S.African mine carnage reveals anger over inequality

South Africa’s mine bloodshed which killed 34 strikers has laid bare anger with persistent poverty and put a damning spotlight on President Jacob Zuma’s government, analysts say.

Police opened fire on striking workers Thursday in an escalating stand-off between rival unions that had already killed 10 people days earlier at the North West province mine owned by the world’s number three platinum producer Lonmin.

“I really believe the government should have been more proactive,” said analyst Susan Booysen of Wits University.

“Here they should have been pre-emptive, getting together, convening stakeholders, and getting together the ministries of labour, mining, and police. I really think this tragedy could have been prevented.”

Horrific images of workers being gunned down in the worst police violence since the dawn of democracy in 1994 have left a reeling nation and the world asking how scenes evocative of apartheid brutality could recur in a free South Africa.

“Is it going to force an existential crisis among South Africans? Yes, and I hope it does. It needs to shake up South Africans, and it particular needs to shake up its political and economic elite, who have become too complacent,” analyst Adam Habib told AFP.

“I don’t think they actually recognised how volatile our society has become, and in sporadic moments, it can flare.”

South Africa’s workplaces and streets frequently erupt into protests over low wages or a lack of basic services and jobs, with millions of poor blacks still living in shantytowns.

With one of the world’s most glaring gaps between rich and poor, the lives of workers have changed little since Nelson Mandela vowed a better life for all.

“The poor are saying ‘bugger you’. If you plunder the resources of this country, we are entitled to a share. It’s become survival of the fittest in a lot of ways,” said Habib who is based at the University of Johannesburg.

“That your political elite must take responsibility for, but also executives in the private sector.”

Despite inroads made by black wealth, Africa’s biggest economy is still divided along racial lines, with the miners who live in shacks on the world’s richest platinum reserves seeing little of the country’s mineral riches.

Worryingly for the government which is already trying to quell increasingly militant protests, the economy is failing to grow fast enough to transform frequently trotted out pledges into reality.

“I think we are sitting on a ticking time bomb in South Africa,” said Kwandiwe Kondlo of the University of the Free State, who said issues boiled down to poor leadership, governance and lack of coordination.

“There is no proactive governance and you can’t have proactive governance if there is no leadership,” he said, charging that under President Zuma “the situation actually has gotten worse”.

Zuma cut short a foreign trip to travel to the carnage site and announced an inquiry into the deaths for which union leaders and Lonmin bosses have also been slammed.

But his government faces questions over why it did not step in after the first deaths — which included two police officers — and fears of a trigger-happy police force that has resumed taking military titles since Zuma took power in 2009.

The internationally condemned shootings join a string of damning reports of public service breakdowns, including a textbook delivery scandal that saw the state hauled to court.

The escalation at Lonmin reflects a tendency to put out fires through crisis management rather than pre-emptive action, said Booysen.

“It does shed a very poor light on government in that it creates the impression that its eye is not on the ball,” she said.

“It suggests regrettably that this a government that is not in full touch with developments on the ground.”