Reclaim Rustenburg: The NUM wants to reclaim members it lost to Amcu.
The ANC has declared war on workers and has “no respect for their opinions or needs”, the National Union of Mineworkers charged at its central committee meeting in Centurion this week.
NUM general secretary David Sipunzi launched a scathing attack on the party’s leadership of the tripartite alliance in his secretariat report, delivered at the meeting on Thursday.
“If one reads the ANC economic policy discussion document for the forthcoming policy conference, one will observe that there is no more respect for the opinion and needs of workers in the ANC. War has been declared on workers,” reads the report.
The union has 193 000 members, nearly half the 320 000 it had before 2012, when the rival Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) emerged as the preferred union of workers in the platinum belt in the North West and Limpopo.
The report appeals to the ANC to heal the rift between the tripartite alliance partners at the party’s policy conference in July.
“The alliance is currently at a very delicate stage, where some among the alliance components have begun talking about going separate ways, something that might be suicidal,” Sipunzi wrote.
The NUM has publicly joined trade union federation Cosatu’s calls for Zuma to step down as head of the country and for his deputy and the founder of the union, Cyril Ramaphosa, to take his place.
The general secretary’s chief criticism of the ANC is that “a new denialism has emerged”. “The leadership is not ready and prepared to accept and correct their mistakes. The political situation has shifted balance of power to benefit of the opposition.”
The NUM’s assessment of the ANC is that it is in a state of paralysis, Sipunzi wrote. “As we approach the elective conference, the focus is about ‘where will I be in the next regime?’, and there is complete paralysis in the organisation.”
NUM president Piet Matosa, in his address at the meeting, called for the independence of the judiciary to be protected, fearing there would be attempts to discredit judges in the wake of the Gupta email leaks.
“Clearly, many of the names that are appearing in the email saga may lead to courts and lead to jail time. So there could be attempts to defame the judiciary … The courts must be resilient and their independence uncontaminated,” Matosa said.
The NUM also expects the South African Communist Party to remain within the alliance, despite growing calls within its own ranks for it to contest elections on its own.
Sipunzi said the party had allowed itself to be drawn into “squabbles and factionalism” in the ANC. Similarly, these tensions had brought Cosatu to the brink of chaos.
“The shenanigans in the ANC are spilling over to Cosatu … Cosatu is on the verge of yet another civil war due to factions for or against ANC leadership,” Sipunzi wrote.
The NUM will also launch operation “Reclaim Rustenburg” at a planned report-back rally at the Olympia Park Stadium in the town on Saturday. It is a bid by the union to win back the thousands of members it has lost to Amcu since 2012.
So far, the union has only managed to claw back 950 of the 32 000 members it lost to Amcu around the time of the Marikana massacre in 2012, when 34 mineworkers were gunned down by police during an unprotected strike. The NUM claims it could have regained more support were it not for continued intimidation.
It will be the first time the union is returning to the North West town since a chaotic rally in 2014, when Amcu members occupied the stadium before the NUM march arrived and scuffles ensued inside the grounds, sparking a violent response from the police.
“The strategy is to regain momentum and show members in that area we are still alive and still an organisation they can rely on,” NUM deputy general secretary William Mabapa told the Mail & Guardian this week. “The danger here is that people still have a fear that if they are seen associated with NUM, they will be killed.”
The NUM’s losses have led to its representation of workers dropping to just 25% in the platinum sector. But Rustenburg remains the NUM’s second-largest region, topped only by Gauteng, known by the region’s old name of PWV.
The 2014 rally was addressed by ANC deputy president Ramaphosa, who boldly proclaimed that the platinum belt “belongs” to the NUM, a statement that has since been disproved.
Mabapa and other senior NUM leaders such as Matosa are hoping Ramaphosa will again address the rally to strengthen the union’s campaign. Ramaphosa’s office could not confirm whether he will attend.
If he does, it will be his first trip to Rustenburg since he apologised for the “inappropriate language” he used in an email that called for concomitant action to be taken by police to deal with the Lonmin workers’ strike, a day before the Marikana massacre.
He was a nonexecutive director of Lonmin at the time and was accused of being complicit in the deaths, although the commission of inquiry into the massacre later cleared him.