SEPTEMBER NATIONAL IMBIZO RESPONDS TO THE REPORT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION OF INQUIRY REGARDING THE MARIKANA MASSACRE

“as we correctly call Zuma to account (he is the president), and we correctly recall that it was the deputy president of the country and anc who called for action against the striking mine workers. we must remember the face of the whiteman who wrote a 600 pages thick document to try hide a massacre and shield white capital and its agents like Ramaphosa. I ask you to remember the role played by Judge Farlam in this second 600 pages massacre, killing the murdered again. I ask you to imagine Farlam and his assistants with large brushes working the Marikana Koppie whitewashing the blood of our brothers who were murdered for demanding a living wage. we must condemn not just the politicians but also those who labour to make a lie look like the truth. in my view judge Farlam is as violent as the police who took orders to shoot. he is as guilty as Cyril and co if not more.” Andile Mngxitama Face-Book update, 26 June 2015.

It must be stated that the September National Imbizo (SNI) has right from the beginning rejected both the Presidential Commission of Inquiry and the civil society call for its own Commission of Inquiry. As a sharp retort to the BLOODY report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry SNI maintains its position and to this end re-issues its statement dated 24 August 2012:

“MARIKANA MASSACRE: SNI Rejects Both The Presidential Commission Of Inquiry And The Civil Society Call For Its Own Commission Of Inquiry And Declares September 2012 The Month Of A Living Wage!

We all saw it with our naked eyes. The police opened fire on black people who have been demanding what is fair, just and reasonable: a living wage. Their’s is a legitimate protest against the shocking injustices they have suffered under Lonmin. Two days before the Marikana Massacre the media reported that a pattern of non violence had developed. Workers would emerge in the morning to occupy the mountain and wait for management to come speak to them as promised, and every evening they descended the mountain to travel back home.

We saw it with our eyes. The police opened fired and killed over 30 workers! We have heard how the miners were ambushed; how they were crushed by inyalas; how they had water bombs thrown at them from police helicopters and how the disorientated miners were rounded up and arrested. What more does government and civil society want?

What does Jacob Zuma not know already?

If the ANC, which sent the police to kill blacks does not know what happened, we will tell them. If civil society is also not sure, we will explain to them. If anyone is still lost as to what happened in Marikana, we shall assist with an explanation. What happened is simply this:

Workers who have been treated like slaves, who risked their lives every day to enrich Lonmin and ANC leaders, had had enough. They wanted justice and the dignity that comes with a living wage. They made their demands known to all. No one can say they didn’t know the workers’ demands. Lonmin decided to hide behind government, instead of heeding the reasonable demands of the people. Lonmin hid behind labour laws that are approved by Cosatu and NUM, the very labour laws that legalise wage slavery.

According to SA’s labour law it is acceptable to pay a mine worker a monthly salary of R4000! It is acceptable to pay a farm worker R1500 per month! It’s acceptable to exploit and oppress black workers. These laws are made by the ANC alliance which includes the South African Communist Party and Cosatu! They all support wage slavery and then turn around and pretend to fight against it. If the ANC wants to end black suffering, why do they not use their political power to do so?

We also saw that Lonmin management used NUM to divide workers. We saw government come and side with NUM and management against workers. We saw that instead of engaging workers, government brought in a well armed police force and army. They surrounded the workers, shot them from all sides and water bombed them from above with a toxic substance that immobilized them! After the shooting 34 workers were killed by the police under the control of the ANC and instructed by Lonmin.

The September National Imbizo asks, what exactly is it that needs to be probed? What is it that the ANC does not know?

The SNI rejects both the presidential commission of inquiry and the civil society call for its own commission. We recall that after each massacre the apartheid regime instituted a Commission of Inquiry , the function of which was to hide the truth, to police the righteous anger of the people and to break the momentum of revolutionary demands of the people. We say government must pay reparations to the families for their pain, suffering and loss of income. This must be done immediately!

Also the mines must be nationalised and placed under worker control and the dependents of the murdered should get shares in those mines as a priority. Lonmin belongs to the murdered workers! Furthermore, the SNI says: Let all workers, in every sector, get a minimum wage of R12 500. It’s a reasonable demand!

To mourn the murdered workers with dignity and respect, let the workers in all mines embark upon mass strikes for the next month to demand their fair share! It’s a living wage the workers of Marikana were prepared to die for.

It is only a living wage which can bring justice; not commissions of inquiry. We all know what happened. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Out of respect for the memory of the Marikana warriors, let there be justice for workers. Cosatu is part of the problem, so is NUM and the ANC which killed black people to defend white capital.

Let our mourning include building resistance. Let us make September the month of action for a living wage. Let all the mines go on strike. They need us more than we need them!

Viva R12 500!

Issued By September National Imbizo

24 August 2012″

We Are The One’s We Have Been Waiting For

SNI

26 June 2015

THE SEPTEMBER NATIONAL IMBIZO RESPONDS TO THE CALL FOR OUR PEOPLE TO CELEBRATE AFRICA DAY

In a continent still plagued by abject poverty, civil wars, diseases and corrupt governments, this Africa Day, we must ask whether there is anything really that Africans can celebrate? All the big imperialist nations continue to loot African resources ultimately rendering our people hopeless. It is worth mentioning that currently 14 African countries still transfer most of their profits to French banks which serves as a form of colonial tax. Moreover, our people are subjected to abuse and death as they flee from their countries and some even from their own continent in pursuit of a better life. In these new lands the African is treated with contempt as the most wretched of the earth fueling all forms of anti black violence including Afrophobia. Africa is cursed with leaders who crack the whip on its own people in service of its old colonial masters.

As the September National Imbizo we say: Africa is not free! We have no reason to celebrate! Slavery is rife and as is currently evident unaccounted for in the USA. We stand with all the revolutionary black people in America fighting for liberation. Colonialism is very much alive in Africa! We commit ourselves to realise a truly liberated Africa.

To end the current carnage, wrongly called xenophobia, we need radical Pan Afrikanism and Black Consciousness! Only then will Blacks/Africans understand that the cause of this madness is neo-colonialism and white supremacy, only then shall we understand that democracy (political freedom without ending colonial land theft) is in service of white supremacy, only then shall we understand that all the borders in Africa today were not put up by us but by those who enslaved and colonised us! What is shocking is how deeply we Africans have internalised what white supremacy created to serve white interests. Each time we call a black person a “foreigner” we are speaking the language of the colonizer. Whites in Europe are creating a single Europe with one identity document and one currency. Here in Africa blacks don’t get it! We are still holding on to the colonial enclaves which don’t even belong to us. SA currently does not belong to black people. More than 80% of the land is owned by about 35 000 white families and trusts. The resolution of the colonial question, which is primarily the land question, is key to stabilising life in Africa. We shall not compromise! We call for land first (all of it), destruction of the colonial borders, and the establishment of a United States of Africa under one economy and one political and military arrangement. We can only do that if we defeat the comprador who currently rule Africa in service of the master. The comprador is too corrupt to end white rule. They cut deals with our oppressors all the time. Our people are victims of hunger and ignorance hence they attack their fellow blacks. Hence Steve Biko correctly said that our people suffer from both material and spiritual want. It is the duty of all revolutionaries to understand Pan Africanism and Black Consciousness and to agitate for real revolution,  not compromises with land thieves and colonizers! The South Africa government is the epitome of anti black neo colonialism as exemplified by “Operation Fiela” and in this regard SNI condemns its actions.

Until the day Africa is not defined by misery, landlessness and destitution there is nothing that any of us can celebrate! On this day referred to as  “Africa Day” SNI directs all revolutionaries to the good counsel of Frantz Fanon in “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” in his book  “The Wretched of the Earth”: https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/fanon/pitfalls-national.htm

We Are The One’s We Have Been Waiting For!

ISSUED BY THE SEPTEMBER NATIONAL IMBIZO

25 May 2015

THE STATE IS PERPETUATING AFROPHOBIA

Operation Fiela has such wide objectives one can’t help but conclude that it is actually a ruse to criminalise Africans.

15 May 2015 00:00 Andile Mngxitama

When the government called in the army to quell the spirit of Afrophobic violence sweeping South Africa recently, I grudgingly supported the move. Afrophobia is what we wrongly call xenophobia. If we really hated and feared foreigners, then we wouldn’t be targeting blacks only, so for precision it should be called negrophobia-Afrophobia.

The black-on-black violence we have seen is merely the spiralling out of control of the permanent structural violence in the black community. The last time the police reported on the statistics it was clear that within a period of 12 months we murdered about 17 000, mostly black, young men. The black African who arrives here from outside South Africa is placed in this generalised violent reality.

As Steve Biko so correctly said, it’s a miracle for a black person to reach adulthood in South Africa – not to mention the real possibility of dying before one reached the age of five, given the genocidal levels of infant mortality rates among black people.

I supported the army call because brute force needed to be met with brute force to break the violent cycle before it consumed us all.

Now, with hindsight, I wonder if one can under any circumstances support the increased policing of black bodies by a police force and an army that is governed by antiblack racist beliefs and practices. The police and army in a racist society invariably dish out violence against blacks.

The deployment of the army was meant to increase visibility at street level and to break up the formation of violent mobs. Instead of this reasonable intervention, we saw an apartheid-like systematic brutalisation of people in the middle of the night in hostels. This was not dealing with Afrophobia; it was a criminalisation of a whole people by virtue of where they lived. Invariably, they were black and poor.

The targeting of hostels performs the function of deflecting attention away from the roots of the violence. It creates the impression of exceptionalism, of the hostels as sources of the violence, when the truth is that the agents of Afrophobia are every-where because the sources are so generalised.

The triumphalism of Operation Fiela revealed more than it concealed. Despite official police denials, the campaign was a perpetuation of Afrophobia by other means. Basically, the South African government brought in the army and the police to complete what the citizens were doing.

It must be remembered that the anti-African sentiment we see manifested as Afrophobia is essentially organised by the state in the first instance. It’s the government that treats black Africans as illegal. Operation Fiela finally gives official expression to the mooted idea that the black African is a subhuman – dirt to be despised and swept away.

Fiela literally means sweeping the dirt away. One fielas with a broom. Removal of vermin is a more apt description of the concept. This discourse, therefore, affirms the self-hatred among blacks as state-sanctioned. If the state does it, surely it must be correct to emulate it as citizens?

We end up with a situation in which black youths from the townships believe they can do as they wish with amakwerekwere (foreign Africans) – they are, after all, “surplus people”, or beings without legal protection, available to abuse by all.

It has been proven again and again that when blacks institute violence against each other the perpetrators mimic the methods of white society: they assume whiteness when, for example, they castrate, lynch or burn each other. The master is present even in his absence.

Colonial borders were primarily created to demarcate the property of Europeans, as they sliced and diced Africa and parcelled it out to each other in 1885 in Berlin.

This state’s antiblack discourse and practice is sustained and taken advantage of by businesses in South Africa. They employ “foreigners” and pay them less than they would pay South Africans – and then use the racist stereotype that “foreigners” are not lazy like black South Africans. The tragedy is that the “foreigners” internalise the same racist discourse.

Exploited, overworked, underpaid, the black African is seen as the subhuman who takes jobs. The labour law regime allows for this reality because the employer is protected by the “flexibility” of the labour market. So employers hire at below survival rates because they are dealing with people without rights.

The answer to this aspect of Afrophobia is to have minimum wages across all sectors and to insist whoever is employed has similar rights. It must be legally permissible to be employed without so-called papers but, once employed, you must enjoy all the rights defined for that sector. This would end the artificial divisions between South African and African, so separated by the artificial colonial border now given life at the job-market level.

Operation Fiela has such wide objectives one can’t help but conclude that it is actually a ruse to criminalise Africans who come from outside the country as part of driving them back “home” by any means necessary. The operation claims to be multifocal, ranging from ridding the country of illegal weapons to dealing with drugs, prostitution, human trafficking, hijacked buildings and general lawlessness – and somewhere nicely packed in this long catalogue of sins is “undocumented immigrants”.

Let’s see how the operation has performed to date. On May 3 the police issued a triumphalist statement: “The National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure is happy with the successes of this past week’s Operation Fiela, which rooted out criminal elements in seven provinces, resulting in 889 arrests.”

Before you pop the champagne cork, look closer at the figures and see what is actually being swept clean. Of the 889 arrests a whopping 745 are “undocumented immigrants”. So the police have arrested only 144 for other crimes in the whole of seven provinces? More than 80% of the “criminal elements” are Africans ostensibly without papers. Here, blacks have been criminalised by virtue of their blackness, not because they have done anything wrong. This “success” also exposes the true motive of Operation Fiela.

If we look at this figure, the reports of harassment and the fact that so many people have been arrested that the Lindela repatriation camp can’t cope with the influx, then we understand that Operation Fiela is about sweeping South Africa clean of black Africans from outside our borders.

Some migrants have been waiting for their documents for up to 15 years, so it’s not their fault they are not “documented”.

The more penetrating question, though, is this: Why do Africans need to have documents to be anywhere? If there is a need to have any document then it must be a single document for all of us in the continent.

The tragedy is the ruling party is pandering to backward sentiment, which it has helped create, and then it turns around and feigns surprise when society follows its example.

The poor in South Africa are under sustained attack from poverty and hunger and, instead of addressing these issues, easy scapegoats are thrown about.

The government now, like all right-wing parties and governments in Europe, wants to come across as tough against the “undocumented” to placate the poor, instead of dealing with root causes that are about lack of transformation and the continuation of apartheid economic and property relations in South Africa.

This situation is exacerbated by the terrible ongoing economic and political crises here and in neighbouring countries. A solution to these crises needs an Africa-wide approach, but it can only take place within a decolonising politics and movement. Until then we are going to be trapped in these cycles of violence.

Andile Mngxitama is challenging his expulsion from the Economic Freedom Fighters

Government’s antiblack discourse and practices, like Operation Fiela, dehumanise African migrants.