Johannesburg - The country’s biggest metalworkers’ union faces convincing its 380 000 members that they should abandon the ANC in favour of a worker-led political party.
The National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) has found easy allies in parties and left-formations like the Democratic Left Front, Workers and Socialist Party, the UDM and the PAC for its United Front - the springboard to its formation of an opposition to the ruling-ANC.
Numsa will meet with EFF, which it hasn’t yet met one-on-one, when it manages to get “everyone in one room”.
The union earlier this year announced its intention to launch the front, envisioned as a UDF-type coalition of civil society formations, NGOs, civic organisations and religious leaders.
Its goal will be to marry shop floor battles with the fight for basic services demanded by communities.
This weekend sees the union launching United Front structures in five major metros in the country, following last weekend’s launch in Gauteng.
These are Ekurhuleni; the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro, Numsa’s biggest local; Buffalo City, Emalahleni (Witbank) in Mpumalanga, and Emndeni and Diepkloof in Soweto.
It’s official national launch is in December.
But the biggest battle to success could well come from within because thousands of Numsa members are still resolute in their support for the ANC.
Many serve in ANC branches and remain members of the SACP.
Numsa’s United Front held its first protest march this week, over possible retrenchments at a company where it organises, but it managed to garner mass support from civic organisations, the PAC and the UDM under the same banner.
“We’ll still vote for the ANC. We know where they come from. They fought for us,” said Mirriame Mashiane, who has worked at the company for over 20 years and is a loyal member of the union.
“We’ve got RDPs, electricity but they (the ANC) failed us,” Mashiane said, still she is not yet ready to abandon the party.
There were loud cheers from the crowd at the Ekurhuleni march this week when Numsa’s young and energetic president, Andrew Chirwa, repeated the union’s demand for the resignation of President Jacob Zuma.
Mashiane was part of that crowd, but here lies the nub of Numsa’s challenge: she believes the ANC will self-correct, return to its roots as the party of Joe Slovo and OR Tambo if Zuma goes.
A senior national Numsa leader confirmed to Independent that its smaller Leftist-allies were impatient with the tempo at which the union is going about launching the Front and the planned political party.
“They would have wanted us to move very fast. (But) we said we have a constituency which we have to take along with us,” he said.
“The approach we’ve taken is we must work with progressive people in the ANC and SACP.”
But Numsa faces resistance to this from its Leftist-allies in the DLF and Wasp.
Numsa leaders in Mpumalanga where the ANC got 85 percent in May, were explicit recently, telling the national leadership that local union members in the province would not easily abandon the party of liberation.
While the ANC lost considerable support in metros such as Nelson Mandela Bay, Ekurhuleni, Joburg and Tshwane it knows it has to up its game in the provision of basic municipal services, such as water and sanitation.
Several indicators of this include its Gauteng conference resolution to oppose the imposition of e-Tolls.
At a meeting last week national convener, Dinga Sikwebu, broached inviting Premier David Makhura to the provincial launch of the front in Gauteng next month.
As a Cosatu-affiliate, the Numsa has opposed urban tolling and opposition to privatisation is a battle principally supported by Left but which also has currency among middle-class white formations such as the Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance (Outa).
And last month, at the first United Front event in PE, church leaders insisted that former-NPA chief Vusi Pikoli, who is an ANC-member, to address the gathering.
But representatives of the DLF and Wasp who hold contempt for anyone associated with the ANC’s “neoliberal” agenda/1996 class project oppose Numsa’s refusal to alienate its base.
This will likely be a bone of contention when discussions are held with the EFF.
Tomorrow (MON) Numsa will finalise the organisations it wants “pull into one room” for the December national launch.
It would hope that as many of the parties and formations it meets with form a single political opposition-party, for now referred to as the Movement for Socialism.
“There’s no easy departure (on these issues) because people do remember who liberated them. The first of two acknowledgments is that it’s going to be difficult. But the second, is we know there is a groundswell for things to be done differently,” the same senior national leader told Independent.
But there may be a middle road.
“You need labour movements to be independent. Should a new federation be formed we won’t want it to be aligned to the Movement for Socialism. This is problem Cosatu faced – it can’t be critical of the ANC because of the tripartite alliance,” Numsa deputy GS Karl Cloete says.
This weekend’s United Front launches must address some of these questions - if not, the Numsa-moment will fall apart before it has even begun because of disagreements on tactics.
More importantly, Leftist-allies will have to make strategic concessions because if Numsa’s constituency is not brought on board then the whole project could split, as has been the case in Cope and the EFF.
Sunday Independent