LABOUR FORCE SURVEY

Unemployment for black South Africans is worse today than before 1994

By Ayal Belling• 12 November 2020

Photo: Flicker

On Thursday, Stats SA released its latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey. The record numbers of unemployed should send a shock through our system and compel an immediate reconsideration of our economic policy. The toll on poor people is now unbearable.

South Africa is literally not working. The numbers out on Thursday suggest that a recovery is barely being staged. At 14.7 million, the number of people employed in the country remains far below even the disastrously low level of 16.4 million just before Covid-19 hit South Africa. To put this in perspective, there are 39.2 million people aged 15 to 64 in the country (the “working age”). Between July and September of this year, only 37.5% of them were in work. This is barely more than half the world average.

South Africans, particularly black working-age South Africans, are less employed today than in 1994.

The narrow or strict unemployment figure sits at 30.8%, the highest on record, exceeding even the first quarter of 2020 figure of 30.1%. However, this alarming rate does not capture the full picture. There are still 10% (1.7 million) fewer jobs in the country than in January to March of this year.

To be classed as strictly unemployed, you must have actively looked for work over the past month. The number of people who have completely given up looking for work has increased by 2.7 million since before lockdown.

Only 543,000 jobs have returned to the market of the 2.2 million lost since April. Informal workers such as traders, own-account workers, domestic workers and those in micro-enterprises, who engage in the most survivalist and entrepreneurial activity in the country, accounted for 292,000 of the returning jobs. However, as the most financially vulnerable group, there are sadly still 16% fewer people employed in this way than in the first three months of 2020. 

How unemployment impacts on the poor

Ntsikelelo Msweswe, a 36-year-old volunteer at the Gugulethu branch of Organising for Work (OfW), the unemployed movement I am associated with, says that the “lockdown came and made things worse for me as I have to sit at home and wait for NPOs [non-profit organisations] to help us to have food”. Despite feeling “very helpless”, Msweswe says that, “I would love to do something for people with criminal records … to share the skills and the energy I have towards working.”

OfW, which launched in 2018, does grassroots community organising to alleviate unemployment. It has branches in some of the highest unemployment areas of Cape Town. Its model is to organise unemployed people to run their own branches that support people in their search for work.

The branches – run for free by unemployed volunteers in public libraries – also push for better treatment of jobseekers and act as communal spaces that make searching for work a little less solitary. They are in a sense free job centres connecting unemployed of all ages, education levels, abilities and criminal records directly to employers from where they live.

Msweswe, as well as many other volunteers and members of OfW, has been involved in local organising efforts like Cape Town Together that arose in response to the pandemic. More than ever, government failure in South Africa has placed the burden of alleviating poverty and worklessness on individuals.

Thomas Piketty, a French economist regarded as the world’s foremost expert on inequality, describes South Africa as an extreme case of an “inequality regime”. In his latest book, Capital and Ideology, he lays out in detail how inequality regimes around the world result from choices made by the political classes – choices that are never as forced by circumstance as they are later portrayed.

Disgracefully, inequality in South Africa, along with unemployment, has worsened since the end of apartheid. Piketty, as well as many local economists, will tell you that the choices made since 1994 were made instead of many other competing and feasible options. For example, the choice by the ANC in the first two years of democracy to scrap rather than carry out the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) – the cornerstone pledge of their 1994 national election campaign – haunts us today.

Fast-forward 26 years and President Cyril Ramaphosa speaks of an Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan that promises some of the housing, infrastructure and manufacturing of the RDP. The past two and a half years of his speeches have contained a relentless recycling of economic plans that are never realised, dead or inadequate. 

They make it hard not to see him as anything more than a Baghdad Bob, a farcical character promising victory in the face of catastrophic destruction.

The unemployed members of OfW are best placed to know how empty his words are. 

Millicent Kamase, a 39-year-old member of OfW’s Site B Khayelitsha branch, summarises them well when she says that his promise of 800,000 public jobs “will never happen. We’ve been voting for years and are still unemployed.”

Ramaphosa’s recovery plan and R500-billion stimulus were revealed last month in the National Treasury’s Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement to be, in reality, a reduction in spending over the next three years through regressive austerity. For an excellent summary of the “puffery and confusion” of Ramaphosa’s plans and Treasury’s defunding of them, read Duma Gqubule’s detailed and investigative analysis.

What appears not to occur to the president nor to his finance minister, Tito Mboweni, is that there are other options.

For example, a new-money stimulus and an infrastructure-led jobs programme which actually creates jobs and builds infrastructure that supports and reaches the poor. Their choice to go for austerity in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression is the worst of all possible options. 

Comparable economies such as Brazil and poorer ones, such as India, which have higher public debt than South Africa, have massively increased their spending and debt to cover the cost of the pandemic.

Not only is the national government’s approach stalling the South African economy, tax collection and job creation, but the cost of the pandemic is also being placed disproportionately on the country’s poor in the form of worklessness, a reduction in public investment and contraction of basic services in health and education. 

City of Cape Town hoards while people starve

Of course, it is not only failures at the national level that hold back job creation and make job seeking even more gruelling, discouraging and unaffordable than it needs to be. The City of Cape Town approved its budget in June this year, during the darkest days of lockdown, retaining R4.6-billion as surplus in 2020/21, R6.2-billion in 2022/23 and R5.4-billion in 2023/24.

It is an extreme indictment of the hypercapitalist, socially aloof city council and its executive not to direct these funds towards, for example, public employment, township infrastructure and free public Wi-Fi. 

As I write, the city’s public libraries, virtually the only sites of free public Wi-Fi in poorer areas and the sites of OfW branches, are still operating unnecessarily restrictive lockdown policies.

Life was hard before Covid-19 for unemployed South Africans. The paltry R350 per month that will continue to reach a minority of those not working until January next year, pales in comparison to lost income related to the pandemic. 

As Mnyamezeli Sibunzi, a 26-year-old member of OfW’s Langa branch, puts it: “Finding work now is something that I wish, I even dream about… I’ve never been so broke in my life.” DM/MC

Ayal Belling is a founder of the unemployed movement Organising for Work. He previously worked in finance and technology in London and Cape Town. He can be contacted at ayal@ofw.org.za.

• economic recovery
• infrastructure-led jobs
• new-money stimulus
• Organising for Work (OfW)
• Thomas Piketty
• Unemployment

 

THE SOUTH AFRICAN ORGANISATION SASOL - OIL FROM COAL GERMAN TECHNOLOGY - SHOULD BE SOCIALISED!

Umsebenzi Online, Volume 19, Number 7, 23 March 2020

Voice of the South African Working Class

In this Issue:

Sasol should be socialised!

Introduction

The Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF) and Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) lost in total more than R200 billion in this month’s crash of Sasol, reported the Business Report on 15 March 2020. The GEPF is managed, as an investment fund, by the Public Investment Corporation (PIC), while the IDC is a state development finance institution (DFI). The combined loss of workers and public funds occurred through 13.5% and 8.5% stakes held in Sasol by the GEPF and the IDC respectively. The landslide loss did not occur at Eskom or any SOE – it occurred, on the contrary, in a privatised company.

The silence of the private profit sector, its business associations and political and ideological agents, such as the DA, “expert” or “analyst” “notice me” and hangers-on, is deafening. The sycophantic supporters of privatisation are instead calling for more privatisation, divestment of the state in SOEs, and other neoliberal measures. The working class has to unite in defence of public property rights and for the SOEs to be turned around to thrive. Below the excerpt of the editorial from the forthcoming African Communist (Issue 202, 1^st & 2^nd Quarter 2020) deals with the failure of the privatised company, the crash of Sasol, and the way forward, socialisation! 

• Umsebenzi Online

Sasol should be socialised!   

African Communist editorial | Red Alert |

In just one single day in mid-March this year, Sasol lost 45,6% of its share price, with R76-billion of shareholder equity being wiped out in one week. In an attempt to reassure its shareholders, creditors and the markets more generally, Sasol put out a statement valuing its underly­ing assets at R23,3-billion. That’s no small sum, but it represents a huge collapse in value for this synthetic fuel company that was worth more than R400-billion just six years ago.

The immediate cause of the mid-March collapse was the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on global oil demand and the stand-off between two of the world’s major oil producers, Saudi Arabia and Russia. The oil price dropped to around $US35 a barrel. This is close to what the SACP (and others) have long assumed to be the cost to Sasol of producing oil from coal – a cost which, until now, Sasol has kept a closely guarded secret for reasons we will elaborate below.

But behind Sasol’s March 2020 troubles lies another story, and be­hind that story lies yet another. Before the advent of Covid-19 and the oil price collapse, Sasol was already in major trouble.

But let’s first travel back 14 years.

In February 2006 the SACP Central Committee put out a statement welcoming then Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel’s announcement that he was setting up a task team to investigate the possibility of im­posing a windfall tax on Sasol. The announcement was, in principle, an important step forward in the campaign that the SACP had been leading for some years for the socialisation of Sasol and its huge accu­mulation of profits.

Sasol was established in 1950 as a public entity. It was subsidised from the fiscus for many years to cover the difference between the glo­bal price of oil which hovered around $25 a barrel and Sasol’s cost to produce oil from coal (which we long assumed to be around $35). This arrangement was a key part of the strategic intervention of the apart­heid regime to ensure that South Africa’s industrial development was not entirely at the mercy of external oil producers (and later, of course, oil sanctions). This strategic intervention was successful. Today Sasol still supplies around 35% of South Africa’s petrol needs.

Following the global oil price shock of 1973, in which OPEC coun­tries collectively combined to limit production and drive up the global price, oil prices soared. Sasol became immensely profitable as it sold (as it still does) its oil on the South African market at the same price as imported oil. In 1979 Sasol was privatised and sold at a discount to established South African monopoly capital.

But through the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s the global price of oil, sometimes moving above $100 a barrel, was way above Sasol’s produc­tion cost. Over many decades, the South African economy and general public, not just car owners, but taxi and bus commuters, farmers us­ing tractors and food transporters have been subsiding mega-profits for Sasol’s private share-holders – paying at the pump for Sasol petrol as if it were imported all the way from the Middle East.

It is in this context that the SACP has called for the return of Sasol to public ownership and, as a first step, for a variable “windfall tax” to be imposed on Sasol for any time the global oil price tracks significantly above the $35 a barrel – the amount that we believed was the cost to Sasol for producing oil from coal. We also argued that this windfall tax could be the basis of a South African sovereign wealth fund.

So, in 2006 as the oil price hovered around $60, the central com­mittee welcomed Trevor Manuel’s announcement that he was finally establishing a task team to look at the windfall tax proposal. Sasol’s executives went ballistic. “The company is concerned that its ability to reinvest profits into its operations will be compromised if a windfall tax is imposed,” it proclaimed. Sasol CEO at the time, Pat Davies, made veiled threats about “re-thinking” its local investment plans.

To its credit, in 2007 Manuel’s task team, after detailed considera­tion, brushed aside this howling and strongly recommended a windfall tax on Sasol.

Instead, however, and inexplicably Treasury reached a “gentleman’s” agreement with Sasol – in exchange for not imposing the windfall tax, the company committed to investing some of its mega-profits in a new coal-to-oil plant in Limpopo (the so-called Mafutha project).

In 2012, with the global oil price around $120 a barrel, Sasol’s net profit for the year was R24-billion, but there was still no Mafutha! Then in 2013, Sasol announced a R200-billion investment in a gas to liquid plant, not in Limpopo, but in faraway Louisiana, USA.

Even the conservative Business Day journalist David Gleason was outraged: “Born courtesy of taxpayers…South Africa’s biggest compa­ny and world leader in various critical energy technologies is investing ever more deeply in the US than it is here. This may be the right thing for the company, but is it right for the country?”

Gleason was right, but he was also wrong – the decision to disinvest massively into the US has now proven to be a disaster for Sasol and its shareholders. The Louisiana project has run years over schedule and billions over budget. Sasol’s debt has ballooned and creditors are nerv­ous. Before the Covid-19 outbreak, before the oil price collapse, Sasol was in trouble. It joins a list of former pillars of the apartheid economy that disinvested out of South Africa and that have now run into trou­ble. Old Mutual burnt its fingers in London, Anglo American is a pale shadow of its past, SA Breweries got eaten up, Woolworths is limping from its Australian ventures.

And now to add further insult to our injury, Sasol has put out a state­ment reassuring its creditors and investors that even at $28 a barrel, the company can cut it. The blighters! All these years they have kept their cost of producing oil from coal a deep secret, disguising from the South African public the actual amount we have been subsidising mega profits over decades.

The wealth and world-class technical capacities of Sasol need to be socialised and harnessed for the overall development of our country. A windfall tax in 2007 would have been an important step forward in that direction. The task of socialisation has become a whole lot more complex, but no less critical.

• This is an excerpt of the editorial from the forthcoming African Communist, Issue Number 202, 1^st & 2^nd Quarter 2020

Mar 23

SOUTH AFRICA - APARTHEID POLICE STATE; AUSTRALIA - APARTHEID POLICE STATE; ISRAEL - APARTHEID POLICE STATE

HOTEL HELL FOR REFUGEES

Headline on front page of Preston Leader on Tuesday 10 March 2020 (This is a Murdoch paper!!! )

Whatever happened to our so-called democracies?

Starting with South Africa, the world waited with bated breath for dramatic changes when Nelson Mandela became the first black president of a united South Africa and possibly the end of apartheid - and the police state.

Mandela retired after his first and only 5-year term as president - he was, of course, quite elderly by then and after the criminally hard life he had had in South Africa's infamously dreadful prison on Robben Island, he rightly thought a younger generation should govern for South Africa.

He  wrongly favoured Thabo Mbeki who was disastrous during his periods as president because he was an AIDS denier to the extent that even today, a few presidents later, HIV/AIDS still presents a major health challenge for the South African people.

A little later Jacob Zuma became president and corruption set in, with disastrous results for the economy and all other facets of South African life.

One of the disasters of this period was the Marikana massacre of many miners who had gone on strike because of the murderous mismanagement of the company owning certain mines.

The person who is now the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was apparently the person who ordered the police and the army to open fire on the miners. In an earlier incarnation he had been the president of the organisation Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Then he became a business man and also very rich.

Disaster all the way, and the rich got richer and the poor poorer - if possble -  and South Africa still remains a mess - in 2020.

I arrived in Australia from South Africa in 1978, hoping apartheid and police state would not be as bad as in South Africa.

Idle hope! After all, apartheid started in Australia on 26 January 1788 and the nature of the British colonisation of Australia was that it was already a police state. Instead of improving over the years, the police state has intensified to the extent that asylum seekers managing to get to Australia - escaping mostly from brutal regimes around the world and arriving here to ask for asylum, hoping to have peace in their lives, are locked up in concentration camps from which escape is virtually impossible.

Some slightly more humanitarian politicians - and they are few and far between in Australia - managed to pass legislation to bring refugees to Australia from the concentration camps on Manus and Nauru for medical treatment.   This legislation was overturned by the government as soon as it was possible, and 55 asylum seekers have been locked up in a Mantra Hotel in Preston in Melbourne for the last 8 months with no chance of any relief in sight and no hope of change from a government and opposition determined to follow a police state mentality of locking people in concentration camps and throwing away the keys.

What is mostly ignored by most white Australians and many migrants in the last 200 years or so is that the indigenous inhabitants of this ancient country are still treated like savages in their own land and they are imprisoned at alarming rates where they are also suffering deaths in custody by a brutal police regime determinedly maintained by the police state governments of the country.

Some of those of us who have experienced the "joys" of living in a police state despair of any changes in Australia because so many people behave like sheep and also can - or won't be bothered with making any sorts of protests and leaving the rest of us with that hopeless feeling that there is never going to be any changes - ever!

At the age of 93 I thought I had seen and experienced most of the worst aspects of human nature but the longer I live the worse it gets - and I haven't spoken about Israel yet.

Israel is not only a police state, but one with fascist tendencies. Israelis resent being compared to the Nazis but most of what they are doing to keep the Palestinians under control is to keep them incarcerated in their concentration camps in Gaza and the West Bank on land stolen from them by the zionist settlers. Even those Palestinians who were and are in Israel as citizens of their own land are treated like second or third class citizens without full citizens' rights because the zionist project is to occupy the rest of Palestine which has some old Jewish names - Judea and Samaria - for them called after some of the old tribal groups of a few thousand years ago.

Israel wants a Jewish state and if that is what they want, Israel under no circumstances can be called a democracy - it hasn't been that for most of its existence - but a theocracy similar to Iran and other  similar religious states.

.........and Israel is the propagator of much of the anti-semitism in the world in the 21st century.

Op-Ed

South Africa, Apartheid, Crimes against humanity and the Rule of Law: Quo Vadis?

By Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh• 21 February 2020

Former president FW de Klerk looks on as the EFF raises points of order in Parliament during President Cyril Ramaphosa's State of the Nation Address. The EFF demanded that de Klerk be removed from the national assembly before allowing Ramaphosa to continue with his address. 13 February 2020. (Photo: Leila Dougan) Less

South Africa is a young democracy, but the unfinished business of apartheid remains a pressing priority for the state. South Africa’s embarrassing and often unlawful stance on international crimes has received worldwide attention.

Apartheid (Afrikaans for “separateness”) describes the system that committed acts of racial discrimination, oppression, mass violence and murder in order to protect the white supremacy in South Africa from 1948 to 1994.

FW de Klerk, the last president of apartheid South Africa, who was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with former President Nelson Mandela made an unfortunate appearance on TV where he stated that apartheid was not a crime against humanity. While the damage had already been done, the FW de Klerk Foundation further amplified this with a statement on 14 February stating that the idea that apartheid was a crime against humanity was an idea propagated by communist political propaganda. 

As a result of the brouhaha, the Economic Freedom Front (EFF) seek to rescind the Nobel Peace Prize from De Klerk. Interestingly, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has never considered rescinding the prize from any Nobel Laureate. Even though both statements were subsequently retracted, questions remain about where South Africa stands in terms of its fight against impunity for international crimes and on reconciliation.

The Southern Africa Litigation Centre (SALC) stands with the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in its declaration that it is irresponsible for the FW De Klerk Foundation to debate the degree of the awfulness of apartheid. We recognise that the offending statement has been withdrawn, but such offensive sentiments have no place in democratic South Africa. We question the relevance and utility of the FW de Klerk Foundation as a nation-building entity. 

Apartheid is a Crime against Humanity

The crime of “crimes against humanity” covers various offences including murder, enslavement, rape as well as the crime of apartheid. The fact of those offences having a connection to a widespread or systematic attack against any civilian population is what makes them a crime against humanity. Not only does apartheid constitute a separate offence under the crime of “crimes against humantity; but also a brutal system of oppression that qualifies as a widespread or systematic attack against any civilian population. International law recognised apartheid as a crime against humanity from the mid-1950s onwards. The United Nations General Assembly regularly condemned apartheid as contrary to the Charter of the United Nations from 1952 until 1990; and it was regularly condemned by the United Nations Security Council after 1960. In 1966, the UN General Assembly labelled apartheid as a crime against humanity, condemning the policies of apartheid practised by the Government of South Africa as a crime against humanity which was later endorsed by Security Council.

In 1973, The Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid was adopted and codified that apartheid was not only unlawful because it violated the Charter of the United Nations but also declared apartheid to be criminal. Today, apartheid constitutes a separate crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. South Africa implemented the Rome Statute by passing domestic legislation with The Implementation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Act which came into effect on 16 August 2002. This long-standing history of the recognition of crimes against humanity and the crime of apartheid in international law serve as the legal basis to prosecute crimes committed by the apartheid system in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond.

Why does the characterisation of Apartheid as Crime against Humanity matter?

Ahmed Timol, Steve Biko and Neil Aggett are the well known names of persons that died in police custody during apartheid. There are many more who were persecuted, discriminated against, abducted, disappeared and tortured. Ahmed Timol’s murder took place 48 years ago. This long duration of time is one of the reasons why a characterisation of apartheid as a crime against humanity is so crucial. The recognition of apartheid as crime against humanity allows the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to initiate investigations and prosecutions into alleged crimes that were conducted as part of the apartheid system such as the persecution of black people or the torture of anti-apartheid activists in detention. The South African Criminal Procedure Act explicitly states that there is no time limitation to initiate prosecutions for crimes against humanity. Even a single murder can suffice to meet the legal requirements of a crime against humanity. 

Another aspect of the importance to characterise apartheid as a crime against humanity is to show the systematic and/or widespread nature of this system that negatively affected the lives of thousands of South Africans. While crimes against humanity do entail an individual criminal liability, the nexus to a widespread and/or systematic attack against any civilian population shows that the alleged offence was not only the wrongdoing of one individual person but rather by a comprehensive system. In pursuit of truth and national healing, we need to see justice and accountability for all the people murdered, tortured and disappeared by the apartheid government. Prosecutions play a significant role in the healing process of a nation. Catergorising  apartheid as a criminal system of oppression and discrimination is not only important for the current discourse, but also for future generations who might not have the benefit of contemporary witnesses and testimony.

How does South Africa enforce its international obligations in respect of crimes against humanity and other international crimes ? 

South Africa is a young democracy, but the unfinished business of apartheid remains a pressing priority for the state. South Africa’s embarrassing and often unlawful stance on international crimes has received worldwide attention. While the NPA starts investigating and prosecuting cases like the disappearance of anti-apartheid activist Nokuthula Simelane (trial to commence in October 2020), Ahmed Timol or Neil Aggett, there is still a long way to go in order to fight against impunity of individuals in the former security branch of the apartheid system. With regards to the persons who are charged with or have been convicted of international crimes, the South African government has shown an unwillingness  to either prosecute domestically or arrest for hand over to other states or the International Criminal Court for prosecutions. South Africa’s refusal in 2015 to arrest former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir during his attendance of an African Union Summit in Johannesburg is a stark reminder of the country’s willingness to facilitate impunity and disrespect for the rule of law. Al Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. The case of the former head of Rwandan intelligence, Kayumba Nyamwasa, from June 2010 is another situation where South Africa shielded a person implicated in the commission of egregious crimes and is the subject of various extradition requests by granting him refugee status. Nyamwasa continues to reside in South Africa. Dutch war criminal Guus Kouwenhoven has been convicted for complicity in war crimes during the presidency of Charles Taylor in Liberia. The Netherlands requested Kouwenhoven’s extradition in December 2017 so that he can serve his 19-year sentence. South Africa issued him with a visa and he continues to reside in Cape Town. 

The fight against impunity for international crimes requires a solid legal basis. In the case of apartheid, this foundation has been prepared by a long history of international condemnation, codification and classification as crime against humanity. However, this foundation is only the first step.

The inaction of the NPA to pursue individuals who were not granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is unfortunate. The South African government’s resistance and reluctance to prosecute or extradite international criminals illustrates how crucial the implementation and application of existing domestic and international law continues to be. South Africa’s ongoing attempts to withdraw from the International Criminal Court is a display of contempt for accountability and the rule of law. This points to a catastrophic failure of leadership. DM

Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh is Executive Director, Southern Africa Litigation Centre

MARIKANA, SEVEN YEARS ON

Another year, another Marikana commemoration – but betrayal, neglect and injustice are still there

By Greg Nicolson, Chanel Retief and Yanga Sibembe• 16 August 2019

Photo: Lonmin employees gather on a hill called Wonderkop at Marikana. (Greg Marinovich)

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‘They say in this country we’re free, but only some are free, others are not. A policeman has the power to kill and it’s not a big deal. Justice is not a real thing. I have not seen it.'

Zameka Nungu on Wednesday stirred pap on the stove in between washing dishes in her two-bedroom apartment in Karee Hostel, Marikana. An Amcu calendar was pinned to the wall.

It was Nungu’s day off from her job cleaning the K3 shaft at Lonmin, the platinum giant recently taken over by Sibanye-Stillwater, the same shaft where her husband Jackson Lehupa worked before he was shot by police 11 times — in his back, shoulder, thighs, buttock, groin and feet — on 16 August 2012.
Life has changed for Nungu in the seven years since the Marikana massacre. Her children lost their father and she had to move from Mount Fletcher, Eastern Cape, to the platinum belt to take up a job working for the same company many believed was complicit in her husband’s murder.
There has been one constant since the day SAPS officers killed 34 striking mineworkers, with 78 more injured at the scene of the massacre — the feeling of betrayal, neglect and injustice.

Police officers open fire on striking mineworkers outside the Nkageng informal settlement on August 16, 2012 in North West, South Africa.  (Photo by Gallo Images / Foto24 / Felix Dlangamandla)

Since then, there have been a handful of actions taken to achieve accountability and improve the livelihoods of mineworkers and the Marikana community. They have largely come in spite of, and not because of, efforts from government, the platinum company and SAPS.
“They say in this country we’re free, but only some are free, others are not. A policeman has the power to kill and it’s not a big deal. Justice is not a real thing. I have not seen it,” said Nungu.

 

Police officers open fire on striking mineworkers outside the Nkageng informal settlement on August 16, 2012 in North West, South Africa. (Photo by Gallo Images / Foto24 / Felix Dlangamandla)

Mineworker Mlungiseleli Makhatshwe, who still wonders how he survived the police onslaught while he was part of the strike seven years ago, said:
“It pains me that no one has been held accountable for what happened, that the police who were responsible have never been held accountable. There are families who lost loved ones. I also lost my comrades. It’s very difficult because these policemen are free, but us as mineworkers are still oppressed.”
Eight police officers face criminal charges in the North West High Court. They were charged in 2018 for concealing how one injured miner was left to die in a police vehicle on 16 August 2012 and for causing the chaos on 13 August 2012 that led to the killing of two SAPS officers and three mineworkers.
Activists have welcomed the charges, but they are related to the five deaths on 13 August — a gruesome precursor to the massacre — and appear hard to prove, a strange first step for the NPA, which has evidence from the two-year Marikana Commission of Inquiry of more direct failures in SAPS leadership on 16 August as well as cases of cold-blooded murder.

 

Mineworkers gather to plan a way forward near the Nkaneng informal settlement on 14 August 2012 after clashes at Lonmin’s Marikana mine claimed nine lives. The gathering happened two days before the Marikana massacre. (Photo: Gallo Images / Foto24 / Felix Dlangamandla)

While the cops aren’t the only ones to blame, they have been the most successful in avoiding accountability. Ten people were killed in the week leading up to the massacre. The Marikana Inquiry failed to make conclusive findings, but it heard arguments that striking mineworkers killed two SAPS officers and two mine security guards in the week leading up to the massacre. Three mineworkers thought to be against the strike were also killed.
Until the SAPS officers were recently charged for issues largely unrelated to the massacre, however, accountability has only gone one way. Hundreds of striking mineworkers were initially charged for causing SAPS to kill their own comrades and 17 mineworkers have long faced charges for the violence in the week leading to the massacre. Like the other dependents of those killed, Nungu only became a part of the violence once her husband was slaughtered. She still wants to know the truth about what happened and to see the culprits charged. She also wants the state to pay her and the other widows and their dependents the compensation they deserve.

 

Lonmin employees gather on a hill called Wonderkop at Marikana, outside Rustenburg in the North West Province of South Africa August 15.  (Photograph by Greg Marinovich)

“There is a narrative out there that the president compensated the families of the slain miners. However, we have only received a portion of what we were promised,” she said.
“We’re not saying money will replace the void left by the death of our husbands, or that it will erase the pain, but it would be something to show that government cares about us.”
In 2018, the government agreed to pay compensation for loss of support to the families of those who were killed. The families are arguing they should be paid R1.5-million each for the pain they suffered beyond losing their breadwinners. Those injured are still fighting to receive any compensation.

In the wake of the massacre, Lonmin offered jobs to the family members of the deceased and offered to pay the school fees for their children, education which at least one report has suggested is sub-par.
Living conditions were a major driver behind the 2012 strike and Lonmin committed to improvements such as upgrading single-sex hostels for workers to bachelor and family units, but Marikana residents complain that little has changed, either for workers or the surrounding community still dependent on the economy generated by the mine.

 

Lonmin employees gather on a hill called Wonderkop at Marikana, outside Rustenburg in the North West Province of South Africa August 15, 2018. Photo by Greg Marinovich

Local activist Wiseman Dibakwe, who has worked for a nearby mine since 2013, said:
“The 2012 massacre could have been something that is teaching the government, the mines, the community, the municipality that they must get together, they must come with a solution to solve, eradicate poverty, unemployment.”
“Go around the location, you’ll see the community are suffering that because they believed that one day things will be right, but since the whole years that I’ve been staying here I’ve never seen any progress.”

The 2012 strikes, first at Impala Platinum and then Lonmin, focused on the fight for a living wage, a basic salary of R12,500 a month. Salaries in the platinum sector have since moved closer to that goal, but workers say those increases aren’t yet making a significant difference in their lives.
“After the strike, there was a change. We were able to earn a slightly better salary. Though even today we haven’t reached that R12,500, which we were promised in the aftermath of the strike, but at least it’s a bit better,” said mineworker Austin Mofokeng, who was part of the 2012 strike. “The working conditions can only improve when our employer takes us seriously. For example, when we’re underground, they could have a doctor or nurse nearby so that if there is an emergency (we) can get medical assistance as soon as possible.”

 

Photo by Greg Marinovich

Demands in Marikana often centre on two institutions. The first is the mining company. The community wants it to help improve services and boost the local economy, while workers want decent living standards and improved wages and conditions. But after Sibanye-Stillwater recently took over Lonmin, many workers just want to avoid potential job losses and uncertainty as they continue to fight for better wages in current negotiations.
The second is the government and its leader, President Cyril Ramaphosa, who was accused of causing the massacre when he called for “concomitant action” during the 2012 strike while he was a Lonmin shareholder. “The government hasn’t even come to us, even when president Zuma was in power, he never once came to Marikana to apologise for what had happened in his country. Zuma is no longer in office and there is a new president, Cyril Ramaphosa. He too has never come to see us. Plus, if there is one person who knows what happened at Marikana, it’s him,” said Nungu in her workers’ quarters.
It’s unlikely Ramaphosa will ever visit, despite his commitments. The president rarely faces criticism over Marikana after the commission of inquiry found he was not the cause of the massacre and the plight of the workers and community has largely disappeared from the public eye.

It also appears unlikely that there will be any significant moves towards achieving justice or developing the community soon, despite ongoing efforts from a committed group of lawyers and activists.

“My life was great when my husband was around,” said Nungu, who now has to fill her husband’s shoes at the mine in order to provide for her children.
“I only agreed to this job because I didn’t really have a choice, I needed the money. So I agreed to take up my husband’s space, even though it was difficult”. DM

POLICE STATE - AUSTRALIA, 2019, IN THE STYLE OF SOUTH AFRICA DURING THE APARTHEID YEARS AND SIMILARLY ISRAEL, 1948 TO PRESENT

When I left South Africa in 1978 to escape the police state and hope for a new life in Australia, I did know that Australian governments had tendencies similar to police states, in its treatment of its indigenous population, tendencies which have magnified over the years.

Censorship in South Africa was extreme, particularly in relationship to the English-speaking media, because of their anti-apartheid views and the journalists who expressed these views.

Raids on all sorts of organisations - political, media, social - went to extremes and death resulted more often than not and also incarceration for non-crimes but deemed crimes by the police state and its laws and regulations - themselves criminal activities.

Australia has a government which is pressing the security  button on every occasion, but one needs to consider what the threats to Australia are and where they are or are not - coming from.

Australia involves itself with wars which threaten Australia's security, but which Australia has no right to be involved with. It has locked up - illegally of course - people fleeing from the terrors of many of the regimes around the world, often supported by the USA and its allies of which Australia plays its part one way or another. These people are locked up in concentration camps in Manus - Papua New Guinea, and Nauru, which is a country with laws similar to dictatorship and from whom all the poor asylum seekers need to be removed immediately.

Attacks by the government on journalists as has happened in the last few days is something which Morrison and Dutton are responsible for, no matter how much they deny it. The next step after this could well be complete censorship and we are well along that road because of the secrecy of the governments operations. What we do know is that we don't know what is going on in this country, and that is dangerous.

THE ANC, SOUTH AFRICAN JEWISH BOARD OF DEPUTIES,LINDIWE SISULU, ANTI-SEMITISM

It is disingenuous for the South African Jewish Board of Deputies to single out a leader of the ANC, as if the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Lindiwe Sisulu, was not implementing and promoting ANC policy.

A story is told of how two ladies, one day, spotted Nelson Mandela and Joe Slovo. One wondered who the white man was with Madiba, the other responded: “That’s not a white man, that’s Joe Slovo.”

May 23 this year marks the 93rd birth of Yossel Mashel Slovo better known to us as Joe Slovo or JS. As his name suggests, he was born in Obeliai, Lithuania, to a Jewish family and came with his family, aged eight, to South Africa in 1934. While his father was a truck driver and fruit vendor in Johannesburg, Slovo left school at the age of 15 to start working as a dispatch clerk later becoming a shop steward for the National Union of Distributive Workers. 

A year after leaving school, he would join the Communist Party of South Africa, which would later become the SACP, and volunteered to fight against the Nazis during the World War ll. Eventually, as we all know, JS would become the General Secretary of the SACP while having been the first white person to be elected to the National Executive Committee of the ANC at Kabwe in 1985. He would be a sworn enemy of the apartheid regime.

Up to the talks about talks at Groote Schuur, Joe Slovo was an item on the agenda for the Nationalist Party. FW de Klerk and his colleagues hated Slovo so much that they demanded that he not be included in the ANC’s delegation. Madiba would hear none of it. Yet one wonders why they hated him so much. 
Was it because he was a Communist or Chief of Staff of umKhonto weSizwe? Was it because he was a white man and therefore seen as a betrayer of white people in South Africa? Or was it because he was a Jew? Even though JS was an atheist, he would remain faithful to Jewish culture. He would later marry another prominent Jewish anti-apartheid activist, Ruth First.  Yet the story of JS and Madiba sums up the view that the ANC has had not only of white people but also Jews. On the one hand, the story illustrates that non-racialism which has been the foundation of the ANC, more specifically from the days of the Freedom Charter. On the other hand, it tells of an ANC that is simply not anti-Semitic.
In fact, the expulsion of the Gang of Eight, after the Morogoro Conference in 1969, a conference JS played an instrumental role in, exemplifies the intolerance that the ANC, whose membership was opened to all races by this time, had of those Africanist members within its number that criticised the organisation for being “hijacked by minorities”. Like those who left the ANC in the late Fifties to form the Pan Africanist Congress, the Gang of Eight were dissatisfied with the role and prominence played by people such as Joe Slovo in the ANC’s leadership.
Fundamental to the understanding of the ANC, based on the universal principles of the Freedom Charter, was that despite the fact that oppression under apartheid was being led by and favoured white people, it could by no means condemn or in fact judge all White people. Similar to the notion of “an injury to one is an injury to all”, the ANC believed that, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu would put it, freedom would free not only the oppressed but the oppressor as well. White people themselves needed liberation from the chains of apartheid.  The condemnation of the human rights atrocities perpetrated by the apartheid Israeli regime is therefore not a condemnation of all Jewish people. Far from it. In fact, the ANC believes that just as white people needed liberation from the chains of apartheid, so too Israelis need liberation from the atrocities perpetrated by the apartheid state of Israel. The ANC will never hold all Jews responsible nor even condemn them for the atrocities of Israel just as it never held white people, as a group, responsible for the atrocities of the apartheid regime in South Africa. 
The ANC has a long history of the involvement of Jews in its membership and its fight for freedom. It would be anathema for it and its members, and especially its leaders, to be anti-Semitic and in fact one could be disciplined for “sowing racism, sexism, tribal chauvinism, religious and political intolerance, regionalism or any other form of discrimination”. (Rule 25.17.6 of the Constitution of the ANC.)

It is therefore disingenuous and somewhat dangerous for the national vice-president of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies firstly to single out a leader of the ANC, as if Lindiwe Sisulu was not simply implementing and promoting ANC policy and, secondly to thereby suggest that the ANC is anti-Semitic because it condemns the atrocious abuses of human rights in the Occupied Territories and the crimes perpetrated against Palestinians globally.

Even more so, it is questionable for the SJBD to speak on behalf of South Africa’s Jewry, as if there are not Jews who do not currently support the State of Israel and even worst to suggest that they are lesser Jews because they do not support Israel.

If Israel wishes to recall its ambassador to Pretoria, as a sovereign state it has all the right to do so. The ANC and, in particular South Africa as a sovereign state, should beg no country to keep its ambassador in place where it does not wish to be represented. In fact, the remarks made by the vice-president of the SAJBD are sectarian and radical in themselves because it serves to cause anxiety and apprehension about the ANC administration under President Cyril Ramaphosa by suggesting that South Africa’s Jewry has an enemy.

As in the last 25 years of democracy, South Africa’s Jewry have nothing to fear and have no enemies. What is well within the government of South Africa, they would find, are enemies of discrimination, enemies of human rights atrocities and enemies of violence.
The words of Nelson Mandela, who was seen with Comrade Joe Slovo by those two ladies in that story, continue to reverberate across our country and the ANC continues to listen to them. “As long as the Palestinian people are not free, South Africa will not be free.” As long as Palestinian people are not free even South Africa’s Jewry will not be free. DM
 
Jessie Duarte is Deputy Secretary General of ANC

DIPLOMAT CULLED

Pretoria permanently withdraws its ambassador from Israel

By Peter Fabricius• 5 April 2019

Minister Lindiwe Sisulu. (Photo by Gallo Images / Thapelo Maphakela)
 

International Relations Minister Lindiwe Sisulu says withdrawing SA ambassador is just ‘stage one’ in downgrading relations with Tel Aviv.
 

The South African government has implemented what International Relations Minister Sisulu calls “stage one” of its programme of downgrading relations with Israel, by withdrawing its ambassador from Tel Aviv permanently.
 
Minister of International Relations and Co-operation Lindiwe Sisulu announced this on Wednesday evening in an address to the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) in Johannesburg.
 
Sisulu also suggested that eventually Israel would no longer have an ambassador in South Africa. If so, the government would be going even further than the ANC did at its conference in December 2017 when it decided to direct the government “to immediately and unconditionally downgrade the South African Embassy in Israel to a Liaison Office”.
 
The ANC resolution did not direct the government also to downgrade Israel’s embassy in Pretoria.
 
Sisulu told SAIIA that the ANC already had “no relations with Israel” and would like the government to adopt that position as soon as possible.
 
In her prepared remarks for the SAIIA lecture, Sisulu said that after Israeli security forces had shot Palestinian protesters on the Israel-Gaza border in 2018, Pretoria had immediately recalled South Africa’s ambassador to Israel – Sisa Ngombane – for consultation. It had also “démarche’d” the Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Lior Keinan. To démarche is diplomatic speak for summoning a foreign diplomat and delivering a protest.
 
“We are in the process of following the downgrade resolution of the ruling party and stage one has been completed,” Sisulu continued.
 
“Our ambassador is back in South Africa and we will not be replacing him. Our liaison office in Tel Aviv will have no political mandate, no trade mandate and no development co-operation mandate.
 
“It will not be responsible for trade and commercial activities. The focus of the Liaison Office would be on consular and the facilitation of people-to-people relations.”
 
Sisulu did not actually deliver these prepared remarks at SAIIA but was asked there to confirm her written announcement and also to say if her government had assessed the implications of a downgrade on relations with Israel. She had indicated in March that relations would only be downgraded once the implications had been assessed.
Sisulu replied to this question at SAIIA by confirming:
 
“We are putting together a programme of downgrading our relations with Israel in line with the resolutions which were taken by the ANC.
 
“We have a programme put in place which we will place before the ANC in response to their demands and the resolution they have taken. And we will also look at the legal implications of the agreements we have currently with Israel if there are any. And any other administrative repercussions that come out of that. 
 
“The first thing we have done is that we no longer have an ambassador in Israel. We now operate at the level of a liaison officer. So the liaison officer in Israel will deal with all the diplomatic matters in Israel. 
 
“The ambassador in Israel in South Africa is still an ambassador here until such time as we have adopted fully the resolutions of the ANC conference.”
 
This last remark seemed to imply that Pretoria might also eventually ask Israel to remove its ambassador from Pretoria, which the ANC did not demand in its resolution.
 
Israeli ambassador Keinan said on Thursday he had “no comment regarding South African policymaking”.
 
At SAIIA, Sisulu was asked why the government allowed the University of Cape Town, a partly government-funded institution, to have relations with Israeli universities.
 
Last week the UCT Council overturned a decision by the university’s senate to cut off relations with Israeli universities.
 
“The reason why public institutions have relations with countries the ANC has decided to sever relations with is possibly because we have been slow in getting to where we should,” Sisulu said.
 
“If we had done it much faster we would have a very clear policy where we direct even public institutions like the one you are talking about (with) what the government’s position is in relation to Israel. 
 
“The ANC’s position in relation to Israel is very clear. We have no relations with Israel. That’s what we would like the government to adopt as soon as possible,” Sisulu said.
 
She said the government would eventually deal with the matter of public institutions such as UCT and their relations with Israel. DM