We’ve spoken ad nauseam about the many coalition scenarios that could play out in South Africa after May 29, but there is a crucial participant in these pacts we have been ignoring. That’s the trade unions massed under Cosatu. Their role in the next few months will be important to the ANC’s fortunes, and their stances afterwards could make or break some coalitions.
One union’s role in the run-up to the May 29 election is already being felt in eThekwini, KwaZulu-Natal, where the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) has embarked on an unprotected strike and engaged in acts of violence and intimidation that have left the city dirty, chaotic, stinking, waterless, powerless and looking like some post-apocalyptic warzone. I was there last Thursday. It’s an embarrassment. The ANC has lost control of eThekwini. The place is a disgraceful, dysfunctional dump. The private sector has fled the city centre. Umhlanga is now where even the ANC’s own leaders meet and socialise. Durban is dead.
Samwu in eThekwini, with 10,000 of the city’s 25,000 workers under its wing, last week suddenly decided to demand that its members be paid salary packages on par with those of council workers in other major cities. Not a single person, it seems, said anything about the city’s revenues, or that old chestnut called “living within your means”.
After a discussion with the municipality, Samwu told its workers to drop everything and take to the streets. The strike did not follow any formal process.
Samwu members blocked city streets, lit fires in rubbish bins, pulled their colleagues out of workplaces and threatened them with kieries, clubs and all sorts of “traditional weapons”. One city employee was shot. Parts of the city experienced water and power outages, apparently due to sabotage.
ANC leaders in KZN have huffed and puffed at Samwu but have done sweet nothing to stop the chaos. What was interesting was the ANC’s characterisation of what was happening. ANC provincial secretary Bheki Mtolo said the strike was an orchestrated “counterrevolutionary programme disguised as a labour dispute”. It was, he said, aimed at unseating the ANC. Mtolo was keen to make this point. After the SABC’s line to him dropped three times, he came on for the fourth time to underline this characterisation.
Why? Some of the Samwu strikers were seen in T-shirts of Jacob Zuma’s new political outfit, the MK Party. Allegations are that the party is running the action.
These, then, are the people who will back the ANC when it negotiates a coalition with the DA, IFP, MK Party, EFF or some other entity in KZN after May 29. At national level, it will be Cosatu that will be whispering in the ANC’s ear as it negotiates coalitions with other parties.
At national level, it will be Cosatu that will be whispering in the ANC’s ear as it negotiates coalitions with other parties
Do not underestimate Cosatu and the SACP, the party it funds and supports, and with which it is in a three-way alliance with the ANC. In the early 2000s, when former president Thabo Mbeki and his cabinet dumped the reconstruction & development programme for the more business-friendly growth‚ employment & redistribution economic policy, the two formations went on a huge anti-Mbeki campaign and swiftly adopted Zuma as their figurehead.
When Zuma was planning his takeover of the ANC in the run-up to the 2007 party conference, Cosatu funded him, gave him numerous platforms to deliver “lectures” and mobilised for him within the ANC. When he rose to power in 2009, he rewarded the public sector unions with years of generous, above-inflation increases — and put the country in serious debt.
In KZN, therefore, it might not be too left-field to consider what may happen if the ANC must negotiate with the MK Party — and if the provincial Samwu is already in bed with that outfit. In Gauteng, Samwu has recently run a destructive, chillingly violent campaign against Tshwane mayor Cilliers Brink and the people of the city. Would it agree to an ANC detente with the DA in Gauteng? This may drive the ANC into the arms of the EFF or the MK Party.
Coalition talks will not just be with the ANC. They will be with the tripartite alliance, and down that road may lie treachery and deceit. eThekwini is a lesson we should all be studying closely.
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