Ramaphosa and Mantashe groomed for decades by White Monopoly Capital

By: Sipho Singiswa*

At a NUM gathering that took place in East London in October 2021, Gwede Mantashe boasted about the uninterrupted succession of former NUM leaders who became ANC Secretary-Generals. He may have thought this was witty but his glibness was perhaps misfired as it gave away more than he intended to. It could be argued that he blew the cover on the real state capture that began over 30 years ago by the white apartheid capital.

It is no secret that many in the ANC have labeled this NUM/SG succession as a carefully planned take-over of the ANC/Alliance by former NUM and COSATU leaders who, they argue, work in service to White Monopoly Capital. In this framework, it is noted that Mantashe and his boss, President Cyril Ramaphosa, are part of a select few former labour union leaders who enjoy exceptional access to, as well as the confidence and trust of the giant Mining bosses in South Africa. Further evidence of this alleged takeover resides in the fact that the period Mantashe gloats about is one that saw a serious decline in the ANC’s traditional support base as well as three splits in the ANC.

Many have questioned whether it is a long-term mandate of the Ramaphosa/Mantashe alliance to break the ANC from within and replace it with a wholly whitewashed neoliberal agenda. Ramaphosa’s SONA address strongly suggests this trajectory.

The long history of the Ramaphosa/Mantashe alliance also strongly suggests that it is no coincidence that both, who have no long-term tested history in the ANC Alliance politics, became the Secretary-Generals of the ANC, then President and Chairperson respectively. Circumstances around this common history do strongly suggest that this is indeed the real state capture that began with the Urban Foundation in the 1970s.

Looking back …

Mantashe, who is the current National Chairperson of the ANC, is also its former Secretary-General (SG). He also held the positions of Secretary-General of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and former chairperson of the South African Communist Party. His beginnings with the labour movement started in 1975 when he was employed as a Recreational Officer at the Western Deep Levels Mines and later as a Welfare Officer at Prieska Copper Mines where he worked until 1982.

After co-founding NUM and becoming its Witbank Chairperson from 1982, Mantashe held different leadership positions between 1985 and 1998 before finally becoming NUM’s Secretary-General.

He was the first of many union officials, including Jay Naidoo, former Secretary-General of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), that were invited to become Board members, in the corporations and industries that are controlled by White local and global monopoly capital. Along with these positions came the offer of accruing shares and self-enrichment through these companies.

In 1995 Mantashe made history by becoming the first trade unionist to be co-opted into the Board of Directors of SAMANCOR, a listed Johannesburg Stock Exchange minerals extraction transnational company.

He was later also invited into the Development Bank of Southern Africa as the Executive Manager of its Strategic Operations Division whose ‘…mandate is to pilot and incubate projects and build and maintain relationships with external stakeholders such as the government at national, provincial, and local levels, business, labour, and communities’.

Ramaphosa’s introduction into the politics of Black consciousness was through his work organising evangelist student group activities. He later joined Mantashe in co-founding NUM.

Ramaphosa also co-founded and became Secretary-General of COSATU, thus, effectively consolidating all bargaining powers of South African labour unions in his office before transitioning to the same position in the ANC.

It appears that for both Mantashe and Ramaphosa the often-controversial contact and engagements they had with the mining conglomerate bosses to resolve labour disputes were seen as advantageous by white monopoly capital and later developed into cosy personal business relationships with the likes of Harry Oppenheimer, Bobby Godsell of the Anglo-American Corporation mining and Clive Menell of the AngloVaal gold mining

Big mining bosses had already been in close contact with the likes of Ramaphosa prior to his involvement in the labour movement and the United Democratic Front (UDF) politics that preceded the ANC/National Party’s secretive ‘Sunset Clause’ Agreement. And it was through the Urban Foundation, that was established in 1977 by Harry Oppenheimer and the doyen of the Afrikaner business sector, Anton Rupert, that this contact was facilitated. It was initiated as a direct counter-response to the 1976 student uprising that the White corporate sector believed threatened the White establishment’s historical stranglehold of the country’s economy

Like Mantashe’s co-option into the Board of Directors of SAMANCOR, Ramaphosa, too, was co-opted into the Board of Directors of Urban Foundation where he joined the likes of Menell. Menell went on to fund Ramaphosa’s legal studies after which Ramaphosa went on to work as legal counsel on the mines.

These predetermined relations ultimately led to questionable public-private partnership policy decisions, actions, and dodgy tender deals that continue to contribute to the socioeconomic marginalisation of millions of Native African people.

Monetised invitations into big business mirrored the objectives of the Urban Foundation and are part of the White corporations and industries’ modus operandi’ in the transitions of settler states to new democracies. Overtures are made expressly to ensure that their western agenda is given priority and the state remains at the disposal of the free-market economy and White monopoly capital. It ensures that new governments remain subordinate to capital and thwarts its ability to deliver that which serves the common good.

It is state capture pure and simple. By capturing the government and all major union bosses in this way they create a situation where the government is more about protecting its own business interests rather than the people. It also ensures that the state’s security agencies are tied-up in protecting the White monopoly capital and justifies the use of brute methods to quell any opposition to it.

That the mine bosses groomed Ramaphosa as their inside-man in the ANC seems clear and would explain how Ramaphosa, who was a union leader, became an instant billionaire overnight after his failed attempt to become Nelson Mandela’s Deputy-State President, instead of Thabo Mbeki or Chris Hani, who were the preferred favorite’s of the ANC branches. Ramaphsa’s run for Deputy Presidency had been handsomely endorsed by the mining bosses. They even managed to convince Nelson Mandela to lobby for Ramaphosa, selling him the idea that it was the best decision for the reorientation of South Africa into the global economic markets.

It is argued within the more radical ranks of the ANC/Tripartite Alliance I that the close relationships between Ramaphosa, Mantashe, and big business were predesigned, predetermined, and cultivated prior to and during the labour and mine bosses negotiations. They make references to, among other things, the history and overall long-term objectives that informed the establishment of the Urban Foundation as a privately funded White ‘Think Tank’ to protect the White status quo.

Many also believe that Ramaphosa and Mantashe have been groomed and planted within the ANC with the express mandate of derailing the original socialist objectives of the party Given their common history in the extraction industry followed by their unprecedented meteoric rise into the leadership of the ANC, some comrades argue that the white monopoly capital endorsed leadership of both Ramaphosa and Mantashe has willfully contributed to the widening ANC fragmentation, factionalism and three breakaways (UDM, COPE & EFF) in the history of the Tripartite Alliance.

It also led to a split of NUM resulting in the establishment of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) which preceded the 16 August 2012 Marikana massacre of more than 34 LONMIN mineworkers affiliated to AMCU. Police massacred the mineworkers after Ramaphosa, supported by Mantashe, had used his political connectivity to pressure the police on behalf of the London-based mining company, LONMIN, into putting a swift end to the mineworkers’ wage strike.

Later Cosatu also split resulting in the formation of the SA Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu)

Both Ramaphosa and Mantashe’s leadership has become synonymous with violence through political killings, police brutality, conflicts of interest; unfulfilled promises to the Native African people; shameless contradictions; denials, and barefaced lies. Contrary to consolidating and unifying the ANC/Tripartite Alliance’s constituency, their leadership style is marred with mistrust and has seen a continuous drop in the ANC’s support base.

One thing for certain is that the Ramaphosa/Mantashe alliance, in cahoots with the extraction industry bosses and white monopoly capital in general, has rendered the ANC effectively captured lock stock and smoking barrel. The DA endorsement of Ramaphosa’s SONA speech as reflecting its own business agenda underscores this.

Ramaphosa and Mantashe, it seems, are there explicitly to whitewash the ANC’s policies of anything that remotely resembles the will of the African majority. In short, they are there to facilitate the laissez-faire trajectory of entrenched white monopoly capital at the expense of all else. The only thing that will save the ANC from the clutches of this neoliberal stranglehold is a countermove to capture it back and this begins with a total overhaul of its current top leadership structures.

*Sipho Singiswa is an ex-Robben Island political prisoner, co-founder of Media For Justice, and media director for Robben Island Ex Political Prisoner International Human Rights Program. He is a well-known filmmaker and social justice activist