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The Farlam Commission of Enquiry that are investigating the circumstances around the infamous arms deal in our country, has been burdened with an enormous tasks, and we need to ask how do they make sense so far out of the testimonies of the people that have appeared to testify at the Commission, where they all claim innocence, or alternatively say that the blame for the massacre should be labeled collectively to all those stakeholders and role-players that were part of parcel and contributed to the event.
Cyril Ramaphosa was and still is, a non-executive director of Lonmin, but at this point in time in our history broad-based-black economic empowerment partners are crucial in this kind of management that necessitates political intervention. For his sins, he is being confronted by Julius Malema’s Rottweiler, Dali Mpofu, who was infamously responsible to plunder the salary account of the SABC at the time of his involvement with them, and the also for his romantic relationship with Winnie Madikezela-Mandela which ultimately forced Nelson Mandela to divorce from her and the matter landing up in the Divorce Court.
Mpofu force ‘stooped’ Ramaphosa down to his level and gave him a decent show-down, as Mpofu is more equipped to swim up-stream in a sewerage line than Ramaphosa. Lonmin in all consequences will soon be subject to a public prosecution by those that are spitting on the capital that they would have preferred to have in their own personal wallets, and that would be a glorious tribunal to say the least. A Management member of Lonmin shortly after the massacre at Marikana stated that the mining industry is somewhere where every possible scenario comes to the table and usually plays itself out in the environment. But usually union representatives, can interpret a balance sheet, and they wear designer clothes well branded, the act of negotiating comes natural and is known by union representatives of labour including the mine management when at the time they have to decide on how to hand out the silver and the shickels.
Until on that very faithful and disastrous day when three men, covered over their shoulders with blankets, sweet drenched knopbkieries in the one hand and a gleaming panga in the other, pitched at the Boardroom to negotiate salary adjustments for the people that they represented at the time. A faded photo of the event shows a sangoma, a fierce religious leader with a Bible in the hand, and up to now an unidentified worker. When labour relations and the relevant Acts were discussed at Nedlac, no one thought that a scenario where the world opinion would be relevant would stretch over ten decades of our history.
Not knowing how to handle the situation, a phone call is made to the overpaid cadre Cyril Ramaphosa that is now after they were able to lift their heads out of the sand. With the same pen, with which he signed to purchase a buffalo bull for R 18 million, Cyril then made a few brief notes, which he in the face of meeting up with Mpofu, could only declare and explain with blood on his lips. At this point in time, the sangoma’s theoretical assumptions on life and death had already had disastrous fatal consequences and on the koppie where the protestors gathered the SAPS were drastically searching in their text books on how to exercise crowd control.
Minister Oliphant being conspicuously absent in her presence and this left a trail of blood at the time when the guns went quiet, causing loss of life and property, poverty and the deprivation of Marikana. Corruption, maladministration and mismanagement, patriotism, lack of leadership skills, immoral optimism and the presidency of Jacob Zuma, caused an dark eclipse of the sun on that day, something that we at this point in time can hardly afford.
Entreperneurship became a word of choice for those men with their sunglasses, cheese cut hairstyles, and the fat tenders in their back pockets, with the forcing of masses into empowerment monopolism. The ‘Jewish Piano’ became quiet and to a standstill, while the stock market was bursting at its seams.
At someone’s house in Melville, he is still ordering the last load of bricks that he needs to built the high wall around his property, and somewhere in an informal settlement, a mother is boiling water on her two plate stove, hoping that her hungry children will succumb to sleep, as she has no mealie meel to even make them pap to feed their starving bodies.
Somewhere else in a Boardroom, the ring necks are at one another, not out of concern for the hungry children, but on who will be at the top of the scandle pole.
And when the dust settles, they just walk away, clinging onto their full fat wallets, and ever increasing bank balances, and on ground level and within the mainstream of events, we are destroying one another every day, not even realizing it – that is how dumb and blasé we have come to be.
