The families of the 34 mineworkers killed by police in Marikana are still looking to obtain justice and to be compensated by the government. The case around the compensation of the miners was far from being settled. They is not a tragedy, but it was and it is how the bosses treats workers.
This comes as the country on Friday 16th August 2019 marks seven years since the massacre that occurred in the North West mining area. But families have yet to see justice.
34 workers lost their lives in the Marikana Massacre in 2012 in a the mass shootings at two sites around a koppie where workers had gathered during their strike, demanding a minimum salary of R12 500 a month.
To this day, there have been no prosecutions of senior officials or role players involved in the shooting. The mineworkers and their family have yet to see justice.
Seven years on, Marikana residents still live in dire conditions. The company’s Lonmin failure to live up to its promise to build 5 500 houses for workers. It only built three. This created a situation living hell in which large numbers of Lonmin workers live in squalid informal settlements, creating an environment conducive to the creation of tension, labour unrest, disunity among its employees or other harmful conduct. The mineworkers were promised that life would change after the blood of so many was spilt. People who were fighting for more wages. It was promised that they would have it by 2017, but nothing.
The President of Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) Joseph Mathunjwa honored the fallen 34 who tragically lost their lives in the massacre in 2012 by building the families of fallen comrades homes.
The miner Edwaerd of the Marikana Fighting Committee says they still have no running water and electricity. He believes the koppie needs to be turned into something to help remember those who died.
Today the COSATU bureaucracy can no longer speak on behalf of the workers. Each time their role as agent of the bourgeoisie becomes clearer. They have sold out the workers of Marikana. It is the working class conquering its own democracy which must sweep away the servile leaders, accomplices and executors of the capitalist slave schemes. Only then will the workers be able to conquer the long-awaited and longed-for unity of their ranks and Justice.
Down with the collaborationist bureaucracy! Out the Ministry of Labor, the state, the employers and their politicians of our organizations! Out the statutes and organic bodies of the bureaucracy and their state-ized unions! That the delegates go to collect the union quota around the workplaces in the factories and establishments! For recallable leaders and delegates elected in the grassroots assembly, which would be dispensed of when the assembly so decides or believes it necessary! Let the leaders, once their term is over, return to work!
Worker's must put end to the government of Ramaphosa and the parliament where evil plots are combined at the backs of and against the poor people and all laws are voted against the workers, all of which are previously concocted in the embassies of the dominant powers between the CEO's of the AngloAmerican and other imperialist gangs, and the local bourgeoisie.
Workers must conquer a program of revolutionary action to unify the ranks of the workers and prepare a superior fight against Ramaphosa, the ANC, the imperialist pirates and the infamous regime of the capitalists!
Against the power of those at the top, the power of the exploited must be upheld.
The demands that unify us are those that were raised in each of the mobilizations that shook South Africa on the 16th August 2012. The time has come to unite our ranks in a single list of demands and to organize and prepare a struggle superior to that which we have already starred in. It is about strengthening all those enormous energies deployed by the exploited in all these years of battles against the bourgeoisie and the state of the oppressors and showing them a path to victory.
For a 12,500 Rand minimum living wage, mobile according to inflation index! Jobs for all the unemployed! Enough of temporary hired workers! Equal pay for equal work! All workers must be registered and belong in permanent staff, and receive a wage under collective agreement! Opening accounting books of all companies! For the workers’ control of the mining industry, with a workers' directory in each state companies, mining companies, and all the key branches of the economy!
To conquer bread, jobs, wages; land, housing; cheap credit for the ruined middle classes: Out with imperialism! Out with the IMF!
Expropriation without compensation and under workers' control of the transnationals, the Anglo-American, the mines, the land and the banks!
Only the working class expropriating both imperialism and the new black bourgeoisie can guarantee an emergency worker's plan and thus remove suffering from the masses.
The true struggle for the socialist revolution is in the embryo bodies of dual power of the masses, which are emerging in Southern Africa. The struggle for proletarian internationalism of the South African workers is side by side with the revolutionary masses who are fighting today in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Sudan; those who are resisting in Syria and in Palestine; those who are fighting in the imperialist countries like the Black Vests of France.
#NeverAgain #RememberMarikana
#JusticeForMarikana
For a Worker's and Socialist Black Republic in Marikana South Africa
Jussa Kudherezera
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