An inquiry commissioned by the state established the company did not provide "sufficient safeguards and measures to ensure the safety of its employees" and that its "failure to deliver on its housing obligations created an environment conducive to the creation of tension". Furthermore, it "did not use its best endeavours to resolve a dispute", and had urged the state to respond to the protests as a criminal issue, rather than a labour issue. The company aggressively lobbied the state to, in the words of its CEO, "bring the full might of the state to bear on the situation". The current president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa—then board member and shareholder at Lonmin—pressed for "concomitant action" against the "criminal" protesters.

The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) establish that companies, as part of their responsibility to respect human rights, should provide for or cooperate in the remediation of adverse impacts which they have caused or contributed to. Since 2012, Lonmin and its successor Sibanye-Stillwater have undertaken various initiatives to support the families of the 44 deceased. These initiatives included the provision of houses for widows, the establishment of a trust fund to support the education of orphaned children, and the provision of employment to relatives of those killed. The company also engaged in annual commemorations and constructed a memorial wall within company facilities bearing the names of the 44 victims.

Although these initiatives have provided some relief to victims, they have resulted in disputes, as well as re-victimisation for some. Promised houses were systematically delayed; policy to assign them was unclear, and many were built in places where families did not want to live. Others insisted the provision of employment was not acceptable as "even the work they gave us, we use our strength". The "Wall of Remembrance" was also controversial due to its form and location in an area where victims and their families could not freely access

This Op-Ed was originally published by Business & Human Rights Resource Centre.

Although "justice" is a commonly understood term, climate justice is a new concept that has become a familiar rallying cry among environmentalists globally. The African Union Transitional Justice Policy defines justice as the provision of judicial and non-judicial measures that not only ensure accountability of perpetrators of violations, but also redress to individuals and communities who suffered violations.

Within the context of climate change, justice refers to the ethical and human rights issues that occur because of climate change. Inherent in the concept of climate justice is the recognition that those least responsible for climate change experience the greatest negative impacts.

Various studies have shown that lower-income countries are likely to have a much lower carbon footprint than the wealthier ones. Their contribution to the carbon pollution that is driving the climate crisis is small, and yet they are disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of an increasingly unstable climate. It is this unfair situation that demands we bring climate justice to the forefront and to the top of the climate agenda.

On Earth Day in April, five African presidents and 35 other world leaders joined a climate summit convened by US President Joe Biden to discuss efforts towards global climate change. Africa's participation in the summit reflected the continent's indispensable role in the world's efforts to address the impacts of climate change. Even though the region's contributions to global greenhouse emissions are small, African countries are the most vulnerable to and least prepared for the extreme weather patterns brought on by a warming climate.

On the matter of climate justice, this summit would have been a great platform for African leaders to go beyond their context-specific climate change ambitions and engage at length about adaptation and be unequivocal about the justice part of it. Yet even President Cyril Ramaphosa — who would have been a great representative for the southern Africa region — failed to table the matter at the summit.

Currently, southern Africa is one of the most water-scarce regions in the world. Various weather studies have shown that increases in the global temperature are likely to disrupt already temperamental rainfall patterns. In the past few years, Cape Town nearly succumbed to its worst drought in more than a century. The Nelson Mandela Bay municipality is also close to limiting access to piped water. Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe have all recently experienced periods of prolonged drought, while Mozambique and the western regions of Zimbabwe have been devastated by tropical cyclones, exacerbated by warmer ocean waters on Africa's east coast.

The ongoing issue in Kavango East in Namibia is one stark example where — on the borders of Angola and Botswana — a Canadian oil company named Recon Africa has secured the rights to explore what it believes could be the next, and perhaps even the last — giant onshore oil find. Although this fossil fuel extraction will bring vast wealth to a few, it will further impoverish northern Namibia's people, exacerbate climate change and destroy their traditional way of life.

Given the reliance of the majority of our populations on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, livestock management and fishing, the potential impacts of these issues and unpredictable climate changes could be catastrophic for the people of southern Africa as they have already affected food prices and accessibility. Recent findings from the World Food Programme estimate 45 million people in southern Africa are food insecure, with the number without access to adequate, affordable and nutritious food up 10% from 2020, which is a great cause for concern.

Even though climate adaptation and resilience-building measures will be different across the region, the shared objective should be that these measures must all serve the interests of the most vulnerable. Now is the time for our leaders to take necessary actions towards climate justice and intersectional environmentalism and further advocate for both the protection of people and the planet by acknowledging that the injustices happening to marginalised communities and the Earth are interconnected.

Unlike their counterparts at the University of Cape Town, there has been no amnesty or transitional justice process to mediate the urgency of their struggle – and more recently the CCMA has sided with Securitas in its decision to fire these workers. For many of them, unemployment continues to be a stark reality and any struggle for greater job security and improved wages was stripped away through outsourcing.

This reality is one facing numerous workers across South Africa, where informal work contracts and increasing precariousness from VAT hikes, levies and inflation make the new minimum wage increase to R20 per hour an insult in the workers' struggle for survival.

Workers are told to be grateful for jobs in the face of great unemployment, but this trope does not recognise how the little workers earn is extended to families across the country. Similarly, there is little acknowledgement of the grave inequalities that exist with CEOs making millions of rands such as at Steinhoff – often unregulated and undertaxed – and who are themselves a large part of the problem of worker precariousness.

Since its inception in post-apartheid public discourse, the labour struggle has been framed by some as one linked to efficiency – a noble concept used to assign the value of work, sometimes hidden behind constructs of power, elitism and classism. The value of the white-collar CEO is signalled by (usually) his years of experience, his MBA degree from a leading institution and his business savvy measured by profits.

Masked within the covert judgements, however, is a particular brand of patriarchal heteronormativity, including a healthy dosage of privilege: that the definition of efficiency is merited purely by the economic output at lower monetary cost, and thus any increase in minimum wage must take into consideration the societal costs to economic development. However, investigations into the relative economic efficiency of CEOs earning amounts hundreds of times higher than those of their lowest earning employees, do not consider the detriment to broader society of such economic inequalities.

Perusing the trenches of website comments sections, and social media reveals the debate surrounding the new minimum wage proposals are framed purely in terms of the efficiency of workers – as if this does not exist within an ecosystem of privilege within the global political economy.

During the negotiations to end apartheid and transition into a democratic dispensation, cooperative ventures (such as the National Economic and Development Council) were forged by the ANC to ensure collaboration between government, labour and business in the realisation of economic growth. As time has passed, these gains have accrued mostly to business and politicians – as the line between the two has blurred – with bodies like NEDLAC hamstrung to make little headway in the interests of the mostly black working class in South Africa.

The challenge of change continues not only because the interests of black workers are not carried by their corollaries in the upper echelons of government, but also because the ownership profile listed on the JSE remains understudied and largely untransformed. Furthermore, black women are more likely to be unemployed or employed in the informal economy to this day.

The challenge is not just racial diversity, but also gender diversity – both of which require a commitment to rethinking the function of economic efficiency. As the world reels in anger at the revelation that 1 percent of its population controls half of its wealth, there is an opportunity for South Africans to reimagine economic efficiency through new parameters that may meaningfully address our own historical legacies of resourcing elite wealth with the poverty of the masses.

One such way to do this is to move public discourse away from analysing the profit-driven bottom line as the only indicator of success for big corporates. Internal income equity and social investments that address structural challenges in collaboration with civil society are some other measures that should determine efficiency. A progressive tax regime, including meaningful amendments to Capital Gains Tax and Corporate taxes, along with legislation that regulates the maximum earnings of CEOs also present opportunities to indicate a policy commitment to overall societal efficiency that views corporates as part of an ecosystem.

Unfortunately, regulation of the minimum wage that does not take into consideration its very real structural impacts on working class and unemployed families will ultimately make little difference in the bold goals to end poverty and inequality as articulated in the National Development Plan. One challenge of the minimum wage to policymakers is not only output efficiency and competitiveness, it is also one of commitment to make tangible the South African welfare state.

Taken in isolation, the truth is that a single African country, even with an economy as relatively big as South Africa's, will have limited scope for large taxation increases on corporates that can easily move capital across borders and syphon earnings to ill-regulated havens within seconds.

However, the African Free Trade Agreement offers prospects for regional collaboration that may give more power to African states to shape the agenda for taxation – including for South African companies that have since moved to be listed overseas.

The first step to making meaningful the Trade Agreement, I would argue, is an outright commitment on the part of policymakers for a more comprehensive view of efficiency – that prioritises the struggle of black female workers in the continent and delegitimises the assumption that the costs of structural inequality, fuelled by the current capitalist organisation of the economy, are relatively low.

Rather, we see in the workers struggle for living wages and their mobilisation for equitable distributions of the gains made off their bodies, a great cost to society: of lives (like those lost in Marikana), upward mobility (like those lost for outsourced workers in universities), and of human dignity for those who rise earlier than others to travel the greatest distance to be paid the least.

This is the greatest cost of such a framing of efficiency: it is the beating of structural violence on those expected to pull up their bootstraps and work in a system that promises equal opportunities, but with higher hurdles for those who need the jump the most.

This opinion piece was originally published by Huffington Post.