South Africa's "unbearable contradictions"

Published by MAC on 2010-10-10
Source: Reuters, Ar Issue, statement

South African Splinters: From "elite transition" to "small-a alliances"

by Patrick Bond

Ar Issue e-zine, Volume 12, Number 6

October 2010

Since the freeing of Nelson Mandela in February 1990, the South African liberation struggle has witnessed the truncation, hijacking and reversal of its fabled "second stage": the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), which aims to transform the state and address class inequality. Instead, the state has become an even more blatant vehicle for crony capitalism and merely tokenistic welfarism than under the Afrikaners' Nationalist Party rule. By mid-2010, the contradictions had become unbearable, and a spate of labour unrest suddenly brought home the obvious point: Alliance politics must urgently restructure - as must national socio-economic policies - or face an historic breaking point.

Society divides

The whole society began splintering just a few weeks after the World Cup provided a show of nation-building, broad-based excitement and unity. But the structural cracks had been widening during a long era of neoliberalism, for as the University of Cape Town's SA Labour and Development Research Unit recently reported, "income inequality increased between 1993 and 2008" (from a 0.66 Gini coefficient to 0.70) as South Africa raced ahead of Brazil to become the world's leader among major countries. The income of the average black (African) person actually fell as a percentage of the average white's from 1995 (13.5 percent) to 2008 (13 percent), and "poverty in urban areas has increased" (Leibbrandt et al, 2010).

How could a democratic government actually amplify apartheid-era race-class inequality? It's stunning, but Mandela (1994-99) and his successor Thabo Mbeki (1999-2008), long-serving former Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, former Trade Minister Alec Erwin, former Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni and current President Jacob Zuma, deserve recognition for constructing a "class apartheid" system that not even the most extreme pessimist would have predicted when the African National Congress (ANC) was unbanned.

According to the University of Cape Town researchers, inequality is "due both to rising unemployment and rising earnings inequality" which is in turn partly due to labour broking, i.e., the outsourcing of formerly secure employment at much lower wages with no benefits to around half a million workers. Yet, in his 2010 State of the Nation speech and more recently in the midst of a strike in which he threatened to fire the entire civil service, Zuma displayed "no appreciation of the full extent of the massive crisis of unemployment, poverty and inequality," according to the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).

Indeed the two loudest anti-labour voices in Zuma's cabinet - Defense Minister Lindiwe Sisulu and Public Service Minister Richard Baloyi - provided a burst of neoliberal-nationalist political rhetoric and strident discord so loud, in late August, that it drowned even the sweet memory of World Cup vuvuzelas a few weeks earlier. Zuma's Treasury was most to blame, for refusing to spend an extra $700 million per year to quickly halt the public sector strike.

For those supportive of more genuine liberation traditions, the good news amidst the political and socio-economic rancour is that the centre of power, and associated neoliberal policies, may not hold. The extreme political divisions and ideological distortions associated with the ruling party's "big-A Alliance" with labour and the Communist Party may not permit the ANC's big tent to stay open to all, no matter Zuma's personal charisma and good-times inclusiveness. It may well be necessary, finally, to construct a "small-a alliance" - as John Saul (2005) named the idea - of organized workers, poor people, NGOs, environmentalists and other organized progressives.

The reason is simple: the neoliberal ruling clique is making the rich richer and the poor poorer. As one of the most prescient observers of South African politics, William Gumede, pointed out just after the 2007 ANC leadership putsch of Thabo Mbeki at the Polokwane congress, "For all the doubts that hang over Zuma's character, many argue that he offers a critical conduit for the poor's grievances. These people are going to be disappointed."

Instead the personal has become political. Asked in early September 2010 about the lucrative and extremely dubious deal that global steelmaker ArcelorMittal (formerly SA's state-owned Iscor) cut with a consortium (including his son, Duduzane), as well as his nephew Khulubuse's role in hotly-contested oil prospecting claims in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zuma replied, "Nobody has said, here is corruption. I think for people to think that if you are a Zuma you can't do business is a very funny thing, I tell you."

Not everyone is amused, and communist youth leader David Masondo coined a frank rebuttal, speaking of "ZEE" - Zuma Economic Empowerment. For Masondo, writing in CityPress newspaper (5 September 2010), "ZEE is not only an assault on the Young Communist League and South African Communist Party resolutions - which called for the nationalisation of ­monopoly industries - it amounts to a burial of the Freedom Charter. Only a few can be misled to believe that there is no link between ­Zuma's rise to the presidency and his ­family's rise to riches."

But this isn't only about a family of fat-cats, in which the first B, "broad," in Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (promised as the antidote to Mbeki's elite-oriented Black Economic Empowerment), has apparently been replaced with a new B: belt-size (given the vast girth of several Zuma beneficiaries). More substantially, we now find at war the three main ruling-party power blocs: first, the group bent on personal accumulation projects willing to associate (mostly privately) with ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema's ascendant crew; second, those of the centre-left intent on gaining more influence on policy decisions (albeit with virtually nothing to show for their efforts to date); and third, the president's KwaZulu-Natal regional allies, who are now under extreme stress because of corruption probes that seemed to have emanated from Zuma's office. The ANC's late-September National General Council in Durban will feature such a bloody battle that in trying to keep peace, Zuma decided to withdraw from the United Nation's annual (this time decennial) summit-celebration of the world's failure to keep pace with the mainly meaningless Millennium Development Goals. Zuma's retreat to Durban is significant because in August, he was - apparently without irony - named by Ban Ki-moon to co-chair a UN commission on world sustainability.

The roots of the cracks

We have to go back at least to the early 1990s to explain the degeneration. The secretly-negotiated terms of the elite transition provided benefits mainly for a few hundred at the top of the three divergent interest groups fo- white Afrikaners, white English-speaking business and the liberation movement - within the framework of neoliberalism. Increasingly shifting from white to black allies in South Africa, the "international community" - the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, other global-scale bankers, Northern "donor" governments and associated think tanks - together ensured that post-apartheid policies would deepen the country's vulnerability and destroy any residual self-reliance.

This entailed several economic sabotage techniques: agreeing to repay illegitimate apartheid-era debt in part by taking on an unnecessary IMF loan of $750 million (1993), dropping trade tariffs even beyond what the World Trade Organisation required (1994), liberalizing exchange controls (1995) and then permitting the delisting of the largest SA firms (Anglo, DeBeers, Old Mutual, SABMiller, Investec, Mondi, etc) from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (1999-2001), raising the foreign debt from $25 billion in 1994 to $85 billion today, adopting a bound-to-fail neoliberal economic policy and insulating the Reserve Bank from democracy so as to raise interest rates to SA's highest real levels ever (late 1990s), privatizing state assets destructively, and lowering primary corporate taxes from 48% in 1994 to less than 30% at present.

Many of us who anticipated opportunities for "structural reforms" (Saul, 2001) in the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme were foiled. Personally, of 15 policy papers I was asked to draft or edit from 1994-2000 in a dozen ministries (which I believe to be a record of repeated reformist mistakes worse than anyone else's in post-apartheid government), not one truly converted the era's developmentalist rhetoric into actual progressive change. Indeed the type-left shift-right process I participated in convinced me by 2000 that an NDR process within the government and even the Alliance was futile. A better perspective was that of the emerging independent left (e.g. Marais, 2000; Alexander, 2002; Hart, 2002; Desai, 2002; Bell and Ntsebeza, 2003; Bond, 2006; Ntsebeza and Hall, 2007; Legassick, 2007; Maharaj, Desai and Bond, 2010), which soon concluded that the elite transition to a failing neoliberalism required ever more desperate nationalist rhetoric to disguise ever more unpatriotic economic practices and ever more destructive national social and environmental policies.

One crucial problem during the entire post-apartheid period was labour's "corporatist" strategy, or what Carolyn Bassett and Marlea Clarke (2000) called the "class snuggle," that for a while replaced class struggle. This was especially evident in the National Economic Development and Labour Council, and in sites such as the Seattle World Trade Organisation summit in 1999 when Cosatu leaders found themselves in the "Green Room" with leading neoliberals like Erwin negotiating the next trade deal, instead of with the youth and environmentalists blocking the entrance.

However, with class snuggle's main proponent (textile union leader Ebrahim Patel) chosen by Zuma to head what soon became an impotent new economic development ministry in 2009, more militancy soon emerged in Cosatu, as witnessed in highly successful strikes or strike threats by transport and electricity workers in parastatals before and during the World Cup, and in the subsequent fight for wage and housing allowance increases against a state determined to draw the line at 7% and US$97, not at the 8.6% and $140 demanded. (The potential settlement, to be agreed upon by the end of September, is 7.5% and $110.)

It was inevitable, this wedge between nationalists and proletarians. Tracing backwards to the 1980s and early 1990s, the old "Mass Democratic Movement" carried such enormous potential that its distraction into the creation of what Neville Alexander (2002) describes as an "ordinary country" was only temporary. In mid-2010, it did appear to be, rather, an extraordinary society, one whose the ruling crew had shifted in the region of $5 billion of state funding away from social needs and into a surreal soccer tournament - with unemployment having skyrocketed by 1.1 million over the prior year and a half, rising from 26.7% of the workforce to 32.8%.

This wasn't a function merely of "the world crisis," but of the way the local economy had been mismanaged, with fake growth in the 2000s - reaching 5% per annum for a few years - based on real estate speculation, construction mainly of white elephant infrastructure, consumer credit and exports of base metals. It necessarily crashed of its own account, not only because of declining world materials demand and the 50% fall in world stock market prices (although those contributed), with the consequent outflow of portfolio capital.

The supposed economic boost from the World Cup meant that, though a formal "recovery" was underway, nearly a fifth of those retrenchments were still taking place during the first half of 2010, as GDP increased (at a 3% annual rate). Blame for the tens of thousands of new job losses was not only due to the end of stadium building in nine of the country's major cities, but also to an ongoing shift away from an economy based on manufacturing employment in which unions won a variety of perks and a living wage, to one characterized by even more extreme labour casualisation.

(This was a phenomenon that Zuma and his labour team had vowed to Cosatu allies they would end: "labour broking." Not only did they not end it, but the most globally-embarrassing example of worker militancy, the Stallion Security workers wildcat strike during the first week of the World Cup, affecting half the stadiums, occurred because of abuse associated with outsourced work. And Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan's first budget speech, in February, threatened Cosatu with even more pressure in the form of subminimum wages paid by corporations to young workers through a forthcoming state subsidy scheme.)

The other major public infrastructure under construction - a few big dams, the Medupi power plant (whose electricity would be disproportionately channeled to large mining/smelting operations), a huge boondoggle industrial project featuring an unnecessary $8 billion heavy-petroleum refinery (Coega), a new Durban-Johannesburg oil pipeline, some road upgrades, and the Johannesburg fast train for elite customers - received occasional praise from ANC ideologues (e.g. Alan Hirsch, 2006) for conjoining social-democratic and industrialist potentials associated with a "developmental state." But this was merely dishonest posturing, given the underdevelopmental nature of so much of the state spending, such as the world's cheapest electricity gift to BHP Billiton and Anglo American Corporation ($0.015/kWh, compared to prices three times that high for most businesses and seven times that high for residents).

The war on poverty and the poor

Similarly, a package of minor interventions aimed at bandaging the poverty rift became, under Mbeki in early 2008, a so-called "War on Poverty" (WoP - for more see Maharaj, Desai and Bond 2010). Now another bandaid, the "self-help approach", constitutes one of the Zuma government's many continuities with Mbeki's neo-liberalism - with, the SABC reports, Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe arguing that "the state believes such a project is the only way to fight poverty. He is of the opinion that such an approach will force people to help themselves out of poverty." And when the poor don't "help themselves"? It has become all to easy then for Motlanthe and his ilk to present the masses as simply refusing to fight dependency and as remaining stubbornly mired in their psychological hang-ups and their culture of poverty. With no amount of haranguing and coercion able to shift them away from their penury.

A classic case of "blaming the victim," of course, and there has been more from the ANC along the same lines. For example, Eastern Cape Premier Noxolo Kiviet confessed in April that "lack of coordination and integration of government services" meant that in the village of Lubala, where the WoP had been formally launched in 2008, "only 30 percent of the households surveyed received all the services needed". Yet he didn't even mention the lack of national-local resource transfers or the neoliberal character of SA social policy as structural causes calling out for structural solutions. Instead, he continued to rely on merely scattershot state services, and, no matter how bravely bureaucrat-warriors endeavoured to actually hit the enemy, such services were obviously too few and far between to genuinely defeat poverty on home turf. For example:

• the Departments of Agriculture and Rural Development assisted families with seedlings, and provided fencing "in more than 19 households";
• the Department of Water Affairs had "undertaken" to provide water and sanitation to Lubala Primary School, and to give water tanks to 15 households; and
  
• as for skills upgrading: "about 15 young people have been trained in areas such as First Aid, chain saw operat[ion], health and safety, personal finance and accounting."

But putting aside the modest gains registered at this first pilot site, one tiny "Protected Village," the rest of the country was going up in flames, and poverty was clearly winning the WoP. Of course in any such war, those waging the Good Fight will claim to suffer faulty intelligence and complain of troops lost to friendly fire. The most obvious cases are seemingly ubiquitous "service delivery protests" that force the state to turn its attention from attacking poverty to attacking the poor themselves. Meanwhile, the poor in turn react by burning down state buildings and councillors' houses in townships ranging from small Mpumalanga dorpies in the mountainous East to the big-city ghettoes and highways on the plains of the Western Cape.

To be sure, these quite localised insurgencies are not idealised leftist revolts such as might be characterised by mass-democratic organising and by a radical political consciousness. Indeed, they are even now called "popcorn protests," to evoke what happens when, with the application of intense heat, grains explode high into the air; then the wind or some unknowable physics formula may simply take them leftwards or rightwards (onto xenophobic terrain), up or down, with no pre-set ideological strategic landing, and no discernable pattern that would merit the description of a coherent "urban social movement." Still, what the popcorn protests showed was both that poverty is now deeply engrained in South African society and also that reactions against it, and resistance to it, will continue to emerge quite suddenly and unpredictably - in the form of toyi-toying youth, to take one example, who manoeuvre with seeming ease around the desperately outnumbered local police forces and even the SA National Defence Force.

Amid thousands of such exemplary battles in the WoP, one was especially illustrative. Among the state's most feared symbols is an armoured vehicle, the Casspir, and on the auspicious date of 21 March 2010, Sharpeville Day, one found itself surrounded in the township of an Mpumalanga dorpie, Ogies. The SA Press Association's courageous reporter filed this story:

Captain Leonard Hlathi, spokesperson for the Mpumalanga police said the Casspir was irreparably damaged when it was "outrageously attacked" by a mob who petrol bombed it several times. The protesters apparently led the Casspir into an ambush, by leading it over an improvised spike strip to puncture its tyres. Three of the heavy vehicles' puncture-proof tyres were blown out when it drove over the spikes, that were camouflaged with branches. "Nothing working remained in the vehicle," said Hlathi. "Only the steel hull remained."

Hlathi said the protesters were targeting the 10 police members that were in the vehicle. The trapped police officers were forced to fight their way out, using live sharp point ammunition. "They had to get out of the vehicle. By that time it had been bombed several times," said Hlathi. "If they didn't fight back and if they weren't assisted by reinforcements who came to help, we would have been talking about a different matter entirely."

Hlathi said it wasn't clear how many times the vehicles, which [were] used extensively by police during unrest before the 1994 elections, were bombed. He also couldn't say how long the spikes that were used to blow out the tyres were, or what they were made of. "They do have puncture proof tyres, but the spikes were too long," said Hlathi.

One protester was injured during the violence, but Hlathi said there may have been more. "They [the protesters] carried the wounded away," he said. Sixty-one people have been arrested for public violence during service delivery protests in Mpumalanga over the long weekend. Twenty-nine of these were in Leslie near Secunda after a municipal building and other property were burnt down. Another 32 were arrested in the Ogies protest. "Several cars were pelted with stones and 20 complaints have already been registered for malicious damage to property cases." Four civilian Toyota Quantum minibus taxis, a Condo, and two bakkies were also burnt down.

The Ogies protest started on Thursday, when a march was held to hand over a memorandum to representatives of the provincial government. "It is alleged the authorities did not turn up as requested. The people went on rampage, barricading the roads with burning tyres and burning down property." - Sapa

Encountering these sorts of minefields across the country, the state had a choice: either rapidly move from the ongoing war of position (nice-sounding rhetorical speeches) to a serious war of movement against poverty, or to simply retreat. The latter course was easier, and in 2010 the WoP was relocated to the rural development ministry. Back in the Pretoria War Room, it must have appeared that the WoP was now a fully-fledged class war, unwinnable under the country's prevailing economic conditions, given the motley coalition of power brokers in the Alliance and the continuing grip of neoliberal Treasury and Reserve Bank officials. The poor were advancing relentlessly, and the WoP looked like a US-in-Vietnam or Soviets/US-in-Afghanistan story-line.

The state's forces were obviously confused and confounded. The older anti-poverty strategies were comparable to pre-1942 Maginot lines, easily broken through by a clever enemy. In this new terrain, trickle-down grants were simply not good enough to stem the broken dike. Poverty - and especially the poor themselves - fought back tirelessly, with sticks, stones and Molotov cocktails, retreating into the shack settlements and township alleyways before sallying forth for yet more outrageous attacks. Newer military techniques, such as aerial bombings or even US-style drones were either too high profile (an embarrassment when the state needed legitimation during its other war - to carry off a World Cup in the face of international elite scepticism) or simply ineffectual.

A small-a alliance?

The only good that can come from this chaos of warring nationalist factions and class conflict is a restructured political landscape. The only way that will happen, in the view of many political activists, is the formal departure from the ANC of its most oppressed subjects, from trade union proletarians to the poor lumpen-protesters, and everyone in between. But that in turn awaits either a conclusive victory or defeat in the ages-old struggle for the hearts and minds of the ANC base. That base surprised many by voting out Mbeki in December 2007, which makes more serious the threat from Malema's rambunctious Youth League on August 25 that the next national leader to be targeted is the party's General Secretary (and former mineworker leader) Gwede Mantashe, who is also the Chair of the Communist Party. And not only is Party Secretary (and Higher Education Minister) Blade Nzimande feeling pressure from Malema's faction, but a near-rift between the SACP and Cosatu emerged during the public sector strike, given the weak support the unions were receiving. With more strike threats being made for the last third of 2010, the Alliance may well be in danger of "imploding," as a Cosatu statement expressed it in late August.

The Alliance has stuck together through thick and thin for two decades, and is likely to outlast this latest conflagration for at least a few more years. But, meanwhile, fearing another bout of Mbeki-style control of the airwaves, Cosatu has reemphasized its progressive values, defending media freedom and access to information, against ANC paranoia and secrecy.

The time is not yet ripe for much more. However, because the only formal political opposition not in disarray is the neoliberal Democratic Alliance - the next largest parties, Congress of the People and Inkatha, are imploding with internecine leadership wars - the most important medium-term dilemma for trade unions and genuine communists is whether a small-a alliance might be the basis of a new Workers Party. Municipal elections are scheduled for April 2011 and it is impossible that any substantive radical electoral opposition to the ANC would emerge by then. (The only political party to the ANC's left in parliament, the Independent Democrats, was consumed by the Democratic Alliance in August.) There are two overlapping independent left unifying initiatives - Amandla! magazine and the Conference for a Democratic Left - which are supporting the most logical means of outreach to the left forces in Cosatu: a nascent South African Social Forum, so far joined by forward-thinking public sector unions but, again, not likely to solidify as more than a small group prior to the Dakar meeting of the World Social Forum next February 5-11.

The situation is too fluid to predict with confidence, but the sense of disappointment on the left about Cosatu's "paradox of victory" (Buhlungu 2010) in backing not only the liberation movement in general but Zuma in particular, and "winning" (but thereby putting off necessary debates about basic policy and overall direction for some years) may yet - some time before the next national elections in 2014 - lift. The prerequisite is that labour actually does endeavour to draw the various now fragmented forces of South African socialism together so that they become a wedge for actually shattering the existing big-A Alliance once and for all. Then, it is felt, a firmly anchored political movement able to withstand any future round of tensions and even splits could form. As Gumede concluded in 2007, "The ragbag collection of groups that back Zuma ranges from socialists and trade unionists to supporters of virginity testing and the death penalty. Dashed expectations may be the catalyst for a breakup of the ANC - a breakup which is debatably overdue and can only be good for democracy."

Rebuilding a serious South African left will be a long, halting process. Along the way, extraordinary victories have already been won, such as the Treatment Action Campaign's reversal of Mbeki's AIDS policies and opening up of pharmaceutical corporate patent monopolies (Geffen 2010). And one of the coming issues of the age, climate change, will motivate a strong environmental justice movement, for South Africa will host the Kyoto Protocol Conference of the Parties global climate summit in late 2011 (Cock, 2008; Bond, 2011). As well, South Africa's impressive (but today beleaguered) feminist tradition (Hassim, 2006; Britton, Meintjes and Fish, 2008) will continue battling the resurgent patriarchy represented by Zuma at his 2006 rape trial.

On the terrain of ubiquitous community, student and labour protests that began in the late 1990s (Ballard, Habib and Valodia, 2006), the more visionary activists acknowledge that they have so far lacked capacity to educate and also to influence the direction and intensity of the uprisings (Ngwane 2010). Although the critique many independent leftists offer rings increasingly true, the post-World Cup fracturing shows how impotent radicals are, and how much effort it will take to finally organise a united labour-community front. As Cosatu's (2010) own most recent Central Executive Committee political discussion paper warned, "If we don't act decisively, we are heading rapidly in the direction of a full-blown predator state, in which a powerful, corrupt elite increasingly controls the state as a vehicle for accumulation."

But, on the other hand, as a potential "opportunity" identified within such a scenario, the labour leaders openly remarked that the movement "could become stronger by drawing on its militant tradition to organise the resistance of workers; could broaden its perspective to take up living conditions and political issues as well as wages; and could play a central role in forging a new popular alliance, and in building a new socialist movement in opposition to government." Brave words these latter, but a promising foretaste of what may yet happen nonetheless.

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Bibliography

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Ballard, R., A. Habib and I. Valodia, eds. Voices of Protest. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006.

Bassett, C. and M. Clarke. "Class struggle or class snuggle." Southern Africa Report 15, 2 (February 2000).

Bell, T. and D. Ntsebeza. Unfinished Business. London: Verso and Cape Town: RedWorks, 2003.

Bond, P. The Politics of Climate Justice. London: Verso and Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011.

_____ . Elite Transition. London: Pluto Press and Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2006.

Britton, H., S. Meintjes and J. Fish. Women's Activism in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008.

Buhlungu, S. A Paradox of Victory. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2010.

Cock, J. The War Against Ourselves. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008.

Congress of South African Trade Unions. "The Alliance at a Crossroads: The battle against a predatory elite and political paralysis." Central Executive Committee Political Discussion Paper, Johannesburg, September 2010.

Desai, A. We Are the Poors. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002.

Geffen, N. Debunking Delusions. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2010.

Gumede, W. Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC. London: Zed Books and Cape Town: Struik, 2007.

Hart, G. Disabling Globalization . Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Hassim, S. Women's Organisations and Democracy in South Africa . Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006.

Hirsch, A. Season of Hope. Ottawa: Interenational Development Research Centre, 2006.

Legassick, M. Towards Socialist Democracy. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007.

Leibbrandt, M., I. Woolard, A. Finn and J. Argent. Trends in South African Income Distribution and Poverty Since the Fall of Apartheid. OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers No. 101. Cape Town: Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, School of Economics, University of Cape Town, 2010.

Maharaj, B., A. Desai and P. Bond, eds. Zuma's Own Goal. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2010.

Marais, H. South Africa Limits to Change. London: Zed Books and Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2000.

Ngwane, T. "Ideologies, Strategies and Tactics of Township Protest." In Zuma's Own Goal. Edited by B. Maharaj, A. Desai and P. Bond. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2010.

Ntsebeza, L. and R. Hall, eds. The Land Question in South Africa. Pretoria: HSRC Press, 2007.

Saul, J. Millennial Africa. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2001.

_____ . The Next Liberation Struggle. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2005.

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Haneng Kgotla Suspends Meeting Bafokeng Exco

Statement of Joseph Magobe

2 October 2010

On Friday, 01 October 2010, Chaneng Community Leadership committee were all "dressed up and looking good" when they suddenly changed their mind and suspended meeting Bafokeng executives due to reasons not disclosed to Chaneng ViBe.

Chaneng Executive Kgotla was to meet all key Royal Bafokeng Nation Executives for the 1st time in 2 years in its history. This meeting was to come after Chaneng Community Lekgotla, youth committee and Styldrift Project task team had hosted directors from Minister Shabangu and Minister Sonjica's departments last week Wednesday to resolve a platinum mining-operation quarrel caused by ‘a deliberate and sustained disregard to the community concerns'.

The Chaneng community has for a period more than 2 years relentlessly persisted in resisting an intruding Styldrift Project, despite delaying tactics by mine management. Until the take-over by Royal Bafokeng Platinum in January 2010, BRPM project has reached its lowest community confidence especially from Chaneng.

On 11 February 2010 the youth of Chaneng and nearby communities (Robega, Rasimone & Mafenya) held a demonstration which submitted a memorandum addressed to the Styldrift Project Manager, Mr. Glenn Harris, demanding an immediate "closure of the Styldrift Project within 24hours". The demand was never hounoured and received the same 'deaf ear attitude' as all other preceding community requests and concerns.

A member of the community leadership highlighted that; "this (mining) issue is even causing a quarrel amongst us (community)".

According to one member of the community's Styldrift Project task team, it is not only a community splitting-up which is a recent threat; "we are driven by the mine management like a merry-go-round, and i don't want to be in a merry-go-round. Our concerns are genuine and ought to have been considered prior to the project's roll out, so whom did they consult? "he asked.

A document titled Styldrift Project Community Consultation Report highlights the merry-go-round-story better.

"Time delaying tactics and intentional creation of conflict between the villages around the mines, has been the only response received, coupled with continued bug passing between the project team and the Royal Bafokeng Nation leadership which in turn has declined to meet or engage the Chaneng community kgotla/khuduthamaga(executive committee) despite numerous written correspondence.

"The community is thus left with no other option but to employ more aggressive strategies to enforce compliance", the report concluded.

The ministerial intervention comes after a community complaint was laid in September, with the Department of Mineral Resources and the Department of Water and Environmental Affairs.

Residents of the Chaneng community stand firm in their resolve to involve a third party for purposes of mediation in this matter. This was reflected in a reply letter written to the new Senior Project Manager, Mr. Tom Sertic, who attempted to reopen discussions and in his words "build a good relationship since he is new".

In the morning of the 22 September, Chaneng community members were picketing in and around Phokeng village as well as at the currently developed Styldrif Project mine.

This action is reported to "make sure that the mining and Bafokeng administration officials, are equally concerned as we(the Community), are concerned about this unlawful operation in our grazing and residing land".

"It is clear that the project will harm the environment, deteriorate the quality of life, bring us more poverty and illness without any consideration or humane attempt to empower or benefit the community" added a community member of Chaneng.

History bears testimony to the ruthless exploitation of communities by mining companies, the Chaneng community is but one of the many helpless black communities whose hope for justice and restoration of dignity lies on the ability of government to adequately and swiftly rise to their protection.

It has been reported to Chaneng ViBe that a community meeting will be held at 4pm this Tuesday, 05 October 2010 at Chaneng Primary School to bring a "new world order".

Author: Joseph Magobe
Ph: 083 960 5818

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Kumba iron ore workers begin wage strike - Union

By Olivia Kumwenda

Reuters

4 October 2010

JOHANNESBURG - Thousands of workers at South Africa's Kumba Iron Ore mine on Monday embarked on a strike for better wages after pay rise talks collapsed, a National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) official said.

Kumba, a unit of global miner Anglo American, said last week the strike will not significantly affect its production due to sufficient iron ore stockpiles.

The NUM is demanding pay rises of between 7.5 percent and 10 percent on a one-year deal, depending on workers' category, for its members at Kumba.

Kumba, the 10th-largest global iron ore producer, had offered wage increases of between 7 percent and 9.5 percent on a two-year deal.

"The strike has begun. But we are meeting Kumba (management) this morning, they have asked for an urgent meeting," NUM spokesman Lesiba Seshoka said, adding that there was no indication on whether Kumba would raise its offer.

The union said last week the strike of over 6,000 workers would affect Kumba's Sishen, Kolomela and Thabazimbi operations.

Kumba, however, said NUM represents 2,670 members at the three units.

South Africa, the continent's biggest economy, has been hit by a wave of strikes and strike threats, which have led to pay settlements well above inflation -- at 3.5 percent in August -- and raised fears that the cost of living will rise.

Meanwhile, a strike by NUM members at Northam Platinum entered its fifth week on Monday.

Northam, one of South Africa's smaller platinum producers, had offered an 8.5 percent pay rise increase, below NUM's demand of a 12 percent increment.

The NUM is also demanding 3,500 rand ($505.1) in housing allowance.

"The strike at Northam continues ...we are also meeting the management this morning," Seshoka said.

A smaller union, Solidarity, last week signed a wage deal with Northam while NUM had rejected the offer.

The strike at the Zondereinde mine in South Africa was costing Northam 1,000 ounces per day in lost production of Platinum Group Metals (PGMs).

($1=6.930 Rand) (Editing by Ed Lane)

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Mine nationalisation unlikely to move at ANC summit

Reuters

17 September 2010

JOHANNESBURG - Leaders of the ruling ANC are unlikely to bow to pressure from unions and within the party by agreeing to nationalise South Africa's mines during a policy review conference next week.

Julius Malema, the outspoken leader of the African National Congress' Youth League, has argued mines in the world's biggest producer of platinum and the fourth-largest producer of gold should belong to the state to benefit the country and its people rather than foreign companies or a selected few.

But Minerals Minister Susan Shabangu, keen to calm investors weary of greater state involvement in the sector, has repeatedly said nationalisation was neither ANC nor government's policy, and she is unlikely to change her stance next week.

"There is going to be a lot of hot air, but I don't think we are going to see anything material emerge from that meeting," said Gary van Staden, a political analyst at independent economists NKC.

The mining sector's influence on the South African economy may have declined, but it is still one of the country's top employers, and accounted for 5,2% of the country's gross domestic product in the first quarter.

Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said on Thursday he did not expect any changes in the nationalisation debate, but Stephen Roelofse, an analyst at Metropolitan Asset Managers, said the fact that it was up for discussion was worrying.

"Just the fact that it's tabled as a discussion point makes the world jittery. Investors are very much concerned about that," he said.

Rising Costs

Nationalisation is yet another worry for a sector already battling with power shortages, rising electricity and wage costs, a strong rand and much stricter safety measures following a series of deaths.

A review of the mining charter published this week also showed that whites still dominated the industry and changes were slow despite a decade of affirmative action, fuelling Malema's argument for state ownership in the sector.

Only 8,9% of mines were owned by blacks in 2009, well below a target of 15%, leading the government to threaten that it would revoke mining licences if companies did not comply with a revised plan to speed up the process.

Meanwhile President Jacob Zuma's government also imposed a six-month halt on new mining prospecting bids to amend the minerals law after damaging disputes with two firms over rights.

"It's a mini disaster zone and could become a major disaster zone if they don't do anything soon," Van Staden said.

A state-owned mining company is seen as a step towards nationalisation, with one likely to be formed before the end of this year, although analysts doubt the government has the cash or risk appetite such a venture would involve.

The industry believes the government needs to come out with a clear message to reaffirm to investors once again that there is no change in policy on the horizon.

"There should be a concise statement coming from Zuma and the ANC about nationalisation ... to alleviate fears and concerns internal and international investors might have," said David Davis, an analyst at Credit Suisse Standard Securities.

Yet analysts and industry believe the ANC is unlikely to do that in fear of losing its two major support groups in labour and the Youth League who have threatened not to support Zuma for another term.

"They are so scared of alienating any part of their support base, I doubt that they would come down harsh on anyone, " Van Staden said.

Edited by: Reuters