Mmusi Maimane – Democratic Alliance leader: It is an insult to them [miners and their families] that three years later, not a single person has been criminally prosecuted or taken political responsibility for the tragic events. The report that was supposed to provide some sense of closure has now called for further investigations. But how many more years will it be before those responsible are held to account? The constitution clearly vests political accountability for the South African Police Service with the Minister and National Commissioner; at the very least former Minister of Police, Nathi Mthethwa, and the National Police Commissioner, Riah Phiyega, should take political responsibility for the events that occurred under their watch. There is something very wrong with a system that allows those who presided over the slaughter to remain in office without any penalties.
Dali Mpofu – Miners’ lawyer: The commission did not look at the underlying issues. It confined itself to the issues of who pulled the trigger and all sorts of technicalities about who was standing where without really interrogating the fundamental underlying issues that caused the conflict in the first place.
Julius Malema – Economic Freedom Fighters leader: While the commission of inquiry had the power and mandate to recommend further actions and persecutions in certain cases, the Economic Freedom Fighters believes that the actions of [Deputy President] Cyril Ramaphosa and Mthethwa had a casual effect on the mass killings in Marikana. We think Judge Farlam did a good job. He did what he was asked to do, although within a short period because of the terms of reference, he did not have an opportunity to dig deep.
Livhuwani Mammburu – National Union of Mineworkers spokesperson:  We welcome the report, but from the beginning we were worried when the strike started. The commission found that the strikers who marched to NUM’s offices did so with violent intent and found that the actions of the NUM can’t be criticized. We welcome the recommendation for further investigation. We maintain that NUM officials and members acted within the parameters of private defence.
Joseph Mathunjwa – Head of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union: There is no truth, no justice. I think the commission was made as a gesture not to find the truth. This was another two years wasted. If there is no truth that is unearthed, there will be no healing. This was just a cover up exercise to cover the executives and the blunder of the government.
Zwelinzima Vavi – Former General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions: I find this insulting and insensitive. A new commission of inquiry must look at the conditions of both work and living conditions. Once the terms of the commission were amended, with the president writing another letter in April reminding the commission of inquiry that it can do everything except to make a finding on the executives, then you must know that by design the commission by Farlam was a fuss. It was never intended to give the victims and South Africa a point of knowing that they now are in a better position because the facts are out and they know who is responsible for all the deaths of the workers that perished. There is no truth, there is no justice… Where is the commission on the fitness of those who appointed them, the President for example? The commission is designed not to find the truth. It is designed to put junior officials as the fall guys.
Mosiuoa Lekota – Congress of the People leader: The moment that the terms of reference were amended to say the commission may not make any findings on the executives is one of the most shocking things that suggest that it was an order not to probe the central issue of political accountability to the people and to the nation.
Gareth Newham – Head of the Governance, Crime and Justice Division at the Institute for Security Studies: The deaths of the miners are unjustifiable. There is no finding that the police were under attack. The four commanders who testified, who stood in front of those members who shot, said they didn’t feel under attack. The police have not showed that what happened at scene two was self-defence.

No Truth, No Justice

As a journalist, I will always remember the evening of June 25, 2015. At 7PM, I was driving in the darkness along the Magaliesberg Mountains, with my eyes trained on the tar of the N4 highway and my ears straining to hear the radio over the engine, towards Marikana the land of despair.
On this night, Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, spoke over the radio the findings of the Marikana Commission overseen by retired Judge Ian Farlam. It was a long and painstaking business the FORBES AFRICA team dubbed the Misery Commission.
The Marikana Massacre, between 11 and 16 August 2012, sprang from a wildcat strike, outside the Lonmin mine, along South Africa’s Rustenburg platinum belt, 120 kilometers north west of Johannesburg. Forty-four people, including miners, security guards and police, were killed.
It was on May 14, 2013, nine months after the massacre, when I first laid eyes on this hill where people died. It rang with the chants of thousands of miners on another wildcat strike. The protestors littered the hill, dressed in the green of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) and carrying knobkerries. The atmosphere was tense as they marched to the Wonderkop Stadium, a kilometer away.
I remember asking journalists then, where they had been when the gunfire started on August 16, 2012? They would point, like hounds to a scent, at patches of dirt etched in their memories. The spots where they dived for cover from the gunfire that brought an end to the lives of 34 miners.
On June 25, 2015, as the report outlining that day was released and the expected portion of blame given, the night air held a deafening silence. I remember jumping out the car, opening the boot and shivering to set up a tripod and camera. The hill was cold and barren under the starry sky.
We drove around the township searching for people who had been listening to the broadcast. To our disappointment, many that were awake did not watch, or even know the report was being released. On this night, Bongikhaya Ndumndum, a former pipe maintenance worker at the mine, was in his home on the corner of the township, meters away from the quiet hill. He didn’t hear the news.
“I remember the police being here. When the police started shooting I ran,” recalls Ndumndum.
The Commission sat for 300 days, ringed by journalists from around the world, in the heart of Pretoria. Among suits, laptops and lever arch files were the truths of how the massacre happened.
Farlam’s 600-page document was summarized by Zuma in 24 minutes.
The report absolved a number of key players. Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, a shareholder of Lonmin, who allegedly sent an email to other shareholders to deal with the problem; Minister of Women in the Presidency, and former Mining Minster, Susan Shabangu; Minister of Arts and Culture, and former Minister of Police, Nathi Mthethwa; and Joseph Mathunjwa, the Head of Amcu, were exonerated.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3883" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_6167-1024x683-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
Others, according to the enquiry, did not easily escape. The Commission recommended a full investigation into the criminal liability of all the members of the South African Police Service (SAPS) involved. The killings and assaults prior to August 16, 2012, should be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions‚ for further investigation.
The Commission also ordered a probe in National Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega’s fitness to hold office. Both the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and Amcu are accused of not exercising control over its members and endangering bystanders. Lonmin is accused of failing to comply with its housing obligations, which created the environment to begin the strike.
It also issued that a panel should revise the strategies of public order policing within SAPS and implement proper protocols to best dissolve violent clashes. The SAPS training methods were proved to be inadequate and should be revised, including basic first aid training.
It was not closure for all. As the night stretched on, we found a group of journalists who had returned from inside the iron fences of Lonmin. In a small TV room, the families of the victims and their legal representatives waited anxiously for the findings, but by the time the president had finished, the mines had not set up the TV, a small but telling irritation for the families.
Just another cold night on the fields of the Misery Commission.

The Slaughter Of 34 Miners That Shocked The World

For many Kenyans, Thursday April 2 was meant to be a beautiful day. As with the Christian traditions, many of the Garissa University students were preparing for the long weekend. The Easter holidays would give them an opportunity to relax, away from the long hours in class. This was not to be. In the early hours of that fateful day, gunfire rang out. What followed was a near 15-hour siege – a massacre that left 147 people dead.
Hours into the attack, the Islamic insurgents, Al Shabaab, claimed responsibility.
Most of the dead were students, described by government officials and families as ‘the hope of our country’. Five service men too succumbed. Kenyan officials say four of the attackers were killed, while five Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) soldiers lost their lives. Six other suspects have been charged in court with the killings.
Tales from the survivors are chilling.
Cynthia Cherotich hid in her room as the militants swept through the corridors of the university.
“I had to drink body lotion to survive. I was thirsty,” she says.
“It was a terrible experience. We hid in the closet the entire period until we heard voices we thought were from the Kenya Defence Forces,” says another student, Mary Njeri.
“Still, we were not sure. So I asked my roommates, who we were hiding with, whether to go out and die or stay in the closet and still die there. She told me that if it was our day to die, we would rather die outside. When we got out, it was about 2.30PM. We met the KDF and they rescued us,” she says.
The students say there was a power failure the previous night. They thought the initial gun shots was the sound of an electrical fault. Soon after, the screams of the dying echoed throughout the building.
The attack, police investigations reveal, was planned well in advance with the help of some of the university’s non-teaching staff. Mohammed Abdirahim Abdullahi, the mastermind behind the attack, was a University of Nairobi law graduate and the son of a government chief from Mandera.
At the Chiromo Mortuary in Nairobi, where parents identified and collected bodies of their loved ones, grief filled every breath. They blame the Islamist militants and the Kenyan government.
The rescue mission for the students has been described as bungled. For close to 15 hours, the insurgents roamed the corridors of the institution. They herded the students in rooms and shot them.
Survivors had to answer questions about Islamic teachings to stay alive. Most of those killed were Christians.
An elite squad of the Kenyan police force joined late in the day and in less than half an hour, the siege was over. Interestingly, the cabinet secretary in charge of internal security and inspector general of police arrived at the scene hours before the elite squad.
The squad based in Nairobi arrived aboard two fixed-wing aircraft, while part of the contingent travelled 390 kilometers by road to the college. One of the police planes that should have been used for the rescue operation was in the coastal city of Mombasa to pick up a daughter in law of one of the police commandants.
This has led to the government taking some of the blame.
“Institutions of learning should be the safest place for our children. Now where do they turn to? Our government should have done better. All these lives could not have been lost if they acted on the intelligence,” says a family member of a student that was killed.
Five days before the Garissa attack, several alerts of possible Al Shabaab attacks in the country had been issued by embassies. On the eve of the attack, at the Diaspora Investment Conference in Nairobi, President Uhuru Kenyatta dismissed the warnings and accused the embassies of economic sabotage.
“I have not heard the British issue travel advisories against other European capitals,” said Kenyatta. “We want to send a clear message that they will not intimidate us with these threats.”
In the face of the attack, Kenyatta cut a figure of a head of state in charge. Addressing the nation, the president ordered for the training of 10,000 service men and women whose recruitment was challenged in court. He said he would take responsibility. One week later, the executive order was rescinded and a fresh recruitment ordered.
Tellingly, in March, a number of Kenyan universities had put their students on high alert for a possible terror attack. The notices urged students to be vigilant within the institutions and co-operate with security agents regarding any suspicions.
The Garissa attack is the second deadliest terror attack on Kenyan soil. In 1998, the United States Embassy in Nairobi was bombed, killing over 200 people. The bombings were claimed by the then Osama bin Laden-led Al Qaeda terror group. The attack at Westgate Mall in 2013 resulted in the death of 67 people. In between, however, there have been several Al Shabaab-linked attacks on Kenyan soil.
Al Shabaab claims the attacks, and abduction of tourists along the Kenyan coastline, are retaliation for the KDF crossing the border into Somalia. Victims are told that Kenya will not know peace until its troops are withdrawn.
“We need to withdraw the troops from Somalia and have them pitch camp in the vicinity of the Wajir region [near the Somalian border]. Let them set up a combat base there,” says Andrew Frankline, Managing Director of Small Wars Advisory Services.
However, the government insists that the withdrawal of troops is as good as surrender.
Since October 2011, data indicate that Kenya has been attacked by Al Shaabab, or militants affiliated to it, more than 135 times. This translates to at least nine attacks every month. Government agencies report that it has resulted in over 400 deaths and over 1,000 injuries.
The attacks continue to ruin Kenya’s tourism industry.
“When we thought it could not get any worse it did. Tourism is suffering, it has been tough,” says Agatha Juma, Chief Executive Officer of Kenya Tourism Federation.
It might be a while before Kenya, and its economy, recovers.

‘If It Was Our Day To Die, We Would Rather Die Outside’

The wise, white-haired lawyer who has seen a thousand trials, nodded sagely as he spoke about the shooting that shocked the world. He believes the South African Police Services and government will pay for the deaths of 34 miners at Lonmin’s Marikana mine in Rustenburg, north-west of Johannesburg.
London-based criminal defense lawyer James Nichol traveled 5,600 miles to Johannesburg for a couple of weeks, to give his services for free. Those weeks turned into months of shocking evidence.
<div id="attachment_1590" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1590" class="size-medium wp-image-1590" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/DSC_1167-300x235.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="235" />James Nichol</div>
“There is no question of self-defense here, these are police officers who had gone completely berserk and had fired into these people. And in some cases there’s evidence of a number of strikers who had been shot in the back,” says Nichol.
The hearings are revealing evidence on how the miners died and 78 others were injured. The week before, 10 people—six miners, two police officers and two Lonmin security guards—were killed as thousands went on a wildcat strike, over pay.
When Nichol saw the images of the Marikana massacre in his living room in England, it reminded the 67-year-old of the shock he felt about the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. On that fateful day in the township south of Johannesburg, the police shot into a crowd of around 5,000 unarmed anti-pass protestors, killing 69 people—many shot in the back—and wounding more than 200.
At 15 years of age, he took to the streets, in his hometown of Newcastle, calling to boycott the apartheid regime.
Nichol knows how hard mining is. He started work as a miner at 15, while his father worked at a coal mine from age 14 near Newcastle. Nichol senior died from dust related heart disease when he was just 40. It left Nichol bringing up his siblings—their mother had died earlier from tuberculosis.
Nichol worked his way up to specialize in miscarriages of justice and is a lawyer for the Socialist Workers Party, of which he is a member. He defended miners during the famous miners’ strike in Britain between 1984-1985.
With the help of a legal team from the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), Nichol represents the families at the commission, which is chaired by retired judge Ian Farlam. It is examining whether the police were justified in using lethal force, whether union rivalry triggered the violent strike and whether Lonmin played a role.
Nichol says the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) had abandoned its members. He says the union did not write to the bereaved families or represent them at the commission.
“I can think of no graver betrayal than to do nothing for the family of a dead member of your union.”
The families were wholly ignored by the state until Nichol and Joseph Mathunjwa, the president of rival union the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU),  found them.
“It seemed to me that it was wrong. I knew then that I was here to stay,” says the lawyer.
However, NUM’s general secretary, Frans Baleni, says that it is the responsibility of the company or the owner of the infrastructure where the incident happened, to call or write to the bereaved families. He added that the families would have had to give consent to be represented by the union and its lawyers.
Nichol believes that the killings could have been avoided because stopping the strike was not about public order but more about strike breaking.
The evidence suggests the police set up an operation of 800 officers the night before the massacre, including several machine guns, rifles with stun grenades, gas grenades and water cannons, plus helicopters and razor wire. The operation also organized ambulances and fire brigades.
“The decisive point for me that this was not about public order and more about strike breaking came on the morning of August 16, when two statements were made: one by the police commissioners when she said: ‘This strike stops today’ and one by the head of press for SAPS when he said: ‘Today is D-day.’ Why? Why did it have to be today?”
Many witnesses will appear over the next few months. A ruling by Farlam is expected in May. Nichol will be listening.

Tag: Massacre

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

No Truth, No Justice

The Slaughter Of 34 Miners That Shocked The World

‘If It Was Our Day To Die, We Would Rather Die Outside’

“It Seemed To Me That It Was Wrong”