A potentially very well-funded attempt is underway to radically reconfigure the political landscape in South Africa. Irvin Jim, the general secretary of Numsa, the country’s largest trade union, is the public face of this project, but there are other actors in the shadows.
The documents circulated to the leadership of Numsa by Jim before the union’s central committee meeting held from December 3 to 7 last year were explosive. A report authored by Jim called for the leaders to discuss taking the union back into Cosatu, from which it was expelled in 2013.
A second document, authored by Jonis Ghedi-Alasow, who holds no elected or administrative position in Numsa, proposed that the union host a meeting with the unions affiliated to Saftu and Cosatu, along with the senior leadership of the ANC, SACP, MK Party, EFF and Mayibuye, with the aim of uniting all these organisations under the banner of the ANC.
Although there was significant opposition, the Numsa central committee eventually agreed to engage Cosatu and the SACP about a return to the ANC-led tripartite alliance. It also agreed that Numsa would invite the ANC, SACP, MK Party, EFF and Mayibuye to a ‘symposium’ aimed at building ‘unity’.
Saftu responded by issuing a statement condemning what it called the dishonest “come back home” narrative. After Jim sent a letter to the leaders of the Saftu-affiliated unions announcing Numsa’s decision to convene the meeting aimed at uniting the ANC with its offshoots, Saftu issued a sharply worded response in a letter to all its affiliated unions.
It made the point that Numsa was an affiliate of Saftu, and not the other way around, and therefore cannot issue instructions to Saftu. This is an existential matter for Saftu, which could not continue to function in any meaningful way if Numsa, its largest affiliate, went back to Cosatu.
If Numsa does go back into Cosatu, and thereby the ANC, this will fundamentally change the politics of the union movement in South Africa and put an end to any possibility of the union movement contributing to the development of an independent left project.
It would also be a historic betrayal of the working class, as the ANC is presiding over mass unemployment, austerity, and rapid deindustrialisation.
On his own, Jim does not have the same power to bring the EFF, MK Party and the Mayibuye movement back into the ANC. The leaders of all these parties know that he could not persuade the members of his own union to vote for his Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party in the 2019 election. He cannot seriously claim to be some sort of broker representing the wider working class.
It is highly significant that while the proposal to unite the ANC with its offshoots was circulated by Jim, it was written by Ghedi-Alasow, the director of Pan-Africa Today. This is an NGO that is widely understood to operate under the strategic direction of Vijay Prashad, the Indian communist, who is also widely understood to play a central role in directing the political use of funds provided by the now retired Jamaican billionaire Roy Singham.
At this point , we do not know whether the ANC and its offshoots will be willing to participate in the meeting that Jim is moving ahead to organise.
But given that Prashad has access to a vast budget of millions of dollars, it is quite possible that, should this process move forward, it could be extremely well funded. The prospect of vast election funding could entice at least some parties to participate in the proposed unity-building process.
Civil society has long campaigned for transparency around party political funding, and the same standard must apply to this attempt to reconfigure both the labour movement and the wider political landscape.
Jim needs to explain exactly what role Ghedi-Alasow and Pan-Africa Today now play in Numsa, including in financial terms. Ghedi-Alasow also needs to be transparent about his and Pan-Africa Today’s role in both Numsa and the proposed process to bring the offshoots from the ANC back into the party. This must include full transparency on all financial matters. The South African public also needs to have clarity on exactly where Pan-Africa Today is taking its direction from, including the role of Prashad.
When, in 2019, the Washington-based magazine New Lines ran a story alleging that Singham was running a vast propaganda operation for China, the claim was blindly repeated as if it were credible by media elsewhere in the world, including the US, India and South Africa.
But, as the respected Scottish media scholar Alan McLeod has shown, New Lines is not an independent media outlet but a Washington-aligned project largely staffed by former US military, intelligence, the state department and NATO-linked officials, with some figures drawn directly from Israeli military intelligence. New Lines has, McLeod shows, repeatedly smeared independent left projects as fronts for Russia and China.
While we need full clarity from Jim, Ghedi-Alasow and Prashad and, if necessary, credible investigative journalism into their project to realign our politics, we also need to avoid conspiracy theory and stick to the facts as we make sense of this possibly hugely significant new development in our politics.
- Dr Buccus is a political analyst and senior research associate at ASRI
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