Cosatu accuses ANC of a backroom deal with the DA and warns the alliance is cracking
The federation's political report to its 15th national congress says the ANC negotiated the government of national unity behind its alliance partners' backs, and questions whether the NHI, Bela and the Expropriation Act will survive the coalition.
Cosatu has accused the ANC of negotiating the government of national unity behind its alliance partners’ backs, and told its 15th national congress that the coalition with the DA has severely strained the tripartite alliance.
The charge sits in the federation’s political report, prepared for the congress held at Emperor’s Palace in Kempton Park. Sunday World reported the contents on 18 October.
In the report, the outgoing leadership writes that after the 2024 general election the ANC’s leadership “negotiated behind our backs as Alliance partners, making clandestine deals with the sworn enemy of workers and the poor, the DA”. It describes the DA as “an anti-worker, anti-poor, and white supremacist organisation, funded by capital to pursue their interests”.
The report points to the DA’s absence from May Day celebrations and to what it calls “infantile anti-workers and anti-trade union campaigns” against Cosatu and the SACP.
The ANC lost its outright majority for the first time in 2024, and the multiparty government that followed brought in the ANC, the DA, the IFP, the PA, the FF Plus, the UDM, Rise Mzansi, the PAC, the GOOD party and Al Jama-ah.
Cosatu’s concern is not only who is in the room. The report says the ANC now looks like “a facilitator role, playing the balancing act to manage the GNU, rather than a dominant majority party”, and asks whether already promulgated laws will survive a partner that has opposed them.
It names the National Health Insurance Act, the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act and the Expropriation Act, and says there “seems to be a dilution of the ANC’s historical ideological posture and clarity, as it postures to compromise with the coalition partner, the DA”.
The report also says the division has run inside the ANC itself, between those who see the GNU as “a pragmatic move to remain in power” and those who opposed the grand coalition with the DA as a betrayal of the party’s liberation legacy.
Newly elected Cosatu general secretary Zingiswa Losi told congress that the 2024 election was a setback for the alliance, and that the GNU “further severely strained the Alliance”. Congress, she said, affirmed its rejection of a GNU that includes right-wing parties and what she called their neoliberal austerity agenda, and resolved that any coalition agreement must protect collective bargaining, workers’ rights, public services and social protection.
Cosatu also flags the National Economic Development and Labour Council, where labour, government, business and civil society negotiate economic policy. It says the coalition is increasingly associated with a pro-business agenda that is showing up there too, in proposed amendments to the Labour Relations Act and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, including proposals it says could allow workers to be dismissed without a hearing or representation. The report argues big business wants the GNU kept together because it sees the arrangement as good for stability and investment.
The strain is visible from the ANC’s side as well. ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula, speaking outside the Constitutional Court after the court ruled in the ANC’s favour on its appeal over 181 candidates excluded by the IEC for submitting names after the August cut-off, said the DA’s decision to oppose the application sat badly with the GNU’s founding statement of intent.
“To come to the Constitutional Court to argue against enfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of South Africans does not sit easily beside that understanding,” he said. “We must look for other partners. There’s nothing that binds us to the DA forever.”
The DA has taken a more oppositional posture since Geordin Hill-Lewis replaced John Steenhuisen as its leader.
The SACP has cited the GNU among its reasons for contesting local government elections independently. Newly elected Cosatu president Mike Shingange told delegates the federation would campaign for both the ANC and the SACP.
What the congress has not done is set a date for leaving the arrangement, and neither has the ANC. What it has done is put on the record, in its own political report, that the alliance that has carried the ANC since 1994 is now arguing in public about whether the government it leads is still its own.
