At Marikana, police claim that the striking miners opened fire first. They may well be right, but numerous questions would still follow, notably their use of live ammunition in such apparent disproportion. Perhaps, as at Sharpeville in 1960, police panicked (there are stories of a wrong order being given). But whatever the case, the level of slaughter was unforgivable. Some days before Marikana, it was reported that the number of protests in South Africa between 1 January and 31 July 2012 has already exceeded the highest number recorded for any single year since 2004. Increasingly, it would seem, South African police are being brought into confrontation with a growing revolt of the poor, with Marikana just another episode.
The Politicians
A third layer, ever closer to the core of the onion, is the failure of the politicians to take responsibility. The dispute at British-owned Lonmin (formerly Lonhro) has been rumbling for months. About a week before the massacre, management had increased security and called in the police. Subsequently, two policemen were hacked to death, apparently by supporters of the AMCU. More police were then brought in. After the death-toll had risen to ten, senior cops moved in, but still the politicians stayed away. As the week moved on, senior AMCU officials were imported to address the striking workers, who were gathering on a nearby hill, while the workers themselves demanded to speak to senior management. When management failed to turn up, the workers became increasingly angry, and the scene was set by 16 August for the police to decide to disarm the swelling number of armed and militant workers. They boasted standard tools of 'crowd management' and rubber-bullets, but were armed with live ammunition as well.
Meanwhile, government ministers who might reasonably have got involved to calm a dispute which was visibly getting out of hand chose to stand back and to view the crisis as simply a union matter. Perhaps it was simply too politically dangerous to venture into Cosatu territory, to adopt a neutral stance between the AMCU and the NUM. When, in the lead up to the tragedy, the Chamber of Mines had sought to bring the two unions together for talks, the NUM had refused to meet with AMCU. When belatedly the minister of mines, Susan Shabangu, sought to bring different parties together, her department reportedly omitted to invite the AMCU on the grounds that it did not recognize it as a legitimate union.
Belatedly, after the massacre and amidst much wringing of hands, ministers are eager to be seen to taking action - with the police minister, Nathi Mthethwa, now thrown into the thick of things. The crisis is also accentuating a crucial political gulf. The contrast in styles of the visits to Marikana by President Zuma and one-time-disciple-turned-enemy Julius Malema was symbolic. Zuma was at a conference in Harare when the massacre occurred. Perhaps he could not get to Marikana earlier, but when he did arrive it was under cover of darkness, met with management, and visited the injured in hospital. His main response has been the appointment of the commission of inquiry - a sensible but bureaucratic course of action, and unlikely to appease the striking workers.
In contrast, Malema - who was driven out of the ANC in March 2012 following extended party-disciplinary procedures which many believe were driven by his campaign to see Zuma unseated - drove from his home in Polokwane without any formal authority, refused police offers of protection, and walked unarmed and unescorted into a large open field where the striking miners were waiting for him. There he railed against Zuma ('he doesn't care about the mineworkers, he came here last night and met with whites' [i.e. management]...He went to speak to the white people, not you. It was not the white British people who were killed, it was you.'
Malema railed against the police; he railed against Cyril Ramaphosa (one-time NUM general-secretary and now rich businessman, who doubled up as the chair of the disciplinary committee which expelled him from the ANC); and he railed against the NUM ('when the workers have problems, the NUM sells them out').
Malema's intervention is telling, and may yet prove to have been momentous. When he was expelled from the ANC (and, apparently, the taxman was sent after him to query his highly dubious financial affairs), it looked to many that he was down and out, and that Zuma had vanquished him. Now that is not so clear. Let's forget that Malema's populist politics threaten to lead South Africa down the road of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe: there is probably no other politician in South Africa who could have walked onto that field unarmed and exited alive - certainly not the luminaries of the SACP who are in bed with Zuma and are working so hard to get him re-elected (see 'South Africa's political duel: Zuma vs Malema', 22 November 2011).
Hitherto, deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe (another former general-secretary of the NUM) has been reticent about whether he will run against Zuma at Mangaung. But with Zuma fast losing his allure (and many would say his grip on government), and with Malema threatening by implication to undermine the ANC's basis of support amongst the poor, it may well be that Motlanthe will increasingly be pressurized to stand for the party presidency by those who - with good reason - have begun to worry about the ANC's longevity.
The Employers
The fourth layer, lying at the core of the Marikana onion, lies the legacy and present performance of the mining industry. South Africa's economy was, notoriously, built upon the super-exploitation of migrant labour imported from neighboring territories and the bantustans. Gradually, from the 1970s, things changed. For both economic and political reasons, foreign labor was largely phased out (or in the case of Lesotho, encircled by South Africa, heavily reduced). This presaged a new mining landscape, which gathered momentum after 1994. Its main features have been a massive decline in gold-mining, the rise of platinum alongside other minerals, and the closing down of the compounds into which migrant labors were previously forcibly corralled.
Today, increasingly, the mines draw their workforces from local communities, amongst which those who still retain connections with the former bantustans reside in backyards and shanties. Meanwhile, as the mines become increasingly capital-intensive, the proportion of their labor force which is permanently employed declines, and numerous mineworkers are now casually employed, or supplied by contracting companies.
No one should lament the passing of the compounds. Yet this has allowed for the externalization of many of the social costs of looking after workers - from feeding and housing them to attending to their sanitation. The burden falls upon already overburdened local communities, at the very time when local government in South Africa is collapsing.
It is often supposed that this is an era in which the attitudes and practices of mining companies are becoming more enlightened; indeed, all the large ones are signatories to a 'mining charter' which promises wondrous things. But a report by the Bench Marks Foundation, coincidentally released just before the massacre, reports a massive gap between the the mining companies' promises and their practice. It also highlights (inter alia) a lack of educational facilities and training, environmental pollution, and a total absence of concern for the social conditions in which their workers now live.
In the particular case of Lonmin, 9,000 workers were dismissed in 2011; and those losing their jobs who had also participated in the company's housing scheme would simultaneously have been deprived of their homes. Lonmin, like other platinum companies now cutting back amid the global slowdown, pleads penury and responsibility to shareholders. Accordingly, its management cannot be immune from speculation that it has not been too worried to see the AMCU and the NUM at each other's throats, rather than face a workforce united by a single union determined to better workers' conditions.
The Marikana massacre has coincided with a time when many South Africans have come to feel increasingly uneasy, fearing that the promise of 1994 has faded and that the country has lost its way. Hopefully, it will serve as a jolt to the national conscience, and shame those who claim that the only way to attract foreign investment is by reducing the cost and conditions of labor into rethinking. But don't count on it: for while, conceivably, the tragedy may undermine the Zuma presidency, more and greater shocks may yet be needed before government and employers combine for a serious assault upon poverty and inequality.
