Marikana Mine Latest.

Today thousands of people gathered at the Lonmin owned Marikana platinum mine in South Africa to protest against Thursday's (16/8/12) killing by police of 34 striking miners and to show support for the miners strike. The protest was attended by Julius Malema who used the opportunity to attack South African President Jacob Zuma and the African National Congress (ANC) from which Malema was recently expelled. Therefore this is clearly not a situation that is going to go away so I should provide a quick summary of the information that it is already internationally available.

Since the end of apartheid in 1994 the ANC have won every single election turning the country into something of a one party state with the ANC being embedded in every aspect of South African society including the National Union of Miners (NUM) who have been one of two unions on strike at Marikana. Although I don't have any particular problem with the ANC their total dominance of South African politics is not good for the country because it is the competition between political parties that keeps government's honest in democracies. Fortunately many South Africans have worked this one out for themselves and have been trying to build alternatives to the ANC. One example of these new alternatives is the Association of Mine and Construction Union (AMCU) which is the other union on strike at Marikana. What the British owners of the Marikana mine Lonmin (London Mining) have been doing is playing the two unions off against each other to find out how they work and find out exactly what influence they have over different members of the South African government. The long term objective may well be to make Juilius Malema more popular in order to elevate him to the point where he becomes a serious threat to Zuma's government. This would be very bad for South Africa because Malema is a notorious rabble rouser and firebrand who favours a Robert Mugabe style nationalisation of South Africa's mines and has been long been suspected of provoking riots in order to intimidate political opponents most recently in Cape Town.

As for the actual shooting I've looked at it again and there was clearly a threat to the lives of the police officers so once they'd used tear gas to no effect they had no option other then to use lethal force. They should though have used single aimed shots rather then fully automatic burst. However that is something that needs to be solved through better training rather then prosecuting individual officers.


23:40 on 18/8/12.