'He just wanted to work'

2005-08-08 09:35

This week 48-year-old Lucas Monahane, a bespectacled and soft-spoken man, set about doing what he always did every waking day: he bade his wife and children fond farewells, and went to his job at the Tshwane Metro Council where he was employed as a driver collecting the city's refuse.

It was perhaps not the greatest job in the world, but Monahane did it diligently and faithfully because he was aware it was the best and only way he could put food on his family's table, and pay school fees and buy school uniforms for his children.

Monahane's wife is not employed.

When Monahane set out to work this week, he was quite aware there was a wage strike going ahead and his colleagues expected every council employee - unionist or not - to down tools and heed the union's demand on workers to refuse to do their jobs.

Monahane was not one of those who wanted to take part in the strike; he wanted to work, in part because, as we have already noted, he was the family's sole provider.

But his noble intentions were not to be: Monahane and 10 of his non-striking colleagues were ambushed on the way during their rounds, collected in two pick-up vans, and driven to a plot on council-owned land, where they were severely tortured.

The hapless men were savaged with pangas and clubbed with knobkerries and batons; Monahane, unable to stand the blows any longer, attempted to flee.

His tormentors, having tasted blood, were not to be denied their savage pleasure: the severely wounded man, his life-giving blood gushing out through his wounds, was cut down in his desperate flight.

His whimpering pleas and moans for mercy only seemed to harden the resolve of his attacking colleagues, who chopped him down with their pangas and bashed his brains in with their knobkerries.

The end of the blood-fest

The blood-fest mercifully ended when Monahane died of serious injuries, and his "fortunate" ten colleagues who lived to witness the butchery of their friend were allegedly warned sternly that, unless they "co-operated" by joining the strike, worse would befall them - their families would be sought out and killed, and their homes were all going to be torched.

As I write this piece, I am feeling very weary and sad. Weary because, it seems to me, we will never learn from the disasters of our activities some 20 years ago.

And I am sad because an honest man has been needlessly murdered, and his wife and children robbed of him forever.

Samwu 'has no right'

If the allegations are proved to be correct, I am angry, dammit, very angry because the SA Municipal Workers' Union (Samwu) and, indeed, everyone else, has no right, whatever their cause, to behave in this despicable and utterly barbaric and savage manner.

I do not care anymore to know what grievances Samwu is highlighting; the butchers have lost my respect forever, and the respect of many decent people across the length and breadth of this country.

It is a terrible indictment on Cosatu and its leaders, Zweli Vavi, Willie Madisha and Gwede Mantashe, that an affiliate union of their federation allegedly still believes in the thoroughly discredited democracy of the knobkerrie.

Will it be asking too much to demand that Cosatu expel Samwu from the federation until it actively identifies the alleged murderers in its ranks, and helps to get them successfully arrested and punished by the courts?

Otherwise the blood of Lucas Monahane will forever drip from the federation's hands, and cry out for retribution.

Shall we ever learn?

But shall we ever learn? I remember March 1984 very vividly. I was in Uitenhage on assignment, and witnessed the bloody mob murders of KwaNobuhle councillor Thamsanqa Kinikini, his eldest son Silumko and two cousins, and 13-year-old son Luvuyo.

The problem with a mob is its psychology: it just takes one loudmouth, however insane, to shout obscenities and untruths to the incensed crowd about a marked person, and there will be no questions asked but only untold cruelty and mindless savagery visited upon the wretch.

And then we turn around and complain very loudly when certain sections of our country shun us and condemn us for such behaviour!

In truth, my broer, it is not us they shun but rather our primitive methods of the Stone Age to settle differences.

As for Samwu and this type of "political education" it believes it will teach dissenters, there is this to ponder: however noble the cause, it is barbaric actions such as meted out to Lucas Monahane and his recalcitrant 10 colleagues that sully and defeat the very ends the strike wishes to achieve.

- Sunday Sun