The event will take place in Welkom at the Thabong Sports Centre. Oliphant will address social challenges pertaining to the lack of information on compensation and medical benefits examination that are due to miners and ex-mine workers, respectively.

He says for the past three years they have been trying to reach out to mine workers, to alert them of their unclaimed benefits.

“The unclaimed benefits are particularly those that the ex-mineworkers have left behind at the mines, which include their pension provident funds and some of the UIF funding. The national Department of Health has about R1.5 billion that is supposed to reach about 103 000 people, who contracted lung related diseases while working at the mines. And some of those people are not even aware [of this]. We have also met with the pension provident fund team and have discovered that there are a lot of unclaimed benefits; not only for the ex-mine workers but also for other people, although, our focus now is specifically on mine workers.”

The Deputy Ministers from the Departments of Labour and Social Development, as well as officials from the Department of Health and the Free State Provincial Government, are also expected to attend the Imbizo.

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