Marikana’s wounds fester while our leaders sulk

SOUTH Africans felt the power of a unifying national event on April 27 1994 when we queued together for the first time to create a new, free and democratic country. We felt it again on June 24 1995 when Nelson Mandela walked onto the pitch to share the glory of South Africa’s Rugby World Cup victory with the mainly white crowd. And we came together for a third time in 2010 when we hosted the Fifa World Cup, and even the criminals seemed to take a holiday to share in the national solidarity of the event.

But on Friday, when the nation should have come together for a healing commemoration of the 34 miners massacred at Marikana one year earlier, the politics of division were allowed to dominate.

The National Union of Mineworkers, the African National Congress and even the government, whose police committed the massacre, stayed away from the memorial service at the scene of the shooting.

In an appalling display of political petulance, the relatives of the slain miners and maimed survivors of that most shameful day of our freedom were snubbed by leaders too mean-spirited to put their personal ambitions aside for even a single day.

Referring to the shooting mostly as an “incident”, President Jacob Zuma acknowledged the terrible pain the Marikana killing caused to the families and the nation. “We pulled through because we united and ensured that the tragedy did not derail the country and efforts of nationbuilding and reconstruction,” he said in a statement released as he left for a regional summit in Malawi. But we have not united even around this ghastly tragedy. In spite of myriad promises that such an event will never recur, unpicking the web that allowed Marikana to happen has so far proved to be beyond us. From civil society to the police, we have been unable to create structures, mechanisms or protocols to ensure that social pressures of that sort will never again explode into violence.

So disgracefully weak has the national leadership been on this issue that Julius Malema was able to hijack the first memorial service, when cabinet ministers actually walked out last year, and was able again this year to appear to be one of the dominant figures of mourning.

It is harder to bring a nation together around tragedy than around triumph. Our rulers, their party and their veteran union allies have proved unequal to the challenge.