Alignment, Co-option And Suspended Workers’ Struggles
By: ALEXACTUS T KAURE
NEXT week is Workers’ Day (1 May) and it would be interesting to hear what the union leadership will be telling their ‘loyal folk’. Because last year was not the best of times for workers in Namibia and South Africa. We witnessed widespread workers’ strikes, protests and demonstrations in these two countries, which were suppressed, sometimes harshly.
In the case of Namibian we witnessed the teachers’ strikes that almost brought the educational system down, the nurses’ strikes and, of course, the pilot strike. The demands were usually about salary increases and better working conditions.
When he came to power in 2008 President Jacob Zuma inherited a country that was beset by strikes but these got even worse under his leadership. The strikes have been escalating since 2010, culminating in the civil service strike that almost crippled the South African economy.
There has been considerable repression of popular protest during most of those protests both here and in SA. The Marikana incident was a dramatic and a painful tragedy and was, in my view, the final denouement and helped to broadcast the coming of the “African Spring’.
Whether or not the workers and the labour movement learnt a lesson from the Marikana tragedy is a moot question. My interest is with the broader issues confronting workers and the masses generally who, by now, are supposed to have realised that the lines have been drawn between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.
But one thing that came out during those demonstrations and strikes last year is that people have started to lose faith and trust in their respective unions’ leadership. The striking teachers, in Namibia, for example, said they were fighting on their own without Nantu [Namibia National Teachers’ Union] and it was the same in the case of Lonmin Mine where the workers basically snubbed their union and instead chose their own representatives to negotiate directly with the company. Last year’s teachers’ strike in Namibia, for example, led to the formation of the Workers Union of Namibia.
This year Workers’ Day should be an opportune moment for the workers and their unions to take stock, reflect and map out alternatives. In my view the unions’ leadership has done a lot of damage to the broader labour movement by aligning and thus allowing itself to be co-opted within the structures of the ruling parties.
Arguing from a normative and idealised conception of civil society, I would maintain that civil society is not a thing, forum or actor but a kind of an empty social space recognised and protected by formal state and constitutional guarantees of individual rights and liberties and open to multiple uses by an equal and free citizenry.
I also posit that formal recognition by the state doesn’t always guarantee an active civil society or compensate actors for loss of real importance on the ground and it carries the possibility of getting entangled in a whole web of political patronage. The labour movement in Namibia under the umbrella of the NUNW [National Union of Namibian Workers] represents this kind of scenario.
The present labour movements were initiated by the current ruling parties, during the years of the anti-colonial struggle, and have since been aligned, co-opted and entangled in the agenda of the ruling parties and their neo-liberal ideologies which are inimical to the interests of the working people. The unions’ leadership doesn’t seem to have a problem with this arrangement.
Thus all civil society actors that are aligned to political parties and with state structures have effectively closed that important empty public space between state and society within which civil actors are supposed to operate from. What this mean is that labour has been drafted into politics without it in turn putting any demands on the political establishment.
It is one thing for a civil society actor to blindly align itself with a political party and quite another to support a specific policy initiative that would be beneficial to the everyday needs of its members. The labour movement and other civil actors in Namibia and SA must understand this finer distinction. Thus the labour movement here is nothing but a stepping stone into higher political offices.
That’s why the NUNW, for example, has been conspicuously silent on major issues that affect the masses and working people like corruption and the perennial under-hand deals at our parastatals, such as the recent scandalous ones at Namibia Airports Company where a labour consultant, Brian Nalisa, is said to have received a cool N$7 million for less than five month’s work.
The respective unions’ leadership in Namibia and SA have effectively derailed and thus suspended genuine workers’ struggles for their own political and economic self-interests.