ANC is not unlike new ‘churches of prosperity’. Business Day, 18 February 2011. Anthony Butler

President Jacob Zuma has been widely admonished for his recent claim that opposition voters support “the man who carries a fork” and “cooks people”. He has also been criticized for his insistence that holders of African National Congress (ANC) membership cards have a fast-track to heaven, and for his warning that those who abandon the liberation movement will be cast out by their ancestors and “struggle until they die”.

Zuma’s remarks shed fascinating light on the changing role of religion in South African political life. The South African Native National Congress, as the ANC was first known, was founded and led by Christian converts and former mission school pupils who propagated values of moral improvement and respectability.

When the ANC was first convulsed by ideological conflict in the late 1920s, the communist insurgents believed themselves to be “scientific socialists”. However, they remained prisoners of the Christian values expressed thus in Acts, Book 4: “There was no poor person among them, since whoever possessed fields or houses sold them …and a distribution was made to each one in accordance with his needs.”

Today, Christian concepts have fused in unexpected ways with African systems of ideas. The partisan pursuit of sectional interests and values at the expense of communal cohesion – known to its supporters as “healthy democratic competition” — has been regarded as divisive across most of the political history of Christian societies. Cabals, factions, and political parties themselves have been viewed as threats to the “one perfect body” to which a Christian people should aspire.

This view has echoed and reinforced African conceptions of the legitimacy of “communal” governance. It is a small step from the celebration of one indivisible community to the demonising of the official opposition’s leader as a Satanist or “high priestess” of disunity.

The recent growth of organized religion in this country has been influenced by what is sometimes called “prosperity theology”. A 2006 Pew Forum survey suggested that eight out of every ten South African Christians believe that God “grants material prosperity to all believers who have enough faith”.

In many fast-growing churches, worshippers are preoccupied with the blessings to which they feel entitled as a result of their faith. Church services include testimonials that link religious devotion to wealth. The pastors who lead these churches demand substantial tithes and enjoy lavish personal lifestyles. The plight of the poor must not be ignored — this is the sin of the man named Lazarus – but personal wealth should nevertheless be celebrated and pursued. In the words of the Rhema church’s school of business, believers should aspire to “impact the marketplace with Christ.”

There is a remarkable ethical parallel between the prosperity churches and the liberation movement.

In a prosperity church, worshippers’ tithes support the ostentatious wealth of the pastor, and the congregation’s members understand their success and bodily health as signs of divine intervention and as rewards for their religious devotion.

In the contemporary ANC, wealthy cadres make substantial donations to support the administrative and campaigning expenses of the movement. When they do business, they give the ANC a cut of the spoils. The tenders and job opportunities that come their way are accepted as an expression of grace — as a sign that they are in good standing with the movement to which they have devoted their lives.

It is probably the questionable legitimacy of new-found wealth that explains these striking parallels. The ANC and the new churches have not forgotten the poor but they do not know how to help them. Yet it remains an affront against African communalist ethics – and indeed against the morality of any decent society — for individuals to live in luxury amidst a sea of poverty, while withholding the fruits of their good fortune from their extended families and communities. The ANC and the prosperity churches have found a way to render such personal enjoyment of wealth legitimate in a morally rich but profoundly unequal society.

A deep-seated national prejudice against conspicuous consumption has been exposed in recent weeks. First there was a furore around businessman Kenny Kunene’s nibbles from sushi-bedecked women. Then journalists ridiculed a Department of Public Works’ tender for golden gravy ladles, cut-glass champagne glasses, and Persian carpets “of presidential standard” for the Bryntirion ministerial estate. Soon afterwards, a Sunday newspaper complained that officials and ministers had flown business class to New York on a “shopping junket”.

Stern media moralists appear to share the view first advanced by Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, Heribert Adam, and Kogila Moodley in 1998, that the liberation movement has been “liberated into the bourgeois lifestyle of its opponents”. In their book Comrades in Business they ridiculed male ANC MPs for their “daring ties, silk and quasi-military style suits” and their female counterparts for “fancy hats and ostentatious dresses”.

Such critics do not offer a balanced account of the role of shopping in South African society.

First, shopping played a significant role in the country’s transition to democracy. Sociologist Jonathan Hyslop observed more than a decade ago that, “as barricades burned in the townships, and armoured vehicles rolled through their streets, whites poured endlessly into the shops and malls in an apparent frenzy of consumption”. Middle class whites, and especially socially mobile Afrikaners, attached themselves to “lifestyle” aspirations. When the crunch came, shopping proved to be more important to them than defending a moribund racial ideology.

Second, conspicuous consumption provides the only conceivable basis for the development of a cross-racial national identity in South Africa.

Third, materialism in South Africa is balanced by conservative social attitudes. An article in International Journal of Consumer Studies last August showed that countries such as China have a far more advanced consumption culture than ours. For Chinese youth, material possessions now lie at the centre of conceptions of human happiness.

South Africans often delight in being seen to consume goods rather than in actually consuming them. They enjoy passing time in underground shopping malls devoid of natural light. Their hearts are stirred by the great names in South African retailing: Pick n Pay, Mr. Price, Foschini, Clicks, and Spur. Who can visit Sandton City or the 60,000 square metres of Soweto’s Maponya Mall and leave unmoved by the greatness of their creators’ imaginations?

In most societies, shopping is an instrument of class division. The aesthetic preferences of the rich and the powerful are viewed as superior to the tastes of the lower classes. Yet in South Africa, aesthetics are becoming uniquely and genuinely democratic: whatever their race and gender, and no matter how poor or wealthy they may be, absolutely everyone appears to have bad taste.

We must not forget the dark side of materialism. Poor citizens are excluded from the new catherdrals of consumption. Poverty continues to serve as a barrier to the creativity and individuality that could potentially be expressed through still more national participation in shopping.

The significance of shopping has been hidden by the sinister brotherhood of South African historians who have mostly limited their research to the realm of production (noble workers and exploitative captains of industry). They have ignored shopping as a women’s activity of little relevance to historical and political change.

In recent years, however, it is South Africa’s male politicians who have taken to consumer culture like fish to an aquarium. Gay icon and ANC Youth League president Julius Malema is so beautifully dressed that he sometimes resembles a shop window dummy. Rugged police commissioner Bheki Cele has shown that even a tough guy can expose his feminine side, by shopping for hats and dressing up for fun in fake military uniforms. It cannot be long before shopping is recognized as a key “motive force” in the ANC’s national democratic revolution.

A Business Day column from 4 Feb 2011. Anthony Butler

Recent African National Congress (ANC) deliberations about the ethics of sushi consumption demonstrate how hard it has become to fashion a coherent moral framework for a fast-changing liberation movement.

The furore has centred on businessman Kenny Kunene who earned notoriety last year for employing bikini-clad women, adorned with sushi, as human plates at a Johannesburg party. At a Cape Town event last weekend to celebrate his new nightclub he arranged a repeat performance.

ANC leaders initially seemed uncertain whether the problem was Kunene’s crass materialism or his denigration of women. ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe rather precisely demanded that cadres disengage with immediate effect from eating sushi from women’s bodies. He left it unclear whether a more substantial meal – perhaps a burger with fries — might be viewed as less counter revolutionary.

Youth League spokesman Floyd Shivambu, apparently misconceiving the matter as a health and safety complaint, stated that the League disapproves of “serving any kind of food on human bodies”.

Only the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) directly condemned “stripping women and reducing them to sex symbols for the pleasure of men”. Unfortunately women are rather thin on the ground at Cosatu House and the federation’s gallant observation that “our country will not be free until women’s dignity is protected by all genuine revolutionaries” sounded an unavoidably patronising tone.

It is tempting but unwise to celebrate the ANC leadership’s condemnation of Kunene. The businessman fell quickly into line, accepting not that he was wrong but rather that he is dependent on the ANC to make money and so will not risk offending it. The next time political leaders threaten to destroy a businessman for affronting their conservative values their gripe may concern the promotion of homosexuality or the creation of controversial artworks.

Alongside the sushi fiasco it has also been a week for pork. “Pork barrel politics” refers to the state’s provision of publicly funded goods to narrow constituencies. Two juicy examples, both concerning KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), have hit the headlines in the past few days.

First, speculation has returned that a massively expensive high-speed rail link between Johannesburg and Durban will soon be approved.

The chief executive of the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa warned last year that the national rail system faces collapse within a decade. Minister for transport Sibusiso Ndebele responded that his department lacked the budget to recapitalise the system at the required annual level of R5 billion.

Ndebele’s subsequent announcement of an apparent white elephant – one that will benefit only KZN’s business and political elites at a cost of hundreds of billions of Rand — has inevitably raised eyebrows. The minister has now hilariously obliged his deputy director-general for transport logistics to formulate plans for an imaginary multi-city high-speed network, of which the Durban-Johannesburg link will purportedly just be the first stage.

A second piece of KZN pork was unveiled this week by sports minister Fikile Mbalula. The minister insisted on Tuesday that South Africans must rush into nominating a host city to bid for the 2020 Summer Olympic Games. He pretended that four hosts are in the running despite Cape Town’s repeated denials and the evident lack of credibility of Nelson Mandela Bay or Johannesburg.

Although Durban is unlikely to secure the dubious right to host the games, the bid process itself will enable the diversion of bounteous public resources to KZN’s political and business class and further facilitate the political rise of Mbalula.

Special interests, notably in South Africa’s collusive construction industry, are already out in force defending these frankly ludicrous projects. Shameless consultants will soon be handsomely rewarded for preparing the required “feasibility studies” and “technical assessments”. All this pork is as morally reprehensible as Kunene’s sushi. And it is our moralising ANC leaders who are planning to distribute it.

An excerpt from a piece in Business Day, 21 June, 2010, published under the title “Whites’ failure to say sorry holds back SA’. Anthony Butler

In South Africa there is curiously little discussion of whites’ failure, collectively and at the level of their political leadership, to apologise to blacks for the apartheid system, and to ask for forgiveness for the specific atrocities in which it resulted.

Post-apartheid public intellectuals have mostly followed former Anglican Archbishop’s Desmond Tutu’s nostrum that “without forgiveness there is no future”. In 1995, Tutu even described forgiveness as a done deal. He conceived South Africa as “a living example of how forgiveness may unite people”, and insisted that “our miracle would almost certainly not have happened without the willingness of our people to forgive.”

Tutu’s conflation of moral forgiveness with psychotherapy does not do justice to the necessary role of repentance. Although one might conceivably forgive the dead, for example, the normal meaning of the word requires that an offer of forgiveness can, at least in principle, be understood and embraced by the wrongdoer.

If the process of forgiveness is to be concluded, moreover, it requires of the wrongdoer that he understand that he has done wrong. It must therefore be preceded by remorse and then by self-forgiveness — for surely one can only truly accept forgiveness from others when one has forgiven oneself?

Most whites have not begun to take that first step. Former state president FW De Klerk, a formidable strategist but not a statesman, set the pattern of evasion that still characterises white sentiment today. There has been no apology – just equivocation and amnesia, followed directly by the blather of the “open opportunity society”.

When the issue of responsibility is pushed, Afrikaners and English cynically point the finger at each other for a system from which they benefitted together.

The result of this poor leadership and moral cowardice is that whites have been unable to accept, or even to understand, the forgiveness that blacks have offered them. When forgiveness is thrown back in the face of an injured party, bitterness is supplemented with frustration, and new generations grow up with anger in their hearts.

Perhaps because of close relations between adult African women and white children in their care, Africans in this country have continued to treat whites as moral infants who cannot be held fully responsible for their actions. To hold a wrongdoer to account, however, is at its core an act of respect, because it treats that guilty party as a fully moral person.

Tutu’s therapeutic sentimentality has almost had its day. Sometimes, where rights have been violated, the pursuit of retribution is inescapable – and ultimately it can be good for injured parties and wrongdoers alike.

The offering — and true acceptance — of forgiveness still offers the most promising path forward for all South Africans. But until whites can bring themselves to say sorry, they should not be surprised if black people argue for retribution.

Published in Business Day, 26 October, 2009, under the title, ‘Excluding treasury will serve Zuma, not the left’. Anthony Butler.

The South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) have become disoriented dupes of President Jacob Zuma’s conservative administration. Leftist intellectuals have abandoned planning and instead adopted an ill-advised critique of “treasury domination”.

First, the left wants treasury stripped of its control of economic policy. SACP theorists complain that the economy is still dominated by resources groups, and by financial and agro-processing conglomerates. Growth is not absorbing available labour, savings are low, and the small business sector is stagnant.

Why are these pathologies the treasury’s fault? Treasury has allegedly been obsessed with fiscal and monetary stability and an excessively conservative pursuit of low inflation, all buttressed by an “indefensible” inflation targeting regime.

Treasury “bean counters” have supposedly disallowed strategic industrial policy and obstructed the developmental mobilisation of state-owned agencies and infrastructure programmes. They have also overlooked the positive externalities that public investment in health, education and rural development could generate.

The treasury has been under even heavier fire for its second key role as manager of public expenditure. Its macro-economic stance allegedly obliges it to control spending at any cost. Its junior officials veto programmes that might increase human welfare and expand the productive potential of the economy. A treasury preoccupied by bilateral wars of attrition with individual departments has meanwhile failed to introduce overarching appraisals of the value of public spending.

Treasury’s third key role has been in the strategic co-ordination of government. The left complains that treasury’s divide-and-rule negotiations with individual departments are incompatible with the planning, long-term strategic thinking, and information-sharing required for effective governance.

This treasury critique is in some respects highly persuasive, but the left’s proposals for corrective action are poorly considered. In the absence of credible alternative economic policies and instruments, stripping the treasury of power is worse than futile.

Where the left has been given free rein to develop such alternatives — in creating new regulatory institutions, formulating industrial policies, leveraging infrastructural programmes, and setting out sector strategies — progress has been painfully slow or non-existent. Private and state monopolists have meanwhile used the languages of “strategic development” to cloak planning fiascos and procurement abuses.

Jacob Zuma has been here before and he knows that economic development minister Ebrahim Patel has few policy cards to put on the table. When Zuma and his then comrade-at-arms Thabo Mbeki were last suppressing the left in the mid-1990s, they used exactly the same ruse: they assigned a lame-duck economic portfolio (the RDP office) to a mild-mannered and institutionally disempowered trade union leader.

On public spending, the left’s diagnoses are again more persuasive than its remedies. The treasury, for all its failings, has introduced a culture of justification into the public expenditure process. Every supplicant alike – a leftist minister proposing a strategic investment, a rent-seeking special interest, or an opportunist looking to boost his personal patronage powers — has been obliged humbly to justify his demand for scarce resources.

Treasury officials can be arrogant and they sometimes cut out good proposals along with the bad. But treasury arrogance and discipline have partly insulated national departments against the disorder and financial mismanagement that plague provincial and local government.

The treasury’s coordination and planning failings are well known. A year ago, the left championed the planning commission to address precisely these limitations. Suddenly the left has turned full about and instead now backs what may be far-reaching changes to the functioning of the cabinet system.

National government coordination has rested on a system of cabinet subcommittees or “clusters” that bring only relevant ministers and officials into play. Over the past decade, treasury has been represented on all cluster committees at all levels to ensure that resource considerations are mainstreamed into policy development.

Last week, the presidency announced that reorganised ministerial committees for human development, social protection, and justice would henceforth have no finance ministry representation. Forum of Directors-General (FOSAD) clusters are to be “re-configured” in the same way.

If true, this is a dramatic and foolhardy change. It is hard to believe that treasury representatives should be absent, at any stage, from committees that take decisions with major resource implications.

The SACP and COSATU may have been misled that the human development cluster can now formulate public policy on national health insurance, or higher education and training, without being subjected to treasury-imposed financial discipline. The real beneficiaries of treasury exclusion will be Zuma’s close political allies in the justice cluster who may now treat even cursory treasury oversight as beneath them.

Zuma has chosen provincial politicians with provincial mindsets to chair many of his cabinet committees. If the treasury culture of justification continues to be eroded by its unthinking detractors, the provincial patronage-based tender and procurement model may firmly establish itself across the national sphere of government.

Butler teaches politics at Wits University

Published in Business Day on 19 May 2008 under the title, ‘Lovable Zuma may be harder to keep from perpetual power’. Anthony Butler

When former President Nelson Mandela last week praised the new African National Congress (ANC) leadership at a ceremonial to mark his acceptance of the Freedom of the City of Tshwane, he may have been speaking from a sense of personal regret.

Mandela, after all, chose Thabo Mbeki to be his deputy president. He then set precedents, such as the neglect of HIV/AIDS, informal schmoozing with business people, and the cultivation of a personality cult, that prefigured some of the worst aspects of his successor’s rule.

By the time Mandela realised Mbeki’s limitations it was too late to stop him. OR Tambo’s determined protégé quickly fused, and so multiplied, the powers of the offices of state and ANC president.

It is not an easy time to reflect on lessons to be learned from President Thabo Mbeki’s rise and fall because a chorus of his former praise-singers are noisily blaming him for each and every ill that afflicts the region. Nevertheless, it is only prudent to consider the potential dangers posed by his most likely successor, Jacob Zuma, a man inexplicably buoyed by an airy and inappropriate optimism.

It is comforting for some to attribute all of SA’s ills to the person and personality of Thabo Mbeki, and to suppose that once he has departed a great cloud will be lifted. However, three major weaknesses undermine this rosy scenario.

First, Mbeki possessed certain valuable capabilities that will be greatly missed when they are gone. He was willing to shoulder the immense unpopularity that came with championing economic stabilisation, and he fiercely protected his finance minister’s right to take controversial decisions.

He resisted blackmail by special interests in the trade union movement and big business, and he astutely ignored the South African Communist Party’s empty threat to throw itself on the mercy of the electorate. He refused to humour white denialists about their culpability for apartheid, and he rejected the easy pretence that race does not matter any more. In all these respects, Mbeki’s replacements already show a tendency to find and then to follow the paths of least resistance.

Second, the practical problems that destroyed Mbeki have not gone away. The social environment has worsened dramatically as a result of the maturing HIV/AIDS epidemic which will very soon leave a million – and then two million — South Africans in need of anti-retroviral drugs. Obstacles to sustainable and universal ARV provision remain deeply entrenched and there is little reason to hope that more rational leadership can turn around this deepening crisis.

Service delivery shortfalls will continue to grow, in part because the low-hanging fruit of the Mbeki era have already been picked. Only hard cases now remain in areas such land reform, household services, and the education system. There will also be a Polokwane payback period which will divert energies and involve a costly rotation of snouts at the provincial procurement trough.

Third, the uniquely favourable economic environment Thabo Mbeki enjoyed for a full decade is over, and inequality, poverty and unemployment can be expected to maintain their hold.

The successor will endure continued political turbulence and he may be forced to respond to it in very much the same way as Mbeki. Centralisation in Luthuli House had the primary functions of controlling factionalism, neutralising ethnic and racial entrepreneurs, regulating the worst extremes of corruption and patronage, and maintaining the liberation movement as a professional electoral machine. The stifling of debate, imposition of office-holders, and insulation of leaders from competition were mostly unintended side-effects of this well-meaning – and perhaps necessary — process of central control.

The new ANC leadership has emphasised that collective decision making will replace Mbeki’s factionalist power monopoly. The National Executive Committee’s array of redoubtable sub-committee chairs, and a secretary general now armed with a policy institute, will supposedly keep a rein on the state president and control appointment and deployment processes.

Such hopes fly in the face of history. Once Jacob Zuma is entrenched in the Union Buildings, with a landslide election victory behind him, he is certain to expand his authority rapidly. Even the leaden-footed and unsympathetic Mbeki was able to accumulate powers relentlessly and to sideline rivals and antagonists using the instruments of state power.

Patronage and political intelligence, once injected with the emotions of sycophancy and fear that a president excites, propelled even Mbeki dangerously close to perpetual power. How much harder will it be to contain the ambitions of the loveable, resilient and quick-footed Jacob Zuma?

Butler teaches public policy at UCT

Published in Business Day on 17 September, 2007, under the title, ‘SA politicians show their spirit’

Should South Africans celebrate the recent discovery of an unexpected spiritual dimension in some of the country’s political leaders?

Earlier this year, churchmen from the Full Gospel Church, the eThekwini Community Church, and the Miracles Gospel Church conferred the honorary title of “pastor” upon African National Congress (ANC) deputy president Jacob Zuma. Pastor Vusi Khoza, who presided over the May 2007 ceremony, brushed aside the disapproval of some larger churches: “We stick by our decision to honour Zuma. He will continue to carry the mandate of Jesus Christ for us.”

Now citizens hear the news that the country’s largest church, the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), has taken a special interest in President Thabo Mbeki.

On 2 September, His Grace Bishop Barnabas Lekganyane, paramount leader of the ZCC, invited Mbeki to attend the church’s latest assembly in Moria, a meeting that attracted a staggering two-and-a-half million believers.

Mbeki recalled Bishop Lekganyane’s sermon at some length ten days ago in his regular letter in ANC Today. His recounting came complete with sub-titles – such as “the leaders we need” and “the role of the media” – in order that inattentive readers should not underestimate the significance of Lekganyane’s words.

The “leaders we need”, the hereditary paramount ZCC leader observed, are not born of “meaningless quarrels”. True leadership is based on “service to the nation” and not on “serving your interests and fighting over leadership”.

Meanwhile, Lekganyane’s account of the proper “role of the media” echoed the philosophy propounded by SABC chief executive Dali Mpofu. Although Mpofu is not a ZCC member, and may not be strongly associated in the public mind with ZCC values such as dutifulness and abstinence, he would concur with Lekganyane that the role of the media is “to educate, to transform and inspire our nation”. The bishop’s castigation of “negative reporting”, which encourages disrespect for community values and for the rule of law, likewise recalls the state broadcasting supremo’s recent extensive ruminations on the subject.

His Grace also ventured into the field of health policy, advising the youth to abstain from premature engagement in “adult activities”, and demanding that unnamed villains should “please stop misleading our children that there is a cure” for HIV/AIDS.

In Mbeki’s emotional recollection, the Bishop concluded with a prayer for the President and his cabinet that they might “overcome the challenges they have [faced] in fulfilling their mandate to make a better life for all.” Celebrating achievements such as Nepad, Lekganyane commented that “Your expertise has made us great”.

Mbeki, perhaps unsurprisingly, concludes that “Bishop Lekganyane addressed all these important matters as the leader, and on behalf of, the millions of members of the ZCC,” his words suggesting that His Grace was delivering a vote of confidence on behalf of his church and its many members in the president and his government.

Such an interpretation of the paramount leader’s sermon, however, is misleading. In the apartheid era, after all, ZCC doctrine confused almost all outsiders. Some highlighted what they saw as the church’s tolerance for apartheid evils, and accused the ZCC of “political acquiescence”. Others took the contrary view that the ZCC’s rituals and superficial conservatism concealed a robust cultural resistance to colonialism or even a powerful political protest against apartheid.

As Bishop Lekganyane explained the crux of the matter more than twenty years ago, ZCC theology demands that “a man cannot be a follower of God without rendering due respect to the earthly government which He has ordered.” For this reason, “the President, Prime Minister, Ministers of State, chiefs, and all members of administration, are in authority over you.”

One consequence of this doctrine was that the current Bishop’s father, His Grace Edward Lekganyane, invited representatives of the National Party to Moria even in the immediate aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre. In 1965, when Minister of Bantu Affairs de Wet Nel visited a conference, Bishop Edward thanked government for its “kindness” and “goodwill”.

Two weeks ago in Moria, Bishop Barnabas Lekganyane doubtless conferred upon President Thabo Mbeki the respect due to him as state president. However, this same obligation to a secular authority was evident in April 1985 when Lekganyane invited state president PW Botha to celebrate the 75^th Easter Paseka of the ZCC with him. His Grace prayed to God to “keep our state president and Mrs. Botha safe from harm” and awarded PW the “Freedom of Moria”.

The Groot Krokodil inevitably interpreted this gesture as tacit support for the apartheid regime and gratefully told ZCC members that “you respect law, order and authority. I have come to tell you that we see this.”

Botha’s gloating was based upon ignorance of a theology that insists on due respect for the earthly authorities created by God. In 1986, a year after Botha’s visit, in a sermon delivered to believers and reported only in the ZCC’s official newsletter, the Bishop spoke quite unequivocally about institutionalised racism: “The ZCC, and I as a leader, detest apartheid together with all of its discriminatory laws”.

Despite often profound social conservatism, ordinary members were also a long way from the mindless accommodators of apartheid they were often made out to be. Indeed, when all opposition parties were unbanned in 1990, thousands of ZCC believers immediately became ANC activists.

Today, the Zionist obligation to respect secular authority still conceals a wide spectrum of political opinion and a high degree of underlying political sophistication. Members of the ZCC will not be swayed, and are unlikely to be impressed, by attempts from whatever quarter to mobilise them as recruits in a merely political campaign to advance factional or personal interests.

Butler teaches public policy at UCT.

Published in Business Day on 8 August 2007, under the title, ‘When mineworkers changed the course of SA history’. Anthony Butler

Exactly twenty years ago [now a little over thirty], the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) launched the most staggering industrial action of the apartheid era. On the evening of 9 August 1987, the night shift of gold and coal miners refused to enter the cages that normally hurtled them deep into the ground. On 10 August, as an unprecedented 300 000 mineworkers downed tools, the great mineworkers’ strike had begun.

The strike took place at a political turning point. The exile ANC was wedded to a purely symbolic “armed struggle”, and Oliver Tambo had conceded that victory could only come from “the people inside South Africa … as a result of their reliance on themselves.” A wave of popular discontent was sweeping across the country to which government had responded with a national state of emergency. The leadership of the United Democratic Front that coordinated domestic opposition was harassed and detained.

Trade unions were increasingly acting as surrogate vehicles for attacks on the regime. NUM general secretary Cyril Ramaphosa explicitly linked industrial and anti-apartheid protest, telling Anglo American patriarch Harry Oppenheimer to his face that the mining industry was “the furnace in which race discrimination was baked” and still relied on “the exploitative migrant labour system and police oppression”. The NUM adopted the Freedom Charter, elected Nelson Mandela honorary president, and marched under banners reading “The Year Mineworkers Take Control”.

Responding to the union threat, Minister of Law and Order Adriaan Vlok determined that COSATU House, where NUM was housed, was fostering a “revolutionary climate”. He engaged Security Branch Unit C1, also known as Vlakplaas, to “neutralise” the problem. On the night of 7 May, a team of 16 Vlakplaas operatives equipped with silenced AK-47 rifles and explosives destroyed the building with two massive blasts. When NUM workers came to work the following morning, they found their third-floor desks in the basement.

Meanwhile, subterranean power shifts at the Main Street headquarters of Anglo American were also propelling the company towards a showdown. Anglo’s earlier embrace of “modernised” labour relations and voluntary union recognition agreements had resulted in high unionization but brought few corresponding benefits. Mine managers complained to their bosses on Main Street that they were losing control of “their mines” to the NUM.

Meanwhile, all the big houses were running out of mineable gold and the gold price was plummeting dramatically. Mines would soon have to close and low grade ore would have to be left in the ground, implying that any show-down with the NUM would not merely be about one year’s wage increases. NUM had to be decisively defeated if the company was to control the rationalisation process head. Many Anglo executives even wanted to wipe out the union.

The industry had sufficient lead time to build up gold and ore stockpiles, recruit vigilantes, and plan for mass recruitment of strike-breakers from neighbouring countries. As the strike unfolded, striking mineworkers were subjected to violence from police and mine security forces equipped with armoured cars and surveillance helicopters, but the strike dragged on improbably into a third week.

By then, the strike had to be brought to a rapid end one way or another if mining house assets were not to be destroyed. Deep-level mines operate under unimaginable geological pressures, and depend for survival on the regular maintenance of mine supports, roofs and walls. Despite internal rifts among bosses, the Chamber of Mines and Anglo refused to offer any concessions on headline wages that NUM leaders could sell to their members. They opted for a strategy of mass dismissals and reprisals against organisers, an approach that had the potential to destroy the union. By 27 August, 50 000 workers had been dismissed, and NUM leaders discovered that Anglo was planning to escalate dismissals. Representatives of the regional strike committees took the heart-rending decision that the union should not be sacrificed in a dispute they could no longer win, a decision some ignorant outsiders misinterpreted as a betrayal of the workers. On the evening of 30 August, the mineworkers returned to work.

In narrow industrial relations terms, the mining houses had demonstrated their greater power. Anglo had curbed union protest and it was able to manage a major labour downscaling on the gold mines over the next decade largely on its own terms.

However, the significance of the strike was human and political as much as it was industrial. Mineworkers had been victims of a brutal system that left them ashamed of their work. They had been forced to wear a belt with their personal number stamped on it, and they would have to remove this belt whenever they left their mine compound for fear of ridicule or assault. After the great strike, underground work became a badge of masculinity and strength.

The strike shook government ministers, including a young deputy minister of police responsible for coordinating strike policing, Roelf Meyer. Politically, it marked the turning point between abstract discussion “regime vulnerability” and concrete planning for the end of the old order. The NUM and the Congress of SA Trade Unions which it had helped form soon joined the UDF is a Mass Democratic Movement that redoubled pressure on the regime.

In retrospect, it was probably disorganized local protest and “ungovernability” that represented the worst fears of government. After the great strike, however, organised domestic activists, led by the union movement, played a decisive role in bringing the regime to the negotiating table.

Seniority in the ANC will only get you so far

Business Day, 1 March 2013

The idea of “seniority” plays an elusive but important role in the internal politics of the African National Congress (ANC). Its meaning is neither defined in the ANC’s constitution nor debated at the movement’s elective conferences. But it shapes decisions about who exercises power and it influences the outcomes of ANC elections.

Seniority is not merely a matter of which office one holds. Deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe has been stripped of ANC offices but he nevertheless retains a reservoir of seniority.

Seniority is plainly not a direct reflection of age (although it is difficult to acquire this property if you are young). Most ageing ANC cadres lack seniority; they are instead described as “veterans” or, worse still, as “stalwarts”. Such cadres serve on integrity rather than tender committees and can be safely ignored.

The young acquire seniority only if their patrons die – most famously when Oliver Tambo’s aura was bequeathed to his bag carrier, Thabo Mbeki. The young pipe smoker acquired even more of the property by virtue of the status of his father.

Aristocrats such as Nelson Mandela enjoy an initial seniority advantage. Representatives of the workers, such as Gwede Mantashe, can reach the highest offices in the movement, but they can never accumulate a sufficient quotient of this precious commodity to become ANC president.

In the Mbeki era seniority was associated with exile and with Robben Island. Trade unionists and United Democratic Front leaders were inherently junior to their illustrious exile liberators. Whites and Indians obviously cannot become senior no matter what offices they hold (but they can become “dedicated cadres of the movement” instead, which is a reward in itself).

Men are inherently senior to women (of course) but this is no longer an absolute barrier. A woman can acquire seniority from her family (for example in the Sisulu dynasty) or through marriage.

The latest beneficiary of this magical property is Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. “Dlamini-Zuma is as intelligent as she is charming”, an international diplomat remarked at a recent function in Cape Town. “The trouble is that she isn’t very charming.”

It is rumoured that Mathews Phosa, former treasurer general of the ANC, has been assigned a new role working with Dlamini-Zuma. One former minister likened this deployment to animal cruelty; another to the “promotion” of disgraced Soviet politicians to run nuclear power stations in Siberia. It will certainly give pause to future challengers to Zuma’s authority.

Dlamini-Zuma’s record as a minister of health and foreign affairs was lamentable. But despite her personal and political limitations she has acquired a bucket full of seniority over the years.

Her decision to run as Mbeki’s deputy at Polokwane gained her seniority credits.

Her miraculous post-Polokwane rehabilitation has seen her acquire still more. A few months after her arrival as minister at home affairs, it was declared that she had “turned around” the department. Her previous personal relationship with Zuma represents an additional source of seniority.

At Mangaung she came top in the national executive committee elections as a result of concerted lobbying.

Now she has acquired a massive new draught of seniority as a result of her rise to the chair of the African Union Commission.

Dlamini-Zuma may be intellectually and temperamentally unsuited to this demanding role. But her backers in KwaZulu-Natal evidently believe it will provide her with the gravitas that she will need if she is to be parachuted into the ANC presidency in 2017.

This judgment is probably mistaken for two reasons. First, she will flop as AU Commission chair. Second, seniority remains a somewhat haphazard amalgamation of racism, nepotism and cronyism. It is therefore only a secondary value of the ANC, alongside such middle ranking ideals as the quest for human freedom, the search for mining licenses, and the identification of shopping opportunities. It cannot successfully be used to trump the movement’s foundational commitment to reject tribalism.

Butler teaches politics at the University of Cape Town