Long fight for compensation

SEVEN years after he broke his legs in a tractor accident at work, a former farmworker has taken his fight for compensation to the courts.

In papers filed in the Durban High Court last week, Solomon Yalo, now 40 and unemployed, said he had been locked in a battle with the Department of Labour for three years, but that all his efforts had come to naught.

Now the Port Shepstone man is asking a judge to compel the minister of labour, the department’s director-general and the compensation commissioner to act.

According to a medical report submitted to the court, Yalo suffered multiple injuries – including comminuted fractures to his distal femurs – when a tractor slid off the road and rolled over him in June 2010.

He said that before the accident he had been employed to help transport sugarcane for Bense Farming for more than 20 years.

“I was injured on duty, and the Compensation Fund is refusing to provide me with the required information relating to the final award and the date upon which my temporal total disability will be paid so that I can be properly compensated,” he said.

He added he had enlisted the services of an attorney in April 2014.

“Subsequently, it transpired that the (department’s) office had made a temporal total disability award,” he said.

He said he had submitted all the required documents.

“But to date I have not been paid.” He said that on his attorney’s advice he had queried the delays a number of times, but there was “no plausible answer”.

When the matter came before Judge Johan Ploos van Amstel yesterday, it emerged that there had been a problem with the service of the papers, and it had been adjourned indefinitely.

Yalo’s attorney, Vusi Zoko, said his client was a family man who had been left unable to work.

“Both legs were affected – in fact he has implants in his legs now,” he said.

He said his client had expected the Compensation Fund to make a final award and determine the amount he was entitled to.

“But we are not getting any direction.”

He said they would continue pursuing the matter.

The Compensation Fund has come under fire in recent months, with the auditor-general delivering a scathing report to Parliament last year.

When it came to payouts, the AG was “unable to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence for the provision of outstanding claims”.

“The accounting authority did not maintain an effective control environment to accept, adjudicate and make payments to the injured, as required by sections 22 and 29 of the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act,” the AG said.

The Mercury made attempts to obtain comment from the Department of Labour and the fund yesterday, but neither had responded to e-mails at the time of publication.