A wake-up call South Africa will ignore at its peril
“I fear the wheels are starting to come off.” Shortly before he died last year, and with tears in his eyes, Henry 'Squire' Makgothi provided this assessment of South Africa to a small group of friends. A former deputy secretary-general of the governing African National Congress. Makgothi’s disappointment was triggered by reports of high level corruption and, above all, by what the police still refer to as “unrest incidents” around the country.
That he felt so deeply saddened was understandable: he had devoted all of his adult life to the anti-apartheid cause as a loyal member of both the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP). A qualified teacher, he was banned from the profession, eked out a living as a bus driver and clerk before being charged with treason and later served a ten-year prison term, eight of them on Robben Island, before escaping into exile.
Last year, as we sat around a table in Johannesburg, he warned that, unless “something is done, things are going to get worse”. However, even at his gloomiest, he could probably never have foreseen the sort of tragedy that unfolded at Lonmin’s Marikana mine on Thursday, August 16. Then, in two short bursts of automatic gunfire, 34 striking miners lay dead, another 78 wounded, some of them seriously.
Scenes of the carnage flashed around the world and comparisons were hastily drawn with what had happened at Sharpeville in 1960 and Bisho in 1992, both cases where the proclaimed forces of law and order had fired on and killed many protestors. However, such comparisons are not strictly accurate because the strikers were not unarmed men and women. But there are parallels, not the least of which is the international reaction. As one British commentator noted only hours after the first scenes of the shootings made headlines news: “There goes any hope of foreign direct investment — at least for the time being.”
However. there is a tendency to regard what happened at Lonmin in isolation from the other, almost daily, upheavals that so concerned Henry Makgothi. This would be a mistake, because they all stem from similar causes. These were underlined in a report produced just days before the tragic shooting a Marikana. Produced by the Bench Marks Foundation (BMF) of the South African Council of Churches, the report painted a grim picture of desperate poverty among miners and their families.
From the report, it is clear that many miners can rightly claim that their material conditions are worse now than they were under apartheid. During the previous era, mining companies were not obliged by law to house men, like so many artifacts, on three-tiered concrete bunks in stark, utilitarian hostels. Migrant workers from as far afield as Zambia, mainly Barotseland, Malawi and Mozambique, were crammed into this form of housing along with South Africans from far flung rural areas. It was judged by the companies to be the most efficient — and profitable — way to house a captive workforce. But the hostels were at least weather proof and the miners were provided with food rations and access to free basic health care.
After 1994 the single sex migrant labour hostels became, at least to a large degree, obsolete. Freedom of movement was guaranteed and recruitment was concentrated more within South Africa. But rather than provide family housing for the workforces, the mining companies found a more cost-effective solution: outsourcing. A variety of labour broking companies now provide workers for the mines. They compete in terms of price. What this means is that the workers they provide are frequently paid less than the often quoted R4,000 a month. In addition, “contract miners” do not receive the accommodation, rations or health care of permanent workers. They are, instead, residents of the sprawling squatter camps that now surround the mines.
In makeshift shelters, without any amenities and often with their families, these men — and mining remains a largely male preserve — put their lives on the line every day in stygian conditions many hundreds of metres underground. On the Lonmin operations, the workforce is at any time between 24,000 and 27,000 strong. Of this number, at least 10,000 are outsourced workers...
