THE ANC’s leadership should do itself a big favour and hold a workshop with leaders of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). It should try to speak specifically to NUM kingpins from the past 15 years.
The union could teach the ANC a lot about how an organisation can lose touch with its members and how leaders can find themselves becoming increasingly distant from their constituencies. The NUM could teach the party about loss of dominance and power. It could teach the ANC about realising that perhaps you will never be top dog again.
The NUM can teach these lessons because you can pinpoint, to the day, even hour, when the once-most-powerful union in the country began its slow decline — perhaps even its inevitable death. The NUM, started by President Cyril Ramaphosa and others in 1982, grew like wildfire to become the most influential player in South African labour relations. In the 1980s it struck down job reservation, the system that allocated well-paid, skilled jobs to whites only, thereby dealing a huge blow to apartheid.
On August 15 2012 you could see the life ebbing out of the NUM. It was in Marikana, the mining area outside Rustenburg, where thousands of striking workers gathered on a hillock. They wanted their leaders to address them.
The union’s president at the time was Senzeni Zokwana. He did not come to the hill to speak to the workers, to hear their voices. He came to give them instructions.
You could tell by the way he arrived. He was escorted in an armoured police vehicle. It seemed as if he was sent there to speak on behalf of someone else, perhaps the employer. The optics were all bad. When he finally addressed the workers, it wasn’t about their frustrations. It was about keeping production going.
“I plead with you to go back to work,” said Zokwana.
He was speaking from inside the police vehicle. He was afraid of the people he had come to address. The workers shouted him down. The police Nyala rushed him out of there.
The NUM lost Marikana and many other mining areas because it became distant from its constituency. It was not there to see the problems when they began. By the time it woke up, it was too late. The new player on the block, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), had already made major inroads into its constituency, particularly in the platinum belt in the North West and in coal mining.
I was reminded of that Zokwana moment last week when I saw images of social development minister Lindiwe Zulu addressing social grant applicants from an armoured police vehicle. The hundreds, perhaps thousands, of poor and desperate people had been queuing outside the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) office in Bellville, Cape Town. The minister told them to maintain social distancing protocols.
Then, as if to demonstrate the state’s power, the crowd was blasted with a water cannon to force it to comply.
There is so much that is horrifying about that interaction I don’t even know where to start. First, this crisis in social grant payments was triggered by the government. That thousands of people would have to queue after the government changed the system unilaterally at the end of December meant this would happen. During a pandemic.
I have heard this sentiment before: it was uttered in Marikana before 34 people were mowed down like flies.
Second, the system has been a shambles for months. Every month millions of people are forced to queue at Sassa offices and other pay points. In failing to run a proper system, our government dehumanises people every month. In many constituencies people queue from as early as 2am to be attended to. Some sleep at pay points.
After using water cannons, Zulu told reporters: “Nobody would ever want to use water cannons just for the sake of it. The bottom line is that the situation was really getting out of hand and people were refusing to social distance and queue.”
I have heard this sentiment before: it was uttered in Marikana before 34 people were mowed down like flies.
Zulu’s words sounded like those of leaders who have lost empathy for their people. They sounded like the words of leaders who have no idea what ordinary, poor people are going through during this pandemic. The people in that queue are desperate. Many will have nothing to eat if they do not receive service from that Sassa pay point.
Keep that image of Zulu in mind. It is the image of a leadership that has lost touch with its people. Soon, those poor people who have been blasted with water cannons will ask themselves: why are we voting for this abuse?
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.