Back to the streets for worker rights
MUCH water has flowed under the bridge since the legal battle between Cosatu and suspended general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi began.
The scope of the inquiry into Vavi has been extended to include allegations about irregular travel bookings and even a tweet in which he criticised the South African Communist Party for not helping to unify the federation.
Vavi said he had given his laptop and bank statements for the past two years to the auditors hired to investigate him.
It might be coincidence, but it seems that ever since Vavi was shunted out the fabric of a united labour movement has been disintegrating slowly.
The National Union of Metalworkers (numsa) , Cosatu’s largest affiliate, has all but broken away in protest at the “direction” the federation has taken. It sees the charges against Vavi as an attempt to remove a critic of President Jacob Zuma and to transform Cosatu into a “sweetheart union”.
This week, Numsa workers took to the streets in the first step towards establishing a “front” to challenge what it sees as the government’s anti-worker policies.
At a gathering point at Zoo Lake in Johannesburg, some workers sported stickers calling for votes for Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters.
While the nation was focused on the Nkandla report and the pattern of blood splatter in Oscar Pistorius’s bathroom, the tectonic plates of South African politics were shifting beneath the streets.
Vavi believes he has been the victim of this shift as the establishment sought to clamp down on criticism.
In August 2010, Vavi parted ways with the ruling elite when he said: “We’re headed for a predator state where a powerful, corrupt and demagogic elite of political hyenas is increasingly using the state to get rich.”
He did not name Zuma, but he was speaking after a series of controversies had erupted over companies that had the president’s relatives on their boards.
It was something of a reversal from a man who once campaigned for Zuma, famously describing his rise to the presidency as a “tsunami” that could not be halted.
But since his reference to the “political hyenas”, Vavi has been out in the cold.
“They said I was decampaigning for the ANC, that I was misbehaving, all manner of things,” said Vavi. — Ray Hartley