Stubbornness will save SA

It’s not mineral wealth that will be South Africa’s salvation. It’s bloody-mindedness. But the refusal to back off sometimes can come at high personal cost.

A Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) judgment handed down this week gives a glimpse of the repercussions that can result from taking on a greedy, arrogant and cruel corporation. The SCA ruled that KwaZulu-Natal psychologist Linda Holden can sue mining giant Assmang over a “malicious” complaint to the Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA).

The ruling is not the end of the matter. It’s just another way station in a 12-year war of attrition. It’s a battle that’s come close to destroying Holden professionally, bankrupting her, and, as she put it to me without a trace of selfpity, it has “sucked a lot of the joy out of my life”.

Holden’s tribulations started in 2006 when workers at Assmang’s Cato Ridge manganese plant, diagnosed by the company’s doctors as having manganism – a debilitating neurological condition from exposure to high levels of toxic manganese dust – were sent to her for counselling.

Holden went beyond the counselling and took up cudgels on behalf of the workers to help them win financial recompense. Assmang responded ferociously, ending her counselling contract and reporting her to the HPCSA for unethical and unprofessional conduct. It could have ended her career.

Her attorney, Linda Payne, describes Assmang’s complaint as calculated to get her to back off. Instead, she carried on fighting. A year later, she was exonerated by the HPCSA and sued Assmang for malicious prosecution. Assmang pre-emptively tried to invalidate her action on technical grounds.

Now, after a dozen years, the SCA has ruled in her favour, so Holden can sue for malicious prosecution. Depending on how much money Assmang throws against her, it could take another dozen years out of her life. Yet, she is going ahead. Why? Holden says one of her motivating factors was seeing the “piss-poor and evasive, as well as litigious and double-dealing behaviour the sick men were subjected to”.

Human rights attorney Richard Spoor says Holden is “extraordinarily brave”. He represented the eight Assmang workers she counselled, to try to extract recompense beyond the paltry provisions of the Workmen’s Compensation Act.

“Assmang distinguishes itself with its remarkably callous attitude to workers. Assmang is very, very aggressive,” says Spoor.

“Internationally accepted best corporate practice is to take responsibility for the harm your products might cause. It’s not an ethos embraced by Assmang.”

Such abominably medieval corporate behaviour makes entirely understandable those calls for radical economic transformation and expropriation without compensation of white monopoly capital. Except that Assmang is already radical economic transformation.

It’s a subsidiary of African Rainbow Minerals, headed by ANC stalwart Patrick Motsepe, the billionaire brother-in-law of our billionaire president. This week, the National Prosecuting Authority announced it would not bring criminal charges against Assmang as “there were no reasonable prospects of a successful prosecution”.

The final words should go to Holden: “Assmang got me debt and misery. But it got the sick men a death sentence.”

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