h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This thursday an incident happened during a miners' strike at a Lonmin platinum mine close to Rustenburg. The people protested about their low wages, and police present opened fire on them. According to the reports I've seen the death toll was between 34 and 36 people. This makes it the largest loss of life during a demonstration since the end of Apartheid. The infamous Sharpville Massacre, in 1960, caused the deaths of 69 people for comparison.

Apparently the strikers, who were armed with sticks, spears and machetes, threatened to attack the police, who then responded with live ammunition in self defense. Some reports say that miners fired on the police first but this cannot be confirmed.

Here's a video, with a few still photographs as well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gevxiMSE5lc&feature=player_embedded#!

Now get your heads around the fact that this is not apartheid South Africa ... we're supposed to be post now!

I'm condemning neither the strikers nor the police. Both of them acted out of a kind of desperation. The problem here is that so many people's lives are still s**tty enough that they would risk it in protests like this.

Here's an article in more detail on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marikana_miners%27_strike

For me, Willem, you've said it all right here:

"The problem here is that so many people's lives are still s**tty enough that they would risk it in protests like this."

Saw it on our news Willem, most distressing. I don't know enough about it to comment but I was sad to note it is British owned as I understand it.

Websailor

I have seen some footage of this and it was horrific. Everybody needs to account for how the situation was allowed to get to such a lethal flashpoint and should be taking every action now to de-escalate tensions.

From what I have read that is not happening. Families are still unclear of what is happening, who is dead, injured or arrested. The Mining People have said we need to get back to work, yeah, right, um, and there is a shed load of politicing going on, yep, fan the flames in your own political interests

That is my uk centric view of what is going on, how is it looking to you Willem?

Hello KB, Dmitri, Websailor and Peanut, and thanks for the comments.

The way I see it here: there is no clear easy way to solve this. Ideally the miners should get decent wages. I don't know if that is possible. One might tend to think that the top people in the mining companies make fortunes relative to the workers who get paid peanuts ... and yet this doesn't necessarily mean that they can afford to pay the miners much more. I don't know that much about the details of mining economics, but I do know that many mines have closed down here. Now I assume that mine companies do want to make money and therefore that it would be better for them to do everything possible to keep a mine alive rather than have it close down. So maybe that mine is already at the limit, and there is no way of paying the miners better salaries without making the mine uneconomical leading to it being closed down as well and all the miners losing their jobs.

I don't know the details, I say again, but I think the solution is having a very different idea as to how to run a country's economy ... I can't really go into the details here and now, but it basically comes down to everything in the system being made more flexible and adaptable, being more 'aware' of what is going on (a greater diversity of feedback systems) and a greater sensitivity to people and their full range of talents. There are millions of things wrong with how the country and the enconomy is run right now. That's not just in South Africa, but I see the same sort of things when I look at other countries. The result is: huge insecurity, huge wastage of resources both speaking of natural resources and human talents, and very great amounts of human misery. The thing is we don't seem to be even trying to *really* make things better. There's a huge complacency when it comes to economic systems, where those systems the way I see it still can be improved infinitely.

Your last paragraph is so right Willem.

Apparently the demand for platignum has dropped sharply, with the recession in Europe, the shares have fallen over this debacle, and the miners have been told to go back to work or be sacked!

Sad business all round,

Websailor

Hi Websailor, thanks for the comment. Does anybody else think there is something not quite kosher where an economic system leaves people utterly at the mercy of the market? I mean: platinum demand falls, people lose their jobs, no more money for food and other necessities ... people's lives are at stake. If people can't eat, they die. So literally, the fluctuations of the market ends up killing people. Either people die because they can't eat or they become homeless and freeze to death during a freak winter or they protest and get shot to death by police. Now: is this really, really, really necessary? Can't we come up with a way to at least give people the minimal requirements for living? Not bare-bones existential misery either, but at least a somewhat decent sort of life? Not every luxury under the sun. But over here I see every day how people can live with little and still be happy and content enough. But a certain degree of material insecurity is just degrading. Who does it help? Who benefits from the shanty-towns, from the crime, from the preventable and treatable diseases that aren't prevented or treated, from people having to face a daily and often doomed, desperate scrabble for resources without which they can't live, from the bleakness of that sort of life, from the orphans and children who never knew their fathers?

Can we put men on the Moon, robots on Mars, but we can't give the average man, woman or child at least a dignified life, some sort of hope for the future?

When the market falls, people die! Is that really the way it has to be? Can't we build a 'margin' into things within which the market can fluctuate without actually killing people?

If people have more options: they work at the mines when the mines work, but when the mines stop working, they have something else to do, a Plan B, something to fall back on. In this country that is largely not the case ... mines are what we have, and not much else. But can we somehow get something else? The solution has to involve education, making people more versatile and adaptable. And education in THIS country is still an awful, awful mess!

And often mines CAUSE messes ... habitat destruction, water pollution, air pollution, illnesses in the workers. Not always, but too often. So we really must work on finding something else. Humanity as a whole must start thinking of finding something else, a different way of keeping all of us here alive and reasonably happy.

Willem, the Welfare system in the UK was put in place precisely to do that, as a safety net for those in need but for years now it has been an easy living for many, in some cases several generations in the same family, while those in real need still suffer.

I am not sure what the answer is, because every good idea gets abused.

I see the dismissal threat has been dropped. Ic can't begin to imagine the atmosphere in that workplace after what has happened.

Websailor

I don't think is true Websailor, the issues behind generational poverty are complicated, not just a matter of attitude.

There are people who take the p*ss, there are some people who rip off the system and the latter particulary is disgraceful. I think you have to accept that will happen and deal with it when it does.

Also the system fails some people but a welfare system is needed and ours currently needs defending.