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Awhile ago, a wild, exciting rumour reached my ears.
Trade unions Solidarity and the National Union of Metalworkers of SA were in talks about possible cooperation. This was after the metal workers’ union had been kicked out of Cosatu.
I was genuinely excited about this. Not only at the prospect of a new superunion with street fighter Irvin Jim and strategist Flip Buys on the same team, but because Solidarity had finally realised it needed a black partner to be taken seriously by the majority of our country’s people.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the talks were about salary negotiations with the steel and engineering industries, where they had successfully negotiated increases for their members.
Last month, I attended the launch of Solidarity’s new digital platform for its members, called Solidarity World.
Two things struck me. Firstly, the incredible innovation (on the scale that Discovery transformed the world of medical aid) shown by CEO Dirk Hermann and his colleagues to lead the union into the future. Secondly, the very white audience. I could count the black and coloured people in the audience of a few hundred people on my fingers.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with being an organisation campaigning exclusively for the rights of white workers – our Constitution allows for this, provided you don’t prejudice anyone in the process.
But Solidarity’s problem is that it wants to expand and be taken seriously by the powers that be without showing any effort to recruit more black and coloured members.
How do you convince black people of your bona fides when your (white) foot soldiers paint their faces black for a protest and pretend that apartheid never existed?
We do not live in a vacuum. The damage that apartheid caused to black people’s lives, souls and pockets will take years to heal.
Just as the National Party previously financed empowerment projects with state funds to uplift Afrikaners economically (successfully so), the ANC is now trying (inadequately) to lift black people out of poverty with legislation.
The one big difference, of course, is that the ANC does not have a policy of segregation against whites.
Which brings me to Solidarity’s “crisis summit” a few weeks ago at the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria. The summit “put plans on the table” to protect Afrikaners against decline in the country and the state. This included investigating the possibility of self-rule – a proposal Solidarity insists is not, in effect, a neovolkstaat. Buys talks about “mounting evidence that the government is starting to rule against Afrikaners”.
As if the mess at Eskom, the endemic corruption in state tenders, the destruction of statues and growing inequality only affects Afrikaners.
Is Solidarity also prepared to hold up a mirror and ask if it is time to adapt its strategy and appearance, like its website, to a new world?
