Cosatu takes closer look at ANC
ALLIANCE: UNION, SACP DEMAND EQUAL DECISION MAKING POWER WITH GOVERNING PARTY
still reiterates its resolution to campaign for ANC in 2019.
Trade union federation Cosatu has criticised the post-Nasrec ANC for showing weakness and failing to put a coherent political message and programme that would satisfy the masses.
The almost two million-member labour union slammed the governing party’s anticorruption drive for its lack of political content and direction caused by its “mechanical” strategies.
Under the ANC, there was massive dominance of state bureaucracy, undermining of the party’s autonomy to formulate state policy and implementation, and a tendency to elevate “untransformed” state power over mass power.
This uncompromising view emerged after Cosatu’s threeday central executive committee meeting in Johannesburg last week. The central executive committee, comprising of national officebearers, provincial chairpersons and secretaries, and representatives from union affiliates, runs Cosatu’s affairs when its national congress is not in session.
According to Cosatu, any mass mobilisation against the failures of government was being interpreted as being counter-revolutionary, oppositional and therefore antiANC.
Cosatu said: “This has led to a situation where a gap between the masses and the ANC develops and the ANC is forced to sometimes uncritically defend the inherent, horrible deficiencies of the inherited colonial and capitalist state.”
“As a result, the masses are starting to gradually lose confidence in the capacity of the ANC to drive transformation.”
There is a great need to change the ANC so that it had the calibre of leadership that would take the party into the future and guided by the ANC resolutions, it added. The federation seemed to align this to a reconfigured alliance, a refrain of both Cosatu and the SA Communist Party that had been ignored by the ANC for a number of years.
Cosatu and the communists demand equal decisionmaking power among the alliance partners and object to the ANC being the sole decisionmaker as had been the case since it assumed power in 1994.
“We reiterate our position that only a reconfigured alliance holds any chance of delivering on the goals and aspirations of the working class,” it said.
“The future of the alliance is not guaranteed if the process to reconfigure it becomes stillborn, the message is clear for the Alliance ‘reconfigure or die’.”
However, despite the differences over the alliance reconfiguration, the executive committee still reiterated Cosatu’s last congress resolution to campaign and vote for the ANC next year.
It expressed support for the ongoing Commission of Inquiry into State Capture headed by Justice Raymond Zondo.
Cosatu said: “We want to see all those people implicated in looting by the state capture commission prosecuted and sent to jail. The hysterical noises from those who are attacking the state capture commission is informed by their guilty consciences.”
The union federation hit at the ANC’s “neoliberal” economic policies and the continued restrictive policy approach by the National Treasury. It accused Treasury of being obsessively focused on achieving budget-deficit targets and the SA Reserve Bank continuing to pursue its inflation target thus restricting the economy on a low-growth path.
The executive committee called for the VBS Mutual Bank to be used as a step towards transforming the financial sector and to counter a monopoly by big four banks. It opposed the central bank’s plan to close VBS. It also wants Cosatu to pursue its resolution to establish the workers bank. –
Message is clear for alliance to ‘reconfigure or die’.