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Work will begin to implement a legal strategy to force the government to recover the container that buried three miners at Lily Mine near Barberton four years ago.
Action SA Chairman Herman Mashaba said this on Wednesday by revealing that the responses he received from a government department, claiming the shipping container was unrecoverable, were not based on a professional assessment of the mine.
“What this means is that the decision to consider the container irrecoverable, although it was certainly based on something, was not based on a professional assessment of the mine,” Mashaba told a press conference in Johannesburg.
Mashaba became involved earlier this year in efforts to recover the bodies of Yvonne Mnisi, Pretty Nkambule and Solomon. Nyerende.
They were in an above-ground container that was used as a lamp room when the mine collapsed and they were buried 70 meters underground under 20,000 tons of soil.
In May, lawyers appointed by Mashaba’s party wrote to the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy requesting documentation as to why the three miners buried since February 2016 had not been recovered.
Mashaba said the party had always believed that the question of the recoverability of the container was at the heart of the matter. He said attorneys received the documents they had requested on August 20 and did not show any basis for the conclusion that the container was unrecoverable.
“What it means is that these former miners, their families, our parliament and the South African people have been subjected to one of the most elaborate lies in our nation’s history.”
Mashaba said that the party’s legal team would now implement a strategy to force the government to retrieve the container. “I am sure that in the first half of next year we will be in court,” Mashaba said.
Wendel Bloem, the attorney appointed by Action SA, said he was with the families in parliament this year and the department told the parliamentary portfolio committee that the container could not be recovered. Bloem said that the scope of that finding, with regards to irrecoverable, was a two-line paragraph that basically said the container was irretrievable.
The only reference to unrecovery in the entire report were two site visits within a month after the incident.
“We have a research that does not do any research and scientific research,” Bloem said.
TimesLIVE
