Unions turn on ANC in power struggle

Deaf, perhaps, and keeping mum, definitely, in response to the cries of his striking populace, President Jacob Zuma led his comrades in a solemn reunion at St George's Cathedral in Cape Town yesterday for the funeral of anti-apartheid hero Joe Matthews.

Two days earlier, a teacher marching in a huge public servants' demonstration to parliament held aloft a placard saying: "Zuma: Give 700 rands 2 your wives."

Two decades after trade unions played a key role in bringing the African National Congress to power, the $133 monthly housing allowance being offered by the government of the polygamous President to 1.3 million strikers is about as welcome as cake from Marie Antoinette.

And what's really at stake a fortnight into the most bitter industrial action since the end of apartheid is not the 7 per cent pay rise offer or the 8.6 per cent demand from the streets.

It is the future of the ideologically confused ANC alliance, consisting of the huge Confederation of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), a Communist Party that doesn't fight elections and an ANC nourished by memories of a struggle that are increasingly irrelevant to the people.

"The alliance is dysfunctional," said Cosatu secretary-general Zwelinzima Vavi. "It is unable even to convene an alliance summit for fear of an implosion as a result of fundamental differences on where power lies."

Last time the alliance reached implosion point, in 2008, the ANC managed to circumscribe the damage, Soviet-style, by ousting the right-leaning Thabo Mbeki and replacing him with the power-hungry Zuma.

This time, in the absence of a policy-neutral frontman like Zuma who tells everyone what they want to hear, the entire alliance is threatened, and with it the government of the country.

In the run-up to next year's local government elections, Vavi says the unions will not, as in the past, "give the ANC a blank cheque" by guaranteeing their support.

Vavi plans to play his trump card by drawing in the private sector and creating "total shutdown" of the economy. Some 320,000 mineworkers are on standby to down tools on Friday. The only other meaningful sector in a country with 40 per cent unemployment is the car industry, which is already partially on strike.

Vavi's move is intended to give the heebie-jeebies to the man who really runs South Africa. The de facto prime minister Trevor Manuel, who carries the innocuous title of Minister in charge of the National Planning Commission, has maintained the market-friendly course he put in place as Finance Minister under Mbeki. It brought a World Cup to the country, but it did not change lives.

So worried is Zuma that he will not attend the UN General Assembly at the end of September because it clashes with the ANC national general council policy review conference.

The strike is unpopular because public sector workers are unpopular - the police don't solve crimes, social housing is illegally sold to residents by corrupt officials. But the suffering of the masses is irrelevant to the strike.

Amid a lack of leadership from the President, the ANC alliance's fate no longer depends on Zuma.

It's in the hands of Vavi and will be determined by his ability to draw the private sector into the strike and make it felt on the world's stock markets and the share portfolios of South Africa's middle classes.

- OBSERVER