RBPlat opens 422 houses for workers to pay off

Royal Bafokeng Platinum officially opened 422 housing unit for permanent employees at its Royal Bafokeng Rasimone Platinum Mine.Photo Supplied

Royal Bafokeng Platinum officially opened 422 housing unit for permanent employees at its Royal Bafokeng Rasimone Platinum Mine.Photo Supplied

Published Sep 17, 2014

Share

Dineo Faku

ROYAL Bafokeng Platinum (RBPlat) officially opened 422 houses yesterday for permanent employees at its Bafokeng Rasimone platinum mine joint venture at the upmarket Waterfall Hills Estate, next to the N4 in Rustenburg.

The shortage of housing is a hot potato for the mining sector. It was a major contributor to the labour unrest in 2012 at Lonmin’s Marikana mine, where 44 people died in unrest.

The housing forms part of phase one of an employee home ownership scheme. RBPlat recently announced a further R2.8 billion investment for phase two, comprising 3 100 houses to be built by 2019.

Housing on prime land was on the list of demands tabled by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in the 2011 wage talks.

Tshimane Montoedi, NUM’s deputy general secretary, said: “What they (RBPlat) have done here is huge, it is for the first time that a mining house has built homes for its employees on prime land.”

Collin Alexander, RBPlat’s senior human resources manager, said at the launch yesterday that the group had raised R250 million from seed capital and would receive R2bn funding from the Public Investment Corporation and the Unemployment Insurance Fund.

It was beneficial to approach development funding institutions instead of financial institutions, whose mandate was profits, he said.

“About 90 percent of the people who own these units are first-time homeowners who have mainly lived in backyard rooms and single sex hostels.”

Tsepo Matshelo, 30, a boiler assistant at the mine, said he had moved from a one-bedroom home into his three-bedroom home last month with his wife and two children.

“I am happy to own this house, I can go to work a proud man knowing that I am working towards paying a house… I can pay this house off for 16 years. I can decide to leave the company but they won’t evict me as long as I pay monthly.”

Alexander said repayments would escalate at consumer inflation plus 1 percentage point. Employees would repay R2 900 monthly and repayments would rise by 7 percent a year.

RBPlat already paid R2 600 in monthly housing allowances for low-level employees, which meant that the employees could easily pay off the R300 difference. It would replace the living-out allowance with a homeowner’s contribution that would be applied to home loan repayments.

In July, Lonmin also launched a home ownership scheme at Marikana, where it handed over land to the North West government for more than 2 600 housing units.

The government has been applying pressure on mining houses to comply with mining charter targets to convert single sex hostels into family units by the end of the year.

RBPlat’s housing project will accommodate different categories of employees. It includes homes ranging from R500 000 for 80m2 to accommodate its lowest level employees, such as winch operators, to R2m for a 360m2 house for managers.

The development came as 25 percent of employees at RBPlat had credit impaired records, Alexander said.

According to Rustenburg mayor Mpho Khunou, the municipality has a housing backlog of 16 000 units.

Related Topics: