Veteran trade union leader Zwelinzima Vavi has had his setbacks, but the “tragic mistake” he is still kicking himself for was to support Jacob Zuma in becoming president of the ANC and the republic.
“The only mistake, and the biggest mistake, is that I was convinced by some members of both Cosatu and the SACP that the then deputy president of the ANC, Jacob Zuma, was going to be good for the agenda of the working class and therefore we must rally workers behind him.”
In 2005 president Thabo Mbeki fired Zuma, his deputy, on the strength of a court judgment that had heavily implicated him in his friend Schabir Shaik’s corruption case.
Vavi and his comrades at the old Cosatu House in Braamfontein reacted by mobilising support for Zuma, paving the way for his return to active politics and eventual rise to the ANC presidency and, ultimately, the Union Buildings.
Now, almost 20 years after the start of that campaign, Vavi is long out of the ANC-led alliance and is general secretary of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) — a rival to Cosatu.
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Zuma, too, is all but out of the ANC and now spends his days campaigning for his newly formed MK Party. The new party is a major threat to ANC support in KwaZulu-Natal, just over two months before national elections in which pollsters predict the ruling party could drop below 50%.
When he and his comrades started their campaign and went on to install Zuma in the Union Buildings, did Vavi ever imagine that one day they would all be in opposition against the ANC?
“I was reluctant, by the way, and I will write that in my book one day,” Vavi says of his support for Zuma. As he settles in for our interview at the Sunday Times’s Parktown offices in Johannesburg, Vavi tries to explain why he backed Zuma.
“The difference between myself and everybody is that once the collective decides that this is the way, I throw my weight, my soul and everything behind decisions of the unions, behind Zuma. In the process, unfortunately, we acted in a manner that is unprincipled by declaring a non-socialist as the biggest socialist.
“By also closing our eyes to previous allegations that ‘our hero’ had taken a R500,000 bribe from a company that was selling arms to South Africa. We used to joke about these things: ‘What is R500k, we are losing jobs here in the millions, our economy is not based on redistribution of wealth, that is a small matter. Our aim is to drive the ANC programmes towards the left and the Freedom Charter.’
“That was a fundamental mistake, I live to regret that because every day I am reminded of that tragic mistake we committed in 2005.”
Jacob Zuma does not represent any left-leaning radical programme, that’s nonsense. There is no pro-poor programme that he will ever lead at an economic level
He says he has since apologised to Mbeki for having bought into conspiracy theories about why the then president acted against Zuma.
“That's the fundamental mistake we have committed and I have taken full responsibility and have apologised to former president Thabo Mbeki to say, ‘I believed this conspiracy theory that you were driving an anti-Zuma programme.’
“The basic instinct of a worker is to throw themselves behind the person who they believe is a victim. That’s what we did, that’s why Cosatu did it. We believed there was an elaborate plan to stop Zuma from ascending [to power]. We even believed that the Thabo Mbekis were agents of the regime, we were promised that Zuma would one day tell us. Even those who are rallying behind him today are promised the same thing,” Vavi says.
Cosatu and the rest of the trade union movement, he now says, betrayed themselves and the social class they represent by placing all their bets on a Zuma presidency.
“None of what we said was going to happen, happened. There was no ANC that moved towards the left, instead the ANC co-ordinated a move towards the right under the leadership of president Zuma. The response to the world economic crisis, which was the biggest in decades — there was no lack of other examples of how you manage that crisis.
“President Jacob Zuma does not represent any left-leaning radical programme, that’s nonsense. There is no pro-poor programme that he will ever lead at an economic level. Symbolic things can happen, and some of them were absolutely important and there were great strides made, like antiretrovirals, ending the denialism — if that didn’t happen, a good number of political leaders would’ve died in that denialism by Mbeki. On the eve of Zuma’s departure, he introduced a level of free education through NSFAS [the National Student Financial Aid Scheme] — as a result of that, the face of universities has changed. Even if you are critical of the ANC, you have to give that to them.”
Even the weakening of the trade union movement after the expulsion of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and the subsequent formation of Saftu could be attributed to Zuma’s conduct in power, he said.
“Without that mistake, we would have battled and ventilated issues and contained those issues — such as the ANC leading the alliance and the reconfiguration within — as Cosatu. The SACP would have never developed such a thin skin.
“Its general secretary [Blade Nzimande] would have never amended the constitution to enable him to serve as cabinet minister while keeping his post. Great minds would have remained in the SACP and it would have been an SACP of Chris Hani that would’ve supported the ANC only if it maintained a working class position.”
Some of the opposition parties that exist today, he says, are a direct result of Zuma’s presidency.
“There would have been no COPE and no EFF. The EFF was created directly from the intolerance mounted by Zuma himself. Despite the denial, the dismissal of [Julius] Malema was driven by Zuma. He knows how to play his games. He does not do things directly himself, he has an army of sycophants who launch these attacks inside the structures of the party. He even engineered the removal of president Mbeki, but never championed it.”
Now that Zuma has effectively left the ANC and formed a new political vehicle, does Vavi think the MK Party can champion the radical agenda he and others had hoped for when they backed Zuma?
“The fundamental transformation we … are still yearning for is a programme to redistribute two things: [first,] wealth from the rich to the poor — Jacob Zuma failed, together with the ANC, dismally. Instead, there is a redistribution of wealth in this country from the poor to the rich, and that’s why we are the most unequal society. Second, there ought to have been a redistribution of land, but our government failed [to achieve this] even under Zuma. Where is he going to get the stamina at 82 years?
There was no ANC that moved towards the left, instead the ANC co-ordinated a move towards the right under the leadership of president Zuma
"Everybody knows that Zuma and the ANC are not different — why is there a creation of a ‘Ramaphosa ANC’ now when there was no ‘Zuma ANC’ between 2007 and 2018? Nonsense.”
Vavi does not have many kind things to say about the ANC alliance and its “renewal” project. Calls by Cosatu and the SACP for the alliance to be reconfigured, he believes, will be ignored under President Cyril Ramaphosa’s leadership.
“The idea of a reconfigured alliance is just a fairy tale. We have been innovative, calling for a political alliance and centre, where we can drive transformation together as equal partners even though the ANC is the leader, but we can have a sense that we all have a say in where the steering wheel is turning to.”
Vavi complains that Cosatu has been turned into “a vehicle to climb onto the gravy train to parliament”.
“Instead of people taking up militant struggles against austerity, they don’t want to rock the boat because they still want to be looked at sympathetically in the list process.
“That is the fundamental, massive elephant in the room that makes it hard to consolidate real solidarity among workers. There are signs that workers are beginning to be tired of being promised a reconfigured alliance when they are in the back seat of this coach being driven by the liberal, former trade unionists.”
The rise of former trade unionists such as Ramaphosa and ANC national chair Gwede Mantashe to the top of the party leadership and government has not benefited the workers they once represented, Vavi says.
But Cosatu has resolved to continue backing the ANC and will use its structures to campaign for the ruling party’s victory at the polls on May 29. Vavi says this is because some union leaders benefit from the status quo.
“When you analyse and see who has benefited in this dysfunctional education system, it is Sadtu [South African Democratic Teachers Union] activists. The very minister of basic education, at some point almost every director-general, MEC, head of district, principal and head of department were Sadtu leaders, so they have a stake...
"The alliance only comes alive during election time. After elections everybody knows their place, the ANC governs and here’s the tragedy — they govern with communists and trade unionists at the helm.”
With dwindling membership and influence, can the trade union movement ever unite again to become the formidable force it was at the start of democracy?
“It will be difficult to see the unity of the working class that existed before 1994. My hope is that by the time we see the next congress of Saftu there is some semblance of a co-ordinated campaign of workers uniting; fighting job losses, the collapse of state-owned enterprises, privatisation and retrenchments and [pushing for] a living wage. If we were to achieve that, there would be no need to keep union federations existing separately.
“This is easier said than done. In the pot, there are ego battles, there are leadership positions, loyalty to the logo, and the alliance, which is the big elephant in the room. Cosatu, despite the evidence, still believes in the ANC, which has totally and dismally failed workers where it matters the most.”
• Listen to the full interview on TimesLIVE
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