Mashudu Sadike and Baldwin Ndaba
Pretoria - After voting in favour of a decision to divorce the ANC and urge the SACP to contest the 2024 national elections directly, Cosatu members made a U-turn yesterday and gave the governing party another chance, after the general-secretaries of the affiliates reached a last-minute compromise deal.
Pretoria News has been reliably informed by sources that the deal was struck following concerns that it might tear Cosatu apart, after some unions threatened to break away from the labour federation.
The threat allegedly forced the union leaders, who supported the earlier motion to dump the ANC over salary disputes, to grudgingly agree to a reprieve.
In a dramatic development at the 14th Cosatu congress in Midrand yesterday, the federation’s leaders gave the governing party’s top leadership another lifeline to resolve the protracted wage dispute with public sector unions.
Cosatu opted to postpone the decision on whether to dump the ANC until May next year.
The reprieve comes after a public fallout between workers and the ANC, which saw ANC national chairperson Gwede Mantashe and President Cyril Ramaphosa booed and prevented from addressing separate Cosatu gatherings this week and in May last year.
Declaring the suspension of the motion, outgoing Cosatu general secretary Bheki Ntshalintshali said his secretariat and 18 general-secretaries of the affiliated unions met yesterday and agreed not to vote on the matter.
“In our meeting, we realised that some of the unions in the run up to the national congress did not have the opportunity to discuss the matter. We agreed that there must be extensive consultation on such a fundamental matter,” Ntshantshali said.
He said all the unions should meet and discuss their posture towards Cosatu’s future electoral support, saying they’d opted for a broad consultation process.
Moments after Cosatu announced the suspension of the motion, some delegates broke into song singing, We want State power – a favourite song of the SACP members during their 2017 elective congress, in which some members wanted their top leadership to divorce the ANC then already.
Cosatu delegates repeated the song at their national elective congress in what seemed to be a clear indication that they disapproved of the motion’s suspension.
Some of the delegates accused Cosatu’s top leadership of trying to secure a secret meeting with the ANC in another effort to convince the government to review its position on wage increases for public sector unions.
They said some of their leaders were focusing on securing positions in Parliament and provincial legislatures after the 2024 national elections.
Earlier, National Union of Mineworkers Women Structure secretary, Nthabiseng Mashiteng, was outright about their support for the SACP, saying Cosatu’s leaders should stop trying to secure top jobs in the ANC government, but serve the needs of members.
Pretoria News