‘I take responsibility for some of Cosatu’s troubles’
Outgoing president Dlamini says greed by some leaders sucked blood out of federation
OUTGOING Cosatu president S’dumo Dlamini has blamed greed on the part of union leaders for the federation’s massive loss of membership.
Since 2015 Cosatu has bled 317 463 members, a number significantly more than the total membership of its biggest affiliate, the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union, which is at 275 083.
Speaking to Independent Media, Dlamini said that besides the job losses in industrial sectors, fights over resources by leaders of Cosatu affiliates were the leading reasons for the federation’s compounding challenges.
“The fights are over access to resources and over who must lead. Those are unnecessary fights because people are fighting for resources of members, not leaders,” Dlamini said.
The federation’s organisational report prepared for the national elective congress, which started today in Midrand, shows that Cosatu’s membership sharply declined by 16.5%, from 1.9 million members in 2015 to 1.6 million in 2018.
Dlamini said the loss of membership had plunged the once-mighty federation into a financial crisis, which forced it to abandon some of its programmes and campaigns, and sometimes resort to borrowing money in order to pay its staff.
“We have not hidden the fact that the federation has not been doing well financially, purely because a number of Cosatu unions were unable to pay their affiliation fees.
“Cosatu purely depends on the subscription of the affiliates and nothing else. If you have a budget for the year that is not matched by contributions from unions, programmes and campaigns suffer,” Dlamini said.
“We have prioritised our staff and ensured that they get paid on a monthly basis even if it means we have to go around borrowing or getting some support financially from other quarters. It has not really happened that workers will go a month without a salary, which is a positive, but we have had to cut to the bone in terms of a number of our activities,” Dlamini added.
Dlamini, who has been at the helm of the federation since 2008, is set to be replaced by Cosatu’s second deputy president, Zingiswa Losi.
Viewed as an ally and sympathiser of former president Jacob Zuma, Dlamini said it was unfair to blame him for the massive decline in the federation as he did not lead alone.
Cosatu’s woes were triggered by the 2014 expulsion of the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa), then Cosatu’s biggest affiliate with over 330 000 members.
Dlamini said he had regrets about Numsa’s expulsion, which later saw several other unions that opposed the decision also leaving Cosatu.
“There is no leader who would want a tag in his name that Cosatu had to split at a particular time when he was leading, so I take responsibility for some of these things. But we did all that could have been done.
“We were faced with a situation and we chose a path that we believed was going to make Cosatu live going forward, even if a portion of it had to be taken away. That is the painful aspect,” he said.
Dlamini said the federation had to keep the new ANC leadership under President Cyril Ramaphosa in check as it was already showing “neo-liberal tendencies”.
“We feel that in spite of the new dawn that would have brought hope and a positive message to the country, what is emerging is a move to a neo-liberal trajectory from the government side.
“We are beginning to see signs of a zigzag in and out of the policy trajectory agreed at Nasrec,” he said.
No leader wants to be remembered to have presided over a split in an organisation S’DUMO DLAMINI Cosatu president