Marikana massacre just the latest disaster in South Africa’s labour relations

Araminta Wordsworth | Aug 25, 2012 9:15 AM ET | Last Updated: Aug 25, 2012 9:29 AM ET

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe.  Today: Eighteen years after the official end of apartheid, the massacre at Lonmin’s Marikana mine shows how far South Africa is from achieving anything like equality for its black citizens
Under the rule of the African National Congress, a few blacks have grabbed power and riches, joining the ranks of the white randlords. Ironically, they include Cyril Ramaphosa, first general secretary of the National  Union of Mineworkers (NUM), now a millionaire businessman and Lonmin director.
The majority of their fellow Africans remain impoverished and living in squalor.
The Lonmin miners are among the worst paid in an industry that has notoriously exploited those who toil at the pit face, both in terms of working conditions and low pay. Meanwhile the price of the metal they extract — platinum — has soared, overtaking that of gold.

Sadly, the tragedy has turned into a fingerpointing exercise among politicians, the police, labour unions and Lonmin, but there are hopes President Jacob Zuma’s call for an inquiry may result in real change. Maybe. As Anita Powell at the Voice of America notes,

After South African police shot and killed dozens of angry, protesting miners last week, two political leaders rushed to the scene.
Predictably, one of them was President Jacob Zuma.
The other was Julius Malema, a disgraced firebrand youth leader who has been expelled from the ruling African National Congress — but whose radical, militant comments about the incident could spell political trouble for the party … The shooting is exactly the kind of thing Malema has been warning South Africa about for years: an angry, impoverished underclass rising up against its rich masters, with deadly consequences.

Not that Malema is without baggage: critics noted the young leader is comfortably off and recently enjoyed an all-expenses paid trip to London for unknown reasons.
Meanwhile, Zuma is relying on the support of the established NUM to help win the ANC leadership contest later this year, says the Wall Street Journal’s Devon Maylie.

Mr. Zuma will head to the conference in December vying for a second term as the party’s top leader. Since the party holds a parliamentary majority, that would also allow him to retain the presidency. His rhetoric in recent months has grown increasingly populist as he seeks to garner support from key allies of the ANC, like the unions.
Yet one union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, or AMCU, has emerged to challenge the establishment National Union of Mineworkers, or NUM—a member of the umbrella union Cosatu, which is associated with the African National Congress. AMCU has campaigned on a platform of representing the lowest-paid workers and not being part of the ANC. Its rivalry with NUM contributed to tensions at Lonmin’s mine this month.

At the Johannesburg-based The Star, Makhudu Sefara believes Marikana’s miners had been pushed beyond endurance.

[W]hen threatened with death, [they] retorted that the indignity of their lives, occasioned by the meagre pay they receive, had killed everything about them. They embarked on an illegal strike knowing there could be consequences. And the consequences are dire. But in life, people do get pushed to breaking point. They take irrational decisions because they are tired of waiting for a better life for all.
Politicians have been making a meal of the tragedy of Marikana, trying to get cheap political points.

And as Micah Reddy notes at the Mail & Guardian, Marikana is only the latest example of bad labour relations in South Africa.

Statistically speaking, a Marikana massacre occurs many times every year beneath the surface of South Africa’s mining badlands. In 2010, 128 legal mineworkers lost their lives …roughly three times the number of workers who lost their lives in the recent Marikana tragedy …
Lonmin, the world’s third-largest platinum producer, is able to give its chief executive an annual pay package equivalent to what the average rock-drill operator would take home after 400 years on the job. Yet it is unwilling to make good on its modest promises to mining communities: it is unable to fix the burst pipes that leak raw sewage into the rivers running through these sites, spreading waterborne diseases such as ­bilharzia; it is incapable of living up to the easily achievable task of providing effective waste removal and maintaining basic infrastructure.

compiled by Araminta Wordsworth
awordsworth@nationalpost.com