The Big Read: Eye on the promised land

The ANC is most likely not going to have any sleepless nights over Dali Mpofu's admission that his blood is no longer black, green and gold.

Mpofu may have been a prominent figure within the governing party since its unbanning 23 years ago, but he has never held any elected position.

So it is doubtful that he would have taken with him a significant number of ANC members and traditional voters as he donned his red beret to become an official member of Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters.

What should be giving President Jacob Zuma and his comrades at Luthuli House runny tummies ahead of next year's election, however, are developments at the party's trade union alliance partner Cosatu.

They should be specifically concerned about what is happening at the National Union of Metalworkers of SA, which - thanks to the implosion of the National Union of Mineworkers - is now Cosatu's largest affiliate.

Irvin Jim, Numsa's general secretary, may deny this, but he really looks the part of a man about to deliver divorce papers.

His recent public comments are not the type you would expect from a "loyal cadre of the movement" six months before the polls.

A big part of the ANC's campaign message in the election would be to trumpet its achievements as the ruling party in uplifting the lives of the poor since taking power in 1994.

But Jim, whose political activism began in the ANC-aligned youth and student movements of the 1980s, effectively rejected the post-1994 order as meaningless for the black working class when he delivered the Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture in Queenstown, Eastern Cape, last month.

"It is precisely because we have now become acutely aware of the dangers of holding on to an empty tin, pretending to have political power when we do not have economic power, that we are now demanding and calling for a radical and revolutionary socio-economic transformation programme to transfer the economy to the people's camp," he said.

If these words sound familiar to you - like something Malema would say - it is probably because Jim is travelling down the same path.

He is just not ready yet to make a complete break with the ANC-led tripartite alliance.

But that he considers abandoning the ANC's "broad church" as an inevitable step is obvious: "I cannot, today, stand here and proudly say that the SACP of today is the SACP of Joe Slovo.

"It is impossible to honestly say that the SACP and the ANC are pursuing a radical socioeconomic programme to uproot our colonialism of a special type and to destroy capitalism," he told his Queenstown audience.

I listened to Jim at a Numsa international colloquium in Benoni on Monday. It was telling to see the audience - largely dominated by Numsa officials and members - burst out in laughter when he chanted: "Viva ANC, Viva SACP" at the start of his speech.

Also telling was the decision of the colloquium organisers to invite a leftist poet to perform just before Jim took the stage.

His chosen poem ridiculed the SACP's claim to be the "vanguard" of the South African working class.

Jim was in his element, telling guests from Australia, Ghana, Canada and other parts of the world, that he was "not ashamed to admit the greatest achievements of the 1994 democratic settlement had been to embed South Africa into the world capitalist system and to entrench the power of white monopoly capital".

The rest of the speech could have easily been titled "Why I will no longer vote ANC".

He described how government policies have favoured the rich and white while condemning the black majority - especially the working class and poor - to poverty.

In instances where there has been conflict between business and labour, he added, the ANC government sided with bosses.

"The worst sign of this was that massacre in Marikana, which they want us to call a 'tragedy'," he said.

To demonstrate his point that post-apartheid South Africa has benefited whites more than blacks, he quoted Stats SA figures showing that life expectancy was at 71 years for whites, and had fallen to 48 years for blacks.

If Zuma is sitting in his office in Pretoria and thinking he would persuade Jim and his comrades in Numsa to keep their 400000 members within the alliance by offering the union's leaders government posts, Jim shut that door on Monday.

"We cannot afford to be in the upper echelons of leadership in a state that wants to appease capital and rating agencies."

But if Jim is so unhappy with the Zuma-led ANC government, why has he not jumped ship already?

The answer lies with the ongoing battle within Cosatu over the suspension of its general secretary and Jim's closest political ally, Zwelinzima Vavi.

If Vavi eventually wins his fight and gets the upcoming Cosatu special congress to topple the federation's president, Sdumo Dlamini, and other unionists seen as too close to the ANC, Jim hopes to use Cosatu to take on the current ANC leadership.

But if Vavi is defeated, he is most likely to try and lead Numsa out of Cosatu and the ANC alliance.

Those are all long-term plans. What Luthuli House will be watching closely next month as Numsa holds its special national congress is whether the union will follow other Cosatu affiliates - such as the National Education, Health and Allied Workers' Union - and endorse the ANC for 2014.

Considering Jim's utterances, as well as the fact that Numsa boycotted the pre-election ANC alliance summit recently, I don't see the union backing the ANC at the polls.

But will Jim lead his members into the hands of Malema and EFF?