JOHANNESBURG, (Reuters) – South Africa’s COSATU trade union federation threatened yesterday to pull out of an alliance with the ANC if the ruling party persists with disciplinary charges against union leader Zwelinzima Vavi.
“If the decision is allowed to stand it will create a terrible precedent which would spell the end of the alliance,” the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) said in a statement.
The African National Congress (ANC) decided on Monday to discipline COSATU’s leader Vavi for saying the union federation was concerned that senior ANC members were exploiting political connections to get rich.
COSATU is in a formal alliance with the ANC and Vavi is believed to be lining up a bid to head the party, which elects a new leader in two years’ time.
The relationship between the ANC and its labour and communist party alliance partners has soured, threatening to split the decades’-old partnership that freed South Africa from white minority rule.
Disciplinary action against Vavi would comes at a sensitive time for the ANC, just weeks after its youth leader Julius Malema was sanctioned for bringing the party into disrepute with a series of inflammatory outbursts.
Vavi last week accused co-operative governance minister Sicelo Shiceka of lying in his CV, and communications minister Siphiwe Nyanda of running up unjustified hotel bills of half a million rand ($64,500).
While the ANC has not yet confirmed how it will proceed with the disciplinary action, Vavi said the charges would not hold.
“These charges are laughable and not going to happen because I was speaking on behalf of the union and not in my individual capacity,” Vavi told Reuters in a phone interview yesterday.
Vavi said COSATU, with its two million members, was well within its rights to speak out against corruption in government and the ruling party. “I speak for workers. The ANC can’t say that workers don’t have a right to be critical,” he said. COSATU has gone head-to-head this year with the ruling party after the labour federation called for the lifestyles of senior politicians and other leaders to be audited.
