Government to finalise Marikana settlements by end of August

The office of the solicitor-general announced on Wednesday that it would finalise outstanding claims of compensation of mine workers that were affected by the Marikana massacre by the end of August.

It has been a decade since the miners’ protest broke out at Lonmin’s platinum mine in Rustenburg, where 34 miners were shot and killed by police on 16 August 2012 and 48 miners were either unlawfully arrested or injured.

According to media reports, before the massacre, 10 people, including police and mine security guards, had also been killed as tensions flared up between the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu).

READ: State crunches numbers of Marikana claims worth almost R70m

Since then, the state has been embroiled in settlement battles and has paid out at least R75 million to the families of the deceased.

Fhedzisani Pandelani, the solicitor-general in the justice department, said in a briefing on Wednesday in Tshwane that he had instructed the state attorney’s office to finalise the remaining claims, adding that the government hoped to finalise the matter by the end of the month.

“Representatives of the state and representatives of the claimants are as we speak right now in court trying to reach some sort of settlement or alternatively indicating to the deputy judge president that there is no agreement in which case the matter will then be allocated to a judge.”

“I can also give the assurance that to the extent that is possible, we could in fact be in a position to resolve all of those matters within this month,” he said.

He also added that there was no dispute about the causation and merits before court and that all 48 cases were eligible for some sort of settlement.

Pandelani also emphasised that it was regrettable that the matter was taking so much time to finalise.