Union slams Malema

While a Cosatu-affiliated union leader described Julius Malema as part of a "marauding gang" threatening to destabilise the ANC, the youth leader in turn warned the federation's Zwelinzima Vavi to stop demanding lifestyle audits. At the centre of it all is a low-intensity war triggered by succession tensions ahead of the ANC's 2012 national conference, following skirmishes over the 2007 conference.

The youth league wants to replace ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe with Deputy Police Minister Fikile Mbalula. This has angered Cosatu and the SA Communist Party as they see the coup intentions as motivated by anti-communist sentiments. Irvin Jim, general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) has questioned President Jacob Zuma's silence while Mantashe was being attacked by Malema. Jim intimated that Zuma had failed Mantashe by not defending him.

Numsa singled out Malema and accused him of causing divisions within the alliance. Jim warned Malema that he would have to work very hard to remove Mantashe. "We know that he (Malema) has been one of the people among the ANC Youth League, which is not a class organisation, who have been talking. "We sat down and analysed what has been said and we will defend the ANC because we believe that it is not the property of unscrupulous individuals who are only interested in their wealth and tenders," said Jim. He said a number of alliance members wanted communists and trade unionists out of the alliance.

Numsa said the ANC in the provinces was being used for financial gain - and cited that all provincial ANC conferences had been contested in the quest for power over government tenders. "There's a network of marauding gangs who don't sleep and they impose their hegemony on others... and they do as they wish. "The ANC is not an organisation of tsotsis (thugs) who would sit in shebeens and decide to put their friends as leaders. "Mantashe is being eaten alive and Malema should have been reprimanded," said Jim. "Those who've said Mantashe must go are threatening to weaken, fragment and destabilise this movement. Enough is enough," said Jim. He said Malema was not the only ANC leader to have been booed in public, referring to the jeering of the youth league president by SACP delegates in Limpopo last year.

Numsa questioned why the ruling party had drafted a report to the ANC national executive committee on the booing of Malema but had failed to do the same when former President Thabo Mbeki and his deputy Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka were booed while in office. "When Julius is booed at the SACP, there must be a report, but Terror (Lekota) got booed in Polokwane, Thabo (Mbeki) was booed in KwaZulu-Natal including Phumzile (Mlambo-Ngcuka) and there was no report," said Jim.

The union also backed the SACP's call that all the names of people, including politicians, who applied for state tenders should be made public to prevent the "depletion" of taxpayers' money. Cosatu general secretary Vavi wants politicians' lifestyles to be audited to expose their inexplicable wealth.

At a meeting between Cosatu and the ANC Youth League leadership yesterday, Malema apparently told Vavi that his demand for audits would expose some of the leaders in the left "who pretend to be working class". According to an insider, Malema said the so-called Left leaders were not as clean as they appeared to be.

Source: IoL