His fingers, as big as Russian sausages, once moved deftly mining gold. Now they clumsily unfold a yellowed pile of pay slips that he has kept in the plastic fold of his identity book since 1989, the year he retired from Anglo American after 30 years’ service.
Outside Jim Nonyama’s house in Tabong township in the Free State police Hippos cruise the streets.
”They’ll come. They’ll stop at my front gate and they’ll tell me that I don’t own my house any more,” he says.
The police are monitoring Tabong, which has been simmering since evictions of defaulting bond holders started last year. In December three people were shot and one woman died during a skirmish with police.
”I fear people are losing it. I am battling to contain them,” says Dan Mofokeng, the president of the Bond Victims Association, a community movement that represents about 2 000 residents facing eviction, most of whom are retrenched miners.
Nonyama represents their collective fate. Since the late 1980s, 230 000 miners have been retrenched as the industry, once the bedrock of the economy, tottered under the weakening gold price. They have been left fighting for survival.
Nonyama’s story begins in 1987 when Anglo American launched a scheme to ”help employees to buy a home … when the mining company was faced with a shortage of accommodation,” says Sheila Blackman, communications manager at AngloGold (previously Anglo American).
Anglo agreed to provide 22% collateral security and offer a subsidised interest rate of 5% on the repayments. The buyer received a bond based on the size of his salary.
Nonyama took out a bond in 1988 for a house costing R30 000, he says. His dog-eared pay slips show that R211,45 was deducted each month for ”homeownership repayment”. After he retired he continued paying R300 towards his home every month until 1996, when he started defaulting. ”I failed … after I finished my retirement money,” he says. He claims that he only has R4 000 outstanding on the home.
Although the scheme’s admission rules state that ”an employee will not be admitted to this scheme if his proposed term of service with the company does not allow sufficient time for the release of the collateral provided by the company”, Nonyama took out his bond a year before retiring. A second rule stated that ”this condition can be waived … in special circumstances”.
In 2002 AngloGold sold its Free State assets to Harmony Gold and moved out of the province.
That’s when the banks began repossessing the homes of the former miners. What may have started as a communication breakdown 17 years ago between Anglo American and its employees has now become a crowd of dignified, elderly former miners and their families left on the pavement.
The former miners say Anglo didn’t explain that if they retired or were retrenched they would lose both the bond subsidy and the collateral security provided by the company. Anglo believed these rules were clear.
But for the former miners facing eviction, it is clear they misunderstood the concept of repaying a bond, and now they are suffering the consequences. Over a decade later it is difficult to point fingers. What is clear is that this case of miscommunication between employers, employees and banks —which engaged in lending in the townships, a particularly vigorous exercise during the 1980s and early 1990s — is resurfacing a decade later as a serious problem.
”Borrowers lack the understanding of the law as it applies to housing and are unable to understand or manage the consequences of non-payment,” says Manye Moroja, CE of Servcon, which was established in 1994 as a joint partnership between the national Department of Housing and the banks to tackle the problem of defaulting bond holders.
”People often do not accept the principle of losing one’s house due to non-payment due to reasons beyond their control.”
Moroja says that with the establishment of Servcon, all non-performing loans and properties in possession, worth R1,2-billion countrywide, were handed to Servcon to ”normalise”.
Included were those of the defaulting former miners in Tabong. The Servcon programme gives defaulters two options: to buy the home back from the bank at a ”reasonable buy-back amount” or to ”right-size”, which means they lose their home to the bank and get given a Reconstruction and Development Programme home. If the occupants refuse these options, they face eviction and become the responsibility of the provincial government, in this case that of the Free State.
Servcon still has to settle properties in possession worth R428-million and non-performing loans worth R596-million.
”We do our best to assist these people within our own means but there are a high percentage of occupants who refuse to accept the Servcon programme,” said Maroja. This week the Free State government stepped in and requested that Servcon stop evictions until June 3, when it will meet with the organisation to attempt to find solutions to the impasse.