Marikana marks 14 years with renewed calls for a memorial day

South African unions and political parties marked the fourteenth anniversary of the Marikana shootings on 16 August 2026 with renewed calls for accountability and a permanent day of remembrance. On 16 August 2012, police opened fire on striking platinum mineworkers at the Lonmin-operated mine near Rustenburg, killing 34 people in the single deadliest use of force by South African security forces since the end of apartheid.

Build One South Africa (BOSA) spokesperson Graham Charters used the anniversary to urge President Cyril Ramaphosa to formally declare 16 August a national Marikana Memorial Day. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), rival unions that both organise in the platinum belt, joined the MK Party in renewing calls for justice and accountability, and for a fresh national conversation on mineworkers' wages, working conditions and the future of the sector.

Unresolved closure, fourteen years on

Fourteen years after the shootings, families of those killed remain, in the words of commemoration organisers, "without full closure." No police officer has been criminally convicted over the killings, despite the findings of the 2015 Farlam Commission of Inquiry that both police and Lonmin bore some responsibility for the conditions that led to the violence. Civil claims for damages brought by survivors and victims' families against the state have proceeded slowly through the courts in the years since.

A platinum sector transformed, a legacy unresolved

The platinum sector at the centre of the Marikana tragedy has changed considerably since 2012: Lonmin no longer exists as an independent company, having been absorbed into Sibanye-Stillwater in 2019, and the industry has since concluded a series of multi-year wage agreements intended to avoid the kind of prolonged, violent strike that preceded the shootings. Even so, campaigners argue that the underlying issues that drove the 2012 strike, migrant labour conditions, living wages and trust between workers, unions and mine management, remain incompletely addressed.

Why the anniversary still matters

Marikana remains the reference point against which South Africa measures the risk of labour conflict turning violent in the mining sector. Each anniversary tends to reignite debate over compensation, policing of industrial action, and the pace of transformation in an industry still recovering from the reputational damage of 2012, a debate that continues to shape how companies and unions approach wage negotiations across the platinum belt today.

Sources

• Eyewitness News: Marikana massacre: unions and political parties call for accountability, 14 years on, 16 Aug 2026

Photo: The former Lonmin platinum mine at Marikana, North West province, site of the 2012 shootings. JMK, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.