Living among the embers of a fitful turf war
Miners get on with the daily battle for survival as clashes between rival unions flare and die
A YEAR after it resembled a war zone, Marikana is today more like a recovery station for exhausted men.
The miners who lost 34 of their number in the police massacre of strikers on August 16 2012 survive on irregular wages, relying on loan sharks and credit from the local spaza shops.
The area of Lonmin’s operations is calm today, but an atmosphere of uncertainty lingers in sporadic and protracted wildcat strikes and the legacy of the turf war between the National Union of Mineworkers and the Association of Mine and Construction Workers Union (Amcu), which usurped the NUM’s previously pre-eminent role in the industry.
The miners in North West’s platinum belt have become indebted to loan sharks and other lending operations.
The workers who spoke to the Sunday Times this week said loan sharks and local small businesses had been their only resort in keeping home fires burning during the mostly unprotected strikes that left many workers without income.
The loan sharks have reached an understanding with the miners that there will be smooth repayments after the strike. This had at least kept interest rates stable, said the miners.
For Ntobeko Dyantyi, a rockdrill operator with Lonmin’s Karee mine for the past six years, things have been bleak.
“There was a time when my house was really dry with nothing to get through the day,” he said. “I thought about going back home. But then I knew that the savings I had wouldn’t take
There was a time when my mother asked me to come back, even if it meant we would not have anything to keep life going. She said it would be better than to die here in Marikana
me anywhere.”
Dyantyi, who hails from Mthatha in the Eastern Cape, shares accommodation with miners from other companies, creating what he calls a “twoway situation”.
“During the Lonmin strike some people were working at other mines and I could rely on them with the understanding that I would sort them out when things are better,” he said.
“When we got back to work, other operations ground to a halt and I came to the rescue of those people who had assisted me. Truly speaking, I never used the services of the mashonisas [loan sharks]. This is because I don’t drink and I don’t smoke,” he said.
He said the year since the massacre had been quiet, but families back home were still fearful. “There was a time when my mother asked me to come back, even if it meant we would not have anything to keep life going,” he said. She told him it would be better “than to die here in Marikana”.
Nevertheless, Dyantyi is optimistic. “It has been calm now and we hope for the better,” he said.
Robecca Milcao said loan sharks and buying on credit from local spaza shops had been part of his existence since coming to the Rustenburg platinum belt 14 years ago.
“Without them, life could virtually come to a standstill,” he said. “It is hard to repay the loan, but what can you do? We know that even our supervisors need to take these loans.”
Milcao, a labourer at Lonmin’s Saffy shaft, said he was worried about his mother in a village outside Maputo, Mozambique, because he had not been able to save enough to visit her since the strike last year.
“I bought her a cellphone so that we could communicate,” he said. “Although the network could be troublesome, at least I would know they are well and they will also know that I am well here.”
But he had not heard from her for a while.
“I don’t know what has happened to the cellphone because I can’t reach her any more. I think they are so broke. Broke!” he said.
Milcao said he was managing to save some money and he hoped to have enough by December so that he could spend Christmas with his mother and his two children in his village.
“I have had a lot of people to pay since we returned to work. It has been tough, but I am making headway and I am plan- ning to finish [repaying] my loans and groceries debt by this month end — even if it means being left without a penny in my pocket,” he said.
But for Lethabo Matlaku, one of the youngest men on the workforce and a new recruit, life is good. He had been unemployed for a long time in his home town of Sebokeng in the Vaal Triangle, but now he has a job operating a makaranyana — a small train carrying ore in the shafts — at the Karee mine. “It is always good to have money,” he said, even though working underground was “not a very good job”.
“I am still adjusting to the conditions, particularly breathing,” he said. “I was already here when the violence started. It was horrible, but I couldn’t do anything because I needed the job and the money. Some of my homies in Sebokeng don’t believe that I am working in the mine — underground, for that matter,” he said.
The future of mining remains unsettled. The word underground, according to some miners, was that rock-drill operators at the Karee mine were planning another strike. It could happen as early as this week.
SOON after the Marikana massacre, I began a book whose central premise was that the events leading to the deaths of 44 people in the worst industrial disturbances since 1994 were symptomatic of much deeper problems in the mining industry, and South Africa more generally.
One year down the line, as we approach the first anniversary of the massacre on August 16, I have come to the conclusion that this proposition is altogether too benign. This is because Marikana, or the NorthWest mining industry, has settled into what I, as a sociologist, can only call “anarchic normality”.
There is nothing in the physical character of the unprepossessing towns of Marikana or Mooinooi to suggest this — nothing sinister, immediately visible or different. These and other villages abutting the Lonmin mine have ostensibly reverted to their sleepy and impoverished pre-massacre status.
People are understandably aware of the events that a year ago catapulted South Africa into the ranks of the more odious nations. Still, the critical imperative is to work and live as best one can in a seriously depleted environment.
Then, too, many people in the area are migrants. Some who were in the region in August last year have left; others who have subsequently arrived know little about the killings other than on a secondhand basis. There is nonetheless, as Nadine Gordimer named an anthology of short stories, “something out there”.
First, the struggles in the labour movement continue to flare into continual, if low-grade, violence
It has never been the intention of the central government to ensure that the commission succeeds, or does so in a way that addresses the blemish of Marikana
with the potential to emulate the industrial disturbances of late 2012. The situation in the Marikana area remains profoundly unstable. This is partly because mine management throughout the North West platinum industry is almost uniformly hostile — as are most media — to the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu).
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) believes it can recapture lost territory with assistance from mine management, especially in some of those mines where human resources and other strategically important departments have former NUM people who have risen through the ranks from shop steward. Perhaps more importantly, a substantial proportion of Amcu, if not the majority, are also former NUM supporters who will follow the political winds.
Amcu has achieved representative status, but relative to the forces ranged behind the NUM it is still a small renegade with only a toehold in the labour movement. Amcu’s capability in North West it based on idiosyncratic factors, including the initial hostility of NUM members to a handful of leadership personalities coincident with August 16. One year down the line there remain deep conflicts in Amcu, basically vicious struggles over scarce resources rather than ideology.
Much of what goes on between the NUM and Amcu is a mixture of human greed and need that could only occur when people have very little and are in competition for personal power. Both unions are totally unabashed in their use of violence against each other. Rivals are often killed to advance selfserving interests. The mine owners play their part, even though there is little understanding of the extraordinary complexity of who owes whom allegiance in labour ranks. The recent decision of the “industry” to make unions pay for their own shop stewards is probably going to nail Amcu down to a few organisational militants who can scavenge pay to finance their professional and individual activities.
Below the surface calm, it is almost impossible to determine the thin line between political and criminal action. Both unions see an unstable situation as a source of political capital.
Everyone is reluctant to be seen as a political leader, because doing so can invite assassination from either colleagues or opponents. This is particularly the case in Amcu, which remains badly disorganised because of cut-throat internal politics being waged among and between former NUM members.
The police are almost openly active in these brutal dynamics. This includes not only ongoing threats of violence against key witnesses set to appear before the Marikana commission under the chairmanship of Judge Ian Farlam, but death and destruction wreaked by police officers, the “ama-berets” who were involved in the killings and now spend a large part of their time assaulting illegal miners in drunken sprees that could well lead to another collective killing.
Members of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate have received death threats. Meanwhile, the quarries around Marikana known to work with trafficked Mozambique labour are left untouched because of corrupt rela- tions between police, labour brokers and mine management.
The mines have not gone far down the road during the past year in dealing with the key issue facing the industry — how to be globally competitive while reliant on huge masses of unskilled, unstable and unproductive human capital. In the meantime, they are cautiously “restructuring”, for which read retrenching. After the dramatic confrontations between Anglo and the Department of Mineral Resources following its public decision earlier this year to retrench 16 000 miners, it now involves a form of surreptitious “salami-slicing” — workers are being quietly laid off for often minor disciplinary offences, sickness, absenteeism or breaking safety regulations. This is, of course, extraordinary in an industry where gold and platinum extraction kills more than 100 miners a year and reportedly injures 300 each month.
This abnormal situation has enormous implications for the Farlam commission, which is rapidly reaching a point where it is unlikely to be able to fulfil its mandate in any meaningful fashion. It has, in fact, never been the intention of the government to ensure that Farlam succeeds, or does so in a directional way in addressing the blemish of Marikana on South Africa.
From the outset, the commission has lacked the will and logistics to be inquisitorial in a manner appropriate to an effective governmental inquiry into an explosive situation. One consequence is that there has been little informed public dialogue over the meaning of Marikana as stakeholders, the public and the international community have been duped into waiting for the Farlam report.
This is now designated for the
The police are almost openly active in these brutal dynamics, spending their time assaulting illegal miners in drunken sprees that could well lead to another collective killing
last quarter of this year — which is an optimistic deadline not only because of problems now facing the victims and their families in financing their defence, but because Farlam, after 8 000 pages of evidence, has produced nothing that even vaguely resembles the provisional report originally scheduled for October last year. The South African Police Service, the first of four key stakeholders to be examined, is still on the stand.
The ANC and the unions represent the only two channels for individuals to rise above the impoverished environment and into the profitable networks of gravy- train existence. The forthcoming national elections are also a factor, because electoral politics in the area are, as in the whole North West, a winner-takes-all event that propels elected councillors and shop stewards alike into a lifestyle high above the seething masses.
Marikana is exemplary of what is happening on the ground to communities throughout South Africa. It is also becoming, in many respects, a repeat of the Sharpeville massacre, albeit in democratic circumstances. The latter, one recalls, involved a tap on the wrist for the guilty, but a political inheritance that required the repair work of generations.
It is essential that Farlam’s commission, with all its limitations, reports in a way that can be used to chart a road forward to civil or criminal action. Other than the police, both unions, Lonmin, the government and the mining industry — all of whose stakes are best served if Farlam says nothing — it is in no one’s long-term interests that we have a rerun of Sharpeville in the veld followed by failure in the legal system.