Murder at Small Koppie

By now, South African Police Service (SAPS) vans and an armoured Nyala had joined the Lonmin security bakkies that crept along with the phalanx of miners. At a four-way stop, Lonmin security attempted to stop them, but the miners simply walked on past. The mood of the miners was cheerful. The police drove alongside them with the sliding doors of their steel-shelled vehicles open. The men in blue were relaxed as they escorted the miners along the four kilometres of tarmac to Lonmin’s management hub. The cluster of single-storeyed buildings was practically indistinguishable from many of the other utilitarian mine buildings, except for the increased number of shade trees. Here the marchers were again met by mine

security.

 

What the miners did not know was that there had been a flurry of activity preceding their arrival at the local company headquarters. Lonmin’s directors and managers there had hastily set up a conference call with the executive vice president of human capital at the Johannesburg head office, Barnard Mokwena. Together they came to the conclusion that they should not give an inch to the drillers’ show of force. In Mokwena’s opinion, the issue had already been discussed at the top level in the company – at the executive committee back in June, when they had decided to grant the drillers the unilateral allowance. As far as Lonmin was concerned, the issue was closed. Mokwena was much irritated by the presumption of the marchers, as well as their demands. Over the preceding weeks he had sent several ‘communiqués’ to the drillers, informing them that they should not breach the negotiating protocols that had evolved over the years.

 

On that Friday, he instructed the managers on the ground not to speak to the miners. On the face of it, this was because it would set a precedent that neither Lonmin nor any of the other mines desired. No one wanted workers airing their complaints, especially wage grievances, outside of established channels. But it ran deeper than that. Lonmin had for a long time practically outsourced employee relations to the unions. Mokwena and mine management across the industry had worked out a complicated dance with NUM, and to a lesser extent with the two smaller unions with dominantly white memberships. The main characters knew one another quite intimately on a shaft level, and as these elected unionists worked their way up the trade union ladder and as the mine managers climbed to higher corporate positions, there was a depth and a history to their relationships. In the South African context, these connecting strands were knotted together in even more complicated ways by the requirement that mining companies have an 18 per cent black shareholding.¹ The face of Lonmin’s black economic empowerment at that time was the founder of NUM, and ruling party prince, Cyril Ramaphosa.

 

On one of the three mines that made up Lonmin, that closed matrix was in danger of being unravelled. At Karee, AMCU had usurped NUM. To Mokwena and Lonmin, it was no coincidence that the rock drillers’ R12 500 demand had originated from troubled Karee. They believed it was here that an outsider union, apparently spearheaded by the renegade former union firebrand Steve Khululekile, had fuelled and directed the drillers’ unhappiness the year before.

 

The drillers’ challenge was more than just what the mine considered an unreasonable wage demand – it was an attack on the entire way of doing business. The unsettling phenomenon of workers rejecting their own unions to make alarming wage demands that had begun earlier that year at neighbouring Impala Platinum had set a new and dangerous precedent.

 

Mokwena had also been in touch with the leadership of both NUM and the more militant new-kid-on-the-block AMCU. NUM general secretary Frans Baleni and AMCU president Joseph Mathunjwa told Mokwena not to engage with the drillers while they were carrying out an unprotected strike, and assured the mine that neither union was a part of it.

 

Despite Mathunjwa agreeing with Mokwena that Lonmin should not discuss wages with workers outside of union structures, Mokwena believed that AMCU was behind the strike. He was persuaded that AMCU was going to use the strike to force Lonmin to officially recognise them as the majority union at Karee, which AMCU had indeed become over the past months under the covert leadership of the incendiary Khululekile.

 

Mokwena instructed managers in the field office not to speak ‘to a faceless crowd’ and that any wage-related demands should go through NUM. The depiction of the miners as faceless would become a key part of Lonmin’s strategy in dealing with them over the days to come. The claim was that since they were not going through recognised channels, and were not represented by unionists that Mokwena knew by name, the strikers were ‘unknown’ to Lonmin. The recalcitrant drillers would be dehumanised, de-individualised and treated by management as a commodity, a unit of labour that was the most troublesome part of the complex machinery of mining. Despite being ‘an indigenous sort of African’,² whose own brother was an underground mineworker, Mokwena exhibited a patronising and dismissive attitude towards the strikers, treating them as if they were misbehaving children.

 

By the time the marchers arrived at their destination, the offices were marked off-limits to them by caution tape. A handful were allowed to go forward to speak with the head of mine security, Graeme Sinclair, flanked by several other security officers and policemen. Among these miners’ representatives were three men who would feature repeatedly in the strike narrative: Bhele Dlunga, Andries Motlapula Ntsenyeho and ‘Anele’. Sinclair, speaking in the pidgin lingua franca of the mines, Fanagalo, told the group’s representatives that management was refusing to speak with them, and asked them for a copy of their demands. The drillers replied, part tonguein-cheek, that this was not possible, as they were illiterate – they just wanted to speak to the CEO Ian Farmer about increasing their wages. Their demands, however, were indeed in writing, on a flattened cardboard box that simply read ‘R12 500’.

 

Sinclair told them to put their demands through NUM, as there was an agreement in place until the following year, and that their strike was illegal. As would occur time and again, the unprotected though legal strike would be dubbed illegal by Lonmin, the police and the media. Under South African law, as well as the constitution, strikes are not illegal. They are either sanctioned by following due procedure with a representative union, thus protecting the strikers from unilateral dismissal, or they are wildcat and unprotected, leaving the strikers vulnerable to being fired. Neither is illegal.

 

Thwarted from the opportunity to meet their employer, the miners asked Sinclair what they should do next. They were dismissively told to do whatever they wanted, in contravention of Lonmin’s clear and sensible procedure for dealing with such impromptu industrial actions. Bhele and the other leaders managed to convince the angered workers that while they

had failed and the white man was taking them for fools, they should leave to discuss the next course of action. As the drill operators retraced their route, Mokwena issued yet another communiqué – that the striking miners must cease the ‘unprotected march and work stoppage’. Lonmin’s lawyers put together an application to the Labour Court for an interdict of the strike, citing NUM, AMCU and the drillers who had not shown up for work that day. The interdict included an appendix of all the striking miners’ names, showing that they were in fact not unknown or faceless to the company or to Mokwena.