Inaugural Day of Courageous Conversation - Belo Horizonte, Brazil

 Inaugural Day of Courageous Conversation

Belo Horizonte, Brazil

October 8, 2024

“Promoting the Common Good: Inter-sectoral Dialogue and Action on the Future of Mining in South Africa”

The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba,

Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town & President of the South African Council of Churches

Brothers and Sisters in the Mining Industry,

Manala, my wife, here in her own capacity,

Your Grace, Archbishop Marinez,

Your Eminence, Cardinal Stephen,

The Right Revd David Urquhart, chair of the MFRI,

Representatives of the wider Faith Community,

Government representatives,

Leaders of Community Groups,

Civil Society Representatives

All who have joined us today:

Thank you for your warm welcome, and to our hosts, thank you for the privilege you have afforded us in inviting us to be here. I am excited to be in Brazil, a nation whose churches have offered us so much in theological insight and your witness for justice and peace. I am here to tell you about our discussions and our joint activities with the mining industry in South Africa: our rationale, our origins, our participants and our joys and frustrations. It’s a story that goes back for nearly a decade, so let me begin at the beginning without further ado.

Firstly, as some in South Africa asked when we joined this initiative, what did the churches, ecumenical organisations, and the broader religious sector have to do with the mining industry? Why are we involved in this initiative at all?

My close friend, Cardinal Stephen Brislin, here with us today, often reminds me that all conflict begins with communication failure - the failure to speak and, importantly, to listen to one another as human souls. This insight has been a guiding light for us, especially in our engagement with the extractive industry, particularly mining, which has long been a magnet for conflict and bears a troubled legacy in South Africa and worldwide. The late Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu would have put it this way: if God is not God of all, including the mining industry, then God is not God at all.

The world’s mines may cover only one per cent of the earth’s surface. Still, most material aspects of our existence as humanity depend on their output, and the industry is, directly and indirectly, responsible for about 45 per cent of the world’s economy. Bishop David Urquhart, also present here, has reminded us that we should also take into cognisance the supply chain when reflecting on this area. Many eras in the history of humankind are known for the minerals that dominated their times: for example, the Copper Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. George Orwell, the British author best known for his book Animal Farm and a lifelong socialist, once said that mining is “part of the metabolism of life.“

So, we must listen when such an important industry approaches people of faith. And when essential actors in the industry tell us that they recognise that their very legitimacy is being challenged as never before, that the era of exploitative capitalism is coming to an end, and that they want to develop in ways that are in harmony with and do not conflict with, new patterns of human thought and behaviour, they signal to us that they are willing to put in the work needed to become a partner in society which is accepted as promoting the common good.

On a personal note, one of the reasons I have made the initiative one of the priorities in my ministry is my early identification with those who work in South Africa’s gold mines. My first exposure to those miners was in my youth, when my father made a living as a travelling salesman, driving from mine to mine west of Johannesburg, selling clothes and other goods to mineworkers who were living far from their families, sleeping in concrete bunks in crowded single-sex hostels adjoining the mines.

Later, in my capacity as a psychologist and a priest, over five years, I counselled about 400 miners whose spines had been injured in underground accidents. They were young men in their 20s who had endured the trauma of rockfalls up to two or three kilometres underground. They had survived, but in the pitch dark, they found they couldn’t move their legs, having suffered low-velocity, high-intensity injuries, which meant that there was usually no blood – just a bulge protruding from their backs, indicating that their spinal cords had been crushed. One day, a young man would be fit, energetic and looking forward to marrying and having children. The next, he was lying in traction in the hospital, physically and emotionally devastated, the doctors praying that the injuries were low down enough on his back that he would only be a paraplegic and not a quadriplegic. In an instant, this young man could be condemned to life in a wheelchair, unable to control his bladder or his bowels, unable to feel anything below the injury and therefore unable to have children. So, I came to this initiative with a passion for ensuring it would impact those at the coalface, the rock face of the industry, and their families.

I believe that as faith communities, we can bring important strengths to common endeavours such as these: our worship congregations include actors from all sectors of the industry – workers, managers and owners – so our leadership as a collective can aspire to rise above local political and economic conflicts and tensions, and can even play a mediating role in conflicts.

Ironically, our shortcomings are also a factor which compels us to join the initiative. As churches in South Africa, we have often failed to minister adequately to miners, partly because historically, many lived in those hostels cut off from our parishes. So, for example, we still need to understand the aspirations of underpaid miners who have fought to earn even $750 a month for working in conditions of extreme heat, in temperatures sometimes as hot as a pizza oven, on stopes deep in the earth.

We have often failed managers and owners, too. We have not adequately considered how risky mining is economically, as an industry that is one year a market-based success riding high on commodity prices and the next a business in quicksand. We have failed to understand the constraints on managers who face the relentless pressure of meeting shareholders’ expectations for better results every quarter and who have to deal with resistance to social reforms from engineers and line managers responsible for the safe conduct of highly sophisticated and technically complex mining operations.

Apart from our failures as a faith community, our country, South Africa, was scarred in the lead-up to this initiative by a catastrophic failure encompassing multiple sectors of society. One of the darkest days in our young democracy occurred in August 2012 in what has gone down in our history as the Marikana massacre. A mining industry disconnected from its workers, a fracturing union landscape, and a poorly prepared police force – all of these converged during a six-week strike at a platinum mine. This tension culminated on August 16th when police opened fire on striking mine workers, killing thirty-four of them. These men had journeyed from all corners of our country, far from their homes and families, striving to earn a living to support themselves and their loved ones. On that fateful day, families were left without fathers, without breadwinners, and often without hope. It was a stark reminder of the consequences when dialogue fails, empathy is absent, and human dignity is disregarded. The wounds of Marikana run deep, not just for the families of those who perished, but for our entire nation.

As a result of all these failures, when this initiative began in South Africa, I invoked the biblical principle of lamentation to underpin the process – lamentation of our failings, lamentation at the resulting suffering of God’s people. The Book of Lamentations in the Old Testament expresses what it means to experience suffering, but it goes further than that. In the words of the South African theologian, Denise Ackermann, lamenting “...is a refusal to settle for the way things are. It reminds God that the human situation is not as it should be and that God, as the partner in the covenant, must act.” Lamentation is not navel-gazing; it is not only exposing your vulnerability but also exposing it as a tool for leadership because you can’t say let us move forward together without acknowledging the failures of the past.

Upon lamentation, we can build hope, since hope, as Prof Ackermann has also written, “is not that blithe sense that all will end well... because human progress is guaranteed”. No, hope is a determination, a conviction that seeks to name our problems and highlight our differences precisely to mobilize people to overcome them. In that spirit, during our discussions, I have also drawn on the psalms in the Bible, particularly Psalm 118, which assures us that “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” (v24)

The set of psalms, which includes those words, finds purpose in asking for the good and embarking on this process. I believe that we can invoke the hope they embody, enabling us to develop and nurture solidarity together. The theologian Christine Firer Hinze has described working to achieve solidarity as discerning “the interdependency of all peoples within earth’s habitats” and working “collaboratively for the shared good of all people and the planet.” She adds: “In a world of radically unequal power and opportunities, one way towards justice and a better life for all is... about cultivating these practices of solidarity, which is indeed using the power and capability of all of us.”

I believe that the tool we have used in the Church, “See, Judge, Act,” offers us a way of looking at key social concepts, especially concepts that speak to the mining sector’s contribution to a better world, with an emphasis on the sector’s commitment to what we call “just sustainability.”

To turn to the mechanics of our process, you will probably know by now it that had its roots in an international meeting convened at the Vatican when the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace hosted a Day of Reflection in 2013. That meeting was followed by others, including an Ecumenical Day of Reflection in London, hosted by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the President of the British Methodist Conference. The wide-ranging nature of the initiative was established in those meetings, which included representatives of the mining industry, the faith community and civil society.

Apart from the meetings, various mining companies hosted representatives of faith groups and other organisations on site visits to mining operations across the globe to help inform the dialogue. A key outcome of these discussions was a decision that this international dialogue ought to happen at a local level, with all stakeholders included, in regions and countries where mining is an integral part of the socioeconomic fabric.

We recognised that initially, all parties entered with their agendas, committed to their own interests, often antagonistic toward others. Our first step was securing a commitment to genuine, dedicated dialogue. From there, we aimed to cultivate a space of action-oriented communitarianism—a collective responsibility to the well-being of our communities.

So, what has our journey looked like in South Africa? How have we maintained this space?

Over the past ten years, I have led a programme in South Africa called Courageous Conversations. This initiative challenges mining companies, union leaders, civil society, and government to come together in a safe space hosted by the Church, seeking common ground for the common good. This journey has not been easy, nor has it been universally popular. However, as I stated at the outset, my pastoral duty is to the people of South Africa, and fulfilling this duty often requires me to operate in uncomfortable spaces. And, in spite of the difficulties, we have found a sector willing to engage, converse, and learn.

We took the first step in 2015, when I hosted the first South African Day of Courageous Conversations at my official residence and office in Cape Town. In our conversations, against the backdrop of our history, in which mineworkers’ unions have played an important role in forcing change in the industry – and indeed in ending apartheid and bringing about democracy, it was essential to include representatives of labour in our conversations. Consequently, our discussions have been at their best when they have reflected the full diversity of the industry – representatives of owners, management and labour.

In our context, it has also been essential to emphasise, as I did in that first conversation, the crisis that we face due to the enormous disparities of wealth that we experience in South Africa. In the words I used then: “The difference between our situation in South Africa and that in more economically developed countries is that, like no other issue we face, this one has the potential to blow our country apart.” By measures such as the Gini co-efficient, which measures income inequality, South Africa has recently been judged the most unequal globally. Brazil has been in the top 10 unequal countries in some charts so that you may share some of our national characteristics.

In our conversations, industry leaders are seeking to reposition themselves as a sector that can partner with host communities and the government for long-term sustainable development. To help them achieve this, those who have joined our conversations have committed themselves to seeking collaborative solutions to the problems that threaten the sustainability of mining and the communities in which mines operate.

At our first meeting back in 2015, I urged all of those represented – mine management, labour, non-governmental organisations, other civil society groups and religious institutions – to stop working apart from one another in different silos, and I called on mining companies to join the process as a collective and raise the bar, especially in the areas of housing, health, schools and poverty alleviation.

So when we tailored the initiative specifically for South Africa beginning in 2015, there were three critical and unique pillars :

1. Interfaith Inclusion: Recognising South Africa’s multicultural and multi-faith landscape, I insisted that our version be interfaith, embracing the rich tapestry of beliefs that define our nation. In its many expressions, we understood that faith holds the key to unlocking people’s hearts and fostering genuine understanding.

2. Focus on People: Rather than centering the dialogue solely on mining, I wanted us to focus on South Africa and its people, examining the role—or potential role—of mining within that context. Shifting the narrative from industry-centric to people-centric was essential, acknowledging that the true wealth of our nation lies in its citizens.

3. Embracing Difficult Dialogues: I was determined that we engage in challenging conversations, hence the naming of the initiative as Courageous Conversations. We needed to create a space where uncomfortable truths could be spoken and heard and where healing could begin through honest discourse.

We have indeed needed courage and have faced profoundly difficult questions, in our process, when we formed a task team, made up of representatives from the mining sector and faith community, to explore a socioeconomic development agenda, with the initial objective of identifying multi-sectoral partnership opportunities for development projects. Groups reflecting various interests represented in our conversations have visited selected areas and mines to consult on how we can work together.

To embody the spirit of courage, I first asked the CEO of a large mining company at our inaugural Day of Courageous Conversations in 2015: “Would you want your own children to work in a mine underground?” The response was telling, but what mattered most was initiating a shift towards empathy. It forced him and other industry leaders to step out of their boardrooms and into the lives of their workers, to see them not as mere employees but as fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters.

Joel Barker writes, “Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.” So, what actions have we undertaken to ensure that Courageous Conversations is more than just a “talk shop”? To give you an idea of action taken by individual mining companies, various among them have taken the following steps:

• Committing all business units to be part of the multi-stakeholder interfaith conversations and to help provide the means to do so;

• Committing to providing a specific mine and a neighbouring community as a pilot site for the initiative and presenting its social and labour plans and social engagement tool kits for collective review to explore how they can be improved.

• Commit to collaborating with other companies operating in the same area to pool resources to address communities’ needs and engage communities more actively to understand their concerns and needs better.

• Drawing whole communities into collaborative processes. To take a concrete example, in the iron mines of our Northern Cape province, the Ecumenical Foundation of Southern Africa and National Religious Association for Social Development work with mine management to identify longer term, larger projects that will benefit the whole community, especially promoting community-based, vegetable gardening but also recruits government, NGOs and business to join community programmes to extend the partnership beyond the mine.

An engagement which I have been incredibly proud to have been a part of is a company’s commitment to provide housing, schooling and, where possible, jobs for family members of the victims of the Marikana massacre. The company concerned did not own the mine at the time of the tragedy, but as the new owner has nevertheless taken on the obligation to help victims' families, and it has been a moving experience to visit the widows of the victims in both remote rural locations and big cities to witness the handing over of assistance to them and their families.

Let me also share some tangible outcomes of other efforts undertaken as part of the process:

• Moral Regeneration: Companies and churches involved in Courageous Conversations have implemented projects with profound impacts. In the Limpopo province of South Africa, a moral regeneration programme engaged over 9,000 school-aged learners, led by local faith groups with support from a local mine. Within three years, the community saw improvements in academic performance, a dramatic decline in teenage pregnancy rates from 26% to less than 7%, reductions in absenteeism, and decreased dropout rates.

• Empowering Local Churches: Local churches have been encouraged to extend their reach beyond their pulpits and congregations, taking a broader responsibility for social upliftment and development. By collaborating with mines, local businesses, and others, they have become catalysts for positive change in their communities.

• Pathway to Peace: After a spike in violence near a mine in the east coast port town of Richards Bay, which included assassinations of several mining executives, we leveraged our networks and convening power to bring several parties to the table. We found a pathway to peace through dialogue, averting further conflict and fostering understanding.

• Interlocutor During COVID-19: The pandemic presented unprecedented challenges. Acting as an interlocutor between various bodies with differing approaches and needs, we helped forge pathways that saved lives and kept people safe. Our efforts ensured that the most vulnerable were not forgotten and saved lives.

But we have faced challenges and frustrations as well. The challenges facing local communities, faith-inspired networks, mines and investors are not different from those experienced by the rest of society. However, because mining communities are often tightly knit, centred on the mines and their infrastructure with their economic power, members of the community have extraordinary expectations of mining companies. When it comes to joint action, competition between different mining companies encourages the very work in silos that we are trying to end when it comes to pursuing the priority of meeting social needs. Also, most mining company CEOs are well-paid engineers focussed on targets and products, for whom human relationships are ancillary to their primary task.

Mine health and safety are priorities and have improved dramatically in recent years, but they are measured in capacity to disrupt production. When accidents happen, the focus is on how errors in the system need to be fixed to ensure profitability rather than evaluating the broader impact of human lives on families and villages far away. In one particular case in South Africa, a company took a decision not to recover the bodies of miners killed but to let them remain entombed underground because of the prohibitive cost of retrieving them.

An ongoing challenge is how to handle the growth of illegal mining in abandoned mine shafts in South Africa, which is associated with hazardous work and organised crime. Do we try to bring them to the table, or do we leave dealing with them to the law enforcement agencies?

Despite the challenges, it has been a great joy to be involved in the Courageous Conversations, where we have provided safe spaces for dialogue and enabled workers’ representatives to face their employers with their real-life stories rather than as units of production. While union representatives are careful not to replace collective bargaining forums with conversations, it has been humbling to see them appreciate and value the experience of engaging with mining managers and executives as fellow human beings. Perhaps the most powerful impact of this work is best summed up by a labour union leader who said, “The value of this work is that we used to see each other as numbers; now we see each other as people.”

Although the government was initially slow to respond to the process – at first, they sent relatively junior representatives to the conversations – we have since managed to get the relevant Cabinet ministers involved.

I think about our role in three ways:

1. Convener of Leadership: We bring together leaders from various sectors to foster broad transformational change and dialogue. We create a powerful platform for systemic change by uniting voices that seldom interact constructively.

2. Enabler and Guide: We assist in creating localized dialogues and empowering communities to address their unique challenges. This localized approach ensures that solutions are context-specific and culturally sensitive.

3. Interlocutor in Complex Situations: Occasionally, we intervene in specific challenges that require special attention. Our neutral position allows us to mediate and facilitate resolutions where others might struggle.

We have had to work to earn the trust of most stakeholders. Trust is the essential foundation upon which our entire engagement rests. Creating a space where people can begin to trust each other has been my role—a neutral, safe environment devoid of judgment or bias, purposefully holding the centre. We are in the discussion, but not of it. Our calling is to be bridges over troubled waters, facilitators of dialogue where there is silence or hostility. And to ensure that this space remains safe and open, we cannot act as an advocacy group beyond promoting a morally guided, common-good approach. Finally, faith is the key that can unlock much of our potential and must remain our constant foundation, and as faith leaders we must refuse to be exploited or co-opted to serve political or business interests, recognising instead that what benefits South Africa ultimately benefits us all.

As I reflect on our journey, I see parallels with Brazil. Our nations are rich in natural resources and cultural diversity, yet we grapple with social inequalities and historical wounds, leading me to believe that the Courageous Conversations model can be adapted and implemented here, fostering healing and transformation. Please consider the possibilities that arise when we courageously engage in honest dialogue, embrace the discomfort of challenging conversations, and commit to action grounded in faith and love.

I want to close with a passage from a book that speaks profoundly to our shared human experience. It discusses South Africa, but I believe its truth resonates across borders:

“A small reminder that in this inspiring, frustrating, fractured country, two or more realities can coexist, to orbit each other and that wounds—old and new—can only heal properly when we make an effort to recognise, and to acknowledge, someone else’s truth.” – Andrew Harding, These Are Not Gentle People.

My experience of the Courageous Conversations process has given me a broader perspective on the mining industry and the broader economy of our country, and as I have said, it has taught me an appreciation of the complexities, the joys, the sadness and the opportunities which come with the business. Just as Jesus is recorded in the Gospel of Luke as sending out seventy disciples to bring his message to every town and place where he intended to go, we are called to witness Gospel values in the everyday lives of those in the working world. (Lk 10: 1-12) Our Courageous Conversations have enabled us to do this in South Africa.

God bless you, God bless the mining industry, and God bless your efforts to establish this process in your context in Brazil.

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