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Chapter 4: The State
4.1: The COSATU-ANC Alliance Relation
The next question that these divergent histories raise is why the states responded differently to the campaigns. Both campaigns had considerable support behind them, yet this did not seem to make a difference in Nigerian case, while in South African case results were achieved. Moreover, it can be said the media factor did not play a decisive role either, since in Nigeria the media was clearly reporting more in favour of the textile industry than in South Africa, yet it was in South Africa that the government took action within a relatively short timeframe, not Nigeria. The answer then, should not sought be in civil society alone, but also in the nature of the two states and their
relationship with the labour unions.
South Africa’s government is of most immediate interest here as the theories mentioned before and the recent disagreements that the ANC shares with COSATU would make one expect a more unyielding stance on the part of the government. After all, COSATU and the ANC had clashed with each other on numerous occasions over the latter’s insistence to follow an
increasingly neo-liberal policy (Pillay, 2006). Moreover, as mentioned, centralized states in particular have notable incentives to withhold power from competitors such as labour unions.
South Africa can be considered such a state as it is both a unitary state and has a political landscape defined by a historically dominant-party.
Now this last point requires some nuance considering that scholars have pointed out that South Africa displays many features that could be attributed to a federal system. Moreover, even in provinces that have an ANC majority, the provincial governments have shown willingness to resist the central government’s directives. Regardless, the actual strength of the provinces can be called into question as the government has many concurrent powers and can intervene in
provincial autonomy if national standards are not properly maintained or if the economic unity of
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South Africa is put under pressure, among other contingencies. Beyond these, provincial power is also limited by the weak governing capacity of some provinces as well as budget austerity. Some intergovernmental organizations reflect the limits too, such as the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) which, because of lacking administrative capacity on the part of the provinces, has been accused of being a rubber stamp institution for the national government (Tapscott, 2000).
Combine these weaknesses of the federal features of South Africa with the previous unilateral tendencies that the national government has displayed against civil society challengers like COSATU itself, and it would seem that at best South Africa is but a weak federal system with centralizing tendencies at certain times. For our purposes which involve international
negotiations – an aspect traditionally dominated by national governments – it can therefore be safely said that South Africa functions as a centralized state in this context.
Despite this situation, ANC did not follow the expected course of action: although the ANC did not agree with all of COSATU’s positions, the ANC did not seem hostile to the campaign as such. In fact, in a press statement by the ANC (2005) on the matter, the party expressed consent towards the issue and the campaign. It said that the ANC recognized the problem and that the workers were exercising their right to pursue their interests. The statement pledged a number of solutions such as investment in the public and private sectors, reducing business costs, and providing training for workers. It also said that the Alliance would continue to work on immediate solutions for specific industries (among which was textile) but did not specify what.
Indeed, textile appeared to be a problem over which the ANC and COSATU had negotiated a consensus through the Alliance. For example, COSATU press statements asserted that the clothing sector was considered a priority industry in Alliance agreements (Nkosi, 2005).
Additionally, the ANC’s website also hosted a press statement of the alliance published in June
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2005, which elaborated on a joint discussion paper written by the ANC and COSATU in which a number of solutions were proposed to the textile industry issue. These included: proposals to improve quality of locally manufactured goods, to promote product and design innovation, to upgrade technology, to reduce raw material costs, to use local supplies more effectively, to improve efficiency and supply chain management through the use of advances in information and communication technologies (ICT), and better infrastructure and improved levels of investment.
Safeguard measures on imports as allowed under the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and combating illegal imports, were also brought up. (Motlanthe and Vavi, 2005).
Thus, it would appear from the timing of the alliance publications that COSATU and its subsidiaries managed to put the textile issue on the ANC’s agenda through their continued advocacy and mass actions. Yet the disparity with the Nigerian case indicates that there must be more to COSATU’s influence than advocacy and mass action alone. Indeed, the most
conventional explanation would point towards the alliance that the ANC and COSATU share.
This is since the alliance could function as a counter incentive against the centralized state’s motivations to limit the power of organized labour. After all, the alliance works in two directions:
on the one hand COSATU has direct access to the ANC, but on the other hand the ANC can also directly influence COSATU. Moreover, COSATU workers tend to overwhelmingly vote for the ANC during elections, which, arguably, makes them a key constituency for the ANC.
Cherry and Southall’s (2006) work on COSATU worker’s attitude towards politics
certainly points somewhat towards the former explanation. They state that COSATU’s leadership and its members closed ranks with the ANC during the 2004 election, despite the recent
neoliberal tendencies of the ANC. Noteworthy is that the explanation for this behaviour is that, regardless of its undesirable policies, the ANC is seen by the workers as the only party that upholds workers’ interests. Additionally, COSATU’s leadership found in the ANC election
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program that it is committed to reducing unemployment and poverty. As such, the labour
congress decided to support the ANC once again, with 74% of its members intending to vote for the ANC. In contrast, COSATU’s member’s support for the tripartite alliance has steadily decreased over the years, from 82 percent in 1994 to 66 percent in the last survey by the authors.
They furthermore suggest that this may be a result of the increasingly marginalized position of COSATU in the alliance, which leads more and more workers to assert that COSATU should become independent of political interests. Interestingly, when given a set of non-exclusive options concerning what to do if the government fails to deliver, most workers said that they will pressure unionists in parliament. Besides this option, 73% said they would participate in mass action, 42% said they would vote for another party, and 38% said that another party for the workers should be formed.
These findings by Cherry and Southall might very well indicate that the ANC’s decision to comply with the demands regarding the textile industry was a token move to ensure that COSATU would not be aliened further. After all, non-compliance might cause the approval rating for the alliance and perhaps even for the ANC, to drop. Of course, this would be highly undesirable as it would move either COSATU or large parts of its membership base away from direct ANC influence. Especially, the combination of lowering approval for the alliance and the tendency of workers to push their parliamentary representatives for favourable policy, may form a problem for the ANC as it presents a clear incentive for COSATU’s members in parliament to stop cooperating with the ANC. The reason why the textile issue of all topics has received the attention of the ANC might be the result of COSATU’s campaign. The embedding of the textile dispute into the other problems may have given it an exemplary, and therefore symbolic, role.
Thus, in order for the ANC to display its continued commitment to COSATU’s interests and its own promises, it may have taken up the textile dispute to fulfil these objectives.
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4.2: The Nigerian State-Civil Society Rivalry
On the Nigerian side, the Nigerian government seems to become more and more textile friendly, about a decade after the South African government responded to the issue. The Buhari
government has made the goal of saving and rejuvenating the textile industry one of its main selling points during its most recent re-election campaign. Moreover, as mentioned above, during his current term Buhari and his government have implemented a number of policies that are more favourable towards the textile industry. Beyond the 50 billion Naira Textile Revival Fund, the creation of the Cotton, Textile and Garment Policy Council and other such policy councils (some of which NUTGTWN was made a member), and the initiative of endorsing Nigerian textile for government employees, Buhari also sought to actively address the import problem (Bello, 2017;
The News, 12 April 2016). During a visit to Beijing, Buhari openly called upon the Nigerian and Chinese business communities to reduce the trade imbalance between the two countries. At the Nigeria-China Business/Investment Forum, where the appeal was made, Buhari also urged the Chinese to deem Nigeria as an investment destination where goods can be both manufactured and consumed locally.
Moreover, concerning the smuggling problem, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development threatened to close the border if smuggling from neighbouring countries continued (Nigerian Tribune, 1 June 2017). In addition, in the same year, Vice President Osinbajo said that local manufacturing would not survive if smuggling continued, therefore he wished to engage in cooperation with Nigeria’s neighbours to ensure border policing (The News, 5 October 2017).
Government agencies also pitched in. For example, The Standard Organization of Nigeria, which evaluates whether imported products are up to official requirements, decided to engage the Chinese Standards Organization when the import problem went beyond its capabilities. The
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meeting however, did not yield any outcome as the Chinese side proved unwilling to give any concessions and, according to the Nigerian representatives, pretended that the level of English was beyond their ability in order to cease the dialogue (Nwokoji, Okoli and Okoruwa, 25 March 2017).
Noteworthy is that Nigeria is a full fledged federal state, but, like South Africa, faced a number of problems throughout its history that bend its functioning in practice to something that resembles a centralized state. One of these problems is the internal competition among ethnic groups, which has led to the member states being drained of both resources and power. The ethnic struggle also gave way to attempts to centralize power in order for groups to obtain the central resource allocation (Rashid, 2003). Indeed, the lack of transparency in the budget allocation between central and local governments leads grassroot individuals to focus on the central government, rather than the local ones (Wunsch, 2001).
Furthermore, the education gap between Northern and Southern Nigeria meant that the North was not as well represented in the federal bureaucracy. The military, on the other hand, saw an overrepresentation of Northern officers (Rashid, 2003). Said military also pushed Nigeria away from functional federalism as the military dictatorships reshaped the system fitting to a centralized military hierarchy (Ojo, 2009). On top of this, even though in the early 1990s the central government gave the states more jurisdiction in terms of education, health, and other fields, the national government also cut the state’s budget and personnel. In this case the government created a vacuum, rather than a federal system. As such, the local governments continued to depend on the national government for technical assistance. Later, the problem continued as the central government took back control over education and cash flow to the local governments continued to be erratic (Wunsch, 2001). This all has led some scholars to claim that
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Nigeria is federal in name only, and the ramifications of its system are more unitary despite the country being a pioneer of federalism in Africa (Ojo, 2009; Rashid, 2003).
As such, it is highly doubtful whether the recent shift is the result of continued effort by the labour unions, considering the implication of a centralized state. However, the Deputy
General-Secretary of NUTGTWN was more confident in the union’s role in the matter as he said that it was probably the result of advocacy by the union and other actors that wished to see Nigeria’s industry restored. External events, however, seem to suggest that the other actors had the decisive input, rather than the unions. For one, although NUTGTWN’s membership has been growing again from 2008 onwards thanks to the influx of self-employed tailors into the union, it has but little more than half of the membership base it had in 2000 at the start of the campaign.
Additionally, the membership that is actually employed in the industry, rather than self-employed, is less than a third of its size in the Obasanjo years (Bello, 2017). Thus, its leverage in terms of sheer numbers is less than in the period when it was unable to bring about change. Furthermore, the wider labour union community showed in 2016 that it was still unable to change the course of the government when the Buhari administration also sought to raise fuel prices. NUTGTWN General Secretary Aremu claimed that the failure on the part of the labour movement was a consequence of it lacking a united front (Oyelola, 2016).
Beyond competitive measures to influence policy, the relation between Nigeria’s labour unions and the state also lacks a cooperative element through which to sway the state, like the one observed in the South African case. In contrast to South Africa, where the end of apartheid saw a continuation of the cooperation among the main resistance groups, in Nigeria the unity between what was to become the ruling class and civil society groups was lost soon after
independence was achieved. Not long after, the elite that came into power sought to exclude mass and popular movements from government, while also using the state to maintain their own power.
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As a result, some civil society groups were incorporated by the state, while those that were not with the state were marginalized in favour of those that were. This division in civil society itself extended to later years, as civil society became home to both anti-state and pro-state groups (Usman, 2009). Furthermore, Usman (2009) explains that this process is the result of the way in which Nigeria achieved independence: rather than a struggle, the independence movement ended in a negotiation with the British, which left most of the colonial policies (such as those regulating labour) in place and even strengthened them. Thus, Nigeria was given fertile soil for a labour versus state dichotomy to grow. Moreover, although the military regimes went furthest in their attempts to control civil society, the democratic period was not free of such endeavours either, as the chapter on civil society pointed out. All this leads Usman (2009) to even suggest that the very autonomy of Nigerian civil society in general can be questioned.
In sum, neither civil society by itself, nor its relationship with the state seems sufficient to explain the shift in government policy in this case. This is since the adversarial relation between the two allows civil society to only sway the government through competitive means, which means that the state will hold its incentive to follow its own course if it can resist, which seems to have been the case in this context. Then, another explanation for the government’s shift should be provided. This explanation can be found in the fact that the Buhari government seeks to revive the industry through an import substitution strategy. This choice of strategy is indicative that Buhari may have come to the shift in policy by himself. This is since during his military rule in the 1980s his economic policy also rested heavily on a preference for a type of import
substitution that relied on the use of local materials (Nwachuku and Godfrey, 2004). This
coincidence shows that there is a possibility that the President has a personal inclination to pursue such kind policies in a bid to reform the economy, which would severely limit the saliency of labour union-based explanations.
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