From Marikana to Stilfontein Our Lives Count for Nothing

28 January 2025
Abahlali baseMjondolo press statement

From Marikana to Stilfontein Our Lives Count for Nothing

In South Africa, more than thirty years after the end of apartheid, the lives of people who are black and poor are not counted as human lives. We are murdered with impunity and left to die with impunity.

We are regularly murdered by the state and private security during street protests and evictions. We are left to die in shack fires and floods. Our lives are taken in xenophobic attacks.

In 2012 34 striking miners were murdered by the state at Marikana. In 2016 mental health patients in Gauteng were moved out of proper care and into the hands of opportunistic NGOs in the name of ‘cost saving’. 144 patients died as a result of starvation, neglect, and lack of proper medical attention. Now at least 78 miners have died in Stilfontein after enduring horrific conditions as a result of the police barricading them into a mine shaft.

The police blocked the exit of the mine leaving people to starve to death after Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, the Minister in the Presidency who is under investigation for serious corruption, said that “We are going to smoke them out.” The state knowingly condemned the miners to agonising deaths.

Often no reason has to be given for the deliberate murder of people who are poor and black, or for leaving us to die via organised abandonment because we are already not counted as human. At other times killing us or leaving us to die is justified by calling us ‘criminals’ and ‘foreigners’, and by saying that we are really under the control of a ‘third force’ or some criminal conspiracy when we are just seeking livelihoods and land for living.

It is not just the state that kills us or leaves us to die. We can also be killed by private security or xenophobic mobs, often supported by local politicians and given impunity by the police. There is more and more violence within our communities.

No political party takes this seriously. Some, like the Patriotic Alliance, actively call for violence against us. Mostly the media is not concerned when we are killed or left to die. The middle classes do not take to the streets when we are killed or left to die.

We are on our own.

Every human is a human and must be counted as a human. This is the principle on which our struggle is founded and it is a principle for which many of our comrades have given their lives.

We need to build alliances with all people and organisations of good conscience in support of this principle.

The ANC-led government of national unity must be forced to take full responsibility for the human catastrophe in Stilfontein. Families have lost their fathers, husbands, sons and brothers and the right-wing Government of National Unity does not care. There is no party in parliament that really cares.

Ntshavheni must be removed from her position with immediate effect. The Patriotic Alliance must be recognised for what they are, a party with fascist elements that is the enemy of the poor and the working class. Gwede Mantashe, who continually criminalised the miners claiming that they were stealing from the economy, must also be clearly seen for what he is and removed for his position.

The propaganda that was created to justify starving human beings to death is that the miners are ‘foreigners’ and ‘criminals’ here to dig out ‘our gold’ at the expense of ‘our economy’. Africans were mining gold long before colonialism took control of the land and set up a system of private property and invented and enforced borders.

We have never benefited from the colonial and neocolonial economy. Many of our fathers and grandfathers worked in the mines their whole lives and retired sick and poor. Their families remained poor. The communities in and around the mines remained poor.

The mining companies were and remain highly exploitative organisations concerned with nothing but private profit. Billions of rands have been and continue to be removed from our economy by corporate mining companies without tax being paid by what are called ‘illicit financial flows’.

Just as there are some shack settlements run by people who use violence to seize land to sell or rent it there are mafias of various kinds in what is called the informal economy. There are people in these mafias who also have no regard for the lives of poor black people. This must be acknowledged and addressed, as must all forms of predatory economics and violence, including those of the mining companies and their alliances with traditional leaders and politicians that have often resulted in the assassination of grassroots anti-mining activists.

Every human life must be recognised and counted as a human life. All attempts at dehumanisation must be opposed. All forms of exploitation and violence, whether in the ‘formal’ or ‘informal’ economy, must be opposed. We must build an economy centred around human well-being and not private profit. We must build a just and peaceful society.

We fully support the ANC’s brave stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine but repeat our call for the ANC to show the same consideration for poor black people at home.

We express our deepest solidarity with the families of the miners who were forcibly starved to death by the ANC.

Mqapheli Bonono 073 067 3274
S’bu Zikode 083 547 0474
Snenhlanhla Mncanyana 073 832 3331