A year on from Marikana, anarchy is the new normal

Soon after the Marikana massacre, I began a book whose central premise was that the events leading to the deaths of 44 people in the worst industrial disturbances since 1994 were symptomatic of much deeper problems in the mining industry, and South Africa more generally.

One year down the line, as we approach the first anniversary of the massacre on August 16, I have come to the conclusion that this proposition is altogether too benign. This is because Marikana, or the North West mining industry, has settled into what I, as a sociologist, can only call "anarchic normality".

There is nothing in the physical character of the unprepossessing towns of Marikana or Mooinooi to suggest this - nothing sinister, immediately visible or different. These and other villages abutting the Lonmin mine have ostensibly reverted to their sleepy and impoverished pre-massacre status.

People are understandably aware of the events that a year ago catapulted South Africa into the ranks of the more odious nations. Still, the critical imperative is to work and live as best one can in a seriously depleted environment.

Then, too, many people in the area are migrants. Some who were in the region in August last year have left; others who have subsequently arrived know little about the killings other than on a second-hand basis. There is nonetheless, as Nadine Gordimer named an anthology of short stories, "something out there".

First, the struggles in the labour movement continue to flare into continual, if low-grade, violence with the potential to emulate the industrial disturbances of late 2012. The situation in the Marikana area remains profoundly unstable. This is partly because mine management throughout the North West platinum industry is almost uniformly hostile - as are most media - to the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu).

The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) believes it can recapture lost territory with assistance from mine management, especially in some of those mines where human resources and other strategically important departments have former NUM people who have risen through the ranks from shop steward. Perhaps more importantly, a substantial proportion of Amcu, if not the majority, are also former NUM supporters who will follow the political winds.

Amcu has achieved representative status, but relative to the forces ranged behind the NUM it is still a small renegade with only a toehold in the labour movement. Amcu's capability in North West it based on idiosyncratic factors, including the initial hostility of NUM members to a handful of leadership personalities coincident with August 16. One year down the line there remain deep conflicts in Amcu, basically vicious struggles over scarce resources rather than ideology.

Much of what goes on between the NUM and Amcu is a mixture of human greed and need that could only occur when people have very little and are in competition for personal power. Both unions are totally unabashed in their use of violence against each other. Rivals are often killed to advance self-serving interests. The mine owners play their part, even though there is little understanding of the extraordinary complexity of who owes whom allegiance in labour ranks. The recent decision of the "industry" to make unions pay for their own shop stewards is probably going to nail Amcu down to a few organisational militants who can scavenge pay to finance their professional and individual activities.

Below the surface calm, it is almost impossible to determine the thin line between political and criminal action. Both unions see an unstable situation as a source of political capital.

Everyone is reluctant to be seen as a political leader, because doing so can invite assassination from either colleagues or opponents. This is particularly the case in Amcu, which remains badly disorganised because of cut-throat internal politics being waged among and between former NUM members .

The police are almost openly active in these brutal dynamics. This includes not only ongoing threats of violence against key witnesses set to appear before the Marikana commission under the chairmanship of Judge Ian Farlam, but death and destruction wreaked by police officers, the "ama-berets" who were involved in the killings and now spend a large part of their time assaulting illegal miners in drunken sprees that could well lead to another collective killing.

Members of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate have received death threats. Meanwhile, the quarries around Marikana known to work with trafficked Mozambique labour are left untouched because of corrupt relations between police, labour brokers and mine management.

The mines have not gone far down the road during the past year in dealing with the key issue facing the industry - how to be globally competitive while reliant on huge masses of unskilled, unstable and unproductive human capital. In the meantime, they are cautiously "restructuring", for which read retrenching. After the dramatic confrontations between Anglo and the Department of Mineral Resources following its public decision earlier this year to retrench 16000 miners, it now involves a form of surreptitious "salami-slicing" - workers are being quietly laid off for often minor disciplinary offences, sickness, absenteeism or breaking safety regulations. This is, of course, extraordinary in an industry where gold and platinum extraction kills more than 100 miners a year and reportedly injures 300 each month.

This abnormal situation has enormous implications for the Farlam commission, which is rapidly reaching a point where it is unlikely to be able to fulfil its mandate in any meaningful fashion. It has, in fact, never been the intention of the government to ensure that Farlam succeeds, or does so in a directional way in addressing the blemish of Marikana on South Africa.

From the outset, the commission has lacked the will and logistics to be inquisitorial in a manner appropriate to an effective governmental inquiry into an explosive situation. One consequence is that there has been little informed public dialogue over the meaning of Marikana as stakeholders, the public and the international community have been duped into waiting for the Farlam report.

This is now designated for the last quarter of this year - which is an optimistic deadline not only because of problems now facing the victims and their families in financing their defence, but because Farlam, after 8000 pages of evidence, has produced nothing that even vaguely resembles the provisional report originally scheduled for October last year. The South African Police Service, the first of four key stakeholders to be examined, is still on the stand.

The ANC and the unions represent the only two channels for individuals to rise above the impoverished environment and into the profitable networks of gravy-train existence. The forthcoming national elections are also a factor, because electoral politics in the area are, as in the whole North West, a winner-takes-all event that propels elected councillors and shop stewards alike into a lifestyle high above the seething masses.

Marikana is exemplary of what is happening on the ground to communities throughout South Africa. It is also becoming, in many respects, a repeat of the Sharpeville massacre, albeit in democratic circumstances. The latter, one recalls, involved a tap on the wrist for the guilty, but a political inheritance that required the repair work of generations.

It is essential that Farlam's commission, with all its limitations, reports in a way that can be used to chart a road forward to civil or criminal action. Other than the police, both unions, Lonmin, the government and the mining industry - all of whose stakes are best served if Farlam says nothing - it is in no one's long-term interests that we have a rerun of Sharpeville in the veld followed by failure in the legal system.

• Frankel is the author of the newly published 'Between The Rainbows and the Rain: Marikana, Mining, Migration and the Crisis of Modern South Africa'