Sam Shilowa, Cosatu secretary general, in The Mark Gevisser
ONE of Sam Shilowa’s previous employers tells the story of meeting him across a picket line and being so impressed by his performance in negotiations that he suggested he be groomed for management. Sorry, said Shilowa’s immediate boss: nice enough chap but he really doesn’t have the
Anybody who couldn’t see that Sam Shilowa had potential must have been blind — or terrified. He is broad-faced and big-boned, exuberant and clever. His sentences, like his vast hands, go everywhere. They will climb, in spastic spirals, to the apex of an idea before crashing down into outrage; they will meander vaguely through the savannah and then take you by surprise by literally reaching out and clasping you. On the Christmas holiday he took in Cuba, he decided to stop shaving his scalp and let his hair grow a bit. Nonetheless, the image of a shaven-haired cloth-capped giant remains: working-class hero or repo man; I suspect he doesn’t mind the ambivalence. Journalist Phillip van Niekerk wrote in Leadership that Shilowa’s manner `is far more amiable than the Mephistophelean displeasure that his predecessor Jay Naidoo was able to project’. True enough: if Naidoo’s persona veered towards the hood-eyed, scheming, commie intellectual, then Shilowa has the open countenance of a hammer-twirling worker who has just ripped off a piece of socialist-realist memorabilia; sort of retro, quaint and Scargillish at the same time (if such a thing is possible), an extra from the set of On the Waterfront. Well, not quite. For one, while it is true that Shilowa is the sparely educated son of impoverished Shangaan peasants who rose in the unions from the shop floor, he was never quite the on-the-beat security guard he has been portrayed as; he did clerical and laboratory work at Anglo-Alpha Cement, and then was a trainer at a security and cleaning firm. And, while it is true that he had to take years off school because of his family’s poverty, he finally dropped out in standard nine, not because of racial injustice or political activity, but in a fit of pique because he felt he was being unfairly punished (which he was) by a teacher who is now, in fact, an organiser for the African National Congress. `One weakness I have,’ he allows, with a laugh, `is that there are times when I’m arrogant, not willing to listen to reason.’ Certainly, Shilowa rose — meteorically — through the ranks. But, to the extent that you could separate politics and labour in the 1980s, his base was political: it was his work in the South African Communist Party underground and his primacy in Cosatu’s SACP caucus, far more than his brief history as an office-bearer of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, that made him Jay Naidoo’s unlikely deputy in 1991 and his successor in 1993. He obliquely acknowledges this: `Even though I grew up through the ranks, my own strong points have not always been pure trade union bread-and-butter issues. Even when I was Jay’s deputy, he was involved in economic issues, while I was involved in politics. I was part of the ANC’s negotiating team, I was at Codesa, and at every single large bilateral. I think it was a plus for me, as I really do understand the transition.’ It’s his strong point and his weak point; ask people about Sam Shilowa and the word you’ll hear most often is `operator’. He is, says one senior trade unionist, `so politically canny he can hear the grass growing’. One of his best friends is Thabo Mbeki, and he is one of the few who has a direct hotline to President Nelson Mandela. While some in labour see this as a definite boon in terms of lobbying influence, others doubt his loyalty to the sector he is paid to represent. Let’s face it: South Africa 1996 is not an easy time and place to be a union leader. After having powered the struggle for democracy, Cosatu has found itself struggling for new definition, and often seems scattershot, disparate, rudderless. Shilowa himself frames the dilemma acutely: `We either stand accused of being a conveyor belt and in bed with the government, or we are called spoilers who just bark at all ministers and want to exercise the right of veto over government policies.’ But, while he is excellent at posing the questions about the labour movement’s future, he comes across as a man who does not, yet, have the answers. Shilowa’s old comrade, Jayendra Naidoo, who now runs Nedlac (National Economic Development and Labour Council), notes that union-bashing has become fashionable: `People want the unions to be like the Amabokoboko or the Bafana Bafana …’, part of a rainbow vision where we all collaborate and win the cup. `But the job of unions is to take up the cudgels on behalf of their membership. It is bound to be adversarial.’ In this context, it’s perhaps not surprising that Shilowa’s tenure has been troubled: he is often accused of not being able to supply the labour movement with the requisite vision, or to corral it behind the vision he has. Behind the scenes, though, Shilowa has in fact effected a victory in the privatisation debate: in a draft agreement with government last week, service delivery rather than profit generation was re-established as the primary function of state enterprises, and Cosatu has also convinced the government that, within reason, workers’ jobs have to be guaranteed within restructured state enterprises. The sticking point remains, however, whether private shareholders may purchase equity: Cosatu is adamant they may not — and that is a battle it is bound to lose. In the unions, Shilowa is known to be uncomfortable with Cosatu’s hardline anti-privatisation position, and this is seen as further evidence, by some, of the claim that he has become too close to the new elite; that he is too snazzy, too high-flying, too politically ambitious: a unionist with gold hoops in his ears.
One of his favourite tricks, when making an argument, is to make of his own mother an artefact: `My opposition to privatisation,’ he says, `is not theoretical, it’s personal. My mum will be 76 years old this year in May. Why should she walk five kilometres to go fetch water? Why should she only know about electricity because there are power lines runing over her property to a white farm? When talking about restructuring, we need to ask ourselves, how is my mother going to benefit?’ He insists that his bare feet remain planted in the dry earth of impoverished peasantry. But, both economically and socially, the truth is that he is no longer a member of either the peasantry or the working class. Whatever the card he carries says, he is a member of the new elite; recently married to Wendy Luhabe, a glam and go-getter management consultant specialising in affirmative action who was previously the first black executive of BMW. He is upwardly mobile in exact proportion to the downward mobility of those middle-class leftie intellectuals who preceded him — the Bernies and Alecs and Jays. Now they have gone to Pretoria, and the unions are run by people like Shilowa: driven, ambitious, working-class men. While Shilowa does not subject his new life to particularly rigorous self-analysis, he does deal with it with a fair amount of modesty and humour. His home, in the Roodepoort neighborhood of Weltevreden Park, is comfortably suburban rather than glamorously yuppie. In a roots-nod, Shilowa has always wanted to live under thatch: he has now bought a house with a bar in the rafters (`It used to belong to an entertainer’) where an SACP `Umsebenzi’ poster hangs a little sheepishly amid all the Lapalala action. Sure, cappuccino is on offer, but the Shilowa-Luhabe homestead is matt-finished rather than glossy, woody-African rather than slippery-Italianate. It is emphatically not, in its style or location, Northern Suburbs. And his criticism of the narrow `black upliftment’ mantra, the `it’s our turn now’ coda he encounters at dinner parties, remains acute: `Yes, black people are justified when they say democracy means more than the right to vote; that it means economic empowerment. But defining economic empowerment becomes a struggle, because there are those who believe it means the self-enrichment of a few, that we can produce our own black Oppenheimers. That’s rubbish …
`You have to engage with people who say, `Listen, apartheid benefited a few Afrikaner businesses, so surely we’re justified in doing the same thing for ourselves with privatisation?’ They’re not looking at structural transformation, they’re looking at what crumbs they’ll be able to get out of the situation.’ He `agrees to disagree’ with his wife on several issues, but they generally find theselves, both say, in the same ball park. In fact, since he’s a strugglista and she’s an entrepreneur, she often challenges him, he says, with more radical positions on workplace transformation, ones that advocate blazing ahead rather than slowly building consensus around big plans. Sam Shilowa does not balk at being sharply critical of his colleagues — and friends — now in government. But only once, in our few hours together, does he betray anger. `If you had to ask me what is the most ridiculous sentiment, the one I hate the most, it is the one from those of our colleagues in government or Parliament who say, `You don’t understand! The situation has changed!’ They say, `Leave the broader picture to us, you concentrate on shop floor issues’, but then they also accuse us of being narrowly focused on the interests of our own workers and not taking the development of the country as a whole into account.’ Whence does this anger spring? Despite the openness of his features, Sam Shilowa is very difficult to read. I’d venture to guess, though, that he sees himself very much as part of the team transforming this land, and that any hint to the contrary riles him. I would imagine, too, that he is prickly about still being treated, by the intelligentsia of the movement, as an uneducated workhorse from the shop floor who doesn’t really have the wherewithal to run things. Does he feel `left out’; `left behind’? Perhaps one could read the above outburst as defensive, but if one looks at the number of illustrious ex-unionists now languishing on the back benches of Parliament (remember Moss Mayekiso? Chris Dhlamini?), he probably thanks his stars, every now and then, that he wasn’t on the list of 20 that Cosatu handed over for the African National Congress list. But he is an intensely political — and clearly ambitious — man. All he will say about his future is that he wishes there to be a choice of leadership at Cosatu’s 1997 congress. But there must be times when he longs to be in the corridors of executive power. Despite the knocks to his image in the past couple of years, he’ll get there yet.