Dirk Hartford: Meet Irene Charnley, MTN’s Iranian dealmaker, long-time Ramaphosa ally

Key topics:2011 NUM reunion at Ramaphosa’s ranch included key 1980s activists.Irene Charnley rose from NUM admin to MTN executive and pan-African CEO.Charnley’s career spans pensions, telecom deals, and social philanthropy..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Dirk Hartford.In 2011, on the occasion of the first National Union of Mineworkers President James Motlatsi’s 60th birthday, Cyril Ramaphosa invited 25 of his comrades from the NUM of the 1980s to his Phala Phala ranch to celebrate.There’s a lot to say about the people at the gathering from today’s perspective, but for now, let these bullet points suffice.They were ‘inziles’, trade unionists, rank and file workers, activists. There were 21 men and four women. Cyril’s deputy secretary of the NUM at the time, Marcel Golding, was conspicuously absent. They were all either employees of the NUM or worker leaders in the mines that the NUM organised in the 80s.They included Kgalema Mothlante, Zwelinzima Vavi, Gwede Mantashe, Paul Nkuna, Manne Dipico, Godfrey Olifant and Lesetya Kganyago.There was only one “ethnic minority” there, even though in the 80s a bunch of dedicated and talented whites, coloureds and Indians worked for the NUM. Irene Charnley, the daughter of an impoverished domestic worker mother from Elsies River in Cape Town, was that person.As a young activist in Cape Town, without any completed tertiary education, Charnley had ended up in London, where she fell in with an ANC faction who were monopolising anti apartheid work there in the name of the exiled SA Congress of Trade Unions.They were mainly white revolutionaries, including Rob Peterson, Martin Legassick, Paula Ensor and David Hemson. They were responsible for the formation of the Marxist Workers Tendency in the ANC. They were good at solidarity work, especially for the trade unions, and that is how Cyril Ramaphosa came to know them. Cyril was not a member of the ANC then. They introduced Charlene to Cyril in London, and he offered her a job at NUM.Eight of the London group were expelled from the ANC at its Kabwe conference in Zambia in 1985 for “counter-revolutionary activities” - an oxymoron if ever there was one. Irene came home to work for the NUM in Johannesburg in the first half of the 80s. She was in her early 20s. She hadn’t been identified for expulsion as she had no history in the ANC.A feisty, militant, warm and attractive woman, she put her nose to the grindstone in the NUM back-office doing admin, research for negotiations, and eventually assuming the responsibility of all things related to pension funds for the NUM. Comrades called such people as Irene “organic intellectuals”. Workers and activists without formal education, yet they were very smart. She made herself indispensable to Cyril on the only thing that was to count post-1990 - money, admin, negotiations, and pension funds, most of all.Pension funds had not yet gripped the trade union imagination as a pot of money to lay one's hands on. It was still a boring byproduct on the list of demands at a wage-driven strike.Irene Charnley stuck to it, and when Cyril left the union movement to make billions as a darling of SA’s business elite, first at Johnnic and then MTN, Irene went with him. At one stage, it was whispered she might be the wealthiest woman in South Africa.She ended up as an executive director for MTN for North Africa and the Middle East. There she bagged Iran. Pity that the local partners MTN chose were and are literally an adjunct of the jihadist evil cult of the Ayatollahs when there were other choices..Read more:.Right of Reply: MTN Group rejects claims of terrorism support, vows to defend US cases.At the time, it looked impressive. MTN is expanding its African footprint. Black leadership. SA is the continent leader. What’s not to love?Of course, Cyril was chairman of MTN at the time after losing his battle at Johnnic to his erstwhile trade union comrades, HCI’s Johnny Copelyn and Marcel Golding. MTN was a way out of that ignominy for him.Irene really came into her own at MTN, not least of all in the Iranian deal. Of course, there was politics. The ANC had always been aligned with opposition to the Shah and the Ayatollahs have ruled since his downfall. Charnley is from a Christian background. In the struggle, she had a strong moral dimension. However, allegations in cases before the court from Turkcell suggest bribery. What’s a girl from Elsies River to do? We will see what transpires.When Irene left MTN, she founded and is the CEO of Smile, a pan-African Telkom operator based in Mauritius. She came with a track record of doing innovative employee share ownership schemes.Smile raised hundreds of millions of dollars and expanded rapidly into countries like Nigeria, Tanzania and the DRC. It has developed problems of late. She is a generous benefactor to various local social organisations, also in the coloured community.

Dirk Hartford: Meet Irene Charnley, MTN’s Iranian dealmaker, long-time Ramaphosa ally

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