STRUGGLE TO ROOT OUT POLITICS
ANC ‘big shots’ accused of politicisation of the mining industry and capturing it for personal benefit
THE Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) deputy president Jimmy Gama has thrown down the gauntlet and accused ANC “big shots” of politicisation of the mining industry and capturing it for personal benefit.
Amcu told Independent Media the struggle to root out politics and capitalism of the mining industry had just begun.
With the seventh anniversary of the Marikana massacre a month away, the continued plight of close to half a million of South African mineworkers is still no better, with close to 300 miners recently staging a sit-in protest for nine days underground.
Whereas mine protests are often around meagre wages, the health issues, and working and living conditions, last month, protesting miners at Rustenburg’s Lanxess Chrome mine embarked on a nine-day underground protest against the sexual harassment and victimisation of a female worker.
They demanded the accused official be suspended and that 56 dismissed workers be reinstated.
The protest ended in victory for the miners late last month when mine management agreed not to suspend them for their actions, and agreed that the case of their 56 suspended colleagues would be placed under arbitrational review.
The miners were slapped with sixmonth warnings.
Under the apartheid regime, miners fought many battles for better working conditions and financial rewards for their hard toil extracting precious minerals from the belly of the ground.
The minerals are precious, yes, but to whom?
Definitely not the men and women who risk it all to eke out a meagre living working long shifts underground.
The 34 miners who died in Marikana in mid August 2012, South Africa’s darkest post-apartheid tragedy perished for requesting a monthly salary of R12 500 from an employer raking in billions of rand.
Seven years on the widows and families of the miners are still reeling and seething at the lack of judicial consequences for the bigwigs implicated in making calls that led to the shooting of the 34 miners.
President Cyril Ramaphosa, then a board member of Lonmin, called for “concomitant action” to be taken against the striking mineworkers before the shooting.
He has had to carry the burden of responsibility for that ever since.
Barely four months after the massacre, Ramaphosa would emerge as deputy president of the ruling ANC at its 53rd national conference in Mangaung.
Last year, during his presidential address at Struggle stalwart Winnie Madikizela-mandela’s funeral service at Orlando Stadium, Ramaphosa said he would visit the widows of the mineworkers alongside EFF leader Julius Malema.
Fifteen months later, the visit is yet to materialise.
Malema distanced himself from the visit: “I am not going with Cyril to Marikana. He did not go with me when he went to do the things he did; he must go finish what he started there.”
Ramaphosa and Gwede Mantashe, the incumbent Minister of Mineral Resources, cut their teeth in the country’s vast mineral resources industry in the mid-1970s to early 1980s.
In 1982, at the height of apartheid tensions in South Africa, Ramaphosa and Mantashe co-founded the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), with the former becoming its first secretary-general while the man from Cala, in the Eastern Cape, served as its Witbank chairperson before becoming its national organiser.
Amcu has often been critical of Ramaphosa and his former links to NUM, with Amcu’s discontent growing as the union faces possible deregistration for failure to hold a congress to elect new leadership.
Gama said a plot to deregister the union had nothing to do with noncompliance issues, but was purely a politically motivated move because of the union’s visible pro-mineworkers agenda.
“Amcu is the one union fighting for the betterment of the mining employees. In the past six years in the platinum belt, we’ve managed to substantially improve the salaries of those workers to the extent that surveys show its only the platinum sector where salaries have improved, compared to gold and coal.
“We are not affiliated to any federation like Cosatu, so when we comment on issues, we are not a union that is liked by capital and the government, so it could be a factor that they come with this to make sure there is no Amcu in South Africa,” Gama said.
He said the struggle against deregistration was nothing new, as around 2013 and 2014 it had been accused of non-compliance with the Labour Act in terms of financial accountability.
“It was all a fallacy because we’ve been submitting our financial audit results every year, so after they (the government) realised that, they came up with a lot of stories,” Gama said.
Another contentious mining issue brewing away from the big mining corporations in Gauteng and North West is at Xolobeni, Eastern Cape.
There, the community and the Department of Mineral Resources have been feuding for close to two decades with the community opposed to the issuing of a titanium mining licence to Transworld Energy and Minerals, a subsidiary of Australian mining company MRC.
The Department of Mineral Resources has since not responded to our questions on the politicisation of the mining industry by ANC leaders.
Last month, Mantashe announced there would be an independent survey in rural Xolobeni, with the community being given the opportunity to decide if mining would go ahead in the area.
After a meeting with the community, Mantashe emerged, saying: “On the basis of the outcome of the survey, we will take a firm decision on the way forward.”