‘White man’s muti’ deleted evidence

A COMPUTER’s delete button “is the white man’s muti” according to Marikana miners.

The observation emerged this week at the inquiry into the deaths of miners during a 2012 strike.

It has been suggested at the Marikana Commission hearings that the miners used traditional magic, believed to make them invisible. Forty-four people were killed during a violent wildcat strike at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum operation in 2012.

This week a lawyer representing the miners, Dali Mpofu, told the commission the “delete button” observation was made by his clients as former Lonmin security head Graeme Sinclair tried to explain why vital information, including reports of Lonmin security staff firing at and injuring employees, had been deleted — or “made invisible” — from submissions to the commission.

These include Lonmin security submitting a revised version of their occurrence book with deletions including:

The report of Lonmin security officer Pieter Botha firing “10 rounds” at “commuters” on August 10 (2012) at 6.35pm.

Botha shooting 15 rounds of rubber bullets at “commuters” in another incident around 20 minutes later.

Lonmin security official Gean Kellerman firing “10-15 rounds of rubber bullets to commuters (sic)” at 8.10pm that day.

Eight rubber rounds “shot to disperse a mob” opposite the National Union of Mineworkers offices on the morning of August 11.

The report of the deaths of Lonmin security guards Frans Mabelane and Hassan Fundi during a march to the NUM office at the mine on August 12.

The deletions, according to lawyers at the commission, were vital to understanding the rising tensions at Marikana in the days leading up to August 16 when police killed 34 miners.

Sinclair said he had asked his personal assistant to delete all Lonmin shooting incidents from the company’s occurrence book as the information would have been included in other documents, including company shooting reports.

But commission evidence leader Kameshni Pillay said that despite being “assured of being given all the shooting reports” by Lonmin this had not been done.

“The net effect of your intervention,” Pillay told Sinclair, “is to remove all trace that the shooting incidents took place.”