Johannesburg - President Cyril Ramaphosa received harsh criticism at a Marikana memorial lecture on Wednesday for his failure to live up to his promise to go and apologise to the families of the Marikana miners who died during a wage dispute in 2012.
The main speaker at the lecture – organised by the Association of Mine Workers and Construction Union (Amcu) and held in Johannesburg – Xolani Dube, from the Xubera Institute of Research and Development, said the president had promised the families an apology, but has never shown up.
At the time of what’s been called the massacre, Ramaphosa was a non-executive director at Lonmin, the company involved in the labour dispute with workers. His company, Shanduka, was a minority shareholder in Lonmin. There were a series of emails the president had sent at the time that placed him in a bad light with some unions.
“He (Ramaphosa) told the world he would come and apologise, but as we speak today that man never did that. Why do you have to apologise for something that you have not done? Why do you have to pay and apologise for something you have not done?
“Why is the world not frowning upon this man? Why are the business people saying that they want justice, why don’t you take people who killed the miners to the International Criminal Court?” Dube asked.
Dube, who seemed emotional while delivering his speech, said the painful thing was that the miners were breadwinners who risked their lives every day to create wealth for others.
“What is painful about the system is that it kills people who have nothing. How can you kill a rock driller, someone who goes deep, deep into the belly of the Earth to extract wealth for a few, so that you can live an aristocratic life, and when that person is above the ground after extracting wealth, then you kill him?” Dube asked.
He criticised the ability of the Constitution to protect all citizens equally. He said it was a disappointment that years after the Marikana killings, there had been no prominent arrests of those who were at the forefront.
EFF leader, Advocate Dali Mpofu, said it was important that the killings should always be remembered because they were the greatest tragedy of the democratic South Africa.
“This was the first massacre that was actually perpetrated by us, because those times we would say, it is the apartheid government, what do you expect? But now these are the people that we had chosen ourselves to lead us out of that mess, and they did the same thing that was done by the oppressor,” Mpofu said.
The Marikana anniversary will be on August 16. However, it is not clear if the event will take place at the koppie where the miners died, due to Covid-19 restrictions.
The Star