JOHANNESBURG — When 360,000 gold and coal miners walked off the job in South Africa in 1987, protesting the poor pay and grim working conditions of apartheid-era mines, a charismatic young man named Cyril Ramaphosa, the firebrand leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, led the charge.
Rage by Miners Points to Shift in South Africa
President Jacob Zuma of South Africa spoke to a group of mine workers near the Lonmin platinum mine where 34 people were killed in a clash with the police over a wildcat strike. More Photos »
By LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: August 31, 2012
Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters
A South African man danced among his fellow striking miners recently as they waited in Rustenberg to be addressed by Julius Malema, a populist youth leader.
But as the police opened fire on workers engaged in a wildcat strike at a platinum mine two weeks ago, killing 34 people, Mr. Ramaphosa, now a multimillionaire business tycoon and senior leader of the governing African National Congress , found himself in a very different position: on the board of the company the workers were striking against, the London-based Lonmin.
Mr. Ramaphosa’s journey from hunted labor activist to industry titan and perennial presidential contender is an emblem of South Africa’s spectacular transition from brutally enforced white minority rule to a multiracial democracy where, in theory at least, anyone with talent has a chance to succeed.
But the low pay and tin-walled hovels of the miners who went on strike at Lonmin’s mine — conditions in many ways reminiscent of the ones faced by the miners Mr. Ramaphosa led — starkly demonstrate the failure of the A.N.C. to deliver its own slogan: “A better life for all.”
Now, as the shock of the killings reverberates through the nation, the party that liberated South Africa is facing perhaps its gravest challenge since it took power in the country’s first multiracial elections in 1994: seething rage from the poor in one of the world’s most unequal societies and a sense that the A.N.C. has created a wealthy black elite, including men like Mr. Ramaphosa, without changing the lives of ordinary people.
“South Africa is a social, political and economic disaster waiting to happen,” said Aubrey Matshiqi, a political analyst. “The anger is there. All you need is a spark, and then you will have social and political and economic veld fires burning out of control.”
These days it can seem that South Africa has been turned upside down. Relying on apartheid-era legal tactics, prosecutors have said they are charging 270 miners arrested after the melee, not the police officers who fired the bullets, with the murder of their colleagues.
It is not the first time an arm of government has been accused of adopting strategies from the apartheid era. Efforts by the government of President Jacob Zuma to criminalize publication of a broad range of information, to limit the independence of the judiciary and to give greater powers to unelected tribal monarchs have bled away support from the A.N.C.
While the end of apartheid transformed South Africa’s political and institutional landscape, placing blacks at the helm, it left the economic hierarchy largely untouched. A favored few black businessmen, many of them with deep ties to the A.N.C., have become wealthy. But for a vast majority of blacks, inequality has deepened.
The failure to transform the economy is one the A.N.C. freely admits. At a party conference in June, Mr. Zuma urged more radical steps, but such calls may have come too late, as younger, more aggressive leaders whip up the anger of the poor and unemployed.
Days before Mr. Zuma went to speak to miners in the town of Marikana, where the strike occurred, the populist youth leader Julius Malema, who was expelled from the A.N.C. amid a fierce battle with Mr. Zuma, stood up to address them. Mr. Malema has advocated nationalizing mines and seizing white-owned land, positions the A.N.C. is unlikely to adopt.
“President Zuma has presided over the massacre of our people,” he told the miners, drawing loud cheers.
As Mr. Zuma stood last week before a crowd of angry workers near the spot where 34 of their colleagues had been killed, an attendant holding an umbrella to shield him from the sun, his Everyman roots seemed to fail him, and he struggled to find the words to stem the tide of their rage.
The image of corporate stooge that Mr. Zuma’s opponents paint would seem an ill fit. He rose to power on a populist surge of anger against his predecessor, the tweedy, cerebral Thabo Mbeki, whose embrace of laissez-faire economic policy angered many on the left. A grade-school dropout turned freedom fighter, Mr. Zuma could not be a starker contrast to Mr. Mbeki, a University of Sussex graduate with a fondness for quoting Yeats.
But now Mr. Zuma may find himself in Mr. Mbeki’s shoes, battling to remain head of the party at a vote in December, and to serve a second term as president. The Marikana killings have fed a groundswell against him, currently gathering force around his vice president, Kgalema Motlanthe, who is widely reported to be considering a move against Mr. Zuma much like the one that removed Mr. Mbeki.
Whoever becomes South Africa’s next president will face the deepening sense of betrayal that after 18 years, little progress has been made to tackle joblessness, inequality and poverty.
“It might make many of us quiver with fear, but here is the cold, hard truth: they will opt out of the current social, economic and political arrangements and they will choose anarchy,” wrote Justice Malala , a political analyst, in The Times, a South African newspaper.
The rage that had long been focused on white rule and white capitalism has turned on the A.N.C. South Africa’s liberation party has become the establishment. It has forged deep links to the white business class, and through its affirmative action policies a small but wealthy black elite has emerged.
Rodger Bosch/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On Friday, miners paid their respects to Mpuzeni Ngxande, one of the 34 people killed on Aug. 16 during the strikers’ protest. More Photos »
Miners have been fleeing the National Union of Mineworkers, which has acquired a reputation, fairly or not, for coziness with big business. Its new leader recently received a 40 percent raise, according to The Mail and Guardian, a newspaper in Johannesburg, to more than $12,500 a month.
The radical union and Mr. Malema pose a serious challenge for South Africa, which has enjoyed a remarkably peaceful transition from white rule to multiracial democracy. By whipping up workers who arm themselves with machetes, spears and cudgels, and setting them against a government from which there are increasingly alienated, they risk a return to the kind of violence seen in the bloody years just before apartheid’s end.
The shooting of strikers reminded many of the killing of unarmed protesters by the police during apartheid, and some have compared it to the Sharpeville massacre, when white policemen killed 69 people at a protest in 1960. It was a singularly galvanizing moment in the struggle against apartheid.
The images of workers from rival unions hacking one another to death also evoked another grim chapter in South Africa’s history: the fratricidal wars between rival political and ethnic groups, egged on by the apartheid government, that killed thousands in the run up to elections in 1994.
Mr. Malema, with his penchant for Breitling wrist watches and his sprawling house in the wealthy suburbs of Johannesburg, would seem just as pampered as the A.N.C. elite he criticizes. He is facing multiple investigations into his mysterious fortune. Indeed, his strategy seems less about starting a new movement than ousting his onetime mentor, Mr. Zuma, and persuading whoever replaces him to let him back into the party.
Mr. Ramaphosa has escaped that kind of taint. He played a central role negotiating the end of apartheid, was a close aide to Nelson Mandela and in his biography on Lonmin’s Web site he is heralded for helping build “the most powerful union in South Africa.” Yet his dual role — as businessman and political leader — raises tough questions about why so few black business leaders have emerged without deep connections to the party.
Writing in The Sunday Times, he said events at Marikana were “probably the lowest moment in the short history of a democratic South Africa,” and that “underpinning all the factors that led to this tragedy are the extremes of economic inequality, poverty and underdevelopment that continue to characterize our society.”
