Cosatu is kicking the can down the road on whether to ditch the ANC in the 2024 national and provincial polls in favour of rallying behind SACP to contest elections directly.
This was confirmed by Cosatu president Zingiswa Losi at the closing of the 14th Cosatu congress that convened at the Gallagher Estate north of Johannesburg from Monday to Thursday.
The conference, where Losi was re-elected to her post unopposed, was split in the middle about its continued relationship with the ANC, which did not deliver its message of support for the first time since the two have been in unity.
On one side of the divide were Cosatu affiliates who pushed for congress to dump the ANC in 2024, while the other side insisted there must be broad consultation first before such a decision is made.
Workers’ unions, NUM and Popcru were the leading proponents for congress to decide on the matter once and for all in favour of the SACP standing for public office independently from the ANC come 2024.
The majority of the affiliates, who “in principle” agree that supporting SACP makes more sense than the ANC, argued this should not be the decision of the 2,000-plus delegates that attended the conference, while leaving the more than a million members of Cosatu, who did not attend, behind.
Those arguing for further consultation expressed fear it might be misleading to think that the whole Cosatu membership would abide by a decision to vote for the SACP instead of Cosatu. Especially after a similar assumption embarrassed Numsa, which formed a political organisation and contested the 2019 national polls but a commanding majority of its members did not vote for the Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party.
After much bickering with neither side willing to back down, the matter was left to a vote, the results of which were not announced by the time congress officially closed. The matter was deferred to a structure of a few union leaders.
Losi said a final decision on this will be taken at the Cosatu central executive committee (CEC) meeting in November, and all will follow the line emerging from the crucial meeting.
According to Losi, the bigger strategy as decided by the 13th congress was always to force the “reconfiguration of the alliance”, to have all three partners having equal rights and to push the ANC further to the left which had largely failed.
But moving to second gear was a decision that Cosatu “must consider”, deciding whether backing the SACP and leaving the ANC in the cold was a viable option.
“In the 2018 congress, we said we want a reconfigured alliance, and in the absence of that we decided that we will campaign for the victory of ANC in the 2021 local government elections. We did not say we are getting out of the alliance, we said we will consider the SACP contesting for state power so that workers can have an alternative,” said Losi.
“That was the basis of the discussions in this congress. And we did not resolve it as we always do. We will wait for the outcome of the motion. That resolution, whatever it is, will go to the November CEC where it will be processed together with the declaration and other resolutions.”
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