Cosatu's Vavi: "ANC charges are laughable"

Vavi said Cosatu, with its two million members, was well within its rights to speak out against corruption in government and the ruling party.

"I speak for workers. The ANC can't say that workers don't have a right to be critical."

SHOOT: Vavi has a point. The government needs to realise that during a time of recession, of financial hardship, corruption is particularly distasteful, particularly hard to swallow, particularly painful and unnecessary to stomach.

clipped from www.news24.com The ANC decided on Monday to discipline COSATU leader Vavi for saying the organisation was concerned that senior ANC members were exploiting political connections to get rich. The relationship between the ANC and its labour and communist party alliance partners has soured, threatening to split the decades'-old partnership that freed South Africa from white minority rule. Disciplinary action against Vavi would come at a sensitive time for the ANC, just weeks after its youth leader Julius Malema was sanctioned for bringing the party into disrepute with a series of inflammatory outbursts. Vavi last week accused co-operative governance minister Sicelo Shiceka of lying in his CV, and communications minister Siphiwe Nyanda of running up unjustified hotel bills of more than R500 000. Vavi said in a telephone interview: "These charges are laughable and not going to happen because I was speaking on behalf of the union and not in my individual capacity."