Cosatu President S’dumo Dlamini returned from lunch on the first day of its Central Committee meeting on Monday and went straight into damage control. His opening address ignored crucial issues. The Cosatu president has sent contradictory messages regarding President Jacob Zuma. The federation has called for Zuma to step down and it supports Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa in the ANC’s election race. Dlamini didn’t mention either of these points in his speech and someone must have tapped him on the shoulder over lunch.

He had an important announcement to make, he said. He confirmed Cosatu’s resolution to back Ramaphosa – “That is a Cosatu decision. It’s our decision” – and its call for Zuma to resign. But the bizarre “announcement” only made things worse.

“We are not kids, we are adult workers,” said the South African Democratic Teachers Union’s (Sadtu) Nomarashiya Caluza from the floor. “The decisions of Cosatu were supposed to be emphasised when the president was addressing us,” she added. “You must pronounce firmly and strongly on this so that members of Cosatu are not confused on the ground.”

Dlamini has been under pressure since attending Zuma’s birthday celebrations in April, weeks after Cosatu’s Central Executive Committee (CEC) called on the president to resign. He has long been an ally of the president and there’s speculation that affiliates are losing confidence and may challenge his leadership this week.

“The exercise of leadership means that a leader is a leader who is able to realise his mistakes and correct them,” said Dlamini, “correct them and walk the talk, not to walk something else and say something else on the other side.” It was hardly an apology and delegates later sung anti-Zuma songs while ignoring Dlamini’s requests for them to be seated.

The Cosatu president said foreign powers are working with capitalists to remove democratically elected leaders around the world. “Today they are so confident that they go out and march,” he said.

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in April calling on Zuma to resign.

“They will go for all of us who stood against capitalism,” he warned on Monday.

The ANC, Cosatu and the SACP will hold an alliance council meeting next week and Dlamini said Cosatu has a duty to call the ANC to order. “Let us unite. Let us unite as alliance formations but it should not be the unity that has got no principles. It should be the unity that is founded on respect for each other… the unity that has got no big brother and no small boy.”

While Dlamini’s speech received a muted response, delegates cheered loudly for those who took on ANC issues more directly. After his speech, Cosatu First Deputy President Tyotyo James announced, “We want to save the ANC from self-destruction.” He said Cosatu shouldn’t be condemned for backing Ramaphosa “because others are making pronouncements and they are not condemned… We want Cyril Ramaphosa as the president.”

General Secretary Bheki Ntshalintshali said Cosatu must figure out how to engage the ANC. “We say all the good things we think but nobody is listening to what we think should be done.” He said the ANC was like a patient who kept spitting out its medicine. “What is it that we need to do so the leaders of our movement can understand the problems we are facing?”

Cosatu has banned Zuma from addressing its events and Ramaphosa will speak at the Central Committee on Tuesday.

Another former Zuma ally, South African Communist Party (SACP) leader Blade Nzimande, hammered the president’s faction of the ANC. Quoting Oliver Tambo, he said comrades had to tell each other the truth even if it coincided with what the enemy was saying. He said the “parasitic networks encircling the state”, built around the Gupta family, was the country’s most urgent challenge.

Nzimande acknowledged some achievements of the Zuma administration, but said the ANC was in crisis. After the its Mangaung conference there has been accelerated rent-seeking, based on state capture, increasing signs of a parallel state and parallel movement, creeping ambitions for an imperial presidency, and pseudo-radical ideological platforms designed to divert attention from nefarious activities.

Leaked e-mails on Sunday exposed the Gupta family’s relationship with Cabinet members and the president. “The latest e-mails reveal publicly for the first time yesterday, if they are true, the extent and depth of these parasitic networks,” said Nzimande. He is a member of the ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC), which this weekend dismissed internal attempts to have the president removed, and said there is a “stalemate” within the NEC and it cannot provide leadership.

“We are not going to close ranks when wrong things are done,” said Nzimande. “This is our revolution.” The SACP has also called on Zuma to resign and Nzimande was critical of the president’s recent Cabinet reshuffle. “The prerogative does not belong to you as an individual, but us as a movement,” he said.

Cosatu’s Central Committee acts as a mid-term review between conferences and will continue until Thursday. Dlamini said Cosatu had made key gains as a federation since its 2015 congresses, lauding its work pushing the National Minimum Wage, National Health Insurance, supporting those injured at Lily Mine and challenging legislation on provident funds.

Cosatu’s Special National Congress in 2015 saw the federation divided after the expulsion of the National Union of Metal Workers SA (Numsa) and former general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi. “We are not yet where we want ourselves to be yet,” said Dlamini on unity within Cosatu, but he said the situation is much improved. “We are a fighting federation, comrades, and when we’re united no one will be able to stand in our way.” DM

Photo: President Jacob Zuma and S’dumo Dlamini (COSATU President) during the first day of COSATU’s 11th National Congress, celebrated at the Gallagher Estate in Midrand, 17 September 2012. (Jordi Matas)