Barry Streek
The cooperative movement in South Africa, which collectively commands assets worth millions of rands, is to reorganise itself into national and provincial forums to mobilise resources and lobby for support and changes in the laws affecting the sector, including the possible appointment of a minister of cooperatives.
The decision to promote cooperatives was endorsed by Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Erwin and Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Thoko Didiza at a recent conference of the cooperative movement, held in Johannesburg two weeks ago.
Erwin said South Africa has a strong tradition of left-wing parties, like the South African Communist Party, and any left-wing party is not worth its name if it did not take cooperatives seriously.
Although a strong trade union movement has been established and unions has attempted various forms of cooperative action, no significant cooperative movement have emerged apart from those established by the Mineworkers’ Development Agency (MDA).
Erwin said his department had made a decision that in its restructuring it would establish a special division to deal with the empowerment of enterprises, including collective enterprises. He also pointed out that any new legislation on cooperatives would cover all sectors of the economy, not agriculture exclusively. On the other hand, Didiza told the conference that whereas the government is required to create an enabling environment for cooperatives to thrive, the government would not give grants to cooperatives because, by their very nature, these are entities that should be self-sustaining.
Vishwas Satgar of the Cooperative and Policy Alternative Centre told the Mail & Guardian there are about 1 400 formally registered cooperatives in South Africa and thousands of informal cooperatives, such as burial societies and stokvels.
Satgar said the new movement would seek to draw in people in the informal sector, self-employed people, trade unions and NGOs.
Although Satgar could not give the exact amount of capital that cooperatives have in cash and assets, he singled out burial societies, which exist outside of the banking sector, and said these societies were “sitting on millions”.
A vision document adopted at the conference states the important role that cooperatives can play in economic empowement of previously disadvantaged groups.
“We do not believe that cooperatives are a substitute for the state and neither should they be appendages. The state has an enabling and supportive role to play that would ensure conditions are conducive for the development of a mass-based cooperative movement.”
The vision document calls for “easy-to-use legislation and registration procedures, cheap capital, technical training, accreditation for cooperative service and support organisations and tax incentives” as some of the crucial policy support the state could provide.
The conference also endorsed the principles established by the International Cooperative Alliance, which includes voluntary and open membership, democratic member control, autonomy and independence and cooperation.
A notable trend in the development of cooperatives in South Africa came with the re-emergence of black trade unions in the 1970s and 1980s. Examples include cooperatives established after rubber workers were dismissed in the BTR Sarmcol strike at Howick in KwaZulu-Natal, but many later collapsed because they were not financially sustainable.
However, lessons could be drawn from the MDA, the development and job-creation wing of the National Union of Mineworkers. The MDA was established in 1988 after more than 250 000 miners lost jobs, and a grid of development centres was set up throughout the country to provide business and technical training and to help the retrenched miners establish viable ventures, including cooperatives.