Hon Speaker, the IFP has actually asked this House, through its Chief Whip, to discuss this subject of national importance, that is: The current crisis in the mining sector and the detrimental effect it is having on South Africa. There are many causes and reasons for the widespread crisis within the mining sector. They reflect the causes and reasons of the much wider crisis within the rest of the country.
One of the causes relates to something that the IFP has been predicting for 15 years. We have created a monstrosity which is undermining the very fabric of the Republic. In a well-functioning democracy and open society, independent trade unions perform the function of an essential check and balance.
In the past weeks, there have been many calls for government intervention, or complaints about government's failure to intervene. These calls, in my view, are ill-conceived and misplaced. They arise out of the fact that the trade unions have been placed in a position of not performing their fundamental institutional function. Owing to the Labour Relations Act, which the IFP strenuously opposed, and the political arrangement between the ruling party and Cosatu, trade unions are now part of the government, part of management and part of the ownership of the mines.
How can we possibly think that they can represent the interests of the workers, and that the workers can legitimately feel protected by those who sit in the armchairs of government, in the shareholders' meetings of their industrial opponents and in the boardrooms of their employers against which they are advancing their claims? It is absurd indeed. It is unnatural, and it is bound to lead segments of workers into despair, extremism and radical action. Given enough time, the failure of trade unions to do their job has ushered in the present climate of lawlessness, violence and rebellion.
We need to redress the entire system by reforming the Labour Relations Act, and by empowering a government that is no longer caged and held to ransom by trade unions. We need to have new trade unions that do not own shares in any of the businesses in respect of which they are supposed to represent workers. Unless this is the case, it would be natural for workers to feel that trade unions are fornicating with them, in terms of the consent of the king, as far as they are concerned.
The present climate of tension and unreason within our mining industry will lead to the genesis of conditions out of which our own home-grown "perfect storm" will emerge, and its direct and indirect effects will have devastating consequences on our country.
Government must go back to the drawing board, and this mould of self- enrichment first and public benefit second must be stamped out at its point of origin. Our country can ill afford the merciless enrichment of the few at the expense of the many; a case in point being the few elites at the head of the ruling party's gravy train. Our people may be poor, our people may be ignorant for lack of access to education, our people may lack exposure to all that which is worldly and sophisticated, but our people are not stupid.
Our people have seen through the charade of black economic empowerment, la the ANC, and they are now angry about the squandering of vast state and private resources to enrich a few undeserving, incompetent and corrupt leaders. The mines are a case study of a much broader state of failure and corruption within black economic empowerment.
Huge amounts of private resources belonging to the mines have been set aside, and, to compensate for part of their value, public resources have also been set aside and both have been transferred to a small clique of undeserving black diamonds, with no benefit for the many communities who are bearing the daily brunt of the harsh conditions of one of the world's worst forms of employment.
By necessity or negligence or omission, mining pollutes the environment, threatens the health of vast communities and separates families across vast distances because of the migrant nature of its workers.
All this imposes untold human suffering on hundreds of thousands of people who not only need to carry their cross in silence, but must also bear the humiliation of seeing undeserving politicians, trade unionists and useless managers becoming richer and richer by the day because of so-called black economic empowerment. No wonder that they are as angry as hell. Who wouldn't be? I thank you.