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News24 reports that President Cyril Ramaphosa will have to answer to accusations he unlawfully pressurised police top brass to take action against Marikana miners, but a judge has found there was no case to show he pushed for their murders.
Advocate Dali Mpofu SC, representing 349 miners who survived the police's fatal shooting of 34 of their colleagues on 16 August 2012, had argued last week in the South Gauteng High Court that, by proposing concomitant action against striking miners, Ramaphosa had, in fact, been proposing they be murdered. At the time of the massacre, Ramaphosa had been serving as a director of Lonmin (now Sibanye-Stillwater). In a ruling which evaluated both Ramaphosa’s and Sibanye's multiple exceptions to the allegations being levelled against them, Judge Fritz van Oosten disagreed with Mpofu's assessment of Ramaphosa as having had murderous intent towards the miners and dismissed that claim as far-fetched. "The argument assumes, without proffering the grounds in support thereof, that the proposal was made that the workers be murdered," he said after extensively detailing the email exchanges Mpofu had relied on to make his claims against Ramaphosa. "Having carefully read and considered the email communications, I have not been able to find any support for the inference that the murder of the workers was intended or foreseen," Van Oosten found. However, he dismissed Ramaphosa's argument the miners had failed to make a case that his direct interventions and the pressure he placed on police top brass might have led to the Marikana massacre. "As counsel for the plaintiffs was at pains to emphasise, whether the plaintiffs will be able to prove those allegations at the trial is not relevant for the present purposes. I am in agreement with counsel for the plaintiffs that the allegations, as they stand, do satisfy the test for factual causation," the judge stated.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Karyn Maughan at News24 (subscriber access only)
- Read too, Ramaphosa denies he is liable for damages to injured mineworkers, at Moneyweb
Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page