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Our deeply uncaring state is impervious to the lives of our country’s most vulnerable citizens

Judith February
By Judith February
26 Jan 2025
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Stilfontein, Marikana, Michael Komape, Life Esidimeni: These are just some of the cases that show a state that has become so arrogant, so unmoored from its principles, that it is prepared to deny the most vulnerable in our society their basic rights.

Is this who we are? Is this who we want to be?

The selective application of human rights has never helped any society. South Africans more than any other people should know this. 

It is for this reason that the disaster which continues to play itself out at the Stilfontein mine should appal us. As Ferial Haffajee wrote so poignantly, these illegal miners trapped in the deep seem to our authorities to be “children of a lesser god”. The dead remain largely nameless and faceless. As Haffajee writes, “this is how the police identified the miners: 216 are alive illegal miners. 78 are deceased.”

A day earlier, the police had said in a statement devoid of all compassion: “On day two of the operations, a total of 106 alive illegal miners were retrieved and arrested for illegal mining. 51 were certified dead. A breakdown of those arrested per nationality is as follows: Mozambicans: 67; Lesotho: 26; Zimbabweans: 11, South Africans: 2.” 

But, we should not be surprised, Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni felt most comfortable with random cruelty as the disaster started unfolding, saying, half-mockingly: “You want us to send help to criminals? You want us to send help to criminals, honestly?” 

‘Smoke them out’


Not content to stop there, she continued: “We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out. They will come out. We are not sending help to criminals. Criminals are not to be helped, criminals are to be persecuted. We didn’t send them there, and they didn’t go down there with good intentions for the republic, so we can’t help them. Those who want to help them, they must go and take the food down there. They will come out, we’ll arrest them.”

In the deepest irony (if our government did irony), Ntshavheni herself now faces allegations of fraud. No doubt our inert President will find a way of delaying any decision on whether she should remain in the Cabinet. Thembi Simelane, the former justice and constitutional development minister facing allegations of corruption linked to the VBS banking scandal was, after all, merely reshuffled.  

Daily horrors


Ours is a deeply uncaring state. How else do we describe the daily horrors the poor and marginalised have to endure, whether standing in endless queues while trying to extract something administrative from the state, or facing the indignity of a lack of sanitation while rubbish piles up around informal settlements, let alone the indignity of a lack of decent work. 

The palpable violence of poverty and exclusion is experienced by our country’s most vulnerable citizens as part of the quotidian. There are countless incidents, but a few particularly egregious ones stand out.

The 2014 death of five-year-old Michael Komape who fell into a pit latrine at school and drowned, and the Life Esidimeni tragedy, which saw more than 100 people die after the Gauteng Health Department moved them from existing care facilities to others run by NGOs, is a brutal example of the neglect of the Zuma years, alongside the Marikana massacre of mineworkers by police in 2012. (Some are already calling Stilfontein another Marikana. Our current President should understand this better than most.)

As Michael’s father, James Komape, said in his testimony to the Limpopo Division of the High Court in the civil matter: ‘They (the state) should have helped. My son was going to school. I did not send him to die.’

Where was the political leadership? Where was the politicians’ shame at what had happened and where was their desire to make amends?  

Similarly, the Life Esidimeni tragedy was another shocking manifestation of a callous state. The facts are well known to us.

The stories are heart-wrenching. Some patients were loaded on to the backs of open vans as they were being transferred to the new facilities that were ill-equipped to deal with the patients assigned to them.

Arrogant and unmoored


The Komape and Life Esidimeni cases show a state that has become so arrogant, so unmoored from its principles, that it is prepared to deny the most vulnerable in our society their basic rights. This form of violence — there is no other word for it — against the poor creates even greater marginalisation and exclusion from the rest of society for mostly black South Africans.

And now, Stilfontein — the target of much hate being spewed at these illegal miners, mostly foreigners. Those fortunate enough to have been rescued appeared dead-eyed and gaunt. Their rescue was delayed by government inaction and indifference. As usual, civil society and our courts showed us where our conscience should be. The police have now denied detonating explosives in the mine shaft while miners were trapped in the shaft. Who, if anyone, will be held to account for this disaster? 

Read more: ‘Misinformation and lies’ — police deny detonating explosives in Stilfontein mine shaft

There has been no President to provide perspective and compassion where a vacuum of both exists. 

Phendukani Silwani died after a brush with our healthcare system — inadequate and often callous if one is poor. While many doctors bravely manage to work within a broken system — and we owe them a debt of gratitude for not giving up — healthcare is often a lottery for the poor, especially in rural areas.

Karen Press in her beautiful poem, For Silwani, reminds us of the dreams that come in childhood, the joys which are mostly unfulfilled when one is poor and no one cares and when one’s parents do not have the voice and agency that comes so easily and so effortlessly to the middle class.

An extract from that poem always hits to the core and is worth a moment of reflection:

Let Phendukani Silwani stand for all Departments of Health, all out-patient queues and closed wards and unbought drugs and spent doctors.
Let Phendukani Silwani stand for all Departments of Education, all unbuilt schools and untrained teachers and stolen food and books bearing false witness.
Let Phendukani Silwani stand for all Departments of Housing, all cracked walls and broken pipes and poisoned streets and lost gardens.
Let Phendukani Silwani stand for all parents with emptied arms and bent heads whose tears hang like silver nooses in the air.
Let him stand for all children, all parcels of carbon and light who come only once, and vanish forever.
Let Phendukani Silwani stand for himself only, only he existed in his small body, only he was there, looking out at us, at the tall grass that hid him, at the unreachable blue sky.
Thank you for the paracetamol.
Thank you for the social grant.

DM

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