The Mining Charter: citizens or subjects?
Part of the failure of the mining regime is that citizens guaranteed certain rights in the Constitution are reduced to subjects who are denied agency
On February 19, a seminal case is being heard in the High Court in Pretoria, which once again sees the poor and marginalised coming up against the rich and powerful in the Mining Charter issue. This battle between the rich and the hungry, while unique in its own ways, and couched as it is in legalistic and broad liberal principles, is nonetheless, at its core, the continuation of the centuries old struggle of indigenous communities for justice. While one could easily be fooled by the media’s single-minded focus on the Chamber of Mines and the interest of Big Business in the Mining Charter case, a closer look will reveal that the court has sanctioned the inclusion of cases brought by mining-affected communities under the leadership of Mining Affected Communities United in Action (Macua). The communities claim that their exclusion from policy and legislative processes serves only to deny them their Constitutional rights to participate in matters that affect them, and to further deepen...
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