Business Day
*Business needs Cosatu’s Vavi * *Editorial, Business Day, Johannesburg, 1 July 2011*SOMETIMES what isn’t is more important than what is. Questions surround many of SA’s political leaders, but one figure who seems to have escaped the kind of gnawing critical undercurrent associated with President Jacob Zuma , for example, is Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi. The rumours and scuttlebutt that surround so many others in politics are notably absent from the haze of natter that surrounds Mr Vavi.
How does he manage it?Mr Vavi’s success has come despite an outspokenness that verges on sensationalism. It exists despite the odd and seemingly contradictory positions that Cosatu is often forced to take.
He famously commented: "We are heading rapidly in the direction of a full-blown predator state in which a powerful corrupt and demagogic elite of political hyenas increasingly controls the state as a vehicle of accumulation."
That’s saying it. You would not think that anyone making that statement could possibly then go and endorse the party in power. But whenever elections roll around, Cosatu inexorably falls into line and endorses the African National Congress (ANC), and it is Mr Vavi who has to deliver the message.
His job is to manage a delicate balance. Without his "sensationalist" outbursts about corruption, his organisation might risk marginalisation. Without ANC support, his members would suffer.
The same kind of tightrope walking is evident in his relations with leaders of the tripartite alliance.
Mr Vavi is capable of warning earnestly about "right-wing demagogues" — code for ANC Youth League president Julius Malema — but bizarrely enough he remains on pretty good terms with the league, partly by endorsing many of its ideas and programmes.
Likewise, Mr Vavi feels no compunction in calling for Mr Zuma to "pull up his socks" as if he were a schoolboy, but seems ready to throw Cosatu’s support behind a second term for Mr Zuma.
Mr Vavi appears to have successfully guided Cosatu as an organisation too. Trade union membership is more or less stable, and even rising slightly in some cases. Financial problems within the movement don’t exist in a serious form, or have escaped public scrutiny.
What has not been achieved is a true blending of political programmes between the ANC and Cosatu, which presumably is what the organisation hoped to achieve by ousting former president Thabo Mbeki and endorsing Mr Zuma. It may be that such a blending is just impossible. It certainly would not be desirable. But whatever the case, Cosatu remains largely on the outside of the government looking in, almost as much today as it was during the Mbeki presidency.
The same kind of things that Mr Vavi used to say of Mr Mbeki, he now says of Mr Zuma. The same kind of arguments Cosatu had about the nature of the alliance during the Mbeki presidency played out again at its congress this week. The congress declaration criticised the Treasury, calling again for a "fundamental change in the Treasury’s fiscal and monetary policies", just as it used to complain about Treasury programmes when Trevor Manuel was finance minister.
This historical echo is either surprising consistency or a demonstration that this is a structural gap that just can’t be filled.
In many ways, Cosatu needs to retain a level of independence, like a paramour who tries to keep his or her lover interested by maintaining a coquettish distance. Mr Vavi has proved himself amazingly adept at this delicate art — sometimes by being outspokenly frank.
Mr Vavi is no friend of business, but many of Cosatu’s campaigns deserve support from business, notably its desire to stamp out corruption. Business might not share his ideology, yet it can be grateful for the element of stability and leadership within the alliance that Mr Vavi provides.
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