Mantashe’s ill temper has hurt the ANC

For those of us who were in the trade union movement in the 1980s, Gwede Mantashe was widely recognised as a very strong and militant worker leader in the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), then the largest and most powerful affiliate of the trade union federation Cosatu.

He worked at the Matla colliery in Witbank. We saw him as an emerging leader of the NUM, one who would probably go places.

True to prospects, Mantashe rose to the position of general secretary of the NUM in 1997, taking the place of Kgalema Motlanthe, who was elected secretary general of the ANC at its Mafikeng conference that year. Mantashe held the post until he, in turn, became party secretary general at the ANC’s Polokwane conference in 2007.

Mantashe has strong leadership qualities, which we must recognise. But he often overreaches himself, shoots from the hip and is temperamental, tough and even harsh, especially with the media and critics of the ANC.

He told me that his temper comes from his mother, who apparently had a strong, dominant personality, even in relation to his father. She was a no-nonsense woman who shaped Mantashe’s character. He seemed proud of the fact.

The problem, politically, is that he has a very strong – even excessive – sense of himself. His lack of discretion and restraint may have had serious consequences for the organisations he has led.

It was mainly because of Mantashe that Joseph Mathunjwa was expelled from the NUM and formed the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu). The rest is history, and a very dramatic and telling one at that.

A poignant case of the “vengeance of history” was not just the birth of Amcu in direct opposition to the NUM, but that it also went on to wrest control of key mines from the NUM, especially in Marikana, which has come to symbolise the new, militant class struggle of miners and the broader working class.

I often wonder how Mantashe feels about the dramatic developments in which Amcu has become the majority union in former NUM strongholds. In hindsight, did he have any regrets about Mathunjwa’s expulsion and what it led to?

Mantashe also played a big role in the expulsion of the former president of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, with political consequences as serious and dramatic as the consequences to labour of the expulsion of Mathunjwa from the NUM.

The million-plus votes won by Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters in the recent elections, just eight months after being formed, is unprecedented in any election in the history of South Africa. I have no doubt that many in the new ANC leadership elected at Mangaung in 2012 regretted the expulsion of Malema.

There was much speculation at the time that Mantashe had been wanting Malema out before that. How Mantashe dealt with Malema and the rest of the youth league leadership in Luthuli House was decidedly not nice, constructive, comradely or exemplary. Mantashe wanted Malema to be put in his place in a very authoritarian manner.

Mantashe may have followed in Motlanthe’s footsteps when it came to key positions such as the NUM leadership and then the secretary generalship of the ANC, but Mantashe seems to have taken no lessons from Motlanthe’s leadership style. On the Malema matter, as Motlanthe tells us in the biography of him that I wrote, he favoured a “political solution” rather than expulsion for the errant ANCYL leader. For Motlanthe, how the parent body dealt with the league was critical to the future of both organisations.

Mantashe’s often angry, cold and scornful condemnation of critics has been chilling at times. But nothing prepared me for the public relations disaster of two weeks ago when he accused “foreign forces” of attempting to use the strike by Amcu to “destabilise” the South Afri­can economy – and this because a white Swedish woman is part of the Workers and Socialist Party, which supported the Amcu-led platinum strike. The accusation was so far-fetched and misplaced that it was laughable.

Besides the implicit xenophobia and racism of his utterance, it was terribly condescending and insulting to the affected mineworkers – the constituency from which he comes. Did he forget that internationalism and solidarity have always been hallmarks of the international trade union movement? Would he have complained if the NUM had been on strike and received such support? No!

What has happened to the progressive, anti-racist and revolutionary former mineworker? When the Mail & Guardian interviewed him in 2011 and asked if he had presidential ambitions, he did not discount the possibility.

This is a man who can be infectiously jovial, even reasonable – but not, unfortunately, when such attributes are most needed in the hurly-burly of his political work.

Ebrahim Harvey is an independent political writer and the biographer of former deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe