adminJOHANNESBURG. — Last week, I joined millions of anxious South Africans in watching President Jacob Zuma release the findings of the Farlam Commission.
The long-awaited Commission of Inquiry into the Marikana massacre was tasked with investigating the deaths of 44 people and the injuring of many more.
The massacre, which occurred outside Lonmin’s platinum mine in Marikana in the North West in August 2012, shook the country to its core.
On the day that the report was released, I was in Durban preparing for a workshop.
However, I put everything aside to listen to the president.
I was hoping that, just this once, the justice that has been denied to the victims of the Marikana massacre since 2012 would be delivered.
It has been a savage path for the families and those unfortunate to have survived their injuries. I say unfortunate because the survivors must daily relive the shooting nightmare carried out by the police – a nightmare tattooed forever on their bodies in the form of the scars left by their bullet wounds.
As with millions of South Africans, I am enraged with the exoneration of certain individuals and institutions which I feel should shoulder some of the responsibility for the heinous massacre.
I have spent the past week reading the report, trying to make sense of the legal jargon and complex notations that are somewhat above the comprehension of a lay person such as myself.
Having attempted to make sense in the report of how the police changed their initial plan of encircling miners forcing them to abandon their weapons; how the trade unions – Amcu and NUM – failed to exercise effective control over their workers, allowing them to sing provocative and insulting songs; how NUM failed to employ its best efforts in negotiating with Lonmin; and how Lonmin is partly responsible for the massacre through its failure to protect its workers and to establish decent living and working conditions for them.
I was left dissatisfied both by the diagnosis of the problem in Marikana and the recommendations thereof.
Lonmin operates its mine with a dehumanising housing system that separates workers from their families for long periods and indirectly encourages most of its workers to pocket their living allowance (necessitating that they find residence in shacks around the mine site, shacks that have invariably coalesced into a large squatter camp unfit for human habitation).
In this regard, the commission recommends Lonmin be held to account by the Department of Mineral Resources for failing to comply with its housing obligations.
What this means, in simple terms, is that Lonmin’s primary role in this massacre has been reduced to merely failing to provide decent housing.
The solution is for the company to build the 5 500 houses that it was supposed to have built from 2005 to 2011, as per its housing obligations.
While it is indeed true the living conditions of miners are appalling and need to be addressed (for they are a human rights violation), an even bigger question was left untouched – how white capital is an albatross around the necks of the working-class black people in the country; and how, at the heart of the Marikana massacre, is the historical question of land and economic dispossession, which our government presides over.
Contrary to the narrative painted by the report, the Marikana massacre cannot be understood as a single event.
In doing so, we reduce it to something that occurred once and got buried in the soil along with the bullet-riddled bodies of the miners who were shot down like dogs.
We reduce it to a case of recklessness on the part of the police who pulled the trigger, the unions who were at war with each other and a mining company that didn’t abide by the rules stipulated.
But the Marikana massacre is not a case of recklessness, nor is it an accident of history.
It is a product of a system that has dehumanised and disenfranchised a poor working-class black majority in a country where a white minority own and control the bulk of the means of production.
In the critically-acclaimed documentary, Miners Shot Down, directed by Rehad Desai, the harsh realities of the miners working in the platinum belt in Marikana is vividly captured.
Most of the miners killed and injured came to Marikana from the former Transkei and parts of Lesotho.
This is significant in terms of the argument that the land question is absolutely central to the Marikana massacre.
Since the advent of colonialism, black people in South Africa have been violently dispossessed of land by a criminal white minority.
Blacks were pushed out of productive land and hurled into the periphery. Without access to and ownership of arable land for their livestock and crops, they suffered food insecurity.
This became amplified with the passing of the Land Act No 27 of June 19, 1913.
This legislation prohibited black people from owning or renting land outside designated reserves (about 7 percent of land in the country).
And while this legislation was repealed by section 1 of the Abolition of Racially Based Land Measures Act No 108 of 1991, its legacy continues to haunt democratic South Africa, where more than 75 percent of land still remains in the hands of private individuals, predominantly white.
In the context of the Marikana massacre, most of the miners are from the rural periphery, where black people are cruelly marginalised from economic activity due to the unproductivity of the land they have been forced onto through the systematic violence and diabolical legislation designed by the former apartheid regime.
With the rural economy shrinking (mainly for black people who don’t have resources to participate in the agro-economy that is characterised by white dominance) and a demand for cheap labour in urban areas, black people are forced to migrate to urban areas to work in mines like Marikana.
And beyond the land question, Marikana also highlights the historical crisis of mineral wealth dispossession that has suffocated our country’s economic growth since the dawn of colonial conquest.
The dispossession did not only happen in the old regime, it continues today.
According to AU Commission chairwoman Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the most illicit outflow of capital from Africa is from corporates in extractive industries.
Addressing the mining lekgotla in Midrand last year, Dlamini-Zuma reiterated the argument posed in a research report compiled by Oxfam.
In the report, Oxfam argues that although Africa’s oil, gas and mineral exports amounted to $333 billion (about R4 100bn) in 2010, illicit financial outflows – achieved, for example, through tax evasion and trade mispricing by extractive industries – were estimated at $200billion annually.
An earlier report authored by a panel established in 2012 by the UN Economic Commission for Africa, headed by former South African president Thabo Mbeki, ranks South Africa third, behind Nigeria and Egypt, in terms of cumulative losses between 1970 and 2008, which it says amounted to $81,8billion, or 11,4 percent of Africa’s total illicit capital outflows.
Lonmin, which owns the mine in Marikana, is one of several foreign mining companies making money out of South Africa.
Whether or not it is also a culprit in illicit capital outflow is unknown to me.
However, what is clear is that it is a beneficiary of a historical injustice of the dispossession of black people.
In my view, no amount of commissions and inquiries can be adequate for constructing progressive recommendations for as long as the discourse is reduced to mere events as opposed to a critical analysis rooted in the history of this country – a history that is written in blood and dispossession.
Without addressing land ownership, there can be no real solution to the Marikana massacre and every other systematic violence that black people are subjected to in South Africa, because at the heart of the structural inequalities facing the country lies the fundamental question of land.
Land is economy and the transformation of the economy guarantees the genuine redress of the cruel injustices of the past.
The government needs to stop subjecting every important issue in our country to a judicial inquiry that results in disappointing conclusions and shallow recommendations that are not geared towards genuine transformation.
The discourse on the Marikana massacre needs to be elevated and pitched above the current narrative that focuses only on the issue as a product of labour dispute.
We must begin to locate fundamental questions within it.
And no question is more fundamental than the land question.
Unless that is addressed, more blood from black bodies is going to spill on the soil of our occupied Azania. — The Sunday Independent.
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