President Cyril Ramaphosa stood down at the last minute from addressing worker representatives on Monday, leaving ANC chair Gwede Mantashe to face the wrath of delegates at the Cosatu national congress in Johannesburg.
Mantashe was booed off the stage by the angry workers irked by the high cost of living, low salary increases, poor service delivery, load-shedding, high unemployment and what they regard as the ANC’s intransigence towards corruption.
According to the programme, Ramaphosa, not Mantashe, was supposed to deliver the ANC’s message of support at the congress. This means Ramaphosa, who was booed off stage and prevented from addressing workers during the May Day rally in Rustenburg, dodged the possibility of another politically embarrassing situation.
ANC spokesperson Pule Mabe did not respond to a request for comment.
Cosatu first deputy president Mike Shingange said it communicated to the ANC that the speaker the party was sending to the conference “will not speak today”.
Mantashe — who has been criticised together with Eskom management as being responsible for the rolling blackouts choking economic growth — had barely taken to the podium when delegates stormed the stage singing, “Asinamali (We don’t have money)” and, “Hamba Gwede (Leave, Gwede)”. Mantashe is a former general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, a Cosatu affiliate.
Stage-managed
He later told Business Day: “The issue [of the booing] is to send a message [to government] but the anger is not anger, it’s stage-managed anger.
“They were saying they want their increase and I’m not in the bargaining council.”
The Cosatu delegates waved placards calling for inflation-beating increases and an end to austerity measures.
The labour federation is still angry after Ramaphosa’s administration refused to honour the last part of a three-year wage deal signed in the Public Service Co-ordinating Bargaining Council in 2018.
Analyst Ralph Mathekga said the booing showed growing fractures between the ANC and alliance partners over the economy. “The unions have held this position for a while, calling for an end to the monetary policy in place. However, the ANC is very weakened and the unions will not see the need for restraint, hence the booing.”
Another political analyst, Nelson Mandela University political analyst Ntsikelelo Breakfast, told Business Day that Mantashe’s booing was a backlash against neoliberalism.
Independence
He said the booing could also be viewed as a backlash against the government’s “violation of collective bargaining”.
“Public servants must receive an increase every year, but that has not happened, and that’s the bone of contention. Trade unions are demanding independence from the ANC,” Breakfast said.
Mantashe’s booing on Monday came moments after Cosatu president Zingiswa Losi had called on workers to defend the ANC, which she said is still the best option to advance the workers’ struggle.
Cosatu, which represents about 1.6-million members, has often criticised the ANC government’s handling of the unemployment crisis, collective bargaining, slow economic growth, and crime and corruption, warning it risked losing the national election in 2024 if it did not deal with service delivery issues and matters affecting the working class and the poor.
The federation marched to the Union Buildings recently against the rising cost of living and to demonstrate its rejection of the government’s final revised offer of 3% for the country’s more than 1.3-million public servants.
Public service unions initially demanded a 10% wage increase when negotiations began in May, but trimmed it down to 6.5% to match the headline inflation rate the Reserve Bank has forecast for 2022.
In February, the Constitutional Court ruled the government could back out of the deal as unions were “unjustifiably enriched” from the “impugned collective agreement”, a ruling that has put the allies at odds.
Cosatu is crucial to the ANC as the governing party has relied on the federation’s grassroots structures to campaign and win elections since the dawn of democracy in 1994.
ANC leaders have traditionally addressed Cosatu congresses, which they use as platforms to launch their campaigns for political office.
Campaigns
Cosatu was the first ANC ally to formally endorse Ramaphosa’s campaign for the ANC presidency in the build-up to the party’s national conference at Nasrec in December 2017, but that mood seems to have cooled.
The harsh reception that Mantashe received from Cosatu members was in stark contrast to the reception Ramaphosa received from party members in Soweto on Monday, where he sought to assure them of his government’s plans to make SA investor friendly in order to reduce unemployment, which reached 34% in the second quarter of 2022.
“What we are doing is to reposition our country so that it becomes investment-friendly so that we invite investors to come and invest so that we address the unemployment challenges that we have,” he said.
Ramaphosa was whisked away by his security team before he could answer questions from the media on the stand-off with Cosatu. With Thando Maeko
Update: September 26 2022
This article has been updated with new information.
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