SOUTH AFRICA: Behind the COSATU-ANC spat over Zimbabwe

November 24, 2004
Issue 

Dale T. McKinley, Johannesburg

During the last week of October, a 13-member delegation from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) arrived in Zimbabwe for a brief "fact-finding mission" that, according to COSATU, was designed to "get a full first-hand picture of the conditions under which our sister organisation [the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, ZCTU] operates".

COSATU had gone ahead with the long-delayed visit despite the stated opposition of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. Shortly after arriving in Harare, during its first meeting with ZCTU officials, the COSATU delegation was detained by police. Within hours, the COSATU delegation was unceremoniously dumped at the Zimbabwe-South African border post of Beitbridge.

In the week that followed, a war of words broke out between COSATU and its ertswhile alliance partner, the ruling African National Congress (ANC), over the incident. Loyalists of South African President Thabo Mbeki were quick to call the visit "irresponsible games that do not contribute anything towards solving the crisis in Zimbabwe".

A 3000-word official ANC statement was published in the November 5 ANC Today, the party's online newsletter, in which COSATU was accused of showing "contempt for a head of state [and] sovereign government", evidently because COSATU had ignored Mugabe's opposition to the visit. It went on to say that, "we fully support the statement made by our Ministry of Foreign Affairs that 'the South African government accepts that Zimbabwe is an independent, sovereign state that has an inalienable right to determine and to apply its immigration legislation as it may deem appropriate and in its own interest'."

COSATU deputy secretary-general Bheki Ntshalintshali provided a succinct but low-key response the next day: "The ANC and the government have their own ideas on how the Zimbabwean crisis should be dealt with. However, we do not agree with them."

It was left up to COSATU general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, to give a more energetic defence of COSATU's actions. "The only reason why the Zimbabwean government objected to this mission", Vavi said, "was fear of what it might uncover. The mission's short visit proved beyond doubt that this is a society where people's human rights and civil liberties are being crushed. We will not keep mum when freedom does not lead to respect for workers and human rights."

Following a script that has played itself out time and again in South Africa's press, and among most political commentators and analysts when a tactical political disagreement has emerged between the alliance partners, claims were soon made that the Alliance was "in trouble". This time it was the Zimbabwe incident that showed up "serious divisions" between the ANC and COSATU (alongside the South African Communist Party, which came out in support of COSATU).

Of course, what such "analysis" failed to reveal and has always failed to reveal is that the respective leaderships of the alliance partners have never allowed verbal spats and tactical differences to impinge on their underlying strategic and class consensus.

In the past several years, this has been repeatedly "proven" in the realm that matters most to South Africa's organised workers and poor — the neoliberal macro-economic policy of the ANC government, GEAR. While the "left" flank of the tripartite alliance — COSATU and the SACP — have continued to launch verbal attacks on GEAR, most often tied to very occasional and limited strikes, these have never developed into any sustained working class-led struggle with the potential to undermine the pro-neoliberal ANC leadership's domination of the alliance.

The result, not surprisingly, has been that the foundation and pillars of GEAR have remained intact, the occasional left genuflections of the ANC government have been welcomed by COSATU and the SACP as evidence of the "strength" and "relevance" of their role in the alliance and, all the while, the social and economic plight of the vast majority of the working class has continued to worsen.

In the case of the Zimbabwe incident, the same pattern has applied. Not once during the seemingly fierce verbal "battles" and evident political "divisions" that ensued, was there one word from either the COSATU or SACP leadership that made the connection between the ANC's outrageous verbal defence of, and political and economic support for, the Mugabe regime, the ANC’s neoliberal policies and the active pursuit of securing the interests of an emergent black capitalist class (alongside those of "older" white capital) both domestically and continentally.

Instead, what we got was Vavi telling us that all COSATU is really trying to do is to support the "objectives" of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD)– which is little more than a continental platform for exporting the neoliberal-inspired class accumulation strategies of the ANC leadership - and "complement the work of governments who use diplomatic channels to get African states to act in conformity with the objectives of NEPAD". The ANC, for its part, was at least more straightforward and, as usual, confidently arrogant in putting paid to those who, in its words, wanted to "peddle the untruth that … our movement is divided about our relations with Zimbabwe".

If the Zimbabwe incident confirms one thing (again), it is that as long as COSATU (and the SACP) remain politically and organisationally tied to the ANC and thus, by default, to its class project, any "divisions" will remain in the realm of verbal battles and differences over tactical approaches. While COSATU’s analysis of the Mugabe regime and the state of workers' and human rights in Zimbabwe is a great deal more genuine and on target than that of its ANC alliance partner, and even if COSATU does eventually engage in "harsher forms of solidarity action" in support of "the ZCTU and the people of Zimbabwe" without the approval of the ANC, the bottom line is clear: unless and until COSATU and the SACP are ready and willing to wage an unrepentant and confident anti-capitalist working-class struggle independent of the ANC they will continue to betray the hopes of millions of workers and poor, whether in South Africa and/or Zimbabwe and be perpetually confined to "playing" in the sandbox of useful subservience.

From Green Left Weekly, November 24, 2004.
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