I just recently watched some of the Marikana report that president Jacob Zuma delivered at the end of last week. In my humble opinion this represents yet another instance of one of the core failings within South African politics, a lack of accountability.
Essentially what the report boiled down to was shared blame but no accountability. President Zuma systematically identified the failings of each party involved and said something about what they should have done differently. Each party was to share in their portion of the responsibility but crucially, absolutely no one was held accountable for the massacre.
This does not seem appropriate. Surely if there is blame to be found, disciplinary action must be taken in fair measure. It is not enough to expose faults, we have to impose just and appropriate remedial action to those who are guilty. If the fault was an action of blatant and deliberate malevolence for the sake of self-gain then the guilty party must be punished in whatever manner is appropriate for the transgression. It just seems clearly false to think that there was absolutely no one involved in the Marikana massacre that is guilty of malevolent action in the interest of self-gain.
This lack of accountability is not an new phenomenon within South African politics. It seems to be a depressingly common to hear about corruption charges which are going to be the subject of internal investigations, only to be buried and forgotten about. We all surely recognise that no problem will ever be fixed unless you address it with the appropriate medicine. In this case the appropriate medicine is accountability and it is not being administered.
I am however not optimistic about the possibility of introducing accountability into South African politics. If the one at the top will not hold anyone accountable then you are in a difficult position. We can however learn from the failings of our politicians and our government.
A lack of accountability is something that damages a large percentage of our organisations and businesses. This is because accountability is actually something 
that is pretty hard to do. It is much easier to address a performance issue by sending the person to training or even just to ignore it. What accountability in fact requires from us is courage. We need to have the capacity to step up and confront when someone has acted inappropriately.
It also requires the ability to properly recognise and understand the precise nature of the transgression. Sometimes the person at fault really did lack the skills he/she required. In such a case holding them accountable is not appropriate, instead you should, in such instances, send the person for further training.
Accountability also requires more than ability to be courageous. Sometimes it requires the ability to be generous. Holding people accountable is as much a matter of recognising and rewarding good performance as it is about recognising and punishing poor performance and malevolence.
Nevertheless we as a society we need to start practicing accountability and pray that we become good at it. We see a lack of accountability manifest everywhere, from our government to our organisations, and from our schools and homes through to our prison systems which are now called correctional facilities. There is absolutely a place for justice in any society and the watchword for justice must be “accountability”.