Barberton - Inaccurate media reports, broken promises and a thick cloud of uncertainty. These are at the heart of the displeasure expressed by mothers of the three mineworkers trapped in a container at a Barberton mine.
Sunday will mark a year since Yvonne Mnisi, Pretty Nkambule and Solomon Nyerende - were swallowed by the ground on the morning of February 5 when a lamp room container they were working in fell into a sinkhole created by a collapsed crown pillar at the mine.
On that fateful morning, Vantage Goldfields said about 90 employees were trapped underground after the collapse at the main entrance to the mine at about 8am.
The company, which has since brought Lily Mine under business administration, then confirmed that 87 underground workers had been safely evacuated and brought to the surface, but the three surface workers remained unaccounted for.
After many attempts to recover the container underground, operations at Lily Mine remain suspended to this day because the ground was deemed “unstable” and lack of funding to drill a second decline also sealed the fate of the three workers.
Yvonne’s mother, Ruth, was reluctant to speak about the external challenges that had arisen since the incident, saying they had been hounded by reporters who had persistently misrepresented their strife.
The other mothers opted not to speak, lest they be misquoted again, they claimed.
“We don’t want to be asked how we are feeling, of course we are not fine. Of course we’ve been affected. But we’re not hurt like we were before, now we just want our children out of that hole.
“We want to see them start working on digging them out. We are tired of lip service. We are tired of promises,” said Ruth.
The three mothers live in a house about 500m from Lily Mine.
The house was given to them by the chief in the area. “We are living in the wilderness where we are vulnerable to anything. People can rape us, they can kill us, but we don’t care. We just want to see our children out of there.”
Ruth also expressed her annoyance with the promises made by the Minister of Mineral Resources Mosebenzi Zwane, who not only pledged to assist the affected families with necessities, but publicly vouched to donate R200 000 to the three families.
Zwane never gave them a cent.
“We are not happy. We even travelled from Mpumalanga to Zwane’s offices in Pretoria where we marched and he didn’t have the decency to come out of his office to address us,” she said.
“He could have come out and said his department was working towards helping us, but he was not bothered.”
The three women have been camping near Lily Mine for the past year.
“The chief’s wife gave us a piece of land to plant veggies so we can sustain ourselves because we do not wish to leave here without at least seeing the government doing something. We want to see them start operations to retrieve our children.”
Speaking about the media, Ruth said: “It’s not nice when we read things about ourselves and family members in the papers or see ourselves on TV. Our grandchildren are badly affected because they become the laughing stock among their peers.”
Attempts to enquire from the Department of Mineral Resources about promises made by minister Zwane have been ignored.
Independent Media spoke to the departmental spokesperson Martin Madlala in August 2016 and at the time, he said he could not divulge information regarding promised payments to the family, but passed the buck to the mining company.