Zwelinzima Vavi must surely be the one cadre who’s parried more long knives than our last three presidents combined. This even though he is foremost a unionist, a disciple of the MDR movement by affiliation, and his conduct has never quite led one to believe he was ever in it for the hotseat. Or the spoils. That must’ve been hard – probably unsettling – for those at the apex of power to countenance. Harder yet for the besuited land barons and corporate overlords to lure such a mensch with after-hours Bitcoin transfers. In summary, Vavi’s kind have few friends amongst the powerful, whether at Luthuli House or a wine farm in Stellenbosch.
A man who carries himself with an air of incorruptibility. How many can really be at ease around him? Goody goodies always make the elite nervous. Uncomfortable. And it’s been so many scandals down the days of the old hat cadre that those who appear impervious to the new-school trappings of patronage and excess often find themselves cut away very quickly. Before they’ve started to pontificate. Before they’ve reminded the revolutionaries of the way the revolution used to be. Of the days it was about the masses, not the individual or the boondoggle.
The Bra Vavi of today is a far cry from the general secretary of COSATU, the grootman who could mobilise and make things happen. Who wielded such sway as to have the mother of all labour unions – upward of 2.2million-strong in 2012 – speaking with one voice. Imagine such power. Throngs of militant workers marching against e-tolls and labour broking in what was then dubbed ‘the biggest civil action in post-democratic SA.’ The streets of Joburg awash with red t-shirts even though his upcoming speech would be a lucid rendition. Raging populism gone, so too the leeching politicking – just a candid breakdown of what the class struggle looks like in the days of neoliberalism.
Although he’d already been classified as an unsavoury element within the Tripartite Alliance and it was clearly only a matter of time before he’d be shown the door, Vavi would not be held back: ‘We came to fire the first salvo. If they (government / ANC) insist we must pay [e-tolls], we are saying to them, just as we defeated apartheid, we will defeat you.’
But how? Vavi! The man who just five years earlier formed part of a coterie at the ANC’s Polokwane Conference that was bent on substituting a lauded intellectual with a man whose only known claim to any intelligence was to play chess on an island prison. From Mandela to Mbeki, now this shape-shifting tribalist?
Thixo wase George Goch!
Rape and corruption allegations an ominous pendulum over his head, surely this was the last person the ANC wanted – neither for itself nor the country. But to the collective gasp of observers, the pariah Jacob Zuma would triumph over the universally respected Thabo Mbeki. In the aftermath, Vavi celebrated and laughed along as the ANC Youth League turned the conference into a mosh pit and a visibly dejected Mbeki stood looking as though he just wanted to go home and sleep. Mbeki, whom Vavi faults as someone who ‘just doesn’t know how to relate … [how] to treat people equally and to give them their space` was out, in his place Zuma, ‘a naturally very warm-hearted’ fellow.
But no sooner was Zuma sworn in did Vavi begin to second guess his loyalty. ‘When [Zuma] didn’t do the things that we had hoped that we would be able to achieve through him, we got so disappointed’ Vavi explains on the SMWX podcast. Cosatu, and by extension its leader, we’re crossing fingers that this people-orientated president would steer the ship away from the corruptions of neo-liberalism into something that took the lay people into consideration. He’d worked tirelessly to see it through, now here he was discovering that Zuma’s good nature sadly often ‘opens himself to the worst characters of society.’
Zuma was apparently embracing, meeting and trusting everyone, and in light of Schabir Shaik’s (Zuma’s former financial advisor’s conviction on charges of fraud and corruption) Vavi was less than thrilled about the president’s wholesale openness. Vavi tried asking the man to slow it down but that didn’t work, and by the time Zuma moved to Mahlamba Ndlopfu, he took the old habits with him. An assortment of visitors would come knocking, some clutching suitcases, all wanting an audience with the president. As an ally, Vavi says he tried to reason with the president one evening but the man would occasionally dose off during the three-hour heart to heart. They were obviously drifting apart and Vavi could see that they’d made a huge mistake at the Polokwane Elective Conference.
The straw that finally broke the camel’s back was Brian Molefe, then CEO of the Public Investment Corporation (PIC). Zuma had eyed him for appointment at Transnet, but Vavi had been slipped a document that made certain allegations against Molefe. Ever the trusting ally, Vavi rushed to present the president with the information who in turn simply thanked the unionist by appointing Molefe to that position a few months later.
By 2010, the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) was ‘off the rails,’ marred by differences and purges. Although many within the Alliance wanted him out, Vavi survived the National Congress in 2012, saved only by his popularity amongst the delegates. ‘So they postponed the fight to the boardroom. A lot of times people who can’t win the conference go to the boardroom’ Vavi explains.
‘Not that I didn’t help them myself, I did help them with a personal error I committed in 2013, having an affair with a junior staffer in the union was something that delivered me on a silver platter to my enemies and they didn’t waste any time.’ By now it was clear that he was no longer welcome neither was the National Union of Metalworkers of SA who were kicked out of the federation the following year.’ For this he blames Zuma and the SACP’s Blade Nzimande whom he says he’ll never forgive.
‘You do not destroy a movement of 2.2 million … the fearless spokesperson of the downtrodden and then call yourself a revolutionary.’ And when Cyril Ramaphosa was voted ANC deputy president in 2012 Vavi ‘literally … cried out of that conference.’ Under an opaque explanation from Mandela years earlier, the cadres were told that Ramaphosa had been ‘deployed.’ A few years later Vavi would see him speaking on behalf of the Black Business Council.
‘I was just so shocked how he have turned right.’ From his vantage, the combination of Zuma and Ramaphosa ‘spelled bad news.’ As a loyal person, he hated the sidelining of Kgalema Motlanthe for a now liberal Ramaphosa who had ‘crossed the class divide … that’s when I knew that the ANC is gone.’ He has since not found any comfort that things will get any better for the party. He still continues to tell a few comrades in the party that ‘you represent what I thought the ANC is. Only if we can get hundred of you across the country I’ll certainly come back to reinforce you.’
Yet he can barely find ten cadres that haven’t been swallowed up by the scramble for material gain. He doubts there’s anyone amongst the party top six who could pass the ANC’s integrity test: to fit through the eye of the needle.
Like the millions of South Africans faced with poverty and decrepitude, he feels angry and betrayed. After some 42 years in the trade union movement the secretary general of the SA Federation of Trade Unions is considering calling it quits next year. His only hope is that the new generation of unionists will learn from his better examples, not the ones that entail extra-marital liaisons. Watching the podcast one was reminded of the natural intelligence and charisma upon which the liberation movement was buttressed. Despite his flaws, bra Vavi is of a fast-disappearing gentry who own up to them. A charming, articulate, working class hero with delicious phrases. Amongst the remaining true revolutionaries he lists Senzo Mchunu and Mondli Gungubele but one hopes that he’s aware that no NDR list – in fact no account of post-1994 SA – would be accurate or credible without the name Zwelinzima Vavi.