Former NUM general secretary Frans Baleni defined NUM as a democratic organisation in the following terms: ‘We normally have very robust debates in all our structures, even mass meetings, members can disagree with you, with the President, they can shout at the President, they can walk away sometimes, so we are a very democratic organisation.’ A national congress such as the NUM 14th National Congress, which I attended at the end of May 2012, was cautiously prepared for the outgoing leadership to be re-elected and for the gathering to quietly celebrate the union's thirtieth anniversary. Stakes are always high for an incumbent leadership in office and, from a career point of view, one cannot leave one's re-election in the hands of delegates only. This was made clear in a conversation I overheard a few days before the congress. One national NUM leader was chatting on the phone with his human resources manager at the mining company that employed him. The two were seemingly intimate. The leader gave his manager news of his family and asked the manager about his. He then referred to the congress and said he was confident things were going to go well as his team had been nominated by seven regions out of NUM's eleven. He added that it was ‘a very critical congress at a personal level’, and said he had a bond to pay off and an expensive family car to buy.

At the NUM 14th National Congress and during other union meetings I witnessed, it had become common to refer to internal competition between opposed motions by stating, ‘It's Mangaung’, a reference to the big leadership battle that was expected to be waged at the ANC National Conference in Mangaung (Free State), in December 2012, where it was feared that the ‘mother body’ would be divided. It was therefore not coincidental that the theme song of the 2012 NUM congress was a song called ‘Kodoa Ena’ (‘Disaster Here’). One Free State delegate told me that her region wanted the outgoing leadership to remain. She said they sang ‘Koda Ena’ together with other regions who wanted it the same way and that only the PWV region wanted to remove NUM president Zokwana.