Cosatu agenda: Cosatu needs to clarify its socialist agenda

Cosatu needs to tell the public what its agenda is. Is it to be the champion of economic growth and prosperity for all citizens, or to set about implementing a socialist agenda in the name of a few?

Cosatu wants to tell the ANC who its Cape Town mayoral candidate should be. What it is less clear about are the policies it wants implemented in government. As things stand, its agenda is radical socialism and, if it wants control in government, it will be to implement that programme. It needs to set out clearly the nature of the policies it advocates and what they will mean for Cape Town's citizens.

For example, Cosatu and its affiliates want to nationalise large sections of the South African economy (including parastatals like Telkom, Eskom and Sasol), private sector businesses (including South Africa's mines) and the public transport system. It has even gone so far as to suggest that the Reserve Bank and the "whole food-supply chain" be nationalised.

If these radical policies were ever implemented by the government, they would have a profoundly damaging effect on the South African economy; destroying jobs and retarding service delivery.

It is true that these proposals could only be enacted at a national level, but they speak to a particular mindset: a backwards-thinking desire to centralise control and increase the size of the state, and a hostility towards the private sector and business; all of which are pertinent to the policy and programmes designed and implemented by the City of Cape Town.

But it doesn't stop with nationalisation. Perhaps even more disturbingly, Cosatu wants to abolish private property in South Africa or, to quote its resolutions directly, to "abolish bourgeois private property". This is a constitutional right that goes to the heart of any democratic order. Abolishing it would lead to a socialist state, reminiscent of Russia in the 1930s.

And, at the heart of all these ideas lies a fundamental conflict of interest: Cosatu wants to represent both the employer (in the form of the state) and the employee (the workers). It cannot do both. It cannot simultaneously claim to be working for the interests of all citizens, while at the same time upholding a policy programme designed specifically to promote the interests of a minority, often at the expense of the majority. That is dishonest.

Cosatu needs to explain how it will resolve this contradiction, and what the implications are for the policies it claims to advocate.

If Cape Town is going to grow, if it is to encourage investment and create jobs and if it is to become the city of choice for new businesses and, with them, prosperity for all citizens living in the metro, it cannot afford the kind of regressive socialist thinking that defines Cosatu's policies. It is time for Coastu to be honest about what its agenda actually is.

Statement issued by Dr Wilmot James MP, DA Federal Chairperson, March 10 2011

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