Ramaphosa: Forgetful or criminally ill-advised?

WHAT was the president thinking? For a man who supposedly always has his eye on the long-term advantage, Cyril Ramaphosa clearly took his eye off the ball on this occasion.

The remarkable thing about his humiliation at a Workers’ Day gathering is not that he was jeered and had to leave without speaking. It is that he attended in the first place. Either he is becoming forgetful or he was criminally ill-advised.

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 chairman of the board – 34 miners were shot dead and 78 wounded by the SAPS during a wildcat strike. The strike was conducted by the National Union of Mineworkers, a prominent affiliate of Cosatu, the organiser of Sunday’s event.

The men were killed, as a trail of emails afterwards showed, following pleas by Ramaphosa

– who led the National Union of Mineworkers during the most tumultuous years of apartheid – to the national commissioner of police, to the mineral resources and police ministers, to act firmly against these “dastardly criminal” trade unionists.

It was about 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 and roundly condemned.

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

The Bafokeng stadium seats about 45 000 people. For a high-octane rally of this nature, where oppressed workers gather annually to celebrate their gains and challenge their losses in the battle against White Monopoly Capital, squeezing in another 10 000 would, in the past, have been no problem at all.

But the footage of Sunday’s May Day rally tells another story.

The event started five hours late, as union organisers struggled to fill the stadium. The best they could manage was a desultory crowd numbering no more than a few hundred people.

The workers did not, as claimed in some media reports, “storm the podium”. Nor did they, as claimed by Daily Maverick, “howl (Ramaphosa) off the stage”.

There were persistent but halfhearted boos, some unco-ordinated heckling, and a lot of aimless drifting around the podium by workers who looked half pissed. This was not the movement that once would have the government quaking in their goldbuckled Gucci loafers with bloodcurdling threats of “rolling mass action”.

Possibly wanting to pre-empt it from deteriorating into a spectacle, the president decided that discretion was the better part of valour and called it quits.

There are eerie echoes between this week’s event and the 2017 Workers’ Day. Foreshadowing his recall at the ANC leadership conference in December that year, president 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.

At the Bloemfontein rally, pro-Zuma and anti-Zuma factions had to be kept apart by marshals and the police, until that event, too, was abandoned without any speeches being delivered. The same happened at rallies in KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo.

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

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

Probably what will concern Ramaphosa and the ANC far more is the announcement this week by the EFF that it intends to launch its own union movement.

In an embattled economy that is beset by increasing unemployment, such a union conceivably will find fertile ground.

Not only the ANC and its alliance partners should be worried. South Africa needs a militant workers’ movement run by a political organisation that embraces violence like a hole in the head.