Company grievance mechanism is failing communities

Community Alerts/Mathapelo Thobejane/Limpopo-Sekhukhune/17/04/18

 

After a year and half of engagement with the mine we are back to zero. The communities where happy and thinking that the mine will resolve their issues after engagement and all the promises the mine made to livestock owners yesterday 16/04/2018 the mine denied the promises and says they are now looking for laboratory test results of the dead cattle and they will compensate people if they have those results.

You can ask yourself how livestock owners will get results of livestock that died from 2006 until now. They claim that those who were paid by the mine had laboratory test results and when we ask for the results there are nowhere to be found. They further said that the mine compensated some just to show good citizenship.

 

If so why the mine did not take all the livestock that died in their stream to laboratory?

Why didn’t the mine pay others to show their good citizenship?

There’s no answer and still they requested to meet the organization and different mine department to attend the next meeting.

Question is.

We gave them about 6 months to gather all relevant information on the cases dead cattle in their stream but yesterday the answer was no one had the Social Performance manager report.

So now we still need to meet them while on the other hand knowing that they have nothing to share with the team.

We agreed to give them 1 last meeting that will be at the mine premises on 26/04/2018

with all the department that plays a role in the process of compensation, and the task team that has been formed by livestock owners, SEJN, BMF representative, DWS and department of Agriculture in attendance. We agreed this will be the last meeting because the mine has failed us as communities and their Company Grievance Mechanism is not working. By Mmathapelo Thobejane