INLSA
Max Du Preez
The traumatic mining strike and deaths of 45 people at Marikana was a “turning point” in South African history, the country’s “Tunisia Day”, we were told by politicians and commentators. And De Doorns is “another Marikana”, other politicians tell us.
Political leaders, the business sector, trade unions and civil society stand accused of allowing the Marikana tragedy to happen.
It was supposed to be a flashing red light and a valuable lesson to all South Africans.
And yet we are repeating almost all the mistakes with the violent, uncontrolled protest actions by agricultural workers and their communities at De Doorns and elsewhere in the Western Cape.
The only real difference between Marikana and De Doorns is that the police are acting with more restraint this time – at least so far.
There is the same lack of leadership, the same competition between workers’ organisations, the same propensity for violence, the same political opportunism, the same confusion about the real issues, the same cheap populism, the same political recklessness, the same poor reporting by media outlets and the same lethargy by employers.
The upheavals at De Doorns, Grabouw and other hot spots also started as unprotected wildcat strikes outside the perimeters of our labour dispensation.
We’re witnessing the same blind anger and frustration on the part of workers and the unemployed as we saw at Marikana.
We are regularly told about |the “farmworkers’ strike in the |Cape Winelands” and some have even called for a boycott of South African wines.
Yet most workers on almost all wine (and wheat and cattle) farms in the Western Cape were at work last week and this week.
The angry people we see on our television screens are mostly workers in the fruit industries, better |described as agri-business rather than farms.
Most of them are not full-time employees, most have come to the |region recently and many are people in squatter camps who are angry because they have no work.
Several politicians and trade unionists claim to speak for the protesters or act as their champions: Tony Ehrenreich, conveniently with his Cosatu hat on and his ANC hat hidden in his desk drawer; the leaders of the Food and Allied Workers’ Union; Western Cape ANC leader Marius Fransman, the king of opportunism and hyperbole; the controversial Nosey Pieterse of the Bawsi Agricultural Workers Union (Bawu) (Bawsi is the Black Association of the Wine and Spirit Industry); and even a few politicians trying to get a new leftist, socialist party off the ground.
But when senseless violence |and vandalism erupt, when the government asks for restraint, these “leaders” wash their hands of them and say the workers are acting |on their own, criminal elements have taken over or the police are trigger-happy.
The majority and ruling party in the Western Cape, the DA, have been almost completely absent, caught between the interests of the workers and the employers like a hare in |the headlights. The most DA leaders could contribute was to blame “political incitement” and state that the |troublemakers were not actual farmworkers.
I have to add, though, that the ANC, Cosatu, Bawu and other strike leaders would clearly never have allowed premier Helen Zille or her colleagues to move freely at De Doorns nor address the protesters.
The inaction of the national government and the absence of the ministers of labour and agriculture only strengthen the suspicion many have that the fury had been whipped up as part of an ANC effort to embarrass the DA; indeed, to make the Western Cape ungovernable so |the ANC could take it back at the next elections.
The longer the strife continues, the more the economy will suffer and the more attitudes will harden. The biggest losers, as always, will be the workers and the unemployed because after this is all over, there will be significantly fewer jobs in the sector and a lot of striking workers in financial trouble.
The government has to squarely face the fact that it was part of the process that determined the minimum wage of R69 a day.
This should clearly have been at least R100 a day. (It is, of course, not that simple – it depends also on whether workers get food, accommodation, medical aid and support for children at school.)
We need President Jacob Zuma, Labour Minister Mildred Oliphant and Agriculture Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson at De Doorns this week to calm the situation and open the doors to a lasting solution.
If Zuma were indeed the “man of action” as he was called last week by his new deputy in the ANC, Cyril Ramaphosa, this would be a good time to prove it.
That solution should include strategies to deal with the desperation of migrant workers and the large numbers of people who had moved from the Eastern Cape, Lesotho and Zimbabwe to find a |better life in areas of greater economic activity.
