 |
|
Stilfontein…Nationalise the mines under workers control and management! The MWP condemns Minister in the Presidency Ntshaveni’s statement to “smoke out the criminals.” It is reminiscent of Ramaphosa’s condemnation of the 2012 miners strike as a “criminal act” that must dealt with “concomitantly” that created the climate for the premeditated slaughter of 34 mineworkers in the Marikana massacre. Operation Abafele Emgodini (let them die in the hole) is a more accurate description of the state’s approach. The state’s actions are reminiscent of the kragdadige attitude of the apartheid regime and, more recently, the genocidal policy of collective punishment through orchestrated starvation by the very Israeli regime the government had succeeded in indicting for carrying out genocide against the Palestinians, amongst others by deliberate starvation through blocking aid trucks. Like the Netanyahu regime, the SA state vilified the zama zamas just as his regime does to Palestinians, treating them as less than human. The Stilfontein crisis should have been dealt with as an emergency with an emphasis on rescuing and offering any victims of the gangsters’ protection. Instead, the SAPS, backed by the hysteria of politicians at the level of the presidency itself, handled the crisis as pure criminality, including cordoning off the area as a crime scene. The government’s narrative was that this was not a life-threatening emergency requiring a humanitarian rescue intervention, but pure criminality orchestrated by illegal immigrants. Domestic media attention on Stilfontein at first served as an echo for the government by sensationalising its reactionary, xenophobic policy in the name of upholding law and order. It should share responsibility for the delays that have resulted in unnecessary deaths. The nationality or legal status of those trapped should have been irrelevant. This was a life-threatening emergency. The primary duty of a government, which portrays itself as a champion of human rights internationally, is to practice what it preaches and treat this crisis as a rescue mission. Even when it was compelled to accept the reality that some of those trapped were South African, the state was not prepared to be diverted from its mission to demonise the trapped miners. Further adding outrageous insult to injury, the government denounced women from Stilfontein for allegedly aiding and abetting criminality by forming relationships with foreigners. The government could have avoided these deaths had it worked with the community to rescue workers who remained trapped underground for fear of arrest or because the criminal syndicates may be holding them against their will. To the everlasting credit of the Stilfontein community, they stood firm in the face of an avalanche of government propaganda cynically misrepresenting the complex realities of what had unfolded. Community led solidarity action The MWP salutes the Stilfontein community and the organisations that supported them – the Mining Affected Communities (Macua) and the actions of Lawyers for Human Right for the legal action they took to force the state to change it into a rescue operation. Reminiscent of the action taken by communities in Spain, struck by recent floods in stepping forward with their own relief efforts and clean-up operations after their government failed to act in time to come to their rescue, the community in Stilfontein also stepped in to mitigate the tragedy. Until the site was cordoned off and placed under heavy police guard, the community could access it to however painstakingly slowly, rescue the workers and deliver supplies. They worked in shifts using improvised ropes and other materials to bring over a dozen, including one deceased worker, to the surface. One community member reported to an international news agency about how the police just stood idly by, waiting for them to rescue the workers, and only stepped in to place them under arrest once they were brought to the surface. The consequent international news headlines embarrassed the government, exposing the hypocrisy behind its posture as the ‘international champion of human rights’. The community rescue efforts and solidarity challenged the state’s anti-working class and xenophobic attempts to criminalise the trapped miners. They demonstrated their humanity and solidarity by supplying food and mounting rescue efforts with primitive equipment. The surviving trapped zama zamas, several of whom had died, received a reprieve after the Pretoria High Court granted an interim order allowing emergency aid provision which was initially and shamefully dismissed by the same High Court. However, despite the High Court’s interim order granted on 1st December in favour of the applicants for humanitarian aid to be delivered to the trapped workers, arbitrary police restrictions limited the quantity of food that community members can lower down to the trapped miners. Meanwhile, several workers have on their own, reached the surface by crawling and walking in harrowing conditions underground, risking arrest instead of their lives to starvation because conditions underground have become intolerable. Thanks to the Stilfontein community, another Marikana massacre, this time not with guns but through orchestrated starvation, has thus been averted. State tried to save face in the face of zama zama criminal syndicates violent turf wars The unfolding tragedy is a direct consequence of the high levels of unemployment and poverty and the state’s failure to enforce the laws and regulations put in place to deal with the rehabilitation of disused and abandoned mines. Well before Stilfontein, the activities of heavily armed criminal gangs exploiting vulnerable retrenched mineworkers had caused mayhem in and around Gauteng townships bordering abandoned mines. They engaged in open warfare to control abandoned mines close to many townships. Communities already plagued by drug wars and violent crime feared being caught in the crossfire as well as the threat posed by underground mining activities to the stability of residential housing foundations and exposure to possible explosions of gas and fuel pipelines. Given this history of violence and mayhem Operation Vula Umgodi was also calculated to address the damage to government’s authority. The criminality that had become rife in this sector in turf wars between different criminal syndicates had grown to such an extent that it was seen as helpless and portrayed as a threat to state security itself. It is no accident that there is a failure to distinguish between the ordinary zamas zamas discarded by the mining industry and the criminal gangs who exploit them. The ANC government’s entire operation was cynically calculated to deflect attention from the decades-long cowardly failure to hold the mining industry to account for the crisis of abandoned mines, retrenchments, and the deprivation and desperation that surrounding communities have suffered. Stilfontein has laid bare the utter inhumanity and class hostility towards the working class – the poor, the exploited and the oppressed – by the ANC, now as head of the GNU. This is the lot of the working class majority under the capitalist system that came with colonialism, continued under apartheid and now under this ANC-headed coalition of the rejected. The ANC has dedicated its entire existence to assimilating the social forces it represents, the aspirant black capitalist class, into the very same system of exploitation since it was put into power by the working class thirty years ago. What lies at the root of the Zama Zama phenomenon? The immediate cause of the explosion of zama zama activity is the mass retrenchments over the last decade since the miners’ uprising that culminated in the Marikana massacre. Mining companies clawed back the concessions the heroic mineworkers’ strike had forced from them. Lonmin, for example, settled for a wage increase close to the R12 500 workers had demanded. Today, the average general mine worker’s salary in SA is R 177 600 per year or R 14 800 per month. Entry-level positions start at R 146 730 annually, while most experienced workers make up to R 267 540 annually – nearly R23 000 a month. They culled the workforce by over 110,000, reducing it to 423 829 in 2022 compared to 538 144 at the time of the Marikana massacre. These retrenchments focussed particularly on migrant workers from neighbouring countries, following the devastating impact of the 2008 global financial crisis on southern African economies. Compounding this situation was the deepening political crisis caused by the corrupt regimes in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, as well as the debilitating instability in Lesotho. Zimbabwe’s official national unemployment rate during the first quarter of 2023 stood at 19 per cent, while the expanded unemployment rate for the nation was 46.7 per cent, according to HealthTimes.co.zw. Zimbabwe’s economic crisis and the criminality of the Zanu-PF regime policies are exemplified by hyperinflation reaching a staggering 500 billion per cent in December 2008. By January 16, 2009, Zimbabwe’s biggest-ever note, the $100 trillion note, was brought into circulation. Still worth nothing more than a loaf of bread, the note was soon dumped as Zimbabwe formally adopted multiple foreign currencies, mainly the United States dollar and South Africa’s rand, to tame hyperinflation. For over a century, the mining industry had profiteered from workers who had been the source of cheap labour. The vast majority of zama zamas are workers, discarded like human garbage. Thrown into destitution, they have, in desperation, opted to risk their lives, eking out an existence in slave-like conditions in the bowels of the earth. Yet over 30 mining companies fought all the way to the Supreme Court of Appeal to unsuccessfully appeal their liability for the maiming and deaths of hundreds of thousands from silicosis and tuberculosis over decades of profiteering from cheap labour. The criminal gangs who have taken over exploiting zama zamas are as rapacious as the mining bosses who had employed and discarded them but hypocritically joining in the chorus of condemnation of illegal mining. The abandonment of over 6000 mines in SA is every inch as criminal as the activities of the zama zama gang leaders. No solutions under capitalism The closure of holes in abandoned mines is itself no solution. It will not remove the problems of sinkholes in the West Rand that threaten not only housing but schools and other infrastructure as in the West Rand. Vala Umgodi is not so much about closing abandoned mines. It is the equivalent of trying to avert the eruption of a smouldering volcano by pouring in rubble. It is a political strategy by an ANC that suffered a humiliating defeat in the May 29 elections, to arrest its ongoing decline by stoking the flames of xenophobia. It is no less repugnant than the strategy of divide-and-rule of the apartheid regime – turning the oppressed against each other. It is the substitution of apartheid based on race with class. As with the Stilfontein crisis and the food poisoning outbreak allegedly sold by migrant-owned spaza shops, “closing the holes” will not eradicate the problem any more than the closure of spaza shops with or without the help of a Home Affairs foreigner witch-hunt. Furthermore, its political motivation distracts attention from the government’s criminal culpability for the problem’s origins – the collusion between the government and the mining bosses. Artisanal mining is as old as the mining industry and predates colonialism. However, the rapid increase and the extent of this activity have reached startling proportions for communities exposed to its consequences. According to a 2020 study[1]artisanal mining has emerged as a growing sector of the world economy, with between fifteen and forty million directly employed compared to only seven million in formal mining. In South Africa, according to Stats SA, employment in formal mining has declined by more than half since 1988, when close to one million were employed. It has been complemented by artisanal mining which has developed into an industry in its own right. It is estimated that approximately 10% of SA’s annual gold production comes from artisanal mining, equivalent to about R15 billion in annual revenue. This is not possible without the collusion of the “official” industry, which, at the top end of the value chain, facilitates the sale of commodities brought to market by the sweated labour of the modern slaves that ordinary zama zamas are. Mining industry unions allege that mining companies are themselves employing zama zamas. It is believed that a Chinese-owned mining company in Stilfontein has seemingly arbitrarily sectioned off parts of the underground for officially employed workers and sealed off another for zama zamas. These companies rely on the collusion of corrupt politicians in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and as far afield as the Middle East, as was graphically exposed in the four-part Al Jazeera documentary, ‘Gold Mafia’. The failures of the state to regulate the industry lie in its acceptance of its role as the political manager of the capitalist class in general and the mining industry in particular in exchange for the benefits of self-enrichment through BEE deals. https://marxistworkersparty.org.za/?p=5752 Back |
 Links Search |
||||||
|
|||||||
