http://mg.co.za/ [South Africa]
COMMENT
Andile Yawa’s bus leaves Queenstown in the Eastern Cape at 8pm. It reaches Johannesburg’s hustle and grime at six the next morning, and Pretoria by seven.
When the Farlam commission of inquiry starts in Centurion two hours later, Yawa is there, as he has been for almost every day it has sat over the past two years. He wants to find out who was responsible for the fatal shooting of his son Cebisile on August 16 2012 at Marikana.
Yawa’s wife Nosipho says that the time they now get to spend together at home in rural Cala is similar to when her husband worked as a miner.
There is repetition, too, in the journey into South Africa’s mineral-rich hinterland that Yawa first undertook by train in the 1970s, and since the 1980s, by bus.
The route is that of the “conscripted” that Hugh Masekela laments in Stimela, and which Cebisile followed when he succeeded his father after he was medically boarded with lung disease in 2008.
“There are similarities in these journeys,” he says of his travelling to the hearings, “but now [after these trips to the commission] I come back with nothing. Before, there was money and I was making a living for my family.”
Asked whether returning empty-handed includes a lack of answers about why his son died from gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen, and who is responsible for his death, Yawa says: “There are some answers at the commission but they don’t give me any hope. The police don’t answer – they just pass through the questions.”
Inquiry ends
Retired judge Ian Farlam’s inquiry into the deaths of 44 people at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mines during an unprotected strike in August 2012 completes its hearings this week. There are concerns that it has been undermined by the questionable credibility of witness testimony and whether all the relevant evidence has been made available to it.
Evidence leader advocate Geoff Budlender noted in closing arguments last week that the commission’s purpose was “hampered”, because there was “good reason to doubt the truthfulness of a large number of the witnesses … In an attempt to avoid accountability, many witnesses have avoided truth telling.”
For the rest of this article, click here: http://mg.co.za/article/2014-11-13-marikana-the-end-of-a-bitter-road-promises-only-closure