History will absolve us!

Announcing the outcomes of the National Education Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu) National Executive Committee (NEC) held on 3-4 April 2013, the then General Secretary of Nehawu Fikile 'Slovo' Majola, now rewarded by the ANC and serving as Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Energy, shockingly, publicly proclaimed:

"The federation (Cosatu) should do what it has to do - it must without any fear or favour - apply its own rules and policies, and if this means expelling those who want to remain within the federation whilst destroying Cosatu unions and who see themselves as opponents of our Alliance, then let it be. It must surgically remove them; root and branch to allow itself space to begin a process of rebuilding itself and affiliates".

Interestingly, South Africa's biggest trade union - the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa); General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi and scores of other trade union leaders and shopstewards from various unions, particularly from the ranks of the SA Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) and the SA Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) have since been "surgically removed" and expelled from Cosatu. 

Now the federation of Elijah Barayi finds itself in a state of permanent paralysis, facing an impending implosion, rendering it thoroughly useless to the struggles of the working class and the poor. 

Majola's poisonous words were duly executed, implemented to the latter by a grouping in Cosatu's Central Executive Committee (CEC) that is loyal to a faction driven by S'dumo Dlamini, Blade Nzimande and Gwede Mantashe. Needless to say, this is why some of the former Cosatu CEC members were rewarded with plum ministerial and parliamentary positions post the May 2014 elections.

Notable among these working class traitors are Senzeni Zokwana (Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries); Fikile Majola (Energy Portfolio Committee Chairperson); Zet Luzipho (Minerals Portfolio Committee Chairperson); Sam Mashinini (Free State MEC - Public Works) who join Thulas Nxesi (Minister of Public Works) and many others serving as warm-benchers and members of the ANC choirs in national parliament and provincial legislatures.

The domestication and eventual destruction of Cosatu is not class neutral and should not be delinked from the broader political offensive by the ANC/SACP faction on behalf of South African white monopoly capital and its parasitic black blood suckers of turning working class and youth formations into blunt and useless instruments, and by luring its leaders into their networks of political patronage. 

Not long ago, the militant Youth League of the ANC was liquidated; the Young Communist League (YCL) was deeply buried into rightwing parliamentary politics, and now finally, Cosatu has been tamed. This is designed to leave the most marginalised sections in our society, the working class, working class women, working class youth and poor rural populations without any fighting instruments, as they face the savage and vicious onslaught from neoliberal capitalism.

This is happening in the midst of popular struggles emerging in many parts of the world, notably in Greece, Spain, Latin America, India, the Middle East and elsewhere, where the working classes are re-asserting their hegemony and influence against the barbarity and austerity measures of neoliberal capitalism. 

In our own country, we have seen an upsurge of violent service delivery protests, intensification of struggles on the shopfloor for decent wages by unions outside of Cosatu's traditional base, mass violent xenophobia as millions of African workers struggle to survive in extremely impoverished and crowded working class communities. Accompanying this ugly reality is the continued denial by politicians of the crisis of youth unemployment.

There is no doubt that the purgings and expulsions are part of an agenda to tame and domesticate Cosatu into becoming a toothless lapdog of the ruling ANC/SACP governing faction. In essence, Cosatu must abandon its socialist revolutionary traditions and posture, as a militant, fighting, anti-capitalist and class orientated trade union centre, and should transform or "rebuild itself" as a conveyor belt for the right-wing neoliberal policies of the government that continue to be championed by the fading ANC/SACP faction post the 1994 negotiated political settlement.

The federation is now in the hands of a leadership that suffers from acute political and ideological myopia and revolutionary loadshedding. They think that the existence of Cosatu and the struggle of workers is the exclusive monopoly of the ANC/SACP faction. 

Cosatu is the collective property of workers who share the miseries, deep scars and despair they face on a daily basis in their lived reality of the brutality of the South African capitalist system, they collectively yearn for a just and egalitarian system - Socialism.

Whilst Cosatu continues to butcher itself, the biggest losers are workers and the poor, who have for many years seen Cosatu as their only trusted and reliable fighting weapon, amidst the triple crisis of poverty, unemployment and inequality, including escalating and high levels of corruption. 

Already, the exploiting classes - the bosses - have taken advantage of the crisis in Cosatu, including their friends in the bourgeois State, through the imposition of anti-worker policies: austerity budgets, retrenchments, privatisation of Eskom, Transnet and Telkom among others. 

Mass scale retrenchments of workers have resulted in the increased large-scale dependence of millions of unemployed workers. The few workers with jobs find themselves confronted with the heavy socio-economic burden of taking care of the vast army of the unemployed that is ravaged by squalor and poverty in working class Townships and rural slums.

Since Cosatu's "rupture" immediately after its 11th National Congress held in 2012, it has by-passed a number of key struggles to uplift the lives and socio-economic conditions of the workers of our country. Instead, its leaders have been co-opted to recite the ideological fog of the "good story to tell", intended to make the fast fading ANC look good in the eyes of the working class. In reality, the working class has no good story to tell at all, since it can only afford inferior shacks, a collapsing public health-care system, an ailing public education system, among many hardships. 

The Special National Congress to take place next week from the 13th to the14th of July 2015 will be used to consolidate the destruction and conversion of Cosatu, as a yellow trade union federation of workers. If truth be told, the Special National Congress (SNC) is a farce, and there will be no frank and open discussions on the crisis crippling the federation. Superficial unity will be painted to hide the ideological differences that currently exist in the federation; the S'dumo leadership collective will be insulated from its failure to drive and implement the resolutions adopted at the 2012 Congress; and a shelf, fake union will be confirmed to replace Numsa.

Now is the time for the working class, as a class for itself, to create its own platform of agitating, propagating and fighting for their demands and emancipation from the yoke of South African capitalism. Those demands will not emerge from this SNC nor will they fall from heaven. 

As we forge ahead in building working class power from below, we should be inspired by Mao Zedong's dictum, first by noting that the Long March started with a single step forward, and secondly, that every obstacle is an opportunity. Rather than waste time, this moment calls on the working class to embrace the opportunities that have opened up as we move forward.

History will absolve us!

Castro Ngobese is the National Spokesperson of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA)