Cosatu slams 'fundamentally dishonest' National Treasury

26 August 2020 - 18:35 By Sthembile Cele
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Cosatu has called for “political pushback” against a “conservative wing" of the ANC and slammed the National Treasury for “mismanaging” the economy and having “contempt” for the poor following a sitting of its central executive committee earlier this week.
Cosatu has called for “political pushback” against a “conservative wing" of the ANC and slammed the National Treasury for “mismanaging” the economy and having “contempt” for the poor following a sitting of its central executive committee earlier this week.
Image: THE TIMES

Tripartite alliance partner Cosatu is calling for “political pushback” against a “conservative wing" of the ANC, which it says has hindered the implementation of resolutions made at its last national conference.

The trade union federation has also slammed the National Treasury for “mismanaging” the economy and having “bottomless contempt” for the poor.

This is contained in a statement by Cosatu, which followed a two-day sitting of its central executive committee (CEC) earlier this week.

“The CEC has concluded that the national treasury has mutated into our own International Monetary Fund with its insistence on failing, neoliberal policies and unpardonable mismanagement of our economy,” said the federation.

“Treasury is not just innocently delusional by implementing its wrong-headed and cartoonish ideas to fix the economy - like suffocating an economy that they are trying to resuscitate. But it is a fundamentally dishonest and ideologically extreme organisation that has bottomless contempt for workers and the poor.

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“The National Treasury’s current policies perpetuate racism because they punish the poor black majority while protecting the inherited privileges of the white minority.”

The alliance partner blamed this on the ANC, saying  it opted out of giving the president the power to veto budgets from the department which are against the working-class agenda.

“The ANC is responsible for the current crisis perpetuated by National Treasury because in its last policy conference it rejected a proposal for the presidency to have the authority to override the Treasury’s budget and reaffirmed the Treasury’s independence as a core institution of determining a budget.

"National Treasury’s economic programmes reflect the dominant political forces within the government and the implementation of conservative economic policies favouring the moneyed class at the expense of the SMMEs and the working class is a political programme reflecting the balance of class forces within the ANC-led government.”

Cosatu claimed that “a conservative wing” in the ANC has dominated the policy discourse, and is calling for a “political pushback” to be staged in order to ensure that the resolutions of the ANC's 2017 national elective conference are able to see the light of day.

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