Cyril has a brain fart

What was the president thinking? For a man who supposedly always has his eye on the longterm advantage, Cyril Ramaphosa clearly took it off the ball. The remarkable thing about his humiliation at a Workers’ Day gathering on Sunday is not that he was jeered and left without speaking. It is that he attended in the first place.

The gathering was held at the Royal Bafokeng stadium in the Rustenburg platinum belt. Platinum? Miners? Marikana? Does none of this ring any bells, Mr President?

Just a decade ago, at a mine owned by Lonmin – a company of which Ramaphosa was chair – 34 miners were shot dead and 78 wounded by the police during a wildcat strike. The strike was conducted by NUM, an affiliate of Cosatu, which organised Sunday’s chilly welcome.

The men were killed, as a trail of e-mail messages afterwards showed, following pleas by Ramaphosa – who led NUM during apartheid – to the commissioner of police and police ministers, to act firmly against these “dastardly criminal” trade unionists.

So, it was as politically maladroit as it gets for the presidency to accept an invitation from Cosatu to speak to a fired-up gathering of miners in the 10th-anniversary year of a massacre in which the speaker was implicated. The optics, as the spin doctors like to say, are not good.

What has on this occasion, however, saved the president from utter humiliation is the decline of the trade union movement in numbers and influence within the tripartite alliance.

The Bafokeng stadium seats about 45 000 people. But the footage of this rally tells another story. The event started five hours late, as union organisers struggled to fill the stadium. In the end, they could manage no more than a few hundred people.

It was as politically maladroit as it gets for the president to accept an invitation to speak to miners in the 10th-anniversary year of a massacre in which the speaker was implicated.

The workers did not, as claimed in reports, “storm the podium”. Nor did they, as claimed by Daily Maverick, “howl [Ramaphosa] off the stage”. There were persistent but half-hearted boos, some uncoordinated heckling and a lot of aimless drifting around the podium by workers who looked pissed. This was certainly not the movement that once upon a time would have any government quaking in its gold-buckled Gucci loafers with threats of “rolling mass action”.

A more Churchillian leader would have persisted with his speech. But possibly wanting to pre-empt it from deteriorating into a spectacle, the president called it quits.

There are eerie echoes between this week’s event and the 2017 Workers’ Day. Foreshadowing Zuma’s recall at the ANC’s leadership conference seven months later, Jacob Zuma was similarly prevented by Cosatu members from speaking on that occasion at the Bloemfontein stadium.

Cosatu, just a month earlier, had come out against Zuma over state capture. They wanted the president to resign and for his then-deputy, Ramaphosa, to take over.

So, how much should Ramaphosa be worried? No matter how enfeebled the trade union movement has become, repudiation by Cosatu will obviously hurt, both politically and emotionally.

But who are the unions and the SA Communist Party, which both strongly opposed Zuma, going to support as an alternative to Ramaphosa? All of his likely competitors at December’s leadership conference, are Zuma cronies.

Probably what will concern Ramaphosa and the ANC far more than embarrassment in Rustenburg, is the announcement this week by the Economic Freedom Fighters that it intends to launch its own union movement.

Not only they should be worried. South Africa needs a militant workers’ movement like a hole in the head.