When President Cyril Ramaphosa took his seat to testify before the state capture commission of inquiry last Wednesday, few would have remembered it was seven years to the day since he had testified before another commission of inquiry. On August 11 2014, Ramaphosa, then deputy president of the country, took his seat before retired judge Ian Farlam, who was chairing an inquiry into the gunning down of 34 miners. They had been on a wildcat strike at the Lonmin-owned platinum mine in the Rustenburg area in North West. Its low-key anniversary was on Monday, nine years after the bloodbath, and the few tangible outcomes from the Farlam commission of inquiry do not inspire confidence.
Farlam found in his report that the mining company, the police and mining unions were to blame for the worst police killing since the end of apartheid. The investigation took nearly three years to complete, the inquiry cost more than R150m (a drop in the ocean compared to the three-year-long state capture inquiry’s R1bn) and the report was 600 pages long. It absolved Ramaphosa, who was a non-executive director at Lonmin during talks to resolve the strike. He was accused of using his influence to trigger the deadly police action.
No police officer has been convicted. The Bench Marks Foundation, a monitoring non-governmental organisation, said nine officers still face charges — nine years after the shooting.
The Farlam commission recommended that SA’s public order policing policies be revised and the world’s best practices for crowd control be investigated, “without resorting to the use of weapons capable of automatic fire”. Yet today our police force is still notoriously hopeless at crowd control, the deadly riots that hit Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal in July being the most recent example.
The Farlam inquiry also called for a criminal investigation of the police officers who were involved, as well as an inquiry into then police boss Riah Phiyega’s fitness to hold office. The former national police commissioner was finally suspended in October 2015, and only this year lost a court appeal to have Farlam’s findings set aside.
No police officer has been convicted. The Bench Marks Foundation, a monitoring non-governmental organisation, said nine officers still face charges — nine years after the shooting. “Progress in these cases has simply ground to a halt. Even if they are eventually finalised, accountability for this massacre needs to stretch higher up the level of command,” said the foundation’s executive director, John Capel.
The Bench Marks Foundation added that neither the company under which the massacre took place, Lonmin, nor Sibanye-Stillwater, which now owns the mine, have paid out any compensation to the widows and orphans of the deceased miners.
An international law enforcement expert, Cees de Rover, who helped the SA Police Service implement Farlam’s recommendations, told Daily Maverick two years ago that though the commission achieved a comprehensive review of the events at Marikana, it failed in ensuring that those responsible were held to account.
How was Monday marked? Trade unions and political parties issued the mandatory statements, with the ANC saying: “We shall endeavour never to forget their [the miners’] memories,” adding, without a hint of irony, that it reiterated the call to government “to move with speed” in implementing programmes to help the affected families.
The wheels of justice turn slowly in SA but it seems the wheels of justice for lengthy and costly commissions of inquiry may turn even slower. This does not bode well for a post-state capture era.
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