Anti-apartheid veteran and Goldfields chairperson Dr Mamphela Ramphele criticised the mining sector for not transforming and using nineteenth-century business models in the twenty-first century during an address on the ‘Marikana fallout’ at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, in November 2012.

She said the sector was paying little attention to investments in human social capital, and that the trade unions, which were the most radical in the apartheid era, had become part of the establishment through political alliances.

This establishment has led to little attention being paid to workers as people with rights, instead seeing them as the necessary numbers to sustain the alliance in power, the media recently reported.

“So it is not surprising that workers went up in arms … the virus of Marikana is spreading and it’s knocking at the door of the agricultural sector and who knows what next?” she said.

“Marikana is a reminder of the unfinished business of our transformation from an authoritarian government to a democratic government . . . ours was a negotiated settlement . . . and so the elite pact excluded socioeconomic restructuring and funda- mental transformation of our socioeconomic reality . . . the private sector literally and figuratively got away with murder,” Ramphele said.

She added that the African National Congress treated voters like children. “Come election time, it will appeal to you to vote for the party of Mandela, [it will] appeal to you to vote for the only liberation movement [and] appeal to you not to vote for the Democratic Alliance because they will take you back to apartheid.”

Ramphele will deliver a keynote address on mining and sustainable development at the 2013 Investing in African Mining Indaba, which will take place at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from February 4 to 7.