Ann Eveleth
Northern Province pensioners suing the state were rounded up in a police van and forced – by senior welfare officials – to sign documents they could not read, their lawyers claimed this week.
Pretoria Legal Resources Centre lawyer (LRC)Nick de Villiers said about 37 clients involved in legal action to force the state to pay their pensions were rounded up by police on Wednesday and taken to the Bungeni pension office near Louis Trichardt.
“At the pension office, they were addressed by high-placed pension officials. They wanted to know why [the pensioners] had taken the government to court. They told them that their pensions could be stopped at any time by the government, and that their pensions were really just a gift,” De Villiers alleged. Then [the officials] made them sign documents at the police station. Most of the pensioners are illiterate. They don’t yet know what they signed. But they were scared and signed under pressure,” he added.
Northern Province Department of Health and Welfare representative Tsepo Moshina denied the incident ever took place. “There is no way our officials and our police could round up pensioners against their will. I don’t know where that story comes from. There is nothing like that,” he said.
Moshina said he had asked officials from the area about the incident, which they denied. He would not look further into the allegations.
De Villiers said he understood from lawyers representing the state that the documents the pensioners signed were to the effect that they had not given the LRC a mandate to take their cases to court, a claim De Villiers dismissed as “complete garbage”.
State attorney Nicky Kruger said she was still awaiting instructions from the department on the matter, and could not comment on the alleged events or the contents of the document. She said the affected pensioners were part of a larger group who were fighting separate cases – represented by the LRC – to have their pensions restored after the state cancelled them last year.
“We’ve been running a pension campaign in the Northern Province. During February 1998, the Northern Province government ran a so-called clean-up operation to remove some 92 000 names of pensioners from their records. Many of the pension were suspended improperly because the people still qualify for pensions. About 60 000 of those pensions were later returned. Others who are still fighting for their full pensions took the government to court to get their pensions back. We’re running about 150 separate cases for about 200 pensioners,” said De Villiers.
De Villiers said his clients contacted him after the incident. The LRC was awaiting formal notification from the state on the contents of the documents.