Tyotyo James, the deputy president of trade union federation Cosatu, returns to South Africa after his trip to London at a critical moment in the union movement’s history. 

The South African trade union federation faces a split in its ranks over moves by the National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa) — the biggest union in Cosatu with 300,000 members — to break with the decades-old alliance of the ANC, Cosatu and the South African Communist Party (SACP). 

Today James will be attending the meeting that could in theory suspend or expel Numsa from the federation.

“Nobody wants to see Cosatu splitting because if that happens surely it will not benefit the workers, it will benefit the local bourgeoisie and global capital,” says James. 

“We have a very difficult moment right now because the fact that we are discussing whether to expel or suspend Numsa means whatever the decision we make, it will reduce Cosatu.”

Numsa has been involved in prolonged strikes in the metal, engineering and auto sectors over the last year, and is accused by other Cosatu unions of openly poaching members to swell its ranks.

But Numsa’s decision not to campaign for the ANC in the 2014 general election and to launch a new workers’ party next month to challenge the ANC is the issue that could split the triple alliance. 

James says Numsa’s actions are opportunistic, “because anyone who loves this organisation would work within it to change it. You don’t stand on the sidelines and shout from the periphery. 

“Members of Cosatu are from all political persuasions in South Africa including the Democratic Alliance. Overall our position favours the alliance with the ANC and the Communist Party.”

James is a miner who came up through the ranks of the South African NUM. He became a district chair of the SACP in 1995, was an ANC councillor between 2000 and 2005 and was elected to the national executive of Cosatu in 2007.

He says Numsa is wrong to split the alliance that has delivered major social advances since 1994. “All of a sudden they are disillusioned with the ANC and the tripartite alliance and in their resolution they are calling for a breakup of the alliance — which is wrong, very very wrong. This tripartite alliance was formed in order to advance the national democratic revolution and the NDR has not yet reached its logical conclusion, which is the creation of a socialist South Africa.”

A pivotal figure in this drama is the general secretary of Cosatu, Zwelinzima Vavi, who is an ally of Numsa.

James describes Vavi as a “powerful individual ... He is closer to them but he does not support them on poaching members of other unions, on the creation of a new political party and the split of the alliance. 

“He told Numsa recently that ‘it is my duty as general secretary of Cosatu to promote and implement the resolutions taken by Cosatu.’ It was very important that he told them this, because if he did not then other people would be doubting him as a general secretary.”

Despite the looming split, James insists the democratic alliance remains strong, following the ANC’s fifth election victory with a 62 per cent majority in May’s general elections. “In Cosatu we say the NDR is the shortest route to socialism. We are in agreement that if you advance it and deepen it, then you will realise socialism.”

In his speech this week to Action on South Africa (which until 1994 was the Anti-Apartheid Movement) James explained that the alliance had delivered huge social advances for the people it represents.

These achievements include:

• social grants now reading 16 million South Africans — nearly one in three — up from 3 million in 1994.
• 3.3 million homes built — free to the new owners — housing 16 million.
• 7 million new electricity connections to households since 1996
• 9 million pupils getting free school meals.
• However, millions more are still waiting for jobs, a minimum wage and social security. 

“Many people are living in informal settlements who do not have houses. They say the government is not doing anything. It’s only human that they are focused on their own needs — we must speed up housing provision and everything that will lead people out of poverty.”

James accepts that the ANC government has so far not shown the political will to challenge big business and move toward fulfilling the goals of the Freedom Charter, including nationalisation of major industries and land redistribution. 

“The South African economy is dominated by finance capital and the mineral conglomerates. As it is now we are much too afraid of capital, we want to manage the economy on behalf of capital. If you want to address the problems at home we have to take the bold steps, but this is what the leadership in government is not doing.”

He is clear that while a social transformation is underway, economic transformation has hardly begun. 

While average wages are R3,033 (£170) per month and one in four people go to bed hungry, the country’s richest are richer than ever. David Hathorn, boss of paper company Mundu, earns £4.342 million according to the Sunday Times Rich List. “It would take 2,261 years — 37 lifetimes — for an average worker to earn what Hathorn did in a single year.”

The main beneficiary in economic terms of the first two decades of democracy is white monopoly capital, James says. 

“Our underlying problems are the terrible level of unemployment, inequality and corruption,” he told the meeting.

There have been three investigations into misspending of around R240 million (£1.35 million) at President Jacob Zuma’s lavish homestead project in Nkandla but as yet no conclusions as to Zuma’s culpability.

This year has seen “an unprecedented wave of strikes and community protests, clear evidence that millions of South Africans feel they have been left out of the new South Africa.”

And the sense that the legacy of apartheid and colonialism has not been banished was crystallised by the massacre of striking miners at Marikana in 2012, when 44 mineworkers were shot dead by police. 

“As things are, if we don’t change, we are brewing a counter-revolution, because there are many people who are poor and hungry and these pose a threat to the democracy of the country. It would be easy for them to be used by forces that are opposed to the country. If you have an army of the unemployed it is a ticking time bomb. 

“We need the leadership to be bold and tough to mitigate conditions on behalf of the mass of the people who are the voters of the ANC. People are not going to rely for much longer on the struggle credentials of the ANC.” 

Does James believe that in another 20 years South Africa will be a socialist country? “All of us have a dream of realising socialism in our lifetime. As much as we understand that a struggle takes a long time, we share a commitment that we want to realise that dream while we are living, not in a future generation.

“In any revolution you cannot stand up and make a proclamation that by December 2014 we will have a socialist South Africa. What revolutionaries must do is raise the consciousness in society as whole. We have that duty. Numsa has that duty.”