Cape Town - It’s critical to understand that in the final analysis the capitalist system and the economic and land and property-ownership of South Africa is ultimately not about individuals.
While the Zuma saga and the Zondo Commission (Zondo himself is most probably guilty given the signed affidavit of ANC youth activist Phadima Fukula on March 30, which charged the Eastern Cape premier Oscar Mabuyane and Zondo with bribery and corruption in the ANC’s 2017 “CR17'' campaign.
This included other leading ANC figures, with Fukula receiving constant death threats and disappeared since April 7), has occupied much of the mainstream South African news, the issue of Marikana and the role of white (and minority elite Black) capital has been conveniently obscured.
The fundamental economic injustice against the predominantly black working class (and now vast underclass because of millions of job losses, especially 2 million women’s jobs), has never been foundationally addressed.
Millions suffer daily indignities and further marginalisation. The dropping out of 500 000 school children, mostly black, due to pandemic frustration, mental stress, anxiety, and unpredictable class schedules, permanently deprives such children from any form of significant learning and ensures their impoverishment in the future.
Such facts serve as stark reminders of the insouciance and flagrant disregard of the black dispossessed by the ANC-capitalist run-state, offering a degrading R350 to individuals, for which 4 million were forced to apply, even while the president and his cohorts rest comfortably on their banked billions.
It is high time that the people are liberated from this state of neo-colonialist capitalist tyranny and dysfunction and are no longer forcibly distracted by the wave of media reports on “corrupt individuals” like Jacob Zuma and others in the ANC, that has demonstrated that it is a close partner of global white capital and no longer a liberation movement for the impoverished African masses.
Reform is hardly a possibility because of the core illicit and immoral foundation and nature of the capitalist system, from which Cyril Ramaphosa and others in the ruling ANC benefit lucratively. Essentially, the ANC, like the Democratic and Republican parties in the US and among other political parties in Europe, serve as agents of large capital.
Their addiction is tenaciously holding on to profit accumulation and perpetually practising lies and deception as tactics so that the most adversely affected people are blinded as to what the real financial and economic stakes are in the South African political economic system.
It is now time for those who have made millions and billions from the enslavement of black South Africans over the decades and years, including Cyril Ramaphosa, to return this wealth to the working class. This should be part of reparations, restitution, and reconciliation: no more elitist billionaires and no more homeless people, especially children, scavenging the garbage cans of metropolitan centres for food.
South Africans should be able to now participate in a new constitutional referendum, where economic justice, land redistribution and repatriation for the black dispossessed, decent and just compensation for productive labour, and free and equitable education, health, and adequate housing for all, not just the privileged wealthy minority, is enshrined into South African law. Not simply as rights, but practically implemented by structures and mechanisms determined by the black working class that assures authentic justice for all.
Capitalist conglomerates and opulent individual tycoons will thus no longer be legally permitted to rape and pillage the people and physical landscape of South Africa for profit agglomeration ever again. The working classes will be the vanguard protectors of the South African nation.
In this manner, the spirits of the martyrs of Marikana will find rest in a truly liberated, humane, decent, and peaceful South Africa and Africa. Marikana is never forgotten in the eyes of Mother Earth and the ancestors of Mother Africa, but lives on in 2021! Aluta Continua!
Kunnie is an internationally-renowned educational activist and researcher involved with advancing decolonisation struggles of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and the world. He has taught and lectured at colleges and universities on all continents. His next book is The Mother Earth and the Collapse of the Capitalist System in the 21st Century.
Cape Town