On August 16 2012, something went wrong with our democracy. We watched in horror when 34 striking mineworkers at what was then the world’s third-largest platinum producer were being cut down in a barrage of automatic weapon fire by the police.
The images, transmitted across the world, became the symbol of the worst police violence against civilians since the end of apartheid. Credible reports of killings, beatings and assaults of fleeing mineworkers only deepened anger against the police, the mining industry and politicians.
Almost two months later, then president Jacob Zuma set up a commission of inquiry headed by retired judge Ian Farlam. He took nearly three years to get to the bottom of multiple failures of all players involved in the lead-up to the tragedy, and came up with recommendations to make things right.
It is shameful that 10 years later, not only has SA not used the Farlam recommendations to prevent a repeat of what has become known as the Marikana massacre, it has also established a disturbing pattern of impunity and incompetence, threatening to turn on its head the social compact that underpins our democracy.
To begin with, not one gun-wielding police officer nor senior official has been put behind bars to date. In 2017 the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, the police watchdog, told a parliamentary committee it had been weeks away from handing its investigative report to the National Prosecuting Authority for the prosecution of 72 police officers, including Riah Phiyega, the then police commissioner.
To rub salt into the wound, compensation payments for families of the victims — killed or injured — are trickling in way too slowly. Last week the justice department said that half of the 48 cases have been settled in the class action lawsuit, meaning that 24 other claims were yet to be finalised. In addition, claims related to emotional shock and psychological damage, loss of parental care for minor children and spousal support for widows are yet to be finalised, according to Socio-Economic Rights Institute, a rights group.
The message this accountability crisis sends is that the lives of poor, migrant workers are meaningless, widening the gulf between what a democratic state is supposed to deliver for its citizens and the reality on the ground.
What followed Marikana is a striking and traumatic example of a wider malaise poisoning the soul of our democracy. The impunity enjoyed by police officers implicated in the shooting to death and the injuring of dozens more extends to senior government officials, who have turned the state into a free-for-all corruption feeding frenzy. The reason has inadvertently been advanced by senior ANC leaders from Zuma, who has remarked that the “ANC will rule until Jesus comes back”, to the late Jessie Duarte, a top-six party official, who remarked in 2021 that “you know in your heart that you can never live in a country where there is no ANC because the opposite to that would be chaos and, undoubtedly, a civil war that we all don’t want”.
Yes, the ANC is losing electoral support but remains the biggest party in the country, annihilating its nearest rival, the DA, by nearly 40 percentage points and emboldening its leaders to proclaim its indispensability. And the result is not only corruption but also systemic ineptitude, the unwelcome effect of which is day after day of service delivery protests, an unemployment rate at record highs and SA being branded the most unequal society in the world.
As SA commemorates the 10th anniversary of the shooting on a rocky outcrop in Marikana, it’s worth remembering that the wider collapse of accountability is eroding trust in political leaders and, in the end, in the democratic system itself. Last year’s protests over the jailing of Zuma, which morphed into an outpouring of anger over hardship and joblessness by shapeless crowds, offered us a glimpse of a dark future, a future in which we ignored that good government and accountability are inseparable partners with an established track record of success in tackling many of the issues facing SA.
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