Business Day
*Open veld turned into shacks and dumps* /Platinum riches elude desperate communities/ *Carol Paton, Business Day, Johannesburg, 28 August 2012*"THIS place is messed up," says BP Madikizela, a contract worker on Lonmin's Marikana mine, describing the Nkaneng informal settlement where he lives.
His shack is one of the thousands on the flat and dusty expanse of land amid the company's sprawling mining operations.
Large overhead power lines cut across the sky, down below is a network of rutted, self-made roads joining the unplanned mass of shacks, the town and the shafts and other mine plants and buildings.
Most striking about Nkaneng is its sprawling refuse dump that lies on open land between the formal town and the Wonderkop stadium, only a few paces from the nearest households.
Driving past this area last Thursday on his way to the memorial service for the slain miners, Bishop Jo Seoka, the Anglican bishop of Pretoria, was appalled to see a young child picking through the rubbish for something to eat, alongside the foraging dogs that roam the settlement.
In Nkaneng there is no refuse collection, no lighting or electricity and no toilets. People relieve themselves in nearby bushes. Water, according to residents, is provided by Lonmin.
Marikana is part of the Rustenburg municipality.It was, according to economics consultancy IHS Global Insight, the second-fastest growing area in South Africa in 2010, with a gross domestic product growth rate of 3.9% compared with the national average of 2.8%.
The area is home to several platinum mining operations, two of which --- Impala Platinum and Anglo American Platinum --- are the biggest in the world.
The scale of these operations has to be seen to be believed. At Rustenburg, Impala alone employs 30,000 people.
But little of this wealth has found its way into communities such as Nkaneng, just one of several settlements in the Rustenburg area.
Numerous informal settlements have sprung up amid the mine operations.What 10 years ago was perhaps open veld is now a chaotic scene of people, taxis, enormous trucks, buses and train lines.
Unlike gold mines, where mining operations are fenced off from humans, the platinum fields are crisscrossed by public roads streaming with people --- workers on their way to and from work, often walking in the dark, and children on their way to school.
By comparison, the mine hostels, which are now mostly converted into singles quarters or family units, are spic and span and a model of good order.
But, since mines began to pay generous living-out allowances, perhaps believing themselves exonerated from social responsibility by them, most employees have chosen to live out.
At Lonmin, for example, the living-out allowance is R1,850 a month, 30% of the basic wage.
The Rustenburg municipality has not been capable of meeting the developmental demands that growth has brought it.
In the Bojanala district, which includes Rustenburg and four other local municipalities in the north-eastern corner of North West, only 10% of households receive a "basic level" of service.
Basic services include a small amount of electricity, a public standpipe within 200m and a ventilated improved pit latrine for sanitation. All municipalities are expected to deliver services that reach at least this standard.
In 2010-11 the Treasury assisted the Bojanala district council to draw up a new integrated development plan. The Treasury said the original plan had no strategy to deliver housing and that "there was limited capacity" to support housing delivery.
The plan says that 41% of people in the Rustenburg area live in informal dwellings.
When the Bench Marks Foundation, a lobby group on corporate social responsibility, visited the formal township areas of Marikana earlier this year where RDP houses had been built, it found that sewerage and drainage systems were broken down and spilling directly into the river at three different points.
Residents told the Bench Marks researchers that they had been reporting the matter to Lonmin and the municipality for the past five years, with no action from either.
Population pressures, due to constant migration, are continually increasing. In 2007, according to a government survey, the population of Bojanala was 1.28-million people with nearly 40% of them 19 years old or younger.
This means that a significant number of young people will be entering the labour market over the next few years and will be seeking employment opportunities, the foundation says. Yet few locals are actually employed on the mines.
Despite its growth rate and the claims by some mines that they do give locals preference for employment, the vast majority of those employed are migrants.
As many as half of the mines' employees are actually employed by subcontractors, which may partly explain the claim by mines that when it comes to their own workforce they do employ locals.
Using figures from the Treasury, the foundation states that unemployment among those between 20 and 29 years old is 44%, and for those from 30-39 years it is 27.5%.
The educational profile of the workforce is shockingly low. At Impala Platinum, for instance, only 57% of the workforce is literate.
Apart from the stark inability of local government to meet basic needs due to weak capacity, the local government in North West is highly unstable and plagued with factionalism.
Most municipalities, including Rustenburg, are controlled by the dominant faction in the African National Congress (ANC), which calls itself the Non-Conformist League.
The group is led by provincial ANC chairman Supra Mahumapelo and is often at odds with regional executive committees.
The result is enormous tension over political positions and business opportunities associated with government tenders.
The province is littered with failed or substandard housing projects and allegations of corruption among the factions are rife.
Political instability and assassinations have begun to characterise North West politics.
Matthew Wolmarans, the former mayor of Rustenburg, was last month found guilty of murder after he contracted his bodyguard to kill a councillor who had sought to blow the whistle on corruption in which he was implicated.
Following his conviction, supporters of the factions confronted one another outside the court, with Wolmarans' supporters trashing the streets in anger.
Among the squalid conditions and equally squalid politics, many have profited. On the margins of Marikana and in downtown Rustenburg, Chinese shops sell cheap clothing and shoes, and Bangladeshis and Pakistanis have established numerous shops selling cellphone parts and accessories.
Omashonisas --- money lenders who charge exorbitant interest rates --- and vendors selling funeral policies are plentiful and obviously doing well out of the district's mini-boom.
Sadly, many are part of the overall problem that has caused such anger among mineworkers over their earnings.
Nono Mkhize, a rock driller from Bizana, has been on strike since last week. Mr Mkhize says that he takes home R4,000 a month, which is not nearly enough for himself and the 12 people he supports.
But like all the other rock drillers, Mr Mkhize's basic wage is actually R5,405. He also gets the living-out allowance of R1,850, which he does not consider to be part of his basic salary. Several deductions are made from his basic wage, including his provident fund contribution, his National Union of Mineworkers membership fee and a private funeral policy to which he is signed up.
After that, he says, he is left with R4,000.That, however, is not the end of it. He also pays R1,000 a month towards his loan with an omashonisa, which he took out to build a home back in Bizana in the Eastern Cape. So Mr Mkhize --- after performing one of the hardest and dangerous jobs in the world --- is left with very little disposable income at the end of every month.
This is despite the fact that it costs Lonmin R9,812 a month to employ Mr Mkhize once his allowance and benefits are all totted up.
But due to his personal circumstances and the unpleasant conditions that make life very difficult for most households in Rustenburg, the R9,812 that others might consider a reasonable wage, is for Mr Mkhize just a pittance.
*From: http://www.bdlive.co.za/business/mining/2012/08/28/news-analysis-platinum-riches-elude-desperate-communities-in-marikanas-shadow*
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