Moramoanyane Tshabedi's five-year wait for employment on South Africa's gold mines ended 18 months ago when word went out that Western Holdings was looking for football players. His skills as a backline player got him the job.
Last week he was one of thousands of miners sacked by Anglo American for refusing to go back to work and to end their participation in the almost three-week-old National Union of Mineworkers' wage strike.
Tshabedi, 24, returned home to his wife and one-year-old child in Ha Moripa, a drought-stricken village where 90 percent of able-bodied men are forced to seek jobsas migrant workers on South African mines. At least a third of them are unemployed. "I have no money to support my family here," he said this weekend, gazing out at the barren, eroded foothills of the Maluti mountains, a herd of goats chewing on the few tufts of grass in the distance. "There is no food here." Tshabedi's experience summarises the agony of poverty-stricken Lesotho, economically in the thrall of South Africa's mining industry.
Aaron Mokete, 27, an unemployed worker from Ha Moripa, said the general feeling of the villagers was that the strike was justified because "the miners are underpaid". He said: "But they are also horrified because they know there is no food in the villages and the men are returning home to starve. They are afraid they will not get work again."
Some 60 percent of the country's work force is employed in South Africa, the vast majority on the mines. Their earnings constitute 52 percent of file country's gross domestic product. Despite this dependancy, the peasants from the mountain villages of Lesotho have helped form the backbone of the NUM. There are more than 17 000 of them on South Africa's mines and their support for the union, formed in 1982, has continued in this strike.
However, the ability of the Chamber of Mines to dismiss thousands of striking workers and replace them at short notice in places like Lesotho is a key weapon of mine management in their bid to break the strike. The heavily-laden buses transporting the miners homewith their possessions, which crossed Maseru bridge back into Lesotho last week, passed a few hundred metros from a fenced-off complex on the outskirts of Maseru where thousands more workers were queuing to replace them. Those returning to Lesotho came from two "marginal" mines – Vaal Reefs number six shaft and Western Holdings number one shaft – which Anglo American claimed would have to be closed.
But officials of the Lesotho offices of the Chamber of Mines recruiting arm, The Employment Bureau of Africa, said they worked overtime between Thursday and Saturday to sign up 2 000 workers chiefly for these two mines. An Anglo American spokesman said the workers were merely being transported to the hostels at these mines, from where they would be deployed to other mines.
However, officials at the Teba offices said their employment contracts had specified they were going to Western Holdings number one and Vaal Reefs number six. "I am very hurt," said Tshabedi. "Management said they were closing the mine. Now they are recruiting my brothers and my friends to go back to the same mine to take our jobs."
When word spread that Teba was recruiting workers late last week there was aflood of men queuing outside the organisation's offices. On Monday morning again, blanketed men poured down the streets of Maseru to the offices of Teba until some 6 000 were waiting at the gates. The mood of anger and desperation was palpable, particularly when they were told there would be no recruitment that day. "Mokete went to the Teba office at Tetyatcyaneng on Thursday to apply for a job at one of the two mines. "There was a very long queue," he said. Like the vast majority of applicants, he was unsuccessful.
Mokete has been waiting for re-employment since being fired by one of themines two years ago. "The queue is always very long at Teba," said Puseletso Selae, an extension officer for the Christian Council of Lesotho's Migrant Labour Project. "Men walk 76 km over the mountains, where there are no proper roads, taking just one blanket with them, to get to the recruiting offices. "Sometimes they wait for months in Maseru, sleeping on the streets and getting odd jobs to tide them over. You see them eating orange peels for food. They are afraid to go home because their kids are crying for food."
Tshabedi was a ventilation officer's assistant on the mines. After the Chamber of Mines' July increases, he earned about R360 a month, working underground. In 18 months he saw his wife three times – twice on weekend trips and once for a 72-day holiday. He joined the union immediately when he arrived at the mine: "Management exploits us as workers," he said. "They used to fire us without giving reasons. With the union there, we felt we could sit down with management and solve the problem. "The purpose of the strike was to win improved wages. When we stopped work, management tried to intimidate us to go back. Mine security police patrolled the hostels with guns. "After the ultimatum, I wanted to go back to work. But I did not feel secure.
Sootho Mashetla, 28, who was also fired from Western Holdings, said he was the sole breadwinner for the seven children of his two deceased brothers. He said he supported the union from "my heart" and that management had adopted a "very negative attitude" by firing him and his colleagues and employing "our brothers" in their places.
For Tshabedi and others, while the work on the mines is hard, it is far more attractive than sitting at home starving. The strike has created a dilemma among groups such as trade unions in Lesotho which support it but are at a loss as to what exactly to do.
David Ramakgula, the president of the Lesotho Union of Employees for Recruiting and Allied Agents and a Teba employee, said he and his colleagues were in a weak position because "our people are poor". Ramakgula, a middle-aged man with a shattered lens in his glasses glued together with chewing gum, said: "We know there will be conflict between those coming back who are not satisfied with their wages and, those who are hungry. It could lead to bloodshed. "The chamber is misusing us," he said. "We know we areonly shepharding our people to a butcher."
This article originally appeared in the Weekly Mail
