Marikana’s truth must out, and heads will have to roll

RETIRED judge Ian Farlam finally handed his much-anticipated report on Marikana to President Jacob Zuma’s office on Tuesday. Zuma appointed the Farlam commission of inquiry in 2012 following the death of 34 miners at the hands of the police and the death of 10 more people as a result of violence between two rival unions.

South Africans have waited a long time for the probe to get to the bottom of what caused the slaughter of so many people. They are eager to hear from the commission not just who should shoulder the blame and what steps should be taken against them, but also what the country needs to do to avoid similarly violent strikes from happening in the future.

When the report was delivered to the Union Buildings, Zuma was abroad on official business in Algeria and Egypt. He arrived back in South Africa on Friday, and by the time of going to press had not made the report public. It is not clear yet when he plans to do so. Legally, nothing obliges the president to make public the contents of any report he has commissioned. There have been a number of instances over the years of the Presidency simply refusing to release reports from commissions or doing so only after years of legal battles and public anger.

However, considering the seriousness of a case in which the state is accused of having killed so many people, Zuma has a moral duty to make the full Marikana report publicly available. Anything less would be viewed as a cover-up and would fuel public anger.

The families of the 44 victims, including the two policemen brutally killed by strikers days before the massacre, deserve to know the full details of what happened to their loved ones.

Insiders in the president’s office have been saying, in the run-up to the report being handed over, that once Zuma received it he would spend a number of days studying it before deciding which aspects should be made public, and which not.

But unless the full report is made public, Zuma’s purpose in appointing the commission in the first place will have been defeated.

He said at the time of the commission’s appointment that he had gone that route because he wanted to uncover the truth about the killings and ensure that justice was ultimately served.

We concur with the Congress of the People in its call for Zuma not to employ his usual delaying tactics in the matter. The families have suffered enough and the image of the police has been sullied by Marikana.

The only way of fixing broken public trust in the police is for the findings of the commission to be made public and for stern action to be taken against those whose conduct led to post-apartheid South Africa’s first and, hopefully, only police-instigated massacre.

If, as widely expected, the commission finds that police management must take much of the blame for Marikana, Zuma will have to act swiftly against those implicated. But suspending or firing them will not be enough. Criminal charges will have to be investigated as a matter of urgency.

It should not stop there. Heads will have to roll at the political level as well. If the commission does find that the police acted in the manner they did as a result of pressure from politicians, those politicians will have to be fired and steps will have to be taken against them.

Zuma cannot hide behind the fact that some of the ministers who were serving at that time have since moved to different portfolios.

If they are implicated, they will have to be fired from his administration.