adminThe miners were demanding a 300 percent pay rise. In an earlier clash, 10 of the miners were killed ostensibly when two groups of the aggrieved workers clashed between themselves.
One group belonged to the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), and the other to the Association of Mine Workers and Construction Union (AMCU). The NUM is an old, well-known trade union affiliated to the national umbrella, the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), an ally of the ruling party, the 100-year old African National Congress (ANC).
AMCU is a new workers’ movement whose wish is obviously to take over from NUM which it accuses of supporting the government which in turn it says now sups with employers such as Lonmin, owners of the Marikana platinum mine.
The South African police later arrested 259 whom they locked up while the violent situation was being brought under control. President Jacob Zuma has appointed a judicial commission of inquiry headed by a former high court judge.
Some 70 miners were injured and hospitalised. Had the incident happened during the bad old days of the cruel apartheid regime, we would have not failed to point accusing fingers nor would it have been difficult to identify a cause or causes of the tragedy.
The Marikana Lonmin produces platinum which sells for about R12 500 an ounce. The black workers are paid about R4 000 monthly. They staged the strike to support a demand for a monthly wage of R12 500 per worker.
Most of the workers live in self-built slums within a walking or so distance from the mine. Their actual homes are in KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho, the Cape, the Free State, Swaziland, Mozambique and a couple hail from Botswana, thousands of kilometres from Marikana which is itself some 100km South-West of Johannesburg, in the direction of Rustenburg.
Lonmin is a London-based company. One of its directors is Cyril Ramaphosa, a well-known former NUM leader and current ANC senior official.
When the ANC was fighting for the liberation of South Africa, there were many occasions in its history when discussions were held on what ideology it should adopt between capitalism and socialism.
One of its early presidents, Josiah Gumede, was actually replaced because he was suspected to be a communist. He was defeated by Pixley Seme by 39 to 14 votes. Seme led what were called the “moderates” and Gumede the “extremists.”
he “moderates” wanted “equal opportunities for all irrespective of one’s colour, sex or creed.” They wanted a negotiated solution to the country’s socio-economic problems, and were supported by the Natal-based breakaway Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Natal — iICU yaseNatal — as it was generally called — led by George Champion.
Meanwhile, Gumede was calling for confrontation and seizure from the white people of the land and mines they owned. He was supported in this call by a staunch Natal-based communist, Johannes Nkosi.
Nkosi and three other people were killed by the police and white vigilantes in Durban Natal on 16 December 1930 during a pass-burning campaign organised by the South African Communist Party, the ANC and ICU.
Nkosi like Gumede was an unyielding proponent of the seizure of white people’s farms and mines but not that they should be given to the exploited and oppressed black people of South Africa, but that they should be taken over by the State: nationalisation.
This trend of thought later ran more or less through a fairly large ANC segment, especially among the organisation’s Communist party members such as JB Max, Moses Khotane, Joe Slovo and Chris Hani. Hani was born after Nkosi’s death.
It is interesting to note that Hani’s actual totem was “Nkosi” but the author of this article is not aware of any blood relationship between him (Hani) and Johannes Nkosi apart from the fact that both of them were South African Communist Party (SACP) members.
That apart, the debate on how the natural resources of South Africa would be exploited for the benefit of the majority of the people of that land continued up to 1955 when the ANC produced its famous “Freedom Charter,” a document outlining the organisation’s policy in rather broad terms for a free South Africa.
The ANC’s president at that tine (1955) was the highly religious Chief Albert John Luthuli who had earlier taught at Solusi Mission, now Solusi University, about 45km west of Bulawayo
In his introductory remarks on the historic charter, the ANC leader (now deceased) said: “The Charter produced at Kliptown is, line by line, the direct outcome of conditions which obtain — harsh, oppressive and unjust conditions. It is thus a practical and relevant document. It attempts to give a flesh and blood meaning in the South African setting to such words as democratic, freedom, liberty.”
Clause 3 says: “The people shall share in the country’s wealth, calls for the nationalisation of the mines, banks and industrial monopolies for trade and industry to be controlled for the benefit of the people, and for all people to have equal economic and job rights.”
Nationalisation was how the people would “share in the country’s wealth.” This matter could and should have been spelt out in clear ideological terms.
That was tactically not done most probably to avoid committing the ANC to an ideological path that could have assured an effective mode of production that “fairly” shares a country’s wealth among the people, because that could have generated greater opposition to the national liberation struggle on the false claim that the ANC was communist. If that was the feeling by the authors of the famous Charter, it would appear that there is now very strong reason for that document to be visited with a view to modify it for the benefit of the South African common person.
In brief, it is necessary for the ANC Government to rewrite the Freedom Charter to meet current administrative challenges, leaving out those of the liberation struggle era. Would the adoption of a socialist mode of production not be more suitable for the masses of South Africa than the current capitalist system?
There have been campaigns and campaigns by avid supporters of capitalism against socialism as an attempt to demonise it to the core. Some Christian churches have been particularly vocal against socialism as if Jesus Christ was a capitalist. In fact, He and his 12 disciples lived in a socialist way. Apostle Paul preached against money mongering.
Without going back to the days of Plato, who advocated socialism only for the aristocracy, modern socialism is thoroughly democratic and aims at ultimately destroying factors that separate social classes among the world’s communities.
It calls for the nationalisation of the ownership of such natural resources as minerals, land and water. It also calls for equal incomes for equal work, and holds that the present capitalist industrial system carried out by competing firms and corporations be superseded by a system of freely associated workers using collective capital with the aim of an equitable distribution of gains got thereby.
Socialism’s objective is to replace private ownership of land and capital with public (national) ownership. Banks would also be nationally owned and their interests would serve the nation at large and not private individuals.
Individual workers’ incomes would be spent by the workers (by each individual worker) as she or he pleases, while each corporation’s surplus would be utilised for more production, distribution, expansion, modernisation and or savings and taxes for the benefit of the nation at large.
This is not Utopian socialism but modern scientific socialism such as the Chinese type. Modern socialism does not call for a modification but rather for a renovation of the existing industries by way of research, innovation and modern technology.
The Chinese textile technology is an excellent example of how modern socialism can transform the world for the better. That does not mean or imply that socialism in China has reached the optimum of its industrial production capacity. So much more can be done and achieved by modern socialism for the betterment of humanity.
In South Africa, the Communist Party has a very big role to play to guide and educate the people, carrying them from the present national democratic to the socialist stage.
The national democratic stage is (to use the Marxist approach) characterised by petit-bourgeois leadership and hostile conflicts in both theory and practice between the State on one side and the working class as well as the peasantry on the other.
Had the present democratic dispensation come about as a result of an actual armed defeat of the fascist apartheid state by the ANC, the peasants and working class could have most likely got into power, ushering in a socialist state.
The capitalist world, however, intervened before the ANC could launch a full scale armed onslaught against the apartheid administration, and initiated negotiations with the then imprisoned ANC leader Nelson Mandela. The negotiations led to his release and the national democratic setting we now have in that country. Its national economy, based primarily on mining, agriculture and manufacturing, is capitalist-based and oriented in its extraction, production, marketing, distribution and consumption.
It is a situation pregnant with many national expectations particularly for the peasants and the proletariat (the wage-earners).
Although some of the ANC leaders originally belonged to one or the other of these classes, they have now used their leadership positions to propel themselves into the petit-bourgeois class, a social class aligned to the capitalists – the labour exploiters.
ome of those leaders have become camprador-bourgeousie, effectively joining the capitalist camp and operating as partners of foreign capital. These are well known developments, having occurred in several other African states such as Gabon, the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, the DRC, Kenya, Egypt and elsewhere.
The South African workers’ and peasants’ hope lies in socialism, modern socialism, which is fully democratic, unlike the strictly regimented versions of Joseph Stalin, or that of Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu or elsewhere where it was imposed by naked coercion rather than through an untrammeled voting system.
The SACP has a moral duty to stand up and be heard within the ANC alliance or it should declare its abdication so that the South African political area is free for new left-learning, labour-aligned organisations to enter for the promotion of the interests of the peasants and the workers.
There is a vast proletariat in South Africa, and it comprises predominantly black people who are the most exploited. If they are not guided properly by a progressive ideology, this social class and the peasants will, as the Unity Movement once observed cynically; “…. In the morrow of the so-called national democratic revolution, the African peasants and workers will find themselves begging and will, therefore, be obliged to continue the struggle.”
Marikana has come and gone, but not its scars, not its causes which remind the properly informed about a racialistic South African equation most popular in “Whites only” pubs in the 1920s when that country’s mines were practising labour “colour bar”. a phrase which meant discrimination of basic colour. The equation stated: “Blackness equals rightlessness equals powerlessness equals cheapness.” It was coined by white workers.
To understand that slogan, we should remember that in 1919, the Transvaal Chamber of Mines faced a crisis caused by increasing production costs compared to fast decreasing profits.
Production costs rose from about 17 shillings a tonne to 24 shillings, and white miners had received 40 percent increment in their pay during a period of seven years. What about the black miners?
Their wages had been increased by only one penny during the same period.
It was to fight against such glaring pieces of injustice that the black people had formed the ANC in January 1912. A similar situation existed all the African colonies, Angola, Belgian Congo (DRC), Mozambique, Zambia, Malawi, the Gold Coast (Ghana), Nigeria, Niger, Zimbabwe and so on and so forth.
National liberation movements were formed to rid the black people of that exploitation. The slogan: “One man one vote” was meant to give basic political power to the black people to enable them to acquire and enjoy their natural resources.
For their part, the equation was (and should still be): national liberation leads to national acquisition of our natural resources leads to national utilisation and enjoyment of the resources.
We should note that the recurring word is “national” hence the call for nationalisation, an aspect, in fact, of socialism.
That means, in effect, that the national struggle is not over for the workers and the peasants. It is still undoubtedly aluta continua lest we continue begging and being exploited in our countries now being run by our very own. That is the Lonmin Marikana message.
l Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu, a former freedom fighter is a Bulawayo-based retired journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 and also through email [email protected]
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