The word “crisis” has been bandied about by mining executives, ministers, labour leaders and the media with great abandon over the last month. Its use reached critical mass during the last week as the minister suspended the licence of Glencore’s Optimum Colliery in response to the company’s retrenchment plans, and summoned the corporations and unions to an urgent meeting to demand “commitments from all parties toward mitigating retrenchments”.
The use of the word “crisis” implies that we are dealing with an event or situation that is, or is expected to lead to, an unstable and dangerous situation affecting an individual, group, community, or society as a whole.
Mining in South Africa, with its history and legacy of exploitation, has, ever since the discovery of huge deposits of diamonds and gold, propelled the country from one crisis to the next.
In each case, the greed and interests of “entrepreneurs” like Cecil John Rhodes and his company De Beers, or Mark Cutifani and his company Anglo American, have always been the measure by which the sector and its level of crisis, would be assessed. These powerful men did not and do not hesitate to use their wealth and position to drive their own agendas, and as one author points out about Rhodes: “Imperial expansion and capital investment went hand in hand.”
The word crisis also implies another important element that often gets overlooked or under reported as we latch on to the cues from the powerful men of society. Without the approval of these powerful men, a crisis will not be recognised. But I will return to this later.
Unexpected
A crisis by definition has several defining characteristics. A crisis would thus be an unexpected (that is, a surprise) event or occurrence, that creates uncertainty and is seen as a threat to important goals.
All of this implies that a certain amount of change to the old system would be required in order to overcome the threat to the important goals.
If no change is required, then the event or occurrence of the uncertainty that threatens important goals would much better be described as a failure of the old system, rather than crises.
Having better understood what makes a crisis, there are two points that need to be made in order for us to contextualise the current mood of panic, which has been fermented from the towers of power.
The first is that market cycles are not new or unexpected. The downward cycle has been in the making since 2008 when the debt crisis first emerged.
The sudden anxiety and panic created by the power players of the sector is either short-sighted poor leadership or scare mongering and manipulation in order to achieve selfish ends.
The second is that, not only is the sector faced with the problem of lower commodity cycles, it is also faced with a structural legacy of exploitation that manifests in low wages, impoverished host communities and extensive environmental degradation counter posed against multimillionaire mining executives and a history of super profits.
History of exploitation
The latter problem has the dubious honour of always managing to elude the moniker of crisis. This subtle denial has the effect that what should rightly be a crisis, that is, an immediate threat to the important goals of social stability and cohesion, has been constantly relegated to deserving of attention only after the current immediate crisis has been averted.
In this way, the crisis of mining’s legacy of exploitation has been left to the next generation ad infinitum.
This is of course a nice way to say that we are constantly pushing our head in the sand in the hope that when we emerge from the blindness of our cognitive dissonance that the crisis would have resolved itself.
The requirements of a crisis being “unexpected” depends upon our failing to note the onset of crisis conditions. The inability or unwillingness to recognise crises before they become dangerous is due to denial and the overriding urgency of the greed that drives the industry.
Once again, the driving focus of the current “crisis” is not “jobs, jobs, jobs” as the minister would have us believe, but profits. Nothing is worthy of the label “crisis” in the mining industry until it threatens the “important goals” of profit.
Once again, with the mining magnates calling the shots, the minister is only focused on the short-term interests of profits and has completely ignored the structural crisis of mining.
Just a few weeks ago the minister was reminded of the social crisis that remains unresolved, when angry community members, who had shut down the Bokoni mining operation, walked out on him when he urged them to be patient. Or like the Palabora copper mine, which has also been shut down by community protests.
The minister’s insistence on speeding up mining processes while ignoring the crisis unfolding before him, is partly bad leadership, partly ignorant leadership, but in all respects it is the type of leadership that is consistent with the legacy of mining in this country.
A legacy that Cecil John Rhodes and no doubt Mark Cutifani will applaud, but which brings us no closer to solving the crisis.
* Christopher Rutledge is the mining and extractives co-ordinator at ActionAid South Africa and is the convener of the Coalition on the MPRDA. He writes in his personal capacity.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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