The African National Congress continues to meet with coalition partners the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), to try to smooth over some rough edges revealed in a series of techy exchanges last month. It sure seems as if the ANC and COSATU are in a permanent state of assessing the status of their relationship even though they just cannot seem to live without one another. But COSATU needs to know that it will always be the weaker partner no matter how often it stands firm. COSATU either needs to live with this reality, to accept what concessions it can, and to hope that it can bring about change from within or else it needs to start talking with the South African Communist Party (SACP) about breaking away to form an independent party to the left of the ANC.