Minister Jomo Sibiya: NUM Central Committee 2026

Address by Deputy Minister of Employment and Labour, Mr Jomo Sibiya, at the NUM Central Committee 2026

Chairperson of the session, Comrade Olehile Kgware;

President of the National Union of Mineworkers, Comrade Manzaba Phillip Vilakazi;

Deputy President, Comrade Olehile Kgware;

Treasurer General, Comrade Helen Diatile;

General Secretary, Comrade Mpho Edwin Phakedi;

Deputy General Secretary, Comrade Mogase Phillip Mankge;

Minister of Electricity and Energy, Comrade Kgosientsho Ramokgopa;

Deputy Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure, Comrade Sihle Zikalala;

Members of the Central Executive Committee;

Delegates to this Central Committee;

Fellow workers and comrades in struggle;

Ladies and gentlemen;

Good afternoon.

I bring you warm and fraternal greetings from the Department of Employment and Labour and from the African National Congress as the governing party and vanguard leader of the National Democratic Revolution.

It is in the spirit of working-class internationalism and revolutionary solidarity that I stand before this assembly today, conscious that the struggles waged within these walls are not separate from the broader contest between progressive and reactionary forces that defines our historical moment.

The Central Committee of the National Union of Mineworkers is not a ceremonial occasion. It is an organ of working-class power, a forum in which the organised proletariat of the mining sector exercises its democratic sovereignty, holds its leadership accountable to the membership, and charts the strategic course of one of the most consequential formations of the labour movement on this continent.

The Freedom Charter declared unequivocally that the people shall share in the country's wealth, that the mineral wealth beneath the soil and the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole. That declaration was not a poetic aspiration. It was, and remains, a programme of action, a programme whose full realisation demands the sustained, organised and politically conscious agency of precisely the kind of working-class formation that NUM represents.

The decisions taken in this room will echo in the shafts of Rustenburg and Carletonville, in the dust-laden lungs of rock drill operators in the Northern Cape, in the dormitories of migrant workers separated from their families across this republic. This gathering carries the weight of history and must be treated with the seriousness that history demands.

To understand the condition of the South African mineworker in 2026, one cannot begin at the level of the mine shaft or the wage negotiation table. One must begin at the level of global political economy at the structure of imperialism and international capital, at the decisions made in the boardrooms of London, New York, Toronto and Zurich that determine the price of gold before a single South African worker has descended underground.

Marxist political economy has long established that the working class under capitalism does not merely sell its labour power in a neutral marketplace of free and equal exchange. It does so within a structure of class antagonism in which the owners of the means of production, the bourgeoisie, in the classical formulation, hold systematic structural advantages over those who possess only their labour.

In the global mining industry, this class antagonism is compounded by the imperial dimension: the South African mineworker is not simply exploited by a local capitalist class, but is inserted into a global value chain in which the surplus value extracted from their labour is appropriated at multiple levels by the mine house, by the commodity trader, by the multinational financier before it reaches the shareholders of corporations headquartered in jurisdictions far removed from the communities that bear the social and environmental costs of extraction.

South Africa sits atop the world's largest known reserves of platinum group metals, a resource of accelerating strategic significance as the global transition to clean energy intensifies demand for catalytic converters, hydrogen fuel cells and electrolytic applications. The paradox confronting mineworkers is a cruel expression of what Rosa Luxemburg identified as the accumulation of capital on the periphery: the world needs what lies beneath their feet more than ever before, yet the structural conditions of their employment, their wages and their tenure remain precarious by deliberate design.

This paradox is not accidental. It is the product of a global financial architecture constructed through the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Trade Organisation and the international investment treaty framework that consistently ensures the primary beneficiaries of resource extraction are the shareholders of multinational corporations headquartered in the Global North, while the workers who extract those resources, and the communities that bear the environmental and social costs of extraction, receive a disproportionately small share of the value created.

Lenin's analysis of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, characterised by the export of capital, the division of the world among great powers, and the subordination of peripheral economies to the requirements of monopoly finance capital, retains its analytical power in a world where the names of the metropolitan centres have shifted but the fundamental logic of accumulation by dispossession has not.

The International Labour Organisation has documented across multiple studies that the global mining sector exhibits precisely this dynamic: an inverse relationship between mineral wealth and social welfare in the territories where extraction occurs, which development economists euphemistically term the resource curse, but which a more rigorous political economy would describe as the systematic transfer of value from the periphery to the core. South Africa is not immune.

Thirty years after the democratic breakthrough of 1994, the country remains among the most unequal societies on earth, and that inequality is concentrated in the communities most dependent on mining. The structural answer to this condition lies not in modest wage adjustments alone, but in a fundamental restructuring through beneficiation, localisation and meaningful downstream industrialisation of the terms on which South African mineral wealth is extracted, processed and distributed.

The global trading environment has deteriorated in ways that carry direct consequences for South African workers and that require analysis through the lens of inter-imperialist rivalry. The re-emergence of economic nationalism in major economies through the United States Inflation Reduction Act, the European Green Deal, and the broader reshoring of strategic supply chains following the COVID-19 pandemic represents not a departure from imperialism but its contemporary adaptation: the metropolitan powers protecting their own accumulation regimes behind new protectionist walls dressed in the language of climate responsibility and national security.

The geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China, the two dominant poles of contemporary imperialism, adds a further layer of complexity that demands strategic clarity from the South African state and the organised working class alike.

South Africa must navigate between these competing centres of global power without subordinating its sovereign developmental interests to either. The mineral endowment of this country must be leveraged for domestic industrial development, for the creation of value-adding employment, and for the accumulation of national productive capacity, not deployed as a bargaining chip in the strategic competitions of great powers who have historically shown little regard for the developmental aspirations of African nations.

The global energy transition presents the most structurally significant geopolitical development for the mining working class in this generation, and it requires engagement from a position of class consciousness rather than technocratic neutrality. Approximately 90 000 South African workers are employed in the coal sector, with hundreds of thousands more indirectly supported through supply chains and local economies in Mpumalanga, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal.

The closure of coal mines driven by environmental regulation, Eskom's transition commitments, or the withdrawal of international financing from fossil fuel projects will not be an abstraction for these workers. It will be a material catastrophe unless managed with the deliberateness and resourcing that a genuine just transition demands.

The working-class critique of the just transition discourse as currently structured by international financial institutions is a legitimate and necessary one. Nations that industrialised through two centuries of unregulated carbon emissions now prescribe energy pathways to developing countries that would deny them the developmental head start that fossil fuels afforded the industrialised world.

This constitutes a form of climate imperialism, an extension of the dependency relationship into the environmental domain, and it must be resisted with the same vigour and political clarity with which the liberation movement resisted the economic prescriptions of structural adjustment.

South Africa's just transition must be South African-owned, worker-centred, democratically determined and adequately resourced by those nations and institutions that bear the greatest historical responsibility for the climate crisis. NUM must be in the vanguard of shaping that transition, ensuring that no motive force of the National Democratic Revolution is sacrificed on the altar of green capitalism.

Against this geopolitical backdrop, we must interrogate the domestic political conjuncture with equal rigour and equal honesty. The 2024 general elections produced a result that fundamentally altered the balance of class forces within the formal structures of democratic governance: for the first time since 1994, the African National Congress does not hold a majority in the National Assembly.

The Government of National Unity, established through a coalition framework that brings together parties of divergent and, in some instances, antagonistic class orientations, has created a governing arrangement that introduces new contradictions into the terrain of state power.

The inclusion of the Democratic Alliance, a party whose class character is unambiguously aligned with the interests of monopoly capital and the established white propertied class, whose economic programme is rooted in neoliberal orthodoxy, and whose historical relationship with the black working class has been defined by hostility and paternalism, creates real and irresolvable tensions within the policy space.

The working class must approach the GNU with clear-eyed class analysis rather than the sentiment of national unity as an end in itself. Unity of the nation cannot be achieved at the expense of the unity and organisational independence of the working class. The GNU is a political accommodation made necessary by the arithmetic of the ballot; it is not an ideological convergence, and it must not be treated as one.

The organised working class, through COSATU, through NUM, through the structures of the Alliance, must function as a disciplined and vigilant counterweight to any drift in the economic policy programme away from the transformative commitments of the National Democratic Revolution.

The unemployment crisis in South Africa represents the most devastating material expression of the structural failures of racial capitalism that democratic governance has not yet overcome and that, in the absence of decisive radical economic transformation, will not overcome through gradualism alone.

With official unemployment consistently above 30% and the expanded definition approaching 42%, the country confronts a labour market crisis of a scale that carries profound implications not only for the economic wellbeing of the working class but for the very stability and legitimacy of the democratic order.

The mining sector, which at its peak employed over 800 000 workers, now employs fewer than 500 000 in the formal sector, the consequence of decades of mechanisation, commodity price volatility weaponised by capital to justify restructuring, and the deliberate casualisation of labour through subcontracting and labour broking arrangements designed to fragment worker organisation and dilute the hard-won protections of the collective bargaining framework.

The structural condition of labour surplus does not exist in isolation from the labour relations framework; it is actively exploited by capital to weaken the bargaining position of organised workers and to render the threat of replacement a permanent instrument of workplace discipline.

This is precisely why the legislative framework of labour rights, the Labour Relations Act, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act and the Employment Equity Act, must be defended not as bureaucratic convenience but as the legal codification of class struggle, as the terrain on which the working class has institutionalised its power in relation to capital, and as an inheritance that was won through sacrifice and cannot be surrendered through legislative concession to the imperatives of investor attractiveness.

The cost-of-living crisis confronting South African workers in 2026 represents the sharpest expression of the contradiction between the formal rights of democratic citizenship and the material reality of class exploitation.

The cumulative effect of energy price increases driven by Eskom's tariff trajectory, food price inflation exacerbated by global commodity market disruptions, rising transport costs, collapsing municipal service delivery, and the sustained erosion of real wages has placed millions of working households in a condition of chronic economic precarity that no honest observer can describe as compatible with the vision of a national democratic society.

A mineworker earning at or near the National Minimum Wage remains, despite the significant legislative achievement that the NMW represents, a worker managing poverty carrying the reproductive costs of an extended household in a social welfare system structurally inadequate to the scale of need created by unemployment and informality.

The Mining Charter, as a transformative instrument designed to redress the historical exclusion of black South Africans from ownership and control of the industry that extracted the wealth from beneath their ancestral land, has been systematically subverted through corporate legal challenges, compliance artifice and the substitution of narrow elite enrichment for genuine structural transformation.

NUM must hold both the state and the industry accountable for authentic transformation, not the Black Economic Empowerment arrangements that reproduce class inequality within a racially redressed ownership layer while the conditions of the working class remain structurally unchanged, but transformation in the revolutionary sense: a redistribution of ownership, control and the proceeds of production that materially advances the position of the working class as a class.

It would be a disservice to the political intelligence of this assembly to approach the question of the Tripartite Alliance with the language of uncritical solidarity that papers over real and significant contradictions. The Alliance between the ANC, COSATU and the South African Communist Party was not forged on the assumption of perfect ideological agreement.

It was forged on the basis of a shared strategic objective, the National Democratic Revolution as the most direct route to the liberation of the black working class from the triple oppression of race, class and gender, and on the recognition that no single organisation possesses the organisational capacity, the class reach or the ideological breadth to advance that objective alone. That foundational logic remains sound. But the Alliance has, over the past decade in particular, been subjected to strains that have tested its coherence in ways that demand honest acknowledgement.

The corrosive effects of state capture, the factionalisation of the ANC along lines that do not correspond to ideological difference but to the competition for access to state resources, the subordination of Alliance consultation processes to the imperatives of intra-ANC political management, and the periodic deployment of state power in ways that directly contradict the interests of the working class, are not minor operational difficulties.

They are expressions of the class contradictions within the Alliance itself, of the tendency identified by Gramsci for the state, even a state led by a liberation movement, to reproduce the ideological hegemony of the dominant class unless consciously and continuously struggled against by organised working-class formations within and outside the structures of state power.

COSATU's strategic decision to remain within the Alliance, even though the most turbulent period of the post-Polokwane era, reflected a correct assessment that working-class interests are better served by contestation within the Alliance than by political isolation outside it.

But remaining within the Alliance cannot mean subordinating the independent voice of the working class to the management requirements of the governing party. Where Alliance processes marginalise labour, the working class must say so loudly, organisationally and without apology. Silence in the face of class retreat is not solidarity. It is a form of ideological capitulation.

What then must be the attitude of the National Union of Mineworkers in this complex conjuncture of global restructuring, domestic political realignment and Alliance uncertainty? The answer must begin with a reaffirmation of class identity with NUM's explicit recognition of itself not merely as a labour relations actor but as a formation of the working class engaged in the long-term project of transforming the South African political economy in accordance with the principles of the National Democratic Revolution and the ultimate horizon of a socialist society.

In relation to the Government of National Unity, the Union's posture must be one of critical solidarity from a position of organised independence: supporting those initiatives that advance the material interests of workers and the poor, the expansion of the National Minimum Wage, the defence of labour legislation, the implementation of the National Health Insurance, the investment in public infrastructure that creates employment, while resisting with full organisational force any policy drift toward labour market deregulation, privatisation of strategic public entities, or the subordination of the social wage to the conditionalities of international rating agencies and multilateral lenders who are accountable to global capital and not to the South African working class.

In relation to the just transition, NUM must move from a reactive to a vanguard posture, not waiting for government or industry to present transition frameworks for endorsement, but developing independent working-class transition plans that place job creation, community development, skills transfer and worker-controlled beneficiation at their centre.

In relation to the Alliance, NUM must insist on the full restoration of bilateral consultation processes, on the treatment of COSATU's positions as co-determining rather than advisory in economic policy formation, and on the principled enforcement of Alliance discipline against those within the governing party who deploy state resources for factional accumulation rather than national democratic transformation.

The working class did not struggle for 30 years against apartheid colonialism to become a constituency to be managed rather than a motive force to be engaged.

Comrades, the South African working class has never been a passive object of history. From the 1946 mineworkers' strike, that heroic act of collective defiance against racial capitalism that foreshadowed the liberation struggle, to the formation of COSATU in 1985 as the organised vanguard of the internal resistance, to the role of organised labour in the constitutional negotiations that established the framework of our democracy.

The mineworkers and their organised formations have been makers of history in the most profound sense. NUM carries that inheritance. The mineworkers represented by this Union have paid an incalculable price in lives claimed by rockfalls and silicosis, in years spent underground in conditions incompatible with human dignity, in wages that have never fully reflected the surplus value extracted from their labour and the communities that have subsidised the industry through underpaid social reproduction for generations.

That history is not a reason for sentiment. It is a mandate for revolutionary commitment. The world is restructuring at a velocity and in directions that no single organisation, government or ideology can fully anticipate. In such an environment, the organisational strength, the ideological clarity and the political independence of the Union are not less important; they are more so.

I wish the delegates of this Central Committee every success in your deliberations. May the quality of your debate match the gravity of the moment. May the decisions you take serve the workers who sent you here and no other interest. May you leave this gathering more united, more strategically equipped and more resolute in your commitment to the working class and the National Democratic Revolution.

The Department of Employment and Labour stands in partnership with you.

The African National Congress stands in solidarity with you.

History is watching, and so are the workers whose lives and futures depend on what is decided in this room.

I thank you.

Amandla!

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