This year it will be five years since the massacre at Marikana and three years since the five-month platinum industry strike and many mineworkers are still far from owning homes or living in decent accommodation. Some mining companies have failed to keep their promises — made many years ago — to provide housing. They have cited the downturn of the commodity cycle, strikes that crippled them or the indebtedness of mineworkers. With this persistent problem and the apparent inability of mining companies to solve it, it has been suggested that quality rental stock for mineworkers is a better solution. John Capel, executive director of the Bench Marks Foundation, a nonprofit organisation that monitors corporate social responsibility in South Africa, said the reason many miners in the platinum belt were still living in shacks in squalid conditions, with a lack of water, electricity and proper sewerage, was that when companies said they were going to build houses, what they meant was they ...
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