted to combine state and social power in a way that consistently tilted the balance of power in favour of the working class.

The 2015 plan said the following on the ANC: “The ANC is our organisation and we are not going to throw in the towel and leave it. Still we recognise that the ANC is undergoing a process of adjusting to being a party in government, while retaining its overall character as a mass liberation movement.” There is nothing there about insulting the ANC and of turning Cosatu into an opposition party.

Workers mandated Cosatu to jealously defend the progressive and working class bias of the ANC. They gave that leadership that Stephen is nostalgic about a mandate to ensure that Cosatu swells the ranks of the ANC by encouraging its members, shop stewards and leaders to join the ANC en masse. That leadership was mandated to develop a joint programme with the ANC on campaigns, education, and other matters, and also to continue building programmatic relations with the leagues of the ANC.

Workers never said Cosatu’s mandate was to monitor, insult and shout at the ANC and went on to correct that in the Special National Congress in 2015 and in the 12th National Congress. If Stephen misses Vavi, he needs to say so, but he should not misrepresent Cosatu and what it has always stood for. Vavi is still around, and he still makes interesting bombastic speeches that are applauded for their entertainment value, and which are full of sound and fury but signifying precious little at the level of policy and action.

We will leave the tedious business of canonisation and the worship of humans to cultists, while we try to defend workers and the poor from the ravages of monopoly capital. We will continue to unite and rebuild a divided and weakened Cosatu, because we have learnt that loudhailing will not save the workers from the jaws of corruption and exploitation. The federation is still very much against poverty and injustice; but we fight both government and the private sector.

The federation will continue to take the mandate from the workers and the poor and resist the influence of metropolitan trendies, who dominate the climate of opinion and use their subjugating discourses to blackmail and conscript us into a crushing tribal group-think. We will identify our enemies and fight them but we will not play the role of hunting hounds that give chase and provide the bark on behalf of others.

Cosatu will continue to refuse to fight the battles that are against our class interests, while workers are losing their jobs. We will fight exploitation of ANN7 workers, the same as ENCA employees. We shall continue to fight with the banks that have terminated their relationship with Oakbay Investment, with the same vigour that we use to fight Capitec Bank for stopping workers from attending May Day and threatening them from joining unions.

Workers do not have the luxury to choose and fight battles because it’s politically convenient and fashionable and they want to bring about vibrant politics. The farce that has become our Parliament is the creation of the media, to a certain extent, and we are all discovering now that the fact that politics is vibrant does not mean it’s any good. Grootes can sleep peacefully knowing that we still remain government’s fearless and vocal critics, but we also know that, while it’s important to fight corruption in the public sector, it is equally important to fight it in the private sector.

While we need to defend the Constitution against government attacks, we also need to protect it against corporate manipulation. We will raise our decibel levels and fearlessly fight government, demanding the Expropriation Act, and also equally fight organisations like the DA, Free Market Foundation and the South African Institute of Race Relations that are against the Expropriation Act.

We will share the trenches with Grootes, when he is willing to join us, but we will not wait for his approval, or endorsement, when the poor and the landless are frustrated by corporate overlords that he is not willing or interested to fight. We are not an anti-government federation whose role is to gratify social commentators but we are a class-oriented, anti-capitalist and pro-justice Cosatu that workers and the working class need. DM

Photo: President Jacob Zuma dances with Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi at its central committee meeting in Midrand on Monday, 27 June 2011. Picture: Werner Beukes/SAPA