Denial and division
Peter Alexander
On Friday I attended the commemoration event marking the first anniversary of the Marikana Massacre.
Riah Phiyega noted that it was incident free. Indeed it was. Not, in reality, because the Police confiscated a few sticks, but because, unlike a year ago, they left their automatic weapons at home and remained a respectful distance from the workers who, yet again, were sitting on the koppie they call ‘the mountain’.
The event was a considerable success, and the organisers should be congratulated. About 15,000 Lonmin workers, their families and their supporters turned up. Some had been involved in the organisation, working alongside the Association of Mining and Construction Union, the Council of Churches, legal representative Dali Mpofu, and the Marikana Solidarity Campaign.
It was an inclusive affair. Even Lonmin was represented, with its speaker listened to politely (if sceptically). The churches, led by Bishop Seoka, blessed the event and gave their sermons. All the major political parties sent their leaders to read messages of support – all, that is, but one: the governing party, the African National Congress.
The National Union of Miners was also absent. The union’s president, Senzeni Zokwana missed the opportunity to shake hands with AMCU’s president, Joseph Matunjwa, in a public commitment to non-violence as a means of resolving disputes.
Finally, there was no representative from the government. It’s not that the government was opposed to a commemoration. On the contrary. But they wanted to be in charge. It was all or nothing. They did not have the humility to attend a memorial put together by the people of Marikana; those who had lost their comrades and loved ones a year ago.
The government is in denial. It denies that what happened a year ago was a massacre; that is, the killing of a group of people as a consequence of an imbalance of force. But Marikana was a massacre. 34 people were killed by the Police, none of whom was injured. Nobody, not even the Police, dispute this reality.
This denial arises from a desire to avoid political responsibility for what happened. Yet we know that Minister of Police Nathi Mthethwa was briefed about what was happening, both by Zokwana and Phiyega.
And, according to one of Cyril Ramaphosa’s famous email’s, Minister of Mineral Resources Susan Shabangu: ‘agrees that what we are going through is not a labour dispute, but a criminal act. She will correct her characterisation of what we are experiencing.’ Apparently, she also said she would go to Cabinet and brief President Jacob Zuma, and get Mthethwa to act. So far, neither Ramaphosa nor Shabangu has refuted the conversation. The re-characterisation was central to the police’s justification for using maximum force against the strikers.
The government is presently hiding behind the Farlam Commission, claiming that it will determine the truth of what happened at Marikana. There were only two forces directly involved in the massacre, and which, theoretically, could be blamed. One was the Police, and the other is what the Commission’s terms of reference calls ‘individuals and loose groupings’ (code for the strikers). In practice the latter is represented by Mpofu, attorney for the injured and arrested mine workers.
Zuma has made his bias clear. Whereas the Police’s large legal team is funded by vast sums of money from government coffers, Mpofu receives nothing. As a consequence, justice has been delayed, and it is looking increasingly likely that it will be denied.
So far, the government’s main post-Marikana intervention has been the ‘Framework agreement for a Sustainable Mining Industry, entered into by Organised Labour, Organised Business and Government’. Once again the government’s bias is clear.
Presented as some kind of peace treaty, the agreement goes much further. It is a framework for the status quo. Hardly surprising, then, that AMCU, the representative of workers’ in the main effected area, the platinum belt, has refused to sign.
Although the document arises out of last year’s bloodshed, it is not just ‘massacre’ that goes unmentioned it is even ‘Marikana’. Instead the Police are lauded as part of the solution – as the force that maintains law and order. By contrast, workers appear as potential villains. They engage in unprotected strikes and hold protests that might turn violent.
In this framing of the industry’s problems, workers are not people whose lives are endangered every day because of the nature of mining and the flouting of safety regulations. They are not people who return home exhausted because their work is tiring and made worse by targets that, in practice, require them to labour for 12 hours a day and sometimes longer. This is not the kind of illegality and violence the document had in mind.
While strikes by workers are regarded as bad, strikes by ‘investors’ are naturalised. So, for instance, in Clause 3.4.6, ‘Labour commits to Work with Government and Business to improve investor sentiment’.
This is an unabashed pro-capitalist document. Any small glimmer that mining might benefit workers and their families is undercut by 2.1.7, a so-called ‘Guiding Principle’, which commits the parties to ‘accept that economic realities constrain our decisions’. There is no hint of a possibility that mines might – just perhaps – be owned in a way that benefits the majority in society, rather than a tiny minority.
The document ignores a critically important issue, that of pay, yet pay is at the heart of the conflict in mining. It was improved pay that workers fought for at Marikana and pay that motivated the wave of unprotected strikes that followed in its wake.
The government may have learned little from Marikana, but workers have gained valuable experience.
Marikana is regarded as a turning point in South African history in part because it has provided a national focus for localized struggles around pay and service delivery. In different parts of country and in different industries workers are now demanding, as at Marikana, a flat rate increase. New informal settlements have been named ‘Marikana’. I have met cleaners who, like better-organized workers, talk of ‘doing a Marikana’. The very word has become a synonym for militant resistance.
In turning its back on the real problems of Marikana – the injustice of poverty in miners’ communities, as well as the injustice of unequal wealth distribution and the injustice of inequality of support for lawyers – the government is avoiding the growing political gulf in South Africa. This is, more than anything, a class division, and it is one that will lead to even greater conflicts in coming months.
AMCU has taken up the demand raised in last year’s strikes, calling for a wage of R12,500 per month for workers in gold and platinum. This demand will unify workers on the mines, and it is so distant from what the employers’ are prepared to offer that there will almost certainly be a major strike. There can be little sympathy for the companies when one realises that the 20% fall in the rand against the dollar means that – because gold and platinum are sold in dollars – the owners benefit from a 20% increase in income. Set against this, the mines’ claims of poverty are hypocritical, and their offer of 5.5% is provocative.
This takes us back to Friday’s commemoration. This looked back to the massacre of 2012, but it also looked forwarded to addressing unresolved hardships of workers in the country’s major industry. The official theme of the day was: ‘They died for a living wage. The struggle continues’. The government has a choice. Either it addresses the concerns of workers, or the struggle will continue, and Police violence will ensure that blood will flow once more.
Peter Alexander holds the South African Research Chair in Social Change at the University of Johannesburg, where he is a professor of sociology. He is co-author, with Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope, Luke Sinwell and Bongani Xwzwi, of Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer.
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