Africa-Press – Botswana. Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Labour and Home Affairs, Mr Jimmy Opelo says from December 2022 to date, R55 million equivalent to P41.2 million has been disbursed to compensate people who were employed in the South African mines.
Addressing the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee in Gaborone on Wednesday, Mr Opelo said they had met with their South African counterparts and discussed the matter of former miners. Mr Opelo said they had engaged at the level of permanent secretaries and ministerial levels.
“I have personally with my team visited the PS for health and PS for Labour in the Republic of South Africa and some representatives of the Ministry of Health at the PS level and at the lower level of the PS to talk about this issue,” he said.
Mr Opelo said both governments had engaged in an intensive and amicable way to an extent that they had worked out the numbers which had proven to change overtime as while they did assessment, the people they did not talk about came up.
He also said there were a couple of ways the former miners were categorised as some had issues of occupational health and some sustained injuries and some had annuity that they the miners were not aware of when they retired from work.
He further said they had teams working with social workers and traditional leaders through which kgotla meetings were held across the country.
Mr Opelo said they worked with families who brought evidence that their kin had worked in the mines since miners were aged, some had died and any form of money, injury and annuity was paid.
Therefore, he said, the two governments had agreed that a trust should monitor the arrangement as government representatives from both countries met regularly.
He said they met each time as new evidence was presented with 621 former miners yet numbers kept going up.
“As I speak to you now, they are in Palapye,” he said.
He said they started paying former miners pensions late though those responsible for occupational health hastened to draft compensation Memorandum of Understanding was still pending.
PS said while they were engaged in bilateral talks with the South African government, there were fraudsters who collected P300 from each ex-miner promising to collect their benefits from South Africa.
He said the fraudsters did not have any ties with the compensation bodies nor did they know them, therefore were scammers because even if they knew where to go, they would not be given any money as they did not know who had the money.
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