05
Nov
Marikana shows us how South Africa has betrayed it’s high ideals.
Nothing more graphically underlines how far South Africa has strayed from the heady, idealistic days of 1994 than the recent appearance before the Marikana commission some time ago by the Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa. Gone was the urbane charmer of Codesa days, and gone too was the leather jacketed trade unionist who led the National Union of Mineworkers in the late 1980s on what was at the time South Africa’s biggest mining strike.
“Blood on his hands” was yelled by protestors as Ramaphosa was sitting in an awkward splendour at the Farlam commission hearings, clearly a stranger to being grilled aggressively.
Marikana introduced South Africa to a toughening of attitudes on the shop floor, which has since been matched on the political front by the emergence of the like-minded Economic Freedom Fighters. Militancy is in the air.
For year though, it had seemed the ideal arrangement: the ANC in government would let the Cosatu Unions wring concession out of employers burdened by a new wave of regulations and laws on ownership and employment. Simultaneously, a new stratum of owners – often drawn from the top ranks of the unions – would ‘go into business’ and become spectacularly wealthy. There would be strikes, but they were over a few percentage points, usually, and seldom lasted long. In the meantime, the mine bosses, both black and white, drew fantastic salaries, in some cases earning in a day many time more that a mineworker could earn in decades of labour.
This is the toxic mix of uncaring plenty amid widespread deprivation that Marikana exposed two years ago: a ruling party lulled into complacency by easy election victories and blind to the people’s needs; a police force schooled in a shoot-to-kill mentality; a trade union movement emasculated by being embedded in government; and a business sector only too happy to line the pockets of its shareholders and bosses.
Ramaphosa demonstrated that he is a product of all these pathologies, a man of his time, but a man of the past, too. He can’t have done his political future any favours when he appear in-front of the commission. His appeal that we take collective responsibility for the Marikana massacre only amplified the lack of accountability – the inability to take personal responsibility – that has become the defining feature of our government.
One might have thought that Marikana would have been the wake-up call our leaders needed to rediscover the energy and idealism of 1994. This however was not to be the case. Perhaps out of the mass of evidence that has become before him, Judge Ian Farlam may deliver a report that identifies the real culprits in the Marikana debacle. But it is hardly prejudging the work of the commission to suggest we may never know who really was to blame. And even if the judge produces a report that shows a way forward, will anybody in power act on it? Or even bother to read it?
Source: http://www.news24.com/MyNews24/Marikana-shows-us-how-South-Africa-has-betrayed-its-high-ideals-20141103