PART 1 · SECOND INSTALMENT
The congress deadlock and the prospect of a split
The first instalment examined the political context of the congress collapse and the tasks of rebuilding independent working-class organisation. We now turn to the factional manoeuvres that paralysed the congress and the prospect of a split.
What led to the congress deadlock?
Media reports to the effect that the congress collapsed after failing to meet a quorum misrepresent and downplay the real issues that led to the procedural impasse. These reports sanitise the partisan manoeuvres and abuse of constitutional processes by both factions. What was on display was a public exhibition of mutual factional insolence. The complete breakdown of camaraderie was reminiscent of the 2008 ANC Youth League conference that first elected Julius Malema as president. Mercifully, the Cosatu congress did not sink to the level of the ANCYL conference’s insulting exhibition of delegates pulling down their trousers to display backsides in front of media cameras.
The Cosatu congress delegates were nonetheless guilty of behaviour only marginally less repugnant. It is deeply disturbing in the light of the scourge of GBVF in the country that there were reports of threats towards women delegates, alongside deliberate disruption of proceedings that forced the suspension of the congress.
Below we list some of the actions that amount to uncomradely and unruly conduct. We do so not to pass judgement for or against any of the actions in isolation. In terms of the letter of the law and the Cosatu constitution all the parties had a right to take all the actions listed below. What we are illustrating is that all of them used the letter of the constitution against its spirit. In their totality they served to underline Cosatu’s degeneration and did further damage to its already weakened standing in the working class in and outside the federation:
- Comrade Shingange’s decision to accept nomination for the Cosatu presidency in defiance of his own union Nehawu’s support for a different candidate and instruction to him not to avail himself.
- The NUM’s persistence in nominating comrade Shingange in the full knowledge of the conflict between him and the Nehawu leadership.
- The Nehawu leadership’s decision to impose a precautionary suspension on Comrade Shingange .
- Comrade Shingange’s decision to seek an urgent interdict against his own union at the Labour Court.
- The NUM-led faction’s decision to prevent the congress from proceeding democratically despite the Labour Court upholding their candidate’s right to contest.
The failure of a meeting to quorate ordinarily results from the number of properly accredited delegates present falling short of the minimum. Proceeding without the minimum number would render such a meeting unconstitutional. Cosatu’s 15th congress was not rendered inquorate by absenteeism which would, in and of itself, have been criminally negligent. There were 1 815 accredited delegates and 11 of 16 affiliates in good standing present. The congress was thus properly constituted constitutionally.
What was unprecedented was that the congress was rendered “inquorate” by factional design. Two slates of contestants for the positions of Cosatu president and secretary general were put forward by the opposing factions. It is not at all clear which slate supports the SACP or the ANC.
The majority faction’s 1 041 delegates, which included the SA Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) the National Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu), the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru), the SA Clothing and Textile Workers Union (Sactwu), supported Sadtu’s deputy president Mabutho Cele for president and outgoing Cosatu president, Popcru’s Zingiswa Losi for secretary general. From the fact that Nehawu has publicly announced its support for the SACP to contest the elections independently, the inference might be drawn that its slate is pro-SACP.
But Losi has a reputation for being an ANC and Ramaphosa loyalist. She had been nominated by Numsa to stand as Cosatu president ahead of Cosatu’s 12th congress in 2014. But when it became clear that Cosatu was going to expel Numsa, she resigned and mysteriously emerged as a correctional services worker and became a shop steward of the pro-ANC Popcru. She became the first woman Cosatu president at the 13th congress in 2018. Should she be elected secretary general she would be the first woman to occupy the position. At the 14th Congress the Sadtu leadership threatened to disaffiliate if the resolution calling on Cosatu to end its support for the ANC was adopted.
The opposing minority faction (774 delegates), led by the National Union of Mineworkers, nominated Nehawu’s (National Health and Allied Workers Union) president and outgoing Cosatu deputy president, Mike Shingange, for president and outgoing Cosatu secretary general Solly Phetoe for general secretary. On where the Shingange/Phetoe slate stands in the battle for Cosatu’s allegiance to the ANC or SACP, the waters are just as muddy as around their rival contestants.
Wherever the contesting slates stand on the ANC/SACP question, what there is no doubt about is that the SACP leadership’s decision to contest the elections independently is the detonator of the explosion that has left deep cracks in Cosatu’s foundations. The SACP leadership must take full responsibility for the crisis.
Although the majority of the Nehawu/Sadtu grouping was based on greater delegate numbers (1 041 to 774), the minority faction commanded the majority of affiliates (7 out of the 11 present and in good standing). Fearing that their presidential candidate Shingange’s right to contest could be overturned in a legal challenge, the minority (by delegates) chose to withhold their credentials rather than risk a defeat, ensuring that a quorum was not reached.
Both factions may have emerged from this battle believing that they have something to celebrate. The majority may feel confident that victory over their opponents has merely been postponed. The minority, for its part, may enjoy the satisfaction of having held the majority in check even if temporarily. Far more important than their rival partisan interests are those of the rank-and-file on both sides of the factional divide. There is now, after decades of ideological and political degeneration within the leadership, little left of the federation’s founding traditions of worker control and democracy that have been trampled underfoot for decades.
The political roots of the factional conflict
The detonator of the factional conflict – for or against the ANC or SACP – that paralysed the 15th Congress did not begin in September 2026. At Cosatu’s 14th Congress in 2022, delegates representing unions with 600 000 members tabled a resolution calling on the federation to withdraw support from the ANC. The Sadtu leadership threatened to disaffiliate should it be adopted. Whether the supporters of the resolution were in favour of supporting the SACP instead is disputed. What is clear is that the SACP itself cried off citing the fact that its own congress had made no decision to contest independently. The Cosatu leadership ended the debate by undertaking to call a special congress to debate the matter in September 2023. Instead of a special congress, on Freedom Day, April 27, 2023, the Cosatu leadership unilaterally announced the federation would support the ANC in 2024.
The uncertainty surrounding the ideological identity and political alignment of the two contesting slates is rooted in the ideological bankruptcy within the SACP itself. It is the reason that the factional alignments at the 15th Congress cannot simply be reduced to an ANC versus SACP contest.
The ANC’s loss of its overall majority for the first time in the democratic era in 2024 has injected the flammable material that has reignited the unresolved political conflict from the previous congress with such intensity. Given the fact that the SACP has been integral to the ANC’s performance as a member of the Tripartite Alliance since 1994, its electoral collapse is a reflection not just on the ANC but the SACP itself. The SACP’s actions are thus as much about its own survival as a credible ideological and political force. The divorce papers Mantashe accused Cosatu of serving on the ANC in public when he was forced to leave the 14th congress in 2022, are now being served on it by the SACP. That the SACP will not depart the marital home and is defying a call from the ANC to resign reflects the complete and utter ideological and political confusion within the SACP itself.
Both the issue that underlies the impasse — for or against support for the SACP’s decision to contest the elections independently — as well as the manner in which the dispute that precipitated the collapse was handled — the quorum impasse — underline the depth of Cosatu’s decline. Ideologically, politically and organisationally, both in the substance of the debates and the proceedings, the congress showed that the Cosatu of 2026 is separated by light years from the Cosatu of 1985.
Will there be a split?
The congress will now reconvene within the constitutionally required thirty days, from 12th to 15th October 2026. Technically, a congress reconvened under the constitutional provisions that compelled the adjournment can be recalled and proceed regardless of the quorum that ordinarily determines its constitutionality. Between the collapse and the reconvened congress, the underlying ideological and political basis of the factional divisions shall not have been resolved. If both factions remain intransigent and determined to prevail without any concessions to the other, when they return on 12th October, a split would materialise regardless of the intention of either faction.
If the split were to ensue, both factions would be responsible. They would have undone under democracy the remnants of the unity defiantly forged under the guns of the apartheid regime in the middle of the partial State of Emergency declared in May 1985. A split would constitute a crime against not only Cosatu’s 1.7m membership, but the entire working class in all federations and unions, regardless of organisational and/or political affiliation, as well as the unorganised. Only the capitalist class will benefit from a trade union movement weakened so critically.
It would be a betrayal even greater than its expulsion in 2014 of its then biggest affiliate, Numsa (National Union of Metal Workers of SA). It would be as if the executioners have returned to the scene of the 2014 crime to carry out a decapitation this time to ensure that the victim does not survive as it did the amputation of 2014.
The capitalist class and its ANC-led GNU are clearly preparing to step up their offensive in the class war on the working class. Precisely at this moment, on both the political front and in the workplace, when the general staff of the proletarian army, the Cosatu leadership, should be preparing a counter-offensive, they have contrived to paralyse the federation.
A federation whose birth shook the foundations of the apartheid regime and acted as the spinal column of the mass working-class movement that defeated it less than a decade after its birth in 1985 is now on the precipice of a split. Such an inglorious end to a once glorious movement would be a serious setback for the working class.
There are, however, powerful pressures upon both factions to recoil from the nuclear option of a split. Even from the standpoint of the bureaucracy itself, a split would be calamitous for both wings. It would mean the loss of control of the apparatus of the federation and weaken that of the affiliates. It would threaten, above all, proximity to political power in government at all levels. This means it would lose access to power, resources and privileges they enjoy through the various seats they occupy as representatives of labour in government and the private sector. As the congress delegate numbers show, the majority is not significantly greater than the minority, irrespective of the size of the unions on both sides for either to start off on their own as a credible and viable entities on their own. As two separate factions they would be significantly weakened.
Both factions, horrified by the fear of mutually assured destruction, therefore have powerful reasons to recoil from a split that would push Cosatu over the edge of the precipice. It is therefore most likely that both sides will de-escalate in the name of “unity.”
Tactically, such an approach would be similar to the one used by the Irvin Jim-led Numsa leadership at its 2013 Special National Congress. The SNC had been convened in response to pressure from the rank-and-file to announce the formation of a workers’ party.
The leadership, loyal to the Stalinist SACP, feared that a party emerging out of a democratic membership-driven process would result in the formation of a workers’ party that would oppose and be independent of both the ANC and SACP. To quell the discontent of the membership, the leadership announced the union’s termination of Numsa’s support for both the ANC and SACP but that it would be up to the membership to decide who to vote for. This decision — in effect a confirmation of the existence of a “Numsa” bureaucracy separate from the Numsa membership — was not the result of a democratic debate. It was the opposite — a suppression and subversion of worker control and democracy.
Both factions of the Cosatu bureaucracy may therefore resolve to announce a truce; a cessation of factional hostilities to “preserve the unity” of the federation.
Even if Cosatu survives this near-death experience, none of the underlying contradictions that brought it to this point will have been resolved. The rescue of Cosatu requires a struggle to return it to its original traditions of worker control, democracy and socialism. Such a struggle requires organisation based on a common platform and programme of action for a worker-controlled, democratic and socialist Cosatu.
In Part 2 we deal with the theoretical and programmatic basis of Cosatu – the two-stage theory and the National Democratic Revolution, their historical origins, impact on working-class revolution internationally and in SA.