Johannesburg - A year after the shooting at Lonmin's Marikana mine, in which 34 protesting miners were killed, the area remains tense, the Bench Marks Foundation said on Tuesday.
“We continue to walk on a knife's edge in Marikana,” executive director John Capel said in a statement.
“Deaths are still occurring, the mines have still not addressed many of their (corporate social responsibility) promises and we have still not come to the bottom of what actually happened on that fateful day.”
Friday marks the first anniversary of the shooting at the mine, outside Rustenburg in the North West.
The 34 mineworkers were killed on August 16 last year when police tried to disperse them from a hill where they had gathered.
Ten people, including two policemen and two security guards, were killed in strike-related violence there the preceding week.
The Bench Marks Foundation, which monitors corporate performance in social responsibility, made a number of recommendations to Lonmin last year.
These included that the mine had a social responsibility to help the local communities deal with the trauma they experienced in the wake of the shooting.
It also recommended that the mine pay families of the injured and killed miners compensation equal to their lost income for the next 20 years.
The fact that there was not funding for the legal teams representing injured and arrested miners, and the families of those killed, at the Farlam Commission, set up to probe the violence at Lonmin last August, was also problematic.
Capel said this situation, in contrast with the apparent surplus of financial support for government bodies represented at the commission, fuelled the community's mistrust of the government.
The Farlam Commission resumes on Wednesday, after it was adjourned pending a decision on possible funding for the legal team representing the injured and arrested miners, led by Dali Mpofu.
Mpofu previously signalled his intention to file papers with the Constitutional Court for a ruling on whether the state should fund their work at the commission. He made a similar request in the High Court in Pretoria earlier this month, but it was dismissed.
“There is a massive need to not only accelerate the Farlam Commission's proceedings, but to address pertinent public interest issues such as the role of the police, the policing of protests in South Africa, and the culpability of the police and government in relation to this.”
It was vital to address the socio-economic problems that mining communities faced.
Capel called on Lonmin to grant its workers Friday off work to commemorate the lives of those killed in Marikana last year.
Sapa