For hundreds of families in the Eastern Cape, long-overdue relief has finally arrived. The Department of Employment and Labour has paid out more than R1.2 million in benefits to former mineworkers and their dependants during a week-long outreach programme in Port St Johns, in the OR Tambo District.
The Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) paid a total of R1 278 846.28 to 277 clients – money that, in many cases, was owed for years to men who spent their working lives underground, and to the families who supported them.
Project Thubalethu: services on wheels
The outreach formed part of Project Thubalethu, an initiative dedicated to tracing unclaimed and unpaid social benefits owed to former mineworkers. It was delivered in partnership with the UIF, the Compensation Fund, the Eastern Cape Provincial Government and the Port St Johns Municipality.
The department’s Acting Director-General, Jacky Molisane, said the programme addresses the legacy of labour migration, noting that South Africa’s mining industry historically recruited workers from rural areas, particularly the Eastern Cape.
“Project Thubalethu is an initiative to roll out services-on-wheels by relevant stakeholders and departments for ex-mineworkers in the Eastern Cape to address unclaimed and unpaid social protection benefits and occupational disease and injury claims due to them,” Molisane said.
Where beneficiaries have passed away, the benefits now pass to their dependants. As the department put it, the payments offer “a measure of relief to households that carried the weight of illness, injury or loss without the support that was due to them all along”.
Billions more waiting to be claimed
The Commissioner for Occupational Diseases, Barry Kistnasamy, said an estimated R18 million in benefits remains unclaimed by former mineworkers in the Port St Johns area alone, while nationally an estimated R10 billion is still waiting to reach ex-mineworkers and their dependants.
Kistnasamy said bringing services directly to the communities where former mineworkers live is the most effective way of ensuring beneficiaries receive the money owed to them – a model Project Thubalethu is proving in practice.
More than just payouts
The Port St Johns outreach delivered far more than cheques. In addition to the benefit payments, 319 former mineworkers were assisted with work-related injury claims, while more than 400 work seekers were registered on the Employment Services of South Africa (ESSA) database and received employment counselling.
Eastern Cape Premier Oscar Mabuyane noted that the province is home to about 370 000 former mineworkers who spent years working underground. Integrated outreach programmes like Project Thubalethu, he said, help ensure that beneficiaries and their dependants finally receive the benefits owed to them.
It is government at its best: not waiting for people to navigate the system, but taking the system to the people – and putting money that was always theirs back into the hands of families who need it most. The full story is available from SAnews.
Photo: commons.wikimedia.org
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