S’THEMBISO MSOMI | Cosatu faces new crossroads as history threatens repeat

It would be exactly 20 years since it happened later this month, yet the memories are still vivid in my mind.

At one moment, as the heated debate raged on inside the Gallagher Estate conference hall, a delegate from one of the affiliates issued a warning that seemed to take both sides of the debate by surprise: “We must be careful about the Zumafication of the ANC.”

He was carrying a small piece of paper with a list that was being unofficially distributed among union members supportive of one of the slates that would contest for the ANC national leadership a year and three months later.

Jacob Zuma, for president; Kgalema Motlanthe as deputy; trade unionist Gwede Mantashe as general secretary; Thandi Modise as his deputy; Mathews Phosa as the treasurer-general; and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as the national chairperson.

It was the last name on the list the delegate was cautioning against, saying having both Zuma and Dlamini-Zuma in the powerful ANC “top 6” would send a terrible message that the ANC was being “Zumaficated”.

That Dlamini-Zuma and Zuma had not been husband and wife for more than a decade and that Dlamini-Zuma was a political leader with a proven track record in her own right didn’t seem to convince the delegate, and those who cheered for him, otherwise.

It is now history that the Zuma lobby later replaced Dlamini-Zuma with that of another struggle stalwart, Baleka Mbete.

But back to the September 2006 Cosatu congress. There were other slates circulating during the gathering, and they were specifically about the National Office Bearers (NOBs) that were to be elected to lead the federation.

Going to the congress, the federation had effectively split into two major factions – one led by then Cosatu president Willie Madisha, and the other one led by then general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi.

Vavi had become the trade union face of the campaign to have Zuma elected the next ANC president, while Madisha had become too close to the ANC faction lobbying for then-president Thabo Mbeki to serve as third term as ANC leader. The Cosatu congress, therefore, became the site of what some saw as a proxy war ahead of the Zuma-Mbeki contest, 15 months later.

Hence throughout the duration of the congress, then ANC national chairman and defence minister Mosiuoa “Terror” Lekota set aside all his other appointments to focus on getting Madisha re-elected Cosatu president.

The Zuma camp was there in full force too, backing Vavi and his fellow travellers. When a slate was distributed to delegates a day before the actual voting, the anti-Madisha lobby quickly composed a campaign song that was inspired by a popular Eastern Cape gwijo – a traditional song.

“Ayingo Tambo obebhala lencwadi, xa ibinguTambo ngethe Dear Wayile.” Loosely translated, the lyrics to the song say the “letter”, i.e., the list, was not from [late ANC president Oliver] Tambo and that if it had his blessing, it would have included the name of one [Zanuxolo] Wayile. Tambo, in this context, is used to represent what is seen to be the authentic ANC tradition.

Wayile, at the time, was the Eastern Cape chairman of the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) and had been nominated by the pro-Zuma group to take on Madisha.

Although the pro-Zuma lobby eventually won the highly contested congress, it failed to unseat Madisha, who narrowly retained his presidency by 1,194 votes to Wayile’s 1,152. However, his victory was to be short-lived, as he was later ousted from the post because of his clashes with other NOBs.

After Zuma’s victory a year later, Madisha quit the ANC alliance altogether and joined hands with Lekota in forming the Congress of the People (Cope).

But even those who pushed him out did not last long in the federation. Vavi was hounded out of Cosatu after being deemed not loyal to Zuma, and he ended up forming the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu), to rival Cosatu. Wayile, who at one stage had served as an ANC mayor in Nelson Mandela Bay metro, left the ANC alliance not long after Numsa was expelled as an affiliate from Cosatu.

Since that divisive congress, Cosatu has become a shadow of its former self – losing members to both growing unemployment and emerging independent trade unions.

This month, the federation is scheduled to hold its next national congress, where the hot issue seems to be whether Cosatu should back the ANC or the SACP in the upcoming local government elections.

As affiliates deliberate on this issue, they will do well to learn from Cosatu’s history of the past 20 years. If they again let the politics and factionalism of their alliance partners determine their course of action, Cosatu and its affiliates risk, to paraphrase Karl Marx, having the 2006 tragedy repeating itself as a 2026 farce.

Sowetan