COSATU responds to ‘disciplinary charges' against General Secretary

The Congress of South African Trade Unions has noted the decision of the ANC's National Working Committee to lay disciplinary charges against COSATU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi.

It is a decision quite unprecedented in the history of the ANC-COSATU-SACP Alliance, and even earlier, in the decades when the national liberation and trade union movements worked closely together. Never has the leadership of one organisation tried to bring disciplinary charges against a leader of one of its partners.

If the decision is allowed to stand it will create a terrible precedent which would spell the end of the Alliance, whose strength has always been that it is a partnership of independent organisations with shared values and principles for which they have come together to struggle.

Dual membership of different Alliance organisations has been accepted and encouraged and it has created a form of collaboration which has stood the test of time.

This decision would imply on the other hand that any member of COSATU or the SACP who joins the ANC would have to disown his original organisation and accept only the discipline of the ANC. This would mean that they could not then speak out on behalf of the membership which elected them to office in COSATU or the SACP.

COSATU is particularly concerned that the comments to which the ANC objects were not just the personal views of the General Secretary, but contained in an official statement issued by the federation after its recent Central Executive Committee meeting. The statement said:

"The newspapers continue to carry stories of allegations of corruption against Ministers and we are still to hear the President or Cabinet announcing that these allegations will be subjected to investigation. The CEC expressed regret that the government has not inspired confidence through more decisive action against people perceived to hold power in the government.

"Perceptions, as a result of this silence or refusal to act, runs deep in our communities, that government is soft on corruption, in particular if it is committed by members of the cabinet and/or senior party leaders or officials."

The validity of these warnings was confirmed in an interview in the Sunday Times with ANC Gauteng Provincial Secretary David Makhura, who said that "corruption within the party's leadership is a cancer that must urgently be ‘rooted out' before it totally destroys the party". (Our emphasis)

Is David Makhura the next to be charged for raising the issue of corruption ‘within the party's leadership'? Why is this tendency charging those who are blowing the whistle on corruption but not those who are guilty of corruption? The decision is attempting to stifle public debate on this critical issue.

This decision is completely non-implementable and will never be implemented. No leader of COSATU can or will ever be disciplined by another organisation for doing the federation's work on behalf of its two million members.

Our suspicion is that this decision was pushed through by representatives of a tendency within the ANC leadership who are hell-bent on their agenda of self-enrichment and crass materialism. We suspect it was taken at the end of a meeting from which many members had already left. They then leaked the decision to the media, even before it had been communicated to the ANC Secretary General or National Spokesperson.

It is clearly a misguided and mischievous attempt to smear the General Secretary, possibly motivated by fear that he might be taking a position of leadership in the ANC in 2012. It seeks to suggest that he is some kind of trouble-maker, comparable with the President of the ANC Youth League, which is totally groundless.

Zwelinzima Vavi speaks as the voice of the workers and the poor, fully mandated by the COSATU membership and will never be silenced by threats of disciplinary charges.

COSATU calls for meeting on ‘disciplinary charges' against General Secretary

Further to its statement issued today (see above), the Congress of South African Trade Unions is calling for a meeting with the leadership of the African National Congress to resolve the problems which have arisen as a result of the decision taken yesterday by the National Working Committee to initiate disciplinary charges against the COSATU General Secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi.

Statement issued by COSATU national spokesperson, Patrick Craven, May 31 2010

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter