As the African National Congress (ANC) heads towards local government elections in November, it has received a major rebuke from a decades-long ally, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

In a scathing assessment in its political report, COSATU commented: “While the ANC manifesto for the 2021 local government elections provided numerous improvements as proposed commitments to turn around many collapsing municipal governments, approaches taken by the ANC after the elections produced more weaknesses, more decay and corruption.”

The labour federation is currently holding its national congress in Midrand, under the theme “Building a militant, revolutionary labour movement and strengthening anti-imperialist working-class unity to defend jobs and advance socialism”.

Among the issues to be discussed is which party COSATU will back in the local government polls. For decades, this has been a foregone conclusion, as the federation is in a formal alliance with the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP), known as the Tripartite Alliance and formed in 1990. COSATU has been able to use this relationship to ensure that some of its leaders are elected on ANC tickets.

COSATU has traditionally mobilised its 1.5-million-strong membership behind the ANC during elections. This has been critical for the ANC given its own often shaky organisation.

Its critique signals growing frustration with the governing party’s record at local level. The federation said many ANC-led municipalities were in serious difficulty, with basic services such as water, electricity, and roads deteriorating and some municipalities struggling to pay their employees.

Numerous municipalities run by the ANC were “collapsing or on the brink of collapse”, COSATU’s report lamented.

It also objected to partnerships with business on supposedly business-friendly terms, and on the supposed skewed distribution of municipal resources towards wealthier neighbourhoods. This, it said, also disadvantaged rural municipalities.

COSATU went on to ascribe some of this to “deliberate non-payment of municipal infrastructure by provincial and, at times, national government, with municipal towns being owed billions of rand by provincial and national government departments”. This was undermining the ability of municipalities to fulfil their mandates.

In addition, it took aim at the prevalence of corruption in local government. This, COSATU said, was the politics of “thuggery and primitive accumulation, as politically linked and protected tendering syndicates sabotage state infrastructure to induce tenders to provide services that should be provided by the state”.

And while it shared concerns expressed by Treasury, which led to the withholding of the transfer of equitable share payments earlier this year, it opposed its actions. This would amount to “collective punishment that will only hurt communities and workers in affected municipalities.”

It is unclear whether COSATU will in fact withdraw its active support for the ANC, but its stance adds to growing uncertainty over the political future of the Tripartite Alliance. The SACP, another long-standing alliance partner, has registered to contest the elections independently. COSATU has historically been strongly linked to the SACP on the basis of common ideological convictions.

Cracks have long been evident in the relations between COSATU and the ANC. The ANC’s embrace of a “neoliberal” macroeconomic agenda in the 1990s, for example, caused considerable dissatisfaction. However, the advantages of having a decisive say on labour policy and a quiet veto on some other areas has made the relationship a profitable one for COSATU.

It has also been outspoken about corruption in the state, particularly as it relates to the Zuma era of “state capture”. It deserves to be recalled, however, that COSATU was in the forefront of the coalition that brought Zuma to power, and argued vociferously against efforts to hold him to account prior to his accession to the presidency.