COSATU is calling on the SACP and CWU to exercise restraint and avoid any public mudslinging

31 August 2016

The Congress of South African Trade Unions is extremely perturbed by the recent public exchanges between our affiliate the Communication Workers Union {CWU} and our ally the South African Communist Party {SACP}.

The federation is calling for calm and restraint from both parties because this exchange of verbal hand grenades and savage invectives will only serve to embolden and also give comfort to our enemies. We shall speedily facilitate a meeting between these organisations to try and help them resolve their issues before they get out of hand.

The Communication Workers Union is our affiliate in good standing, whose primary task is to organise, protect and advance the interests of its members, while the SACP is our vanguard, whose tasks go beyond the workplace.

COSATU is proud of CWU and the work that the union has done in advancing the interests of its members in the sector, where it is organised. This union is amongst the most militant and radical of the federation’s unions; and its reading and understanding of the workplaces and the sector, where it is organised is unmatched. CWU’s uncompromising approach has seen it fearlessly taking on and shaking the centres of both political and economic power in this country on behalf of its members. 

We take exception to any suggestion or intimation that seeks to portray the leadership of CWU as dishonest or unprincipled, and we view that as an unmerited attack that can potentially weaken the union in the face of its members. There is no place in our revolutionary culture that allows for the trading of insults or that permits that our unions may be insulted with impunity.

COSATU also reaffirm its support for the Secretary General of the ANC and his leadership collective, and we find it regrettable and unfortunate that tensions between the ANC and CWU have spilled out to the public domain and led to what amounts to adhominem attacks directed at the Secretary General, Cde Gwede Mantashe.

COSATU still believes that the Alliance remains the only vehicle available to advance a second more radical phase of the National Democratic Revolution and also wants to reaffirm without any ambiguity that COSATU belongs to the Congress Movement thus to the ANC – led liberation movement and continues to pursue the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) as a direct route to Socialism

We are still committed to struggle against the notion that the main task of the NDR is to merely manage the primary contradictions without ensuring qualitative advances for the working class and the poor. We shall also ceaselessly work to prove wrong the prevailing false narrative that the ANC has lost its leadership of the nation.

Issued by Sizwe Pamla, National Spokesperson, COSATU, 31 August 2016