Metal that will bend
Once a beacon of hope for militant trade unionism, Numsa’s descent into corruption and political entanglement reflects the broader struggles facing South Africa’s labor movement.
SAFTU March in February 2019. Image credit Ashraf Hendricks for GroundUp CC BY-ND 4.0
In July 2023, the leadership of South Africa’s largest trade union, the National Union of Metalworkers South Africa (Numsa), suspended 25 of its members, including its deputy president Ruth Ntlokotse. It also placed one of its largest regions (from the Mpumalanga province) under “administration,” barring it from participation in an upcoming national Congress, originally set for the end of July.
These decisions were contested by the purged members in South Africa’s Labor Court. Coming from a judicial body known for skewing towards the status quo, the judgment was devastating. Judge Graham Moshoana found himself in the strange position of having to remind the leaders of an organization famed for its democratic militancy “that a trade union prevails for the workers and not the leaders of the trade union.” He ruled the suspensions unlawful and interdicted the upcoming Congress.
Numsa’s spectacular coming apart—in full face of the public, punctuated by draining legal battles and exposing a deep rot in the organization’s upper echelons—is dampening social confidence in trade unions as a force for good. It reveals the unremitting scale of the crisis facing labor. Numsa, the “metal that will not bend,” was meant to be a different breed of union, one that stood for an alternative to the ossification and decay engulfing the broader movement. It was the historic bedrock of the “workerist” tradition with its emphasis on shop floor democracy and class independence.
At the time of the democratic transition, Numsa led an effort to split the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) from the African National Congress (ANC). Together with the South African Communist Party (SACP) those organizations formed the “Tripartite Alliance” following the unbanning of opposition parties in 1990. The ANC has been the alliance’s sole representative in electoral politics throughout the democratic era: senior SACP members took up parliamentary and executive positions but as ANC representatives. The attempt to split fizzled, and the Alliance was reaffirmed—but Numsa always remained on the left of that formation, more vocal in its criticisms of the ruling party and nominally less entangled in its patronage circuits.
In 2013, following a lively national congress, Numsa finally cut ties with the ANC and SACP. This happened in the wake of the 2012 Marikana massacre, in which 34 striking mineworkers were gunned down by police. The workers were engaged in a struggle not just with their bosses, but with the COSATU-affiliated National Union of Mineworkers, which they accused of selling out. That fight turned violent and eventually led to the rise of a rival union across the platinum sector and other parts of mining. COSATU and the SACP backed the police’s brutal response to the strike. Numsa broke ranks with them—supporting wildcat strikes which spread out from the platinum mines to other sectors, especially agriculture. It was expelled by COSATU the following year, along with the federation’s own general secretary, Zwelinizima Vavi, who had also soured on the ruling party. Other unions followed Numsa out of COSATU, or splintered internally. The dissidents went on to form a rival federation, the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), with Vavi at the head.
The house of labor grew more divided. But for the so-called “independent left,” which had long regarded the Tripartite Alliance as the main bulwark to a revival of contentious politics, these were portentous events. The “Numsa moment” heralded the possibility of bridging the huge gulfs between community and workplace struggles, a gap that had widened with organized labor’s incorporation into the post-apartheid ruling bloc.
Now, Numsa’s turn for the worse has tarnished those hopes. The organization’s woes are closely linked to Irvin Jim, its general secretary since 2008. Charismatic and domineering, Jim was once feted by the Left as a principled spokesperson for the cause of workers. He’s now accused of the same corrupt practices that have become standard fare in the union movement. Invariably, the union’s investment arm stands at the center of the allegations trailing him. The Jim-appointed head of that arm, Khandani Msibi, has well documented links with the “radical economic transformation” faction of the ANC responsible for state capture. Jim has also struck up a very public friendship with Matshela Koko, a former Eskom executive found by the Zondo commission into state capture to have been “an integral component of the Gupta family’s strategy to capture [the public power utility],” at which Numsa has a strong base. On Twitter he has become openly supportive of RET forces, including uMkhonto weSizwe, the new political party of disgraced former president Jacob Zuma.
The investigative journalism unit amaBhungane has shown that a life insurance company owned and overseen by the Numsa trust improperly executed payments of no commercial value but of personal benefit to Jim and his allies. These include money spent for a new laptop for Jim’s daughter and a lavish birthday party for himself. The company has been under provisional curatorship due to governance questions raised by investigations into its dodgy financial management. It also failed to pay back a Numsa loan to the tune of $8 million, while its erstwhile executives received $5.6 million in preference shares in March of this year. It is this web of graft afflicting Numsa’s higher leadership layers that members began openly questioning.
Party politics
Animating all of this is a bigger strategic rift between rival factions of Numsa and the broader federation. In 2018, SAFTU convened a working-class summit (WCS) where 147 organizations representing unions, social movements, and civics were present. The majority of delegates affirmed the need to form a new working-class party, but the question of when and how was left open. Before these efforts, there had been another attempt to cohere South Africa’s popular forces into a pre-party formation: the United Front.
Spearheaded by Numsa in 2014, the front stitched a wide coalition of workers, the unemployed, rural people, civic organizations, and academics, hoping to build on-the-ground unity ahead of any political venture. It was exactly the kind of initiative that many hoped would spring from the “Numsa moment.” But just three years in, fearing the democratic energies it was beginning to unleash, the Jim leadership abruptly torpedoed the project.
When the WCS rolled around, Jim’s charges took its resolutions as an invitation to get going with the task of setting up a working-class party. Without consulting other stakeholders, they established the Socialist and Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) in 2019. Jim was paraded forward as its leader and it began hurriedly readying itself for national elections scheduled for just two months later. A manifesto was stitched together from shop-worn Bolshevik slogans and blasted across social media only days before the election.
Numsa members were corralled into the new party, which overnight grew to more than 36,000 sub-paying members. Flashy merch and slogan-emblazoned 4x4s suggested large sums were being splashed around, but there was little evidence of serious ground-level campaigning. Resting on its laurels, the SRWP leadership assumed that the rest of the Numsa rank-and-file would automatically support them at the polls.
They were wrong. The party won just 25,000 votes—below the threshold required to secure a single parliamentary seat and in fact fewer than its own nominal membership. SAFTU spurned the party, having been excluded from the decisions behind its launch. Rather than introspection, the SRWP turned to conspiracy theory to deal with the defeat, blaming its poor showing on South Africa’s well-regarded Independent Electoral Commission.
It never recovered. Internally, its culture corroded as Jim bullied critics to secure his hold on power. Just two years after its founding, the SRWP had been reduced to only 900 dues-paying members and was organizationally moribund. An internal discussion document seen by the New Internationalist written by a former central committee member and right-hand man of Jim (subsequently purged), describes a “cocktail of political inertia, incompetence, intimidation, bullying, autocracy, authoritarianism, individualism, fear” and “patronage around the key personalities in the party” that led to this result.
How did it come to this? How did the “Numsa moment” which inspired such flights of hope among the global Left, peter out in such a soggy ending?
Was there a “Numsa moment”?
The truth is that those hopes were misplaced. Breathless certainties about the historic significance of the “Numsa moment,” which were so widespread a decade ago, rested on two fallacies. The first was the belief that Marikana represented a fundamental rupture in popular political consciousness. Some accounts from the “independent Left” ascribed it a kind of millenarian significance. Like the 1946 South African miners’ strike it was to be “one of those great historic incidents that, in a flash of illumination, educates a nation, reveals what has been hidden, destroys lies and illusions,” to quote Ruth First’s oft-reproduced line on those earlier events. Marikana would finally shake the masses from their misbegotten devotion to the ANC.
The reality was a little more sober. The massacre and its aftershocks did dent the ANC’s popularity, but its impacts were heavily concentrated within the activist layers of the Left, the union officialdom, and among those workers most directly affected. Wildcat strikes and sympathy protests followed in its wake, but there is no real evidence that they reflected any wider sea change in popular attitudes.
Anecdotally this is seen through the trajectory of Cyril Ramaphosa, the former ANC general secretary who was a Lonmin director at the time. His political career not only survived Marikana, but flourished: he was elected deputy ANC president just months after and succeeded Jacob Zuma as president in 2018. His involvement was not merely circumstantial: an inquiry found he had been solicited by Lonmin management to coordinate “concomitant action” against striking miners due to his heft in the ANC.
A 2021 survey found that well over half of South Africans had either not heard of the massacre or knew very little about it. This demands we rethink the “Numsa moment.” From the standpoint of Marikana-as-watershed, the fracturing of COSATU was simply the organizational expression of tectonic changes in the political landscape. A handful of union leaders might have taken the final decision to denounce the ANC, but in doing so they were merely being pulled along by the tides of history.
In reality, the dissident union leadership had much more say in the matter from the start. The massacre created new pressures and opportunities, but there was no rank-and-file wave making a break with the ANC inevitable. One upshot of this is that the efflorescence of popular activity that was hoped to follow in tow from the massacre never materialized. The post-Marikana strike wave was big, but contained to specific sectors, without sparking any generalized industrial unrest. So-called service delivery protests simmered on but still failed to congeal into any sustained challenge to the political order.
This impinged directly on the fate of the United Front, which began its short political life in an environment still defined by the familiar dilemmas of post-liberation, in which deeply ingrained cultures of protest provided ample resources for mobilization, but in which the ANC’s all-pervading dominance over civil society continued to frustrate efforts to implant deep organization. As Marcel Paret documents in his recent book, on-the-ground attempts to forge unity between Numsa and its social movement partners hit numerous snags, in part because of their very different political cultures and strategic outlooks.
Had the launch of the UF actually coincided with a new phase of social struggle, as many had predicted, the outcome of the “Numsa moment” might have been completely different. An influx of members and grassroots energy might’ve held at bay the Stalinist revanchism of parts of the leadership and allowed processes of democratic renewal to take full effect.
As it were, the independent left forces that entered the coalition provided no real counterweight to Jim’s eventual attempts to reassert control and close down democratic spaces. They were simply too disorganized. Prior to the UF, the only serious attempt to build unity outside the Alliance had been mounted by the Democratic Left Front (DLF), which brought movement activists together with small, non-COSATU unions as well as Trotskyist groupings and SACP exiles. But while it aspired to replace the ghettoized struggles of community movements with nationally coordinated campaigns, the DLF never really surmounted debilitating horizontalist tendencies and sectarian divides within its own ranks. It failed to evolve beyond a loosely affiliated network, with no clear political identity, no centralized structures, no program of action, and hence no capacity to recruit and develop cadres.
When the UF process started, the DLF took the ill-fated decision to dissolve itself. The coalition that resulted was thus precariously imbalanced, with Numsa members and resources vastly outweighing those of its social movement partners. Absent the transfusion of energy that many hoped would be delivered by the post-Marikana awakening, its dynamic remained heavily determined by the personalities and proclivities of the union leadership.
This is where the second fallacy comes in, which is the simpler mistake of believing that Numsa—“the metal that will not bend”—had somehow stayed immune from the malaise engulfing the wider movement. In reality, a militant facade concealed symptoms of decay that were troublingly familiar. As Roger Etkind—a former Numsa official and now outspoken critic—points out: “The facts in Numsa are the same as the facts in every bureaucratized trade union. There is no individual monster. Rather, there is a whole layer of leadership who have become isolated from their base.”
None of this means that the failure of the Numsa moment was foreordained. A more capable set of leaders might have stewarded the movement through its infancy to a point at which politics and program, rather than personality, once again became decisive. But the leadership that history dealt us—or at least the rump of it that has clung to power—has proven devoid of political vision, susceptible to outside influence, intolerant of dissent, organizationally incompetent, and personally corrupt.
Foreign interference?
Having ended up so quickly back in the orbit of the “party-state” and its Stalinoid politics, it remains something of a mystery why Jim and others ever bothered breaking up with the ANC in the first place. Ambition and venality might have been their watchwords throughout: Jim’s break with the SACP came a few years after a failed bid for leadership over that party. The more nuanced possibility is that Numsa’s zigzags reflect the contradictory pulls acting on its leadership: a genuine desire to represent worker issues checked by a stronger desire to remain in control of the union and its funding pipelines.
Other pieces of the puzzle have begun to more clearly fall into view in the wake of the collapse of New Frame, a progressive media outlet operating out of Johannesburg. The publication was abruptly shut down after its core funder, the American tech magnate and philanthropist, Neville Roy Singham, decided to suddenly pull the plug on funding. Ongoing investigations have given reason to suspect that Singham’s motives relate to his involvement in a broad initiative aimed at re-aligning the third-world Left towards China. The investigative journalist outfit amaBhungane recently uncovered evidence that Singham has been reprioritizing his funding targets as “part of a broader Chinese Communist Party-linked plan to consolidate the Left in South Africa’ and draw the country “closer into China’s sphere of influence.”
Singham won Jim’s ear soon after the Numsa moment got going. He has reportedly poured vast sums into the organization and worked hard to embed its structures within the wider nexus of organizations he oversees, with a reach across various countries of the global South. Jim’s opponents see him as the real power behind the throne. We don’t know precisely how far Singham’s influence extended over the Numsa process—whether the leadership’s reversion to Stalinism was his orchestration, or whether he simply helped to reinforce a trajectory that was already unfolding.
Either way, there is clear evidence that Numsa’s leadership has been pivoting the organization in a Russia and China-sympathetic direction in recent years. A pre-congress report from its Secretariat, for example, asserts that “NATO and [the] European Union provoked Russia into a war in Ukraine” in order to “maintain a stranglehold on the working class throughout the world, particularly in the Global South” and to “offset their declining economic influence—in contrast to China’s economic growth.”
Frustrated with the failures of the SRWP, Singham is now pushing Numsa to reunite with the SACP and COSATU, according to amaBhungane—a move that’s causing consternation within both those organizations, where Jim is not popular. There’s been no overt sign of these plans yet, but it has become apparent that the Numsa leadership is attempting to pull the curtain down on SAFTU. Conflicts stemming from the latter’s commitment to the WCS summit as a democratic alternative to Jim’s SRWP party have grown more acrimonious.
Numsa’s withdrawal from SAFTU would likely collapse the entire federation, given that the metalworkers currently comprise more than half its members and supply much of its resources. The only reason this hasn’t happened already is the unpopularity of such a move with the Numsa rank and file. But the federation continues to skate on thin ice.
Future fractures
SAFTU was meant to offer a new dawn to the beleaguered labor movement. As its travails deepen, the Left is increasingly giving up on organized labor altogether. “Labour is lost,” declared the veteran journalist and activist Terry Bell ahead of May Day last year, which in his view marked a new nadir for the once proud movement.
Accentuating the despair is a sense that labor’s fate is being written by forces beyond its ken and control. The crisis of leadership, which Numsa’s story bitterly illustrates, is only the nearest of its problems. Deindustrialization and economic stagnation pose challenges of a different, more intractable order.
But these forces have worked extremely unevenly—meaning that the picture for unions is not as uniformly dire as many seem to assume. While union density in the private sector has been collapsing since the early 00s, in the public sector it continued to rise for much longer and has since held steady. Public sector membership has kept the labor movement afloat, although it’s seen by many of the South African Left as a moderating force, diminishing the movement’s capacity to lead emancipatory struggles.
But as Sebastian Etchemendy and Germán Lodola show in a recent paper, the public sectorization of unions has been a truly global trend, holding across hemispheres and varieties of capitalism. In other contexts it’s been read in a very different light—with public sector unions heralded as more combative than their private sector counterparts, and better able to build bridges beyond the workplace.
To the extent that they’ve played a different role in South Africa, this is not because of inherent defects. It’s because of political dynamics, in particular their deeper entanglement in the ANC party-state. In the private sector, the ANC was left with little room to offer concessions to workers because of its commitment to disembedded markets. The same was not true in the public sector. The expansive Public Service Coordinating Bargaining Council has given workers considerable leverage. Public sector wages have consistently risen faster than the private sector while employment has steadily expanded, accounting for basically all net job creation since the early 2010s.
It is not surprising that public sector workers have generally kept more faith in the ANC. But their loyalty is not without limit. It’s being repeatedly tested as the ruling party is forced into a deepening austerity regime to deal with the fallouts from COVID-19 and the state capture crisis.
A bruising week-long strike erupted in the healthcare sector last March 2023, led by the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu). The strike wasn’t the biggest public sector action in recent memory, but it was the most politically fractious. It came on the back of years of mounting tensions between unions and the ruling party, with Nehawu growing increasingly vocal in its calls for the SACP to run on its own ballot line, in effect ending the Tripartite Alliance. The strike also fed a growing fallout—marked by legal threats and accusations of violent intimidation—between Nehawu and the South African Democratic Teachers Union, which has remained more loyal to the ANC.
Once again the Alliance managed to patch things up at the last minute. Nehawu announced in December 2023 that it would campaign on behalf of the ruling party in the 2024 national elections, citing the need to defend the gains of the democratic revolution against “counterrevolutionary forces and their imperialist sponsors.”
But the structural sources of tension remain. Recent events seem to confirm Etchemendy and Lodola’s “reverse economic cycle” hypothesis, which predicts that public sector unions will become more militant during economic downswings when budgetary constraints bite harder, inverting the pattern followed by sectors more exposed to competition. South Africa looks set for prolonged bouts of austerity as the economy limps forward through a seemingly endless string of crises.
The ANC’s post-election alliance with the virulently anti-union Democratic Alliance will only ratchet up tensions. Some union and SACP leaders have been vocal in their denunciation of that Alliance.
A “Nehawu moment” might be loading in the future.
The Left would do well to approach it free from the illusions that fueled past disappointments. Breaking free from the ANC won’t automatically restore unions to their militant roots. Decades of democratic erosion have left deep scars, evident in Nehawu’s recent conduct. The ruthless tactics employed in last year’s strike—which reportedly resulted in the deaths of several patients—reflected a union that’s become socially detached and incapable of putting class-wide interests above the narrow concerns of its members.
Those same features will open the union to infiltration from forces of the populist right. The political momentum right now belongs to Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe party which won a stunning 14.6% in last May’s election despite having (officially) formed only six months prior. MK has been aggressively courting labor, particularly in its stronghold province of KwaZulu Natal, where it has already established client unions.
So far there’s no evidence that these efforts have made much headway. The way remains open for a more capacitated Left to turn the crisis in the Alliance to its own advantage and to widen the space for worker-led, social movement unionism.
It’s a chance that must be taken. For all their warts and weaknesses, South African trade unions are still by far and away the largest, best organized, and most highly resourced institutions of the working class. Hard as it might be to imagine them regaining the immense stature they enjoyed in the liberation years, the idea of a genuinely transformative Left existing in their absence is even more far-fetched.
