Lofty promises made at Marikana come to naught
AS we approach Friday’s anniversary of the police slaughter of 34 miners at Marikana, we have little to celebrate about our collective response to that darkest time of our freedom years. In total, 44 people died in that week of wildcat strikes, protests and police overreaction. At least two of them were policemen slain before the August 16 shooting now known as the Marikana Massacre. Some were men hoping to find work on the platinum mines owned by Lonmin, and some were union leaders embroiled in a showdown between the veteran National Union of Mineworkers and the upstart Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu).
In an unhappy parallel with the 1960 police massacre at Sharpeville, it soon emerged that half of those killed on the 16th were shot in the back.
President Jacob Zuma returned from a regional summit in Mozambique a day after the shooting and quickly announced a commission of inquiry headed by retired Judge Ian Farlam. Politicians declared the event a turning point in South Africa’s post-apartheid history and fell over themselves to proclaim: “Never again.” Mine owners, including black empowerment beneficiaries, vowed to review the conditions in which miners lived.
A year later, we have little evidence that those promises are being kept. The Farlam commission has bogged down in exhausting interrogations that have yet to involve anyone who was on the front line when the police switched their rifles to automatic. It is now stalled by an unseemly dispute about legal fees.
Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe led negotiations for a framework agreement for a sustainable mining industry, but has been unable so far to bring Amcu into the deal.
The mines, crippled by a tough global environment and the loss of international trust, which was exacerbated by the massacre, are talking more about retrenchment than about reparations to their workers.
The police have moved on the defensive with no internal overhaul to repair their reputation or break the culture of increasing violence against the populace they are charged to protect.
Mining consultant Philip Frankel warns on the opposite page today that the Farlam commission must speed up and produce a viable road map to take us all out of this quagmire.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela warned this week that South Africa could not afford to let the issues raised by the massacre go unaddressed. “I naively thought that, with the liberation of our country, we would try our very best to fulfil the promises we made in 1994, only to find that it was not so. That is why we have the Marikanas of our day,” she said.
We need — from unions and mine owners to the government, police and civil society — to take the promised hard look at ourselves and work out how we will, indeed, deliver on the promise: “Never again.”