Memo to Sicelo Shiceka: you don’t need the National Intelligence Agency to tell you why people are out on the streets in angry protest; you need a weather man. Sub-zero Highveld nights cut through corrugated iron and plastic pretty quickly, minister, and on the Cape Flats people find water rises swiftly through a sand floor.
You probably don’t need spooks, either, to figure out why municipal workers want more money, although an economist might help. Food prices are up; real wages, not so much. What is harder to understand is that they feel they have bargaining power at a time of surging unemployment. For that you might need a political scientist.
Either way, it is too soon to conclude from the surge in strike activity and service protests that the country is on the brink of an all-out class war. The protests are sporadic, while industrial strife has been fuelled by the annual wage round and should simmer down during the rest of the year.
But there are no grounds for complacency.
To be sure, the squeeze on workers from rising prices is a real factor, but the rise of union power, and of members’ expectations, in the wake of Jacob Zuma’s ascent to the presidency, are clearly playing a major role.
We do not believe the labour movement is a self-serving aristocracyÂ- it has played a very important part in uplifting poor communities and bringing civilised norms to the South African workplace. But that does not mean that everything the unions do, say and demand is in the national interest. The mindless militancy of the South African Municipal Workers’ Union is a case in point: every local government strike is marked by violent disruption and this year’s ”pay talks” have been a charade, with virtually all the movement coming from the employers.
Zuma is doing nothing, as far as we can tell, to manage the expectations of his supporters. Instead, he says, he is leaving it to his ministers, who don’t have the same charisma or power. With government revenues fast declining, Pravin Gordhan and municipal finance officials across the country face an impossible choice between hiking pay and cutting services. Only Zuma, the great conciliator, can help them out of the vice.
The same goes for the service protests, which are driven by people a good deal poorer than union members.
It is doubtful, too, that power struggles ahead of the 2011 local government elections are to blame for the service protests. If past poll percentages are any indication, most South Africans do not think the ballot box is the place to get results at local level.
Instead, communities tired of waiting for years for a better life while they watch their public representatives getting rich are probably concluding, from other upheavals, that the only way to focus official attention on their demands is to loot shops and throw stones. For millions of young people, as we report this week, there is little better to do. That represents an extraordinary political failure and it is not, as Tokyo Sexwale has suggested, a failure of Thabo Mbeki alone, but of his party, and of Jacob Zuma, would-be man-of-the-people.
It is too soon to say we are on the brink, but complacency will lead us there. Zuma must show that he is genuinely prepared to take action on delivery failures and corruption, to enforce the same austerity among party deployees that he expects of workers, and to have a tough conversation with the union leaders who brought him to power.
Victory of principles over principals
Sometimes the system works, not all by itself, and not without a prod, but powerfully nonetheless. This week the Mail & Guardian was involved in two important court victories. The first, shared with our competitors at Avusa, the Independent Group and e.tv, was the most high profile.
Together we convinced Judge Frans Malan of the South Gauteng High Court that the Judicial Service Commission could not lawfully bar the public and the media from its latest round of inquiries into the battle between Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe and the judges of the Constitutional Court. That investigation was under way as the M&G went to press and we were in attendance to help ensure that the process remains both rigorous and transparent.
Equally important is a decision by Judge Ntsikelelo Poswa in the North Gauteng High Court in favour of the M&G. We had asked him to set aside a finding by the public protector, Lawrence Mushwana, that our ”Oilgate” investigation into the diversion of public money into ANC Âcoffers had been poorly founded. Mushwana had also refused to consider aspects of the scandal, declaring them outside his mandate, and thus avoiding criticising the conduct of the government and the party in the affair.
Judge Poswa disagreed. He set aside the entire ruling and ordered Mushwana to start again. What is more, he said, any new investigation must take account of the findings of the Donen Commission of Inquiry into South African involvement in the Iraqi oil-for-food programme, which then president Thabo Mbeki refused to make public.
We are, it is fair to say, ecstatic — not just because of the vindication of our work, but because principles about the way our institutions function have been affirmed.
We shouldn’t have to fight with either the Judicial Service Commission or the public protector: both were set up to serve the same constitutional principles that we believe in.
But when they forget that their loyalty is to principles, rather than to their political principals, we won’t hesitate to do battle. It is clear that our courts are capable of Âsending a pretty stern reminder.