Marikana: scant change as some miners still live in cramped tin shacks

It’s mid-morning in Nkaneng – the ramshackle shantytown on the outskirts of Marikana where most of the local mineworkers live – and the sun is beating down.

The dusty streets are swarming with young and old alike, trying to escape the suffocating heat of their tin shacks. This was once a place of hope, drawing people from across the country who thought work at the then Lonmin-owned platinum mine could offer them a better life. But it is now a place of desperation and pain.

The rocky outcrop on which striking miners on 16 August, 2012 made their last stand before police gunned down 34 of them, stands in the background – an ever-present reminder of the blood that has been shed here.

The Marikana Commission of Inquiry into the massacre and the events leading up to it, found Lonmin’s failure to comply with its housing obligations – in terms of a social labour plan it had to get approved by the department of mineral resources to secure a mining right under the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act – had produced “an environment conducive to the creation of tension, labour unrest, disunity among employees or other harmful conduct”.

The koppie at the site where the Marikana Massacre took place in 2012 when SAPS killed 34 protesting miners, 23 October 2020, Marikana, North West. Picture: Jacques Nelles

Retired Judge Ian Farlam, the commission head, commented at the time that large numbers of the mineworkers were living in squalor, lacking even the most basic of services. He recommended Lonmin’s noncompliance with its social labour plan be brought to the attention of the department and steps be taken to ensure the plan, originally approved in 2006, was finally implemented.

But in the eight years since what President Cyril Ramaphosa called “the darkest moment in the life of our young democracy” on the anniversary of the massacre last year – and the five since Farlam released his findings and recommendations – little has changed.

Ntombi Mthethwa still lives in the two-bedroom house she moved into when she arrived in 2004. She has only intermittent access to running water and a pit toilet she dug for her family of five. She had hoped for changes after that fateful day brought the plight of those in Nkaneng to the fore. “But nothing has,” she said.

Mthethwa moved from Lusikisiki in rural Eastern Cape to Marikana after her parents died, leaving her to care for her three younger siblings. She was just 22 and desperately looking for work. Sixteen years on, she is still looking. Her story is not unique.

Ntsekeng Mtsime came to Nkaneng in January 2012. Like Mthethwa, she was lured here by the prospect of greener pastures. “I thought it would be easy to get a job,” she said. “But it wasn’t.” Mtsime now ekes out a meagre living doing piecemeal work, earning just enough to be able to send something home for her mother and the three children each month. She misses them.

“But if I’m not here working, they won’t eat,” she said.

Mtsime, Mthethwa and a group of other women headed up by Thumeka Magwangqana, Marikana branch coordinator of Mining Affected Communities United in Action and Women Affected by Mining United in Action, have started doing wire craft to sell.

Thumeka Magwangqana stands near the koppie at the site where the Marikana Massacre took place in 2012 when SAPS killed 34 protesting miners, 23 October 2020, Marikana, North West. Picture: Jacques Nelles

No one has yet been held to account for the deaths on 16 August. This month, the trial of six police officers implicated in the deaths of three workers and two from their own ranks during a clash at the mine three days earlier started. But, said Mthethwa yesterday, the community needed an apology.

“We need government to say they’re sorry. And to actually do something about our situation.”

– bernadettew@citizen.co.za

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