“WE THOUGHT we were having a nightmare”, said Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a South African Nobel peace prize laureate and a veteran of the struggle against apartheid. But no, he cried, “it was us, in 2012, in our democracy.” His howl of rage and disbelief has echoed across South Africa. Many of its people experienced flashbacks to the horrors of an earlier time, after last month’s killing by police of 34 striking workers at a platinum mine near Marikana, in the North West province.
Disbelief grew after the national prosecutor charged 259 miners, arrested after the confrontation, with the murder of their colleagues, citing a “common purpose” law that had been enacted under apartheid but upheld in a restricted form by the constitutional court in 2003.
That the miners were charged was bizarre and shocking. Though still on the books, the use of what has been described as a “lazy prosecutor’s law” prompted outrage across the country. Days later the murder charges were dropped, though prosecutors insisted on their soundness in law. It is not clear whether they came under pressure from the government either to lay the original charge or to rescind it, but the affair has inevitably cast doubt on the national prosecutor’s independence.
Marikana has highlighted and inspired unrest elsewhere. On September 3rd four miners were wounded by rubber bullets when security guards fired on a hostile crowd at the gates of a gold mine near Johannesburg, the commercial capital. Around 12,000 miners at another gold mine have downed tools in a wildcat strike, demanding more pay.
The Marikana fiasco has also prompted a wave of criticism of the ANC for its seemingly inept management and for its failure, more broadly, to fulfil its promise, trumpeted long and loud, of a better life for all. Inequality has grown since the ANC took charge in 1994, even though poverty in absolute terms has declined and the number of South Africans living on less than $2 a day has fallen substantially.
At an ANC conference in June South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, bemoaned that most of the country’s economy is still in white hands. Nonetheless, there is a growing feeling in the country that a rich black elite has profited most from South Africa’s liberation, while doing little to improve the lot of ordinary people. Cyril Ramaphosa, once boss of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), is often cited as a case in point. Now a multimillionaire businessman and still an ANC bigwig, Mr Ramaphosa earlier this year bid 19.5m rand ($2.3m) for a prize buffalo at a farm near Marikana. On average black South Africans earned around 26,000 rand a year in 2010, when incomes were last tallied.
The country’s official trade unions, who are in a formal ruling partnership with the ANC and the South African Communist Party, are in danger of losing credibility. In the past five years the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has been criticised by many of its members for not fighting their corner hard enough. Among the established unions, the mineworkers’ has been chastised, rightly or wrongly, for being closer to big business than to its members in the mines.
As a result, at least one loud voice of dissent has resonated among the poor. Julius Malema, once the leader of the ANC Youth League but recently cast out of the party for insubordination, has used Marikana to attack the government, blaming it for the tragedy and calling for Mr Zuma’s resignation. He has demanded a revolution in mining, telling workers—as campaigners did under apartheid—to make mines ungovernable. Investors have not so far been deterred, but their confidence is waning.
Strikes are becoming ever more common. Protests take place almost every week and often focus on a lack of basic necessities such as water or electricity. Most demonstrations are small and local. No political party has managed to co-opt them. Most protesters probably still support the ANC, with its cachet of liberation.
Might that change? The ANC is still by far the most powerful and popular party, with Nelson Mandela its icon. At the latest general election, in 2009, it got 66% of the vote (down from 70% the time before) against only 17% for the biggest opposition party, the liberal Democratic Alliance (DA), still seen by most blacks as an essentially white-led organisation. But the DA is gaining ground. It runs the Western Cape province and the city of Cape Town. At the next general election, in 2014, it hopes to make inroads in Gauteng, the country’s richest and most populous province, which includes Johannesburg, where a growing number of middle-class blacks are disillusioned with the ANC for what they see as incompetence and corruption. But the DA is still miles away from having a real chance of taking over.
In the long run, the ANC might lose power if it were to suffer a serious split, perhaps with a substantial capitalist or socialist chunk of the party peeling away. But in the past it has easily survived the departure of dissident factions.
Nonetheless, the ANC is not at ease with itself. Infighting in the run-up to a party conference in December, when the leadership will be elected, is sure to get fiercer. At a similar meeting in 2007, Mr Zuma ousted his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki. The president will have to pull out the stops to avoid facing the same fate.
Marikana has done little to help him. Some leading lights in Cosatu do not support him. Its leader, Zwelinzima Vavi, has been particularly outspoken about the failings of the government. But none of Mr Zuma’s mooted rivals within the ANC looks strong enough at present to be sure of ousting him. Those most mentioned are Tokyo Sexwale, a vastly rich tycoon who is currently housing minister, and Kgalema Motlanthe, the deputy president.
Though strikes at places such as Marikana have become common in mining, they have not yet spread widely into other parts of the economy, as they did in the struggle against apartheid. But they have drawn attention to South Africa’s many painful problems, especially poverty and low wages, poor policing and questionable judicial authority. Above all, as the gap between poor and rich yawns, they point to the smell of corruption.