Organise or Die?

Democracy and Leadership in South Africa? s National Union of Mineworkers

Raphaël Botiveau

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781776142064
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Organise or Die? Democracy and Leadership in South Africa's National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is the first in-depth study of one of the leading trade unions in the country. Founded in 1982, the trade union played a key role in the struggle against white minority rule, before turning into a central protagonist of the ruling Tripartite Alliance after apartheid. Deftly navigating through workerist, social movement and political terrains that shape the South African labour landscape, this book sheds light on the path that led to the unprecedented 2012 Marikana massacre, the dissolution of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) federation and to fractures within the African National Congress (ANC) itself. Working with the notions of organisational agency and strategic bureaucratisation, Raphaël Botiveau shows how the founding leadership of NUM built their union's structures with a view to mirror those of the multinational mining companies NUM faced. Good leadership proved key to the union's success in recruiting and uniting mineworkers and NUM became an impressive school for union and political cadres, producing a number of South Africa's top post-apartheid leaders. An incisive analysis of leadership styles and strategies shows how the fragile balance between an increasingly distant leadership and an increasingly militant membership gradually broke down. Botiveau provides a compelling narrative of NUM's powerful history and the legacy of its leadership. It will appeal to a broad readership – including journalists, students and social sciences scholars – interested in South Africa's contemporary politics and labour history.

CHAPTER

1

Introduction: South African Trade Unions in Apartheid and Democracy

THE NATIONAL CONGRESS

From 3 to 6 June 2015, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) held its 15th National Congress in Boksburg, Gauteng. It was an important meeting for both South Africa’s trade union movement and the ruling party. Until 2012, NUM had been the country’s largest workers’ organisation and the Congress of South African Trade Union (Cosatu)’s main affiliate. The mineworkers’ union lost its leading status in the aftermath of the August 2012 Marikana strike and massacre, when its rival Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) took over most of its members in the platinum belt. In the meantime, the ruling Tripartite Alliance entered its deepest crisis since its inception in the early 1990s. NUM’s 2015 congress followed shortly after the expulsion of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) – now the country’s largest trade union – from Cosatu, in November 2014. NUM’s congress was also the elective meeting of a pivotal African National Congress (ANC) political ally, which had contributed to the Party’s top national leadership like no other organisation since 1991.¹ Despite mounting criticism of Jacob Zuma’s presidency, NUM national leaders remained among its most vocal supporters.

Stakes were thus high and outgoing NUM leadership had planned things well. Both its president, Pete Matosa, and its general secretary, Frans Baleni – the political protégé of ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe – were ready to continue for, respectively, a third and a fourth term. Political alliances were sealed ahead of the congress and regional delegations thought to belong to the opposition motion, such as Rustenburg, were strategically placed at the back of the room.

As is customary, the congress started with long discussions between the various delegations about ‘credentials’ to agree on the exact number of voting delegates. Proceedings thereafter went smoothly on the first day. As usual in such union gatherings, leaders from allied workers and political organisations, as well as Cabinet ministers, queued to address the more than 800 NUM delegates. Speeches bore no surprises and very little space was dedicated to programmatic debate. Calls to ‘discipline’ and ‘class consciousness’ were now and then directed at invisible or visible external enemies such as the ‘vigilante’ and ‘yellow union’, Amcu. Internal dissidents who had tried to enforce a ‘cult of personality’ in the federation were also warned (an attack directed at recently expelled Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi and at Irvin Jim, the general secretary of Numsa). Speakers such as Gwede Mantashe or Cosatu president Sidumo Dlamini called on all to ‘contest on the basis of ideas’ rather than person, while systematically equating divergent views with mere dissent and factionalism. In short, and as I shall later analyse in more depth, opponents were dismissed as either too politically uneducated to participate efficiently in the life of their organisation (that is, as lacking ‘class consciousness’) or too greedy for power to lead it effectively. The congress was seemingly moving towards its status quo as nominations for leadership positions were announced and accepted by the incumbents and their challengers. Four positions out of the nine put to vote were contested: deputy president, general secretary, deputy general secretary, and health and safety national chairperson. President Matosa’s position went uncontested, and nine NUM regions out of eleven nominated Frans Baleni and his deputy. Their opponents received only the minimum required support of two regions.

Day two mirrored day one in content. The stage monopolised microphones with reports from the leadership and speeches by guests. Delegates got to speak only in short interludes. At the end of this second day my impression, as an external observer versed in NUM politics and as an analyst of organisation, was that I was being the witness of an organisational suicide. This impression was supported by informal exchanges I had with insiders. How – given the critical situation NUM faced on the ground – could this congress spare itself from genuine self-critical debate? How could it even consider returning a leadership under whose tenure the union had lost up to one-third of its membership?² This was a leadership that had proven incapable of dealing with unprecedented strikes and the Marikana massacre other than by claiming they were a conspiracy orchestrated by Amcu and mining bosses.³

The third and last day of NUM’s 2015 national congress started with the treasurer general’s financial report, which put figures to the union’s setbacks since 2012 but also insisted on NUM’s ‘resilient nature’. Halfway through this last day, national leaders finally gave their regional counterparts – including their opponents – a chance to address the state of the union. A turning point in the congress occurred when newly elected Rustenburg regional secretary Desmond Mfuloane took the floor. After acknowledging that things had gone wrong at most Rustenburg mining operations, he pledged his commitment to ‘go back to the basics’ and denounced the fact that when leaders contest for positions, they are labelled ‘troublemakers’: ‘This is wrong and upsets the members who cannot express their views,’ he complained. Mfuloane was anything but a revolutionary or a troublemaker. He had been a NUM member for 26 years, an elected union cadre for many terms and voted into the leadership of his region twice. As opposed to many others, whose dress code spelled ‘comrade’ in a display of grassroots activism, he attended the congress dressed in a blue suit and shirt. His criticisms of the incumbent leadership were calmly argued and not militant in tone or content. To illustrate his point, Mfuloane said that members on the ground did not understand why Numsa had been expelled from Cosatu, a decision which they did not support and which he reduced to a harmful battle between political elites: ‘We should have excluded the culprits if there were [culprits], not the 360 000 members.’ He then recalled that the challenge Amcu posed to NUM was not a new phenomenon and compared it to the rise of the competing Mouthpeace Workers’ Union in the mid-1990s. However, ‘during that time’ he argued, ‘the leadership of the organisation was all over and we recruited back’. This was a reference to the work of former NUM deputy general secretary Archie Palane, who had once enjoyed popularity in the platinum belt before Gwede Mantashe – then the union’s general secretary – had the NUM constitution changed to oust him and ensure the political victory of his protégé Frans Baleni. In an attack against top national leadership – who now only go to the field accompanied by bodyguards – and former NUM president Senzeni Zokwana, who had addressed the 2012 Marikana strikers from within a police Hippo, Mfuloane added: ‘We were not there to assist our members who were threatened. The trend in the organisation is that as leaders we are surrounded by security. Members are not secured. We are not accessible to members because of that.’

These words were not mere rhetoric; they relayed strong criticism of the incumbent leadership, a call for change and a call to go back to the grassroots to serve defenceless members. Dozens of NUM members and local leaders had indeed been killed since 2012 because of police violence and union rivalry (which also claimed many lives among NUM opponents). Mfuloane’s speech was crucial: it broke the silence that had prevented many delegates from speaking, for fear of being disciplined or victimised by the legitimist camp. As he later put it to me: ‘There’s a lot of suppression. People don’t talk their minds out and the congress was the only platform for people to express their views, which they did at the end of the day.’⁴

Later in this book I show how Mfuloane’s words speak for many of his fellow NUM leaders opposed to the type of organisational governance that had been gradually imposed on NUM by its second generation of national office bearers. This type of governance, in which democratic centralism increases and internal debate is gradually reduced, resorts to communist ideology as a powerful source of symbolic violence to muzzle political opponents. It constantly discriminates between political friends and foes to silence diverging views and uses the Party as a tool to seize power positions and further personal and collective political ambitions. This trend, which has affected NUM in the wake of Gwede Mantashe and several of his fellow NUM and South African Communist Party (SACP) central committee members, including Baleni, Zokwana and Crosby Moni, has reached the ANC and Cabinet too.⁵ This political ascent of Party cadres, however, has not been followed by any significant progressive adjustment of national policies under Jacob Zuma’s two presidencies over South Africa.

After Mfuloane’s intervention during the congress, the mood remained rebellious as discussion over proposed resolutions started – an exercise which, as time usually runs short, is generally postponed to a post-congress central committee meeting. Resolution 10 came up, sponsored by the Matlosana, Highveld and North East regions, on the constitutionalisation of the recently formed NUM Youth Forum (see chapter 8). Faced with a situation in which none of those for or against managed to convince one another, a very rare situation presented itself: delegates were to vote individually on the matter rather than adopt the resolution by consensus, as is the norm. Delegates further decided that the vote was to be held by secret ballot and not by a show of hands as the union’s constitution stipulates. A NUM veteran who had attended all union congresses since 1982 told me he had witnessed such a situation only two or three times, the last of which dated back to the 1980s, ‘when I was still a mineworker’, he remembered. As soon as the prospect of voting appeared, one SACP guest requested the mike and accused the delegates of dividing the organisation. This immediately occasioned a strong response by Matlosana regional secretary Joseph Montisetsi, who was also an SACP member: ‘We are following the constitution of NUM,’ he pointed out. While logistical preparations for the vote were in progress, the discussion on resolutions proceeded. Two of the resolutions, which delegates eventually adopted against the will of the national leadership, concerned the allocation of extra financial resources for cars and organisers’ positions in the regions, with a view to rebuilding the union at the grassroots. No matter how hard national leaders argued against these resolutions, most regions held firm and managed to have them passed. Such a down–top dynamic and show of defiance towards national leadership was rare: I have seen this seldom enough in NUM meetings I have followed since 2010 to consider it noteworthy. It was a sign that the wind was changing.

As is usual in union conferences and congresses, the last day went on until late at night. Democracy takes time and collective decisions are sometimes reached through the exhaustion of individual and collective strengths. The vote on the Youth Forum was eventually cancelled after the two regions that opposed its constitutionalisation (along with Zokwana and Baleni) had been successfully lobbied and convinced by the others. Delegates queued in front of the voting station for long hours before the Independent Electoral Commission, hired to monitor the poll, locked itself in with observers from each camp to count the votes. At about eleven o’clock that evening, the commission announced that it was ready to proclaim the results.

President Matosa symbolically dissolved the leadership he had headed for the past three years and the national office bearers descended from the stage to return to their respective regional delegations. One electoral observer solemnly declared the election ‘free and fair’ and the announcement of the results began. This moment, which most delegates and observers had expected to confirm the outgoing leadership, turned into an incredible one, thrilling as only unexpected political or sports victories can be. It was a reminder that one was in the presence of an extraordinary organisation of human beings, the workings of which can be reduced neither to its collective mechanisms nor to the sum of its individual parts. Only two out of the top five incumbents were returned to their positions and, against all odds, outgoing general secretary Frans Baleni lost his position to his challenger, David Sipunzi, by twelve votes. There is no adequate word in the English language to render the depth of this moment – a defining one for democracy as a political regime – when a U-turn such as this change in political power occurs.⁶

This was an unexpected congress outcome for the incumbent national office bearers, just as it was for their opponents. It is seldom that the weakest team scores and wins at the last minute of the final. One could guess by the look on his face how lonely returned President Matosa felt at this precise moment of his political career in which he realised that his closest allies – who were also his political mentors – were gone. A crowd of delegates invaded the stage singing and dancing joyfully, as if symbolically taking over power. One of them next to me exclaimed with visible emotion, ‘That’s democracy!’ Baleni himself proved a good loser and, looking slightly knocked out, with his eyes a bit wet, he mounted the stage to briefly congratulate the winners, a sign that he acknowledged his defeat and submitted himself to the verdict of the organisation. This behaviour on the part of an individual also displayed the collective ethos deeply entrenched in the culture of the ANC and of the Charterist movement: leaders come and go but the organisation remains. In other words, if the movement boasts that it produces extraordinary leaders – who are no doubt ambitious individuals – the latter also remain interchangeable and the organisation never durably succumbs to the ‘cult of personality’. This tradition was exemplified at the very top of the ANC and the State when, in 2008, the organisation decided that Thabo Mbeki should resign from the presidency and be replaced by Kgalema Motlanthe.⁷ The ability to humble oneself before the collective is arguably a rare capacity, demonstrated to me by another unlucky candidate at the 15th NUM congress, who insisted on the democratic nature of discipline: ‘I’ve been a shop steward for some time now and outcomes of the congress do not mean anything to me. NUM is a democratic organisation and as a disciplined member I have a duty to abide by the outcomes as members have spoken.’ After nine years in office, those Baleni had politically marginalised throughout the years, Archie Palane and Oupa Komane (Baleni’s former deputy whom he defeated in 2012), had their revenge. The outgoing general secretary of NUM – a full-time employee of the union – was now officially unemployed. It was half past eleven at night when Pete Matosa metaphorically wrapped things up in his closing address: ‘The members of NUM in the three sectors we are organising have spoken.’

These concluding words were metaphorical only because ordinary NUM members were not present in the congress room to speak their views or cast their votes. It was the delegates mandated by NUM branches and regions – local leaders – who did so in their names. Even though members are supposed to be consulted ahead of the congress, NUM regions are the level at which congress delegations are assembled, nominations for leadership positions agreed upon and proposed resolutions written. In this case regions were internally divided and although nominations were in favour of the incumbents, they were so only on paper. One Rustenburg regional committee member told me: ‘As the region we did not really do justice to the process of nominations.’ He explained that the regional chairperson and his secretary were divided on who to nominate and that even though Rustenburg nominated the incumbent team, individual delegates felt they were not bound by this decision. At least three other regions were in the same situation. Although some argued after the congress that the challengers knew beforehand that they had winning numbers but were clever enough not to advertise them, their slate was in fact never unified; there was no real certainty and they could only hope for victory.

More importantly, this congress was a reminder that voting ultimately remains an individual choice. As one delegate and veteran branch representative expressed it: ‘You can unite on a slate but as I always say when I campaign for the ANC: when you go in the voting booth it’s you, your mind, your pen and the voting paper. You can’t remove an individual’s right.’ The act of voting has particular significance in South Africa, where the ‘one man, one vote’ motto guided anticolonial and anti-apartheid struggles throughout most of the twentieth century. Twenty-two years after the end of apartheid, voting rates in national elections are still higher in South Africa than anywhere else in the world where voting is a free and non-compulsory act. Citizens or delegates at NUM congress feel they have the right to choose, and when offered the opportunity, they do. NUM leadership had long praised stability as a core union value, but delegates at its 15th National Congress thought otherwise and they overruled Frans Ba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Chapter 1. Introduction: South African Trade Unions in Apartheid and Democracy
• Part I: Organisational Agency in Union Bureaucracy and Politics
• Part II: Leading Mineworkers: A Charterist Leadership School
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index