Job losses continue apace and the process seems unlikely to be reversed. That was a comment attributed to South Africa’s statistician general Pali Lehohla and it triggered an angry response from ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe. According to Mantashe, Lehohla had no right to make such an assessment.
But the statistician general is probably the best qualified person to judge such matters. In any event, in so doing, he was merely noting what authoritative bodies such as the International Labour Organisation (ILO) have agreed is a global tendency, one of the consequences of the so-called “fourth industrial revolution”.
This has for long been a wake-up call to workers everywhere and especially to their organisations, the unions. And workers, because they still control most major points of production, have a great deal of potential power.
Mantashe, a former chair of the SA Communist Party and former general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers should know this. He probably does. But he, like rest of the embattled leadership of the governing party, is currently in the business of trying to create an illusion of better times ahead, despite the factionalism that is now dangerously — sometimes lethally — underway in the ANC.
The result is that the stress is on the promise of a better future; that it is just a matter of a changing of the guard at the top of the governing party. This was the role of Cosatu last week as considerable numbers of affiliated unions took to the streets to condemn corruption but, primarily, to call to dump President Jacob Zuma in favour of Cyril Ramaphosa.
The wake-up call about looming job losses was largely ignored. As was another wake-up call specifically to South African public sector unions: the rumours of potential raids on state pension funds. These, as I said last week, were hardly allayed by finance minister Malusi Gigaba.
Warning flags should have been raised throughout the labour movement when government agreed yet another — this time R3 billion — bailout for the barely still airborne SA Airways. Because the money was found from the government’s revenue account, much of which comes from workers, employed and unemployed, who contribute by direct and indirect tax to the fiscus. So it is the disproportionate amount of cash that the sellers of labour contribute that has gone, yet again, to bail out the mismanaged and scandal-ridden national carrier.
This latest bailout adds to the R16.4 billion in government guaranteed funds already swallowed by the airline. It is an ongoing saga: two years ago, a R6.5 billion bailout was agreed on condition that SAA would provide a “90-day rescue plan within a month”.
With no signs yet of a turn around or rescue, it is little wonder that public sector unions are becoming increasingly nervous about their pension funds. But, as I pointed out last week, these monies cannot legally be touched without the complicity of the trade union trustees who serve on pension fund boards. To permit a raid on such funds would also mean trustees forgoing their fiduciary duties.
However, what the state pension fund issue has highlighted is the fact that there is a massive amount of worker money invested via trade unions. And most such funds, it can be argued, are being used to prop up the very system that the unions claim to oppose: a system that has seen joblessness grow and the wage and welfare gap widen grotesquely.
This is the antithesis of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), launched with such hope and fanfare in 1994 and, to all intents and purposes, effectively dismantled from 1996 onwards. The ANC government’s alliance partners, the SA Communist Party and Cosatu, condemned this economic trajectory as the “1996 class project”. But while they bewailed what was happening, they remained within the alliance and part of government.
The major reason for this is the poisonous belief that unity of the organisation must be maintained at all costs; that change can only come from within; that if unity is threatened, corruption and abuses of various kinds have to be tolerated. And so, from the early years of exile, this cancer became embedded within the ANC. Corrupt elements, usually with real or perceived factional support, were able to thrive. They continue to do so although the centre can no longer keep everything in check within a parliamentary democracy.
At the same time, many honest and now marginalised members calling for a principled ANC, persist with the dangerous fantasy of unity at all costs, their attitude to the organisation akin to those of religious acolytes. However, there is a growing realisation that the answer to real change does not lie with the ANC; that it must come from society’s rank and file: from the sellers of labour, united, democratically, and on the basis of principle.
Here there seems to be a clear and leading role for the unions. But only if they can return fully to their democratic roots and unite the majority of the population on the basis of such principles as those contained in South Africa’s rightly lauded Bill of Rights.
Is that, perhaps, too much to hope for?
Cape Town, South Africa-based journalist commentator and author specialising in political and economic analysis and labour matters. 
Terry Bell Writes 
Drs Sears Appalsamy
October 7, 2017
A SHARE OF 49 per cent of SAA shares should be sold to Emirates and still the 51% cold be in SA Government hands and it will still will have the majority and be the decision maker. Let Emirates bare the losses and not the South African tax payer.
fjkruger
October 8, 2017
Emirates are not deluded. They would not agree without the right to fire Myeni.
Drs Sears Appalsamy
October 7, 2017
I dont think a person like Oliver Tambo was involved in corruption in exile. I knew him personally. In moral and ethical practices he was closer to Mahatma Gnadhi and Nkosi Albert Luthuli. We should not forget that NKOSI Albert Luthuli died as a political prisoner ( house arrest) and Madiba died a free man
Terry Bell
October 7, 2017
You are right about OR Tambo. Not corrupt, However, his greatest achievement was to hold to ANC together. And at enormous cost. In doing so, he turned a blind eye to much of the corrupt and sometimes brutal behaviour that went on. And we live with the consequences. But this is an area that needs more research.
Koos Bezuidenhout
October 8, 2017
Terry
Your latest analysis is spot on of the real reasons in so far as the “inside labour” (no pun intended) world’s inability to put their diferences apart to unify and, intentionally in most cases, by artificially keeping them apart through hurdles placed by certain (thankfuly not all could be put over this barrel) labour leaders’ and their “it-normally-and-historically-comes-with-the-appointment” accompanied inflated egos and, most definitely, their perceived humungous “powerblocks” (public & private sectors alike) which “their unions” (as if it personally belongs to them) are of the opinion that they control is, in my humble view as an elected representative and ultimately retiring and the end of 2016 (after being involved as an ordinary leader since 1991) as an ex-President of the second largest Federation in South Africa and, having been on the “inside” as one of those mentioned above. I couldn’t agree with you more!
In addition, I should, with these positively intended critisism and inputs, therefore not be seen as “bashing or unjustly critisising” my fellow Brothers and Sisters in our entire labour movement as they have heard my views before (again and again and again).
The current labour leaders, all very experienced and well-versed in their roles as leaders of a dwindling “union driven” phase (research shows that only 27% of workers are unionised in relation to the total workforce) in our beloved country, are therefore “again” reminded and compelled to do everything in their power to stop the job-losses due to a fractured approach by several unions organising their members in the “same sector”.
One example is in mining – AMCU, NUM and UASA, where the terrible aftermath of the Marikana disaster created the exact and previously “totally acceptable environment” – enjoyed by the previously controlling “majority union”, due to the unacceptable principle of “majoritarianism”. The reversed roles of the two major unions created an explosive and dangerous climate with an unhappy environment and, ultimately, failed disasterously “with the shoe on another union’s foot after the death of more than 40 people” to use the opportunity to unite the labour groupings to install a hopefully new remuneration structure and better life for those who work so hard in the mines. This opportunity was ignored as it would have meant that the “power” of the big groupings would have been diluted. Bigger is not, as we all know after so many dramatic examples, always better!
However, from the utterences of the leaders from many federation and union podiums we constantly hear they are expressing the desire to grow and create a better and decent life for all. My straigh-forward question to my fellow compatriots – not my preferred word as it is regularly used in his SONA speeches by the current incumbent President of this ruined and failing country where its citizens and those who have elected specific individuals to “serve them, the constituents” are being ignored, and since my first day deployed in NEDLAC was, how difficult could it be to join forces and, at least, have a united approach on e.g. the NDP and its failed implementation?
We may differ on many NDP sections but why then prevent the implementation of those ones, where we have consensus, that will improve the country at the same time? Do we want to be constantly reminded of why many African countries to the north of us have disasterously failed their citizens because they allowed the politicians, working with their “smooth-talking mouths” and not, like our poorest of the poor citizens, with calluses on their hands eaking out a living by trying to put food on their family’s table?
Until such time that South Africans realise that the pre-1994 “political revolution” has brought the desired changes of polical and democratic power to those who were, until 1994, deprived of it by “charismatic and smooth-talking politicians” and that we now have entered, as a reality, the phase of an “economic revolution” where similar “charismatic and smooth-talking politicians” are making the rules to suit them (and their inner circle of cadre-deployments and family-related appointments as reported in the media on a daily basis) through powerful families, it just seems to an ignorant person like me very similar to the coloninial phases that our country has endured in the past.
However, if they ever want to see a positive change in the current model that is failing us socially, democratically, financially, morally and tramping on the “freedom charters and desired values”, that we as a nation had adopted in order to take us from the duldrums to a prosperous country, our current labour leaders’ refusal to even consider any proposal, that will fairly and equitably force them “to share their power with another labour group from a different backgroup”, will have to be questioned!
As I have previously said, and, if normal reactions to these sensitive but necessary openly discussed shortcomings and matters continue as we have seen reactions in the past – with “name-calling and false sensational historical misdemeaners that are suddenly unearthed and found” and here it is quite strange but true, at the very same time when people seems to differ on a serious subject, one or all will be accused by those who don’t want to hear what is the truth and what is one one attempt required to turn this incredible country of us around to become a breadbasket and an entreprenuerial decent job-creating proudly South African again!
Hopefully someone will have the guts and wisdom to reach out to take the ball and play the game to win it!