Three white men with a briefcase of insurance policies are the leaders of a union at war with the NUM, writes Ferial Haffajee
THE new union whose running battle with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)has claimed eight lives may have been set up as an elaborate insurance scam. The organisation, called Workers Mouthpeace, is selling insurance policies to recruits, but allegedly cancelling the policies while still collecting premiums.
The Mail &Guardian established this week that Safrican, jointly owned by Fedsure and Thebe Investments, is investigating the cancellation of its policies sold to miners through the union. Safrican managing director Sandile Mbili said this week that Mouthpeace’s failure to pay premiums “has been a nightmare”.
Workers Mouthpeace is run by brothers Piet and Matt Joubert and former mine hostel manager Peter McCleod – all have civil judgments for debt against them and little union experience. North-West province is also investigating their possible right-wing connections because the three platinum mines on which they operate lie near Rustenburg, an area long sympathetic to the far right.
The men are said to tie recruits into policies with a mixture of strongarm tactics and extravagant promises of future benefit pay-outs. A “disciplinary tribunal”, headed by McCleod, imposes fines.
It now appears they may have lost control of their creation. What started as intimidation and rivalry on Anglo-American’s platinum mines around Rustenburg is rapidly escalating: professional hit men have assassinated five NUM leaders and three of their children in three provinces: North- West, Northern Province and Eastern Cape.
This week, after two months of unrest caused by rivalry, marchers attacked police with knobkerries and other weapons near Amandelbult mine in the Northern Province. It is not clear whether the marchers were, as alleged, Mouthpeace members; the union says it does not know.
But by Wednesday, police had arrested 19 suspects and hope that their investigation will unravel the mystery of the killings. They are focusing on Mouthpeace.
Police say that their investigations thus far indicate that those killed were first publicly named at meetings of the Workers Mouthpeace and placed on a hit list.
The North-West province’s MEC for Safety and Security, Satish Roopa, says “the hits are very professional and precise”.
The murders began on June 18 when NUM shop steward Roadwell Diale was killed by three men in balaclavas, who cut the lights at the main power supply, entered his hostel room and shot him. In the latest assassination, on Sunday, ten men wrapped in miners’ blankets killed NUM member Simon Chabana and his young son in a Rustenburg hostel.
“Now we walk around armed like criminals,” says the NUM’s regional co-ordinator for Rustenburg, Mahlakeng Mahlakeng. He carries a gun tucked openly into the back of this trousers. Other unionists are armed too. They cut an incongruous sight in the yard of the former Rustenburg church that the union has just bought as its regional headquarters.
Many of the men in the yard claimed they had away run from this week’s violence at Amandelbult. “I’m under surveillance, I’m being followed,” says Mahlakeng.
Workers Mouthpeace says its membership outstrips the NUM’s, which itself claims 13 000 of Amplats’s 40 000-strong workforce. But the organisation’s lawyer in Rustenburg, Caesar Bungane, can offer no proof.
He refers such queries to the Jouberts. But Matt Joubert was away at the seaside this week and his younger brother had his cellphone switched off.
The two, who look like the wrestling champions they are said to enjoy watching, run an insurance agency called Peoples Assurance Brokers and operate their union from the same office in Carletonville on Gauteng’s West Rand.
Unusually for a trade union, recruits must pay R500 to join, a higher-than-normal subscription fee and take the insurance policies.
Amplats officials say they first came across Workers Mouthpeace earlier this year. It is thought to have grown out of the remnants of the Five Madoda, a motley, violent group that started last year’s wildcat strike over pension pay-outs. The strike crippled Amplats and ended with dismissal of the entire workforce.
Amplats rehired most workers, but those who remained sacked found a helper in Bungane, whose legal work for the NUM had ended when the union decided he was charging too much. Bungane knew the Jouberts and McCleod, the Five Madoda became the Workers Mouthpeace, and the organisation began to recruit.