At a Glance
Elim to Johannesburg: The Migration That Defined a Generation
Sam Shilowa was born in Elim in 1958, in the Limpopo region that is now called the Vhembe district — the far north of South Africa, a landscape of baobab trees and lowveld heat and Tsonga-speaking communities that had been incorporated into the apartheid system's labour migration machinery as a source of workers for the mines, the farms, and the factories of the industrial Witwatersrand. The migration from Limpopo to Johannesburg was one of the defining movements of twentieth-century South African life — the movement of hundreds of thousands of young men from the rural north to the industrial south, from subsistence agriculture to wage labour, from the relative familiarity of village life to the dense political environment of the Rand's townships.
Shilowa made this migration and found in the trade union movement the organisational vehicle through which his political and intellectual capacities found expression. The COSATU of the mid-1980s — the federation launched in 1985 that had become the most important internal political force in the anti-apartheid struggle — was the institution in which a generation of young workers from backgrounds like Shilowa's were developing the organisational and political skills that would eventually make them significant figures in the labour movement and in the broader democratic politics of the post-apartheid era.
His rise through COSATU's structures reflected a combination of organisational ability, political intelligence, and the particular capacity for managing the relationships — between affiliates with different interests, between the labour movement and its political allies, between the federation's internal constituencies and the external political environment — that effective leadership of a large coalition requires. By the early 1990s he was one of COSATU's most prominent figures, and his succession to the general secretaryship in 1993 was the recognition of a capacity that the federation's internal processes had identified and tested.
Succeeding Jay Naidoo: Taking the Federation Through the Transition
When Sam Shilowa succeeded Jay Naidoo as COSATU general secretary in 1993, he inherited a federation at the height of its political significance. COSATU had been the most important internal political force in the anti-apartheid struggle through the state of emergency years of the mid-1980s, had participated in the Mass Democratic Movement's defiance campaigns of 1989, and had been a central player in the negotiating processes that produced the democratic constitution. Its relationship with the ANC was the foundational political alliance of the democratic transition, and the federation's membership of nearly two million workers was the largest organised constituency in the emerging democratic system.
Taking over COSATU at this moment meant taking over at the moment when the relationship between the labour movement and the ANC government it had helped to elect needed to be redefined — when the solidarity of the liberation struggle, which had been relatively uncomplicated because the movement and the federation shared a common enemy in the apartheid state, needed to give way to the more complicated politics of a labour federation relating to a government that was simultaneously its ally and the party responsible for macroeconomic policies that COSATU's constituency found damaging.
The first democratic elections of April 1994 brought the ANC to power with 62.6% of the vote. The Government of National Unity that followed included the ANC, the National Party, and the Inkatha Freedom Party in a coalition whose dynamics constrained the ANC's ability to implement its most ambitious social commitments. The RDP — the Reconstruction and Development Programme that was COSATU's primary vehicle for translating its political support into social delivery — was the government's initial framework for addressing the legacy of apartheid. Shilowa as COSATU general secretary was one of the most important voices arguing for the RDP's implementation and for the prioritisation of the social investment that COSATU's constituency required.
The GEAR Crisis: The Labour Movement's Hardest Political Moment
The adoption of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy in 1996 was the defining political crisis of Sam Shilowa's COSATU tenure. GEAR replaced the RDP as the government's macroeconomic framework, and it did so with a shift in economic philosophy that COSATU found deeply problematic. Where the RDP had emphasised social investment and redistribution, GEAR emphasised fiscal discipline, market-friendly policies, and economic growth as the vehicle for addressing poverty and inequality — a framework that critics within COSATU described as essentially accepting the economic orthodoxy of the Washington Consensus at precisely the moment when the liberation movement had the political power to challenge it.
COSATU's response to GEAR was one of the most significant political confrontations in the history of the ANC alliance. The federation called GEAR "non-negotiable" a criticism of the government's failure to consult its alliance partners before adopting the new framework. It organised mass actions against the policy. It challenged the ANC government's economic direction with a directness that the liberation struggle's solidarity had previously made unnecessary and that tested the alliance's capacity to manage disagreement.
Shilowa's role in managing this confrontation was both politically and organisationally demanding. He had to maintain the federation's principled opposition to GEAR's economic direction while simultaneously maintaining the alliance with the ANC that was the political foundation of COSATU's influence, preventing the confrontation from degenerating into a permanent rupture that would have reduced COSATU to the position of an opposition organisation rather than a governing partner. The balance he struck — critical engagement rather than rupture — defined COSATU's position through the late 1990s and shaped the character of the federation's relationship with the ANC government for the years that followed his tenure.
Gauteng Premier: The Labour Leader as Provincial Executive
Sam Shilowa's move from COSATU general secretary to Premier of Gauteng Province in 1999 represented the trajectory that characterised many of the labour movement's most prominent figures — the transition from liberation movement organiser to democratic administrator. The application of organisational and political skills developed in the labour movement to the challenges of provincial governance was a transition that required both the adaptation of existing capacities and the development of new ones — the budget management, the policy implementation, the civil service leadership that provincial governance required were different in kind from the collective bargaining and political mobilisation that had been the substance of the COSATU role.
Gauteng was both the most important and the most complex of South Africa's provinces to govern. It contained South Africa's economic heartland — the Johannesburg financial centre, the Pretoria administrative capital, the East Rand industrial corridor, the mines and the manufacturing plants and the financial institutions that drove the South African economy. It also contained some of the country's most severely impoverished communities — the townships of the Rand that had been built to house the labour force the industrial economy required and that had been systematically underdeveloped by the apartheid system. Managing this combination — the wealth and the poverty, the formal economy and the informal economy, the established institutions and the communities still awaiting the delivery of basic services — was the central challenge of the Gauteng premiership.
Shilowa served two terms as premier, from 1999 to 2008. The period coincided with the Mbeki government's economic policies — the continuation of GEAR's macroeconomic framework — and with the growing tensions within the ANC alliance over the direction of economic policy and the failure to deliver the social transformation that the liberation movement had promised. His management of Gauteng during this period produced some achievements in service delivery and in economic development, within the constraints of a provincial government that depended on national transfers and that operated within the macroeconomic framework set by the national government.
The Break and COPE: When Alliance Becomes Opposition
The founding of the Congress of the People in 2008 — in the aftermath of Jacob Zuma's election as ANC president at Polokwane in December 2007 and the subsequent recall of Thabo Mbeki from the national presidency — marked Sam Shilowa's break from the ANC and the beginning of the most controversial chapter of his political career. COPE was formed by a group of senior ANC figures — including Shilowa, Mosiuoa Lekota, and others — who argued that the ANC under Zuma's leadership was departing from the values and the constitutional commitments that had defined the liberation movement and that the democratic dispensation required.
The founding of COPE was one of the most significant organisational developments in post-apartheid party politics — the first time that a substantial breakaway from the ANC had produced an organisation with the credibility and the resources to contest elections as a genuine alternative to the governing party. COPE's performance in the 2009 general election — winning 7.4% of the national vote and becoming the third-largest party in the National Assembly — suggested that it might develop into a significant opposition force. Subsequent internal divisions within COPE — leadership disputes, financial management controversies, and the departure of significant figures — limited the organisation's political development and reduced its electoral impact in subsequent elections.
Shilowa's role as a COPE co-founder placed him among the small group of people who chose principled opposition over the security of remaining within the ANC's political family. Whether the choice was correct — whether COPE represented a genuine alternative to the ANC's trajectory or whether it dissipated the energy of its founders in an organisation that never achieved its political potential — is a question that South African political history has not yet fully resolved.
Legacy: The Labour Movement's Transition Politician
Sam Shilowa's legacy is the legacy of the transition generation — the people who came from the liberation struggle's organisational base into the democratic dispensation and who had to manage the translation of liberation movement commitments into governing practice, often in conditions that made the translation more difficult than the liberation movement's programme had anticipated. He managed COSATU through its most difficult political adjustment. He governed Gauteng for nearly a decade. He co-founded a political party when he concluded that the ANC had departed from its foundational values.
The tensions in his career — between labour movement solidarity and governing alliance, between COSATU's economic programme and the ANC government's macroeconomic framework, between ANC loyalty and the political independence that COPE represented — are among the most important political dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa. His career traces them more completely than almost any other individual career of his generation, and the choices he made at each critical juncture illuminate the range of options available to the people who led the transition from liberation movement to democratic governance.