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Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa says he is prepared to go to Marikana to meet and apologise to the widows of the mineworkers who were killed there during a prolonged and deadly strike in August 2012.
“As a leader, I am prepared to be accountable and I am prepared to confront any situation where accountability is required,” Ramaphosa told Parliament while responding to a question from the Economic Freedom Fighters’ Floyd Shivambu.
This was the first time in almost five years that Ramaphosa spoke about Marikana in Parliament, despite several questions having been posed to him by opposition parties over this period.
While addressing students at Rhodes University in Grahamstown on Sunday, Ramaphosa apologised for the manner in which the Marikana massacre unfolded, saying he was sorry for the type of language he used at the time. He apologised while responding to a question from one of the students about his role in the massacre where 34 striking mine workers were killed by the police.
“I am prepared to meet with the widows of those workers who were killed and the widows of the 44 people who were killed,” Ramaphosa said to applause from some ANC MPs in the house.
He revealed that as soon as he made that statement in the Eastern Cape at the weekend, a number of reverends approached him and said, they would like to go with him to Marikana to make sure that he did things right.
Ramaphosa said it was a matter of time that he accompanied struggle stalwart Winnie Madikizela-Mandela who had offered to take her to Marikana to make peace.
“She will lead me. In this process, she will advise she will give guidance and she will lead me.”
Madikizela-Mandela offered to take Ramaphosa to Marikana during her 80th birthday celebrations in October last year.
This afternoon, Shivambu wanted to know what exactly Ramaphosa was apologising for, who was he apologising to and why was he apologising in the Eastern Cape and not in Marikana to the people who were affected by the killing of workers.
After toing and froing about the validity of the question and whether it was parliamentary to ask about the “ANC government killing workers in Marikana” a phrase used by Shivambu; Ramaphosa responded, at length.
He explained that, after his address at Rhodes, the student who had posed the question had in fact, later told Ramaphosa that: “I asked you that question because I wanted to understand precisely what your conscience was telling you.”
The student had also apologised for embarrassing the deputy president, if he had been embarrassed by the question.
“I said, ‘no I didn’t find it embarrassing, because as a public person or as a leader, I know I have to be accountable for what I do and what I say and you as a student and citizen was asking me to be accountable.”
Ramaphosa said he apologised for the language he used. The day before the killing of 34 miners by the police, Ramaphosa had written an email in which he strongly condemned the protests, described them as criminal acts and suggested “concomitant action”. The Farlam Commission into the Marikana killings cleared Ramaphosa of having caused the killings.
“I did use inappropriate, unfortunate language as expressed in the emails. What I was dealing with, the intervention I was seeking to make was to try and stop more killings from happening,” he said.
He said this had been sparked off by the killing of 10 people who had died earlier, saying those killings had happened in the most gruesome manner. Some of them were police officers but the majority were mine workers.
“I explained in that meeting that I had served mine workers for nine years. The better part of my growing up years, I had committed to working for mine workers, having been a mine worker myself. I was asked to go and help form a union together with other people,” said Ramaphosa.
“I said it could never be that I would want to have mine workers killed or anybody for that matter in the way that it happened. That is what I apologised for,” he added.
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