The booing of President Cyril Ramaphosa by union members of his political alma mater in the labour movement, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), from the Kloof mine was a tragic twist to a decades-long story.
The impasse at mine owner Sibanye is serious enough that the president expressed his willingness to engage, or to get his colleagues to intervene and facilitate dialogue between the parties. He may have hoped he could draw on the fact that those who had disrupted proceedings came from “his” union, NUM, and the Association of Mining & Construction Union (Amcu), the breakaway it spawned in 1998.
“I was your first general secretary, I know how you operate at Kloof, I start organising at Kloof and on the 27th of April I voted there, alongside you as workers, I did not turn my back on you”, Ramaphosa said, hoping the rally would continue. It did not. It seems the workers in attendance had other ideas.
It was a twist, because for the first time congress-aligned trade unions in both the private and the public sectors were outwardly registering, through disruption of what was their own rather than a government event, their concerns with their alliance partners (the ANC and the SACP), and also the government they initially voted for when Ramaphosa cast his vote at Kloof in 1994.
What may have been further jarring in the scene was not in frame but likely encouraged the defiance and militancy of the workers — Sibanye-Stillwater CEO Neal Froneman’s bulging pay packet. He is due R300m in variable pay, Sibanye's remuneration committee suggested, because of “exceptional financial results”. Though this call received the green light from the board alongside healthy pay increases for senior managers, more than a fifth of shareholders rejected the remuneration report.
When Sibanye conducts its analysis in its remuneration report, reporting on its Palma and Gini ratios, it only considers total guaranteed pay, which obscures two important features. The Sibanye integrated report shows that less than a third of the CEO and CFO’s pay is in total guaranteed pay, with the rest in short and long-term incentives, so the Palma and Gini analysis is just “bells and whistles” for illustrative rather than truly comparative purposes.
If one combines the R150m upward adjustment for middle managers and specialists with the over R450m given to Froneman and CFO Charl Keyter, it amounts to an upward distribution of an additional R600m-plus in the pay structure of Sibanye. Yet the thousands of workers in categories 4-8 underground and at surface level at Driefontein, Kloof and Beatrix mines are being unreasonable in their demands?
Just over 1,000km south of Rustenburg, workers in the Kirkwood area of the Eastern Cape, in citrus growing country, are continuing with protests that have resulted in one death, several injuries and the destruction of a farmhouse, equipment and citrus trees worth R50m. These actions have severely disrupted the Sundays River Valley citrus belt, which produces a fifth of SA’s $2bn annual citrus exports.
Speaking to one of the organisers, the SA National Civic Organisation’s Patrick Bayini, on MetroFMTalk three weeks ago, I thought of what Malawian economist Thandika Mkandawire suggested at Wits in 2012 regarding the postcolonial distributional challenge: “How does one guarantee labour that the profits arising from their self-restraint in wage demands will result in higher levels of investment?”
The issues unfolding at Sibanye and the Kirkwood citrus belt, with implications for critical tradable sectors of the economy, also show what the dream of a “social compact” may have to contend with in terms of this distributional challenge. The alluring notion of a social compact may be meaningless if it cannot agree on a common value system and set of trade-offs that will guide our collective fight against inequality.
If not, as ANC national chair and mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe lamented in East London at the weekend, the well-written letters and platitudes between Sibanye and labour leaders will continue to replace meaningful dialogue and tragically close the space to achieve resolution.
• Cawe (@aycawe), a development economist, is MD of Xesibe Holdings and hosts MetroFMTalk on Metro FM.
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