S’THEMBISO MSOMI | There’s more to Cosatu congress collapse than meets the eye

As delegates left the aborted Cosatu national congress last week, a colleague handed me a book by a former trade unionist I had not heard of before.

Mpumelelo Cilibe, a prominent activist who led workers’ struggles in Gqeberha, then misnamed Port Elizabeth, in the 1980s, also worked in the ANC underground and, with other activists, took part in early talks with the likes of Sydney Mufamadi and Cyril Ramaphosa to form a trade union federation.

He tells an interesting story about his 1983 encounter with Ramaphosa. At the time, Ramaphosa was leading the Council of Unions of South Africa, which Cilibe saw as being linked to the Black Consciousness Movement.

“I don’t subscribe to non-racialism,” Cilibe quotes the future ANC and South African president telling them before the talks collapsed. How times have changed!

I haven’t finished the book, Keep the Ship Moving – A Memoir , so I can’t do justice to Cilibe’s story. But I am mentioning it here because, baffled at how the congress of the country’s largest and most influential trade union federation turned into a fiasco, I came across a passage in the book that made me think about the calibre of organised labour leaders we have in SA today.

In the passage, Cilibe says that the unexplained opulent lifestyle of one of the trade unionists they had founded the union with made him grow sceptical and, eventually, walked away.

“If comrades in the union executive were getting secret money … What was I doing there? Sure, the workers were singing praises of me: ‘ Cilibe wethu, samlandela! — Cilibe of ours, we follow! F*&k that! I never wanted to be followed by any … zombies. I never fought for or because of these things.

“I fought because of my pain, because of what the white Afrikaner did to me, the humiliation and assaults … There had to be other ways of fighting the racist Afrikaner outside the union. I couldn’t sit and watch others selling us out and becoming rich in the name of the Struggle …”

This was in the 1980s when there wasn’t much money to speak of in the unions. You were more likely to be detained, imprisoned, banned, exiled or, worse, killed, as a reward for trade unionism than become fabulously rich. Yet even in those bad old days, the likes of Cilibe were beginning to notice troubling tendencies that were later to poison the new state, political parties and trade unions in post-apartheid SA.

As I struggled with all the explanations for why the Cosatu congress collapsed the way it did last week over an issue that could easily have been resolved, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the source of the conflict isn’t access to and control of the federation’s rich resources.

Unions today control millions of rand through membership subscriptions and investment arms.