It was African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass who famously said, back in 1857, that “if there is no struggle there is no progress”.
He was speaking in New York, at an event to celebrate the emancipation of slaves in the West Indies some 25 years earlier.
“Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters,” Douglass said.
In short, Douglass was telling us there is no escaping conflict and struggle and that they are essential for human progress.
What matters most, then, is how such conflict is managed when it arises.
At the beginning of this year — notably in his ANC January 8 statement and at the official opening of parliament about a month later — President Cyril Ramaphosa stressed the need for the government, business, labour and civil society to work closely together, but it does not seem like these “social partners” are finding each other.
The big promise made by the president at his state of the nation address on February 10 was that, within 100 days of the speech, a “social compact” would have been agreed between the government, organised business, the labour movement and other social partners.
By my calculations we have now reached the deadline, but still there are no signs of that social compact.
Instead, what we see is an escalation in the kind of rhetoric that can only drive the parties further apart and put paid to the president’s dream of an accord that would help to pull the country out of economic decline and general decay.
Not only have we seen workers and their unions chasing the president and his ministers out of a sports stadium at a May Day rally, we have seen the same workers camp out at the Union Buildings to demand that he intervenes in the months-long wage dispute between them and Sibanye-Stillwater.
Did they learn nothing about the dangers of a protracted strike from Marikana 10 years ago?
Not that the relations between Ramaphosa’s government and mining companies, Sibanye-Stillwater specifically, are that great.
Sibanye-Stillwater CEO Neal Froneman seems to have rubbed the cabinet, especially mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe, up the wrong way when he said SA was “practically a failed state”.
Mantashe, a former trade unionist who led many a successful strike against mining bosses during his days at the National Union of Mineworkers, was further peeved to hear Froneman speak of how Sibanye has “enough money” to fight the strike even if it meant halting production for a protracted period.
The minister threatened to suspend or even cancel Sibanye’s mining licence as the company was “not interested in mining gold”.
The gloves were still off this week when Mantashe told the AGM of Minerals Council SA — a gathering of the country’s mining bosses — that he has “observed a growing temptation to insult the state by strong and powerful mining executives”.
In what must have been a dig at the likes of Business Leadership SA, which is seen as critical of the executive, Mantashe called on the mining industry to “further discuss the role of business associations who also find it fashionable to insult the government and the governing party”.
While tension between these roleplayers is to be expected as they represent different, and sometimes competing, interests, the rising animosity makes the delivery of the president’s social compact less likely.
What is the likelihood of the government, business and labour finding each other soon on how to get the economy quickly back on track if they cannot even get together for the purpose of persuading Sibanye-Stillwater’s management and the unions to find each other and stop a strike that has gone on for far too long?
Did they learn nothing about the dangers of a protracted strike from Marikana 10 years ago?
Given our precarious economic position — and that much of our political future hangs on this — it is crucial that the government and its social partners deliver on a social compact as a matter of urgency.
To do so they do not need to be friends or even pretend to like each other.
What matters is an agreement on a minimum programme, on a few priority areas to focus on to boost economic growth and on the sacrifices each partner is willing to make to achieve these.
But that cannot happen when those who are supposed to be doing all the thinking and negotiating are out there trying to outshout each other.
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