TOP members of South Africa’s ruling ANC party met yesterday to discuss the political crisis that has emerged in the wake of the ANC’s police force shooting dead 34 striking Marikana platinum miners on 16 August.
Hundreds were wounded in the course of the police massacre, and eight miners were killed in earlier clashes with the police who were defending the UK-owned Lonmin company.
The miners are continuing with their strike action which has spread to other mines, and operations at the lonmin mine have ceased entirely.
President Zuma has set up a commission to investigate the violence. The investigation will last four months and is designed to try and cool the situation down, so as to allow normal business to be restored.
The commission is expected to blame, not the police, or the government but the AMCU breakaway trade union for the violence. The AMCU has emerged out of mass opposition to the pro-Lonmin positions of the NUM, including its opposition to the platinum miners’ strike actions and their demand for a monthly wage of 12,500 rand.
The fact that no-one in government or in charge of the state apparatus has resigned indicates that the ANC has launched the inquiry to gain time, to try to get the miners back to work, to find a scapegoat outside the ANC and the bosses and bankers, and to buttress up the ANC regime.
Under the rule of the ANC, black ministers and officials took office and immediately became the local representatives of international capital, with the Cosatu trade unions, its labour lieutenants, enriching themselves with shareholdings in the mining and other industries.
This process has resulted in South Africa replacing Brazil as the most unequal society in the world with the poorest people and the richest bosses.
The strike and massacre at the mine has further convinced the black masses that their lives will never improve in a South Africa ruled by the ANC and that a social revolution is necessary.
Cosatu is despised for the millions that it earns for its shares in the major private industries, and the policies of class peace that it consequently adopts.
The fruits of this treachery are that South Africa has an unemployment rate of 24%, with more than 25% of the population living on less than $2 a day, with 7% of children below the age of five severely malnourished, and with an under-five infant mortality rate of 104 per 1,000 live births.
Millions of South Africans live in shanty towns with no electrical power, no clean water, no jobs and no future for their young people, while the Zumas live like the bosses and bankers that they serve.
The economic crisis has meant that between 2007 and 2009 nearly one million jobs have been destroyed, while the boss class and their ANC servants live in luxury.
That South Africa is gigantically rich with gold, platinum, diamonds and coal is common knowledge, as is the fact that its masses are appallingly poor.
The truth of the matter is that the ANC, with its Communist party and reformist trade union backing, was and is a bourgeois nationalist movement that believes in capitalism and keeping the black masses in their place and will never change its spots.
The working class is now breaking with it and the South African youth have already broken with it.
The working class and the youth want a socialist revolution that puts the working class and the poor into power and nationalises the means of production to bring in socialism and a better life for the many.
Now is the time to build up the Trotskyist revolutionary party in SA to lead this struggle for a socialist revolution to its victory.
