SOLD OUT FOR A SONG
Poor villagers wined and dined, then seduced into selling their future
● Vicky Riba, 51, earns her living picking oranges for farmers near her impoverished village of Ga-Mamphahlane, outside Burgersfort, Limpopo.
Until recently she owned two pieces of land near the village in the mineral-rich Garatouw area, where she planted wheat.
Riba and her family no longer have that land. Chinese-owned Nkwe Platinum Ltd bought it, along with land belonging to about 181 others. The owners were each paid R40,000 after some had been wined and dined at a posh Sandton hotel.
According to the documents they signed, the R40,000 is a one-off payment that will give Nkwe Platinum the right to mine chrome ore, cobalt, copper, nickel ore, gold and other minerals on the land, potentially earning billions.
“I never agreed with them with the amount they gave me. They gave me R30,000 in February and then R10,000 in March. I thought we were still going to discuss and negotiate the details,” Riba told the Sunday Times.
“We have two ploughing fields. One is 6ha and they have already erected a fence there. They told us we are signing to sell off our land. I signed because everyone else was signing. I didn’t understand what I was signing.”
The villagers are now divided. On the one side is a chief and the elderly for whom R40,000 is a fortune. On the other side are younger, more savvy villagers and other chiefs who have hired lawyers and declined Nkwe’s money. The second group is demanding long-term leases for their land to be mined until 2044.
Among Nkwe’s consultants are Guptalinked former department of public enterprises director-general Richard Seleke; former lawyer Bally Chuene, who was struck off the roll of advocates; and Vuyani Gaga, who allegedly told the community he was Gwede Mantashe’s nephew. Since December, Nkwe has held small group meetings with “field owners and occupiers of land”. At these meetings it offered them the R40,000 to give up their land for Nkwe to mine.
Seleke said the company followed the law to the letter and that there was no wrongdoing. Chuene referred queries to Nkwe.
Riba, who matriculated from Phuti Nare Secondary School in 1998, has since done odd cleaning jobs.
“We were called to the offices in Moshate and we were just told to sign on the documents that were given to us. They told us that there will be mining on our land and that there would be some payment we receive. I didn’t know that we were giving up our parents’ land,” she said.
In Ga-Mamphahlane, grazing cattle and goats abound in an area with lush vegetation, suggesting fertile soil. The only sign of the mining to come is a long stretch of fence Nkwe erected, patrolled by guards.
The document Riba signed, which she showed to the Sunday Times, reads: “I ... provide my consent for Nkwe Platinum Limited to proceed with mining activities ... on the portion of land on Maandagshoek 254 KT (farm) on which I have land rights ... in return for the compensation payable to me which will be calculated by dividing the amount of R7.2m equally amongst a total of 181 field owners/occupiers of the Maandagshoek lease area, measuring approximately 495ha in total. Each field owner will receive payment of R40,000.”
The villagers were asked for their banking details and promised business opportunities worth about R5m to provide goods and services to the Garatouw mine.
Another villager, Victor Phiri, whose wife is a landowner like Riba, showed the Sunday Times a booking confirmation for his stay at the Premier Hotel in Sandton on February 14 to meet Nkwe’s directors. Phiri said others from the community were taken to the hotel in a taxi, for which Nkwe paid.
“There were people taken by Nkwe platinum mine to Sandton who own ploughing fields. I was there with my wife, who is part of that,” he said.
“The following day they had a meeting with those people [landowners] for them to occupy their land. Those people refused to sign. Then they did not want to [take] them back [home]. On Sunday morning the people had no choice but to sign so that they can be taken back home,” Phiri said.
Nkwe representatives did not respond to detailed questions sent on Wednesday.
Phiri said he had several meetings with Nkwe’s directors and Seleke.
In one of the WhatsApp conversations with Nkwe director Scott Li, which the Sunday Times has seen, Li told Phiri that Nkwe had already paid more than R7m to more than 180 families from Maandagshoek, and more than R1m to families in Garatouw.
One of the compensation forms, dated March 24, which Nkwe CEO Zhiyu Fan and 10 other Garatouw landowners signed, states that Nkwe will pay them R1,512,000 collectively for the use of their land for 40 years.
The document in which the landowners cede their land to Nkwe adds: “I, together with the other field owners, we will form a business entity which will be given preference to render services like cleaning offices and washing of PPE at the Garatouw mine. Preference will be given to the business entity for sweeping and vamping underground and waste management to the Garatouw mine, provided that the business entity complies with competitive pricing, and its ability to comply with the mine’s health and safety [regulations] ... The Garatouw mine will assist with providing training at its cost, to the business entity, so that it is suitably qualified to render these services.”
This document, however, appears at odds with a hand-delivered letter titled “Compensation Offer” for all field owners of the Garatouw and Maandagshoek communities on January 15, which stated that there was a one-off R3m lump sum that would be shared between them.
Villager Lucas Maelane was at the Baroka Baga Mphahlele royal kraal in Moshate with Riba and others when he refused to sell his piece of land.
“They gave us an evaluation report saying that Garatouw is 11.1ha and then Maandagshoek is 493.3ha, but then, for such a big land thing, they want to give us only R40,000 once off.
“I didn’t want to sign the form to sell our land because that money is too little. Maybe if they said R40,000 is an upfront fee and then they will lease, I would agree.
“They give you R40,000 now, you go buy food and pay school fees and then it is finished,” said Maelane.
Riba’s younger brother, Koketso, a member of the activist group called Maandagshoek Community Against Land Invasion, told the Sunday Times that the situation was not properly explained to those who had signed away their land.
“It cannot be that you take a few people from the affected community who have no idea what they are signing and you make them sign over our parents’ land for R40,000. This land is rich, it cannot be worth R40,000,” he said.
The community, aggrieved at how the mine owners and the government have managed the project, has destroyed a fence
They give you R40,000 now, you go buy food and pay school fees and then it is finished
Lucas Maelane, above
Every individual who signed those documents, they made them sign without affording them the services of legal advice, so that process itself was flawed
Matsene Mabilo, above
I signed because everyone else was signing. I didn’t understand what I was signing
Vicky Riba, above
erected by Nkwe.
“They [Nkwe] are aware of our plight as a poor black community; the issue of land is an emotive one,” said Matsene Mabilo, treasurer of the Garatouw 282KT Community Development Trust.
“Every individual who signed those documents, they made them sign without affording them the services of legal advice, so that process itself was flawed.
“As a community, we feel that those individual plough-field owners who agreed to that particular arrangement did so because of poverty, nothing else, because no-one in their right mind would take R40,000 onceoff for their property.”
Mabilo and his group have sent numerous e-mails, many of which the Sunday Times has seen.
The e-mails were sent to the department of mineral resources & energy asking for help. No response has been received.
In one of the e-mails, the group said that Nkwe and its previous empowerment partner had caused conflict by negotiating with individuals and not the community as a whole, which the department had “directed” them to do.