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SOUTH AFRICA: Behind the COSATU-ANC spat over Zimbabwe
Dale T. McKinley
November 24, 2004

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/607/607p19.htm

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. On November 17, Vavi warned that the ANC Today statement could foreshadow a situation in South Africa in which "trade unions could be accused of guilt by association with imperialist forces, which would then be the pretext for the sort of attacks on human rights we see in Zimbabwe". The only buffer to such a scenario, according to Vavi, was a strong ANC-COSATU alliance.

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