via Marikana and the African National Congress: Bad judgment day | The Economist
PERHAPS it was petulance. Perhaps it was the desire to avoid a hostile crowd. Either way it was an awful misreading of the mood in South Africa. Just hours before an event on August 16th to mark the first anniversary of the fatal shooting by police of 34 striking miners at Marikana, in the country’s platinum region, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) decided it would not attend. It said the organisers of the commemoration were “illegitimate” (ie, they were not political allies of the ANC). So the dozen or so chairs on the platform reserved for government bigwigs remained empty.
Thus South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, failed once again to rise to an important occasion. He had a more pressing engagement in Malawi. There he joined leaders of the 15-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) in endorsing the re-election of 89-year-old Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s president, in a victory that is hotly disputed. Mr Zuma’s rush to congratulate Mr Mugabe was another misreading of public opinion. Two-thirds of South Africans think he was wrong do so, according to a recent poll. Just 7% of his countrymen believe the election result was a true one.
It fell to a Zimbabwean to personally offer an apology to the bereaved at Marikana. Ben Magara was only recently appointed as chief executive of Lonmin, the London-listed company which had employed the striking miners. But he had the courage to turn up and tell the thousands who had assembled at the site of the shooting: “We will never replace your loved ones and I say we are truly sorry for that.” He also said he was prepared to discuss demands heard from previous speakers for higher wages and for jobs for relatives of those killed last year.
Joseph Mathunjwa, the boss of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (ACMU), praised the mining boss for turning up and doing what no government official had done. Mr Magara might have received a more hostile reception had Lonmin not recently concluded a union-recognition deal with ACMU at the expense of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The NUM is an affiliate of the ANC and its snub of the commemoration was in part a churlish response to AMCU’s victory. Yet NUM officials had been criticised at Marikana for being cosy with politicians and mine bosses and remote from the concerns of its members. It was now the ANC’s turn to be accused of being hopelessly out of touch.
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