IN THE midst of the relative turmoil resulting from the coincidence of the World Cup and the annual wage bargaining season, I have to register a mea culpa - a confession of guilt: I have not kept an eye on the source of one of the greatest official travesties visited for years on injured workers or the families of those who died pursuing their paid occupations.

It is an area of maladministration, incompetence and possible financial misappropriation peopled to a high degree by arrogant petty bureaucrats. This is the nightmare world of the Workmen's Com­pensation Commission (WCC) and the fund it administers to compensate workers killed or injured in the course of their labour.

It was a system set up under the previ­ous dispensation and allows employers outside of the mining industry to evade responsibility for negligence resulting in injury or death. Instead, a centralised fund is empowered to assess and pay proportion­ate compensation.

Every year, thousands of South African workers are killed or injured in the course of their work. Often they are sole wage earners supporting as many as 10 depend­ants. Their loss of income - temporarily or permanently - can spell terrible hardship.

I first started writing about the compen­sation fund in 2002 when I became aware of the human tragedies that lay behind statis­tics provided by the bungling, and often sheer bloody-mindedness, of WCC offi­cials. At that time there existed a well-sourced estimate of more than 100 000 pieces of unopened mail in the compensa­tion commissioner's office. As a result it took, on average, eight months to receive a reply from the WCC.

At the end of December 2007, after nu­merous false starts and unkept promises, with a series of acting commissioners in charge, the compensation' fund pledged to clean up its act. A new, permanent commis­sioner, Shakes Mkhonto, the then deputy director-general of the Labour Depart­ment took over the top job.

From 1996 to 2005, Mkhonto headed the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF). When he was appointed as deputy director-genera], the department hailed him for turning around the UIF, where Boas Seruwe took over in an acting capacity. - Nearly two years later, in April 2007, when Seruwe was confirmed in his UIF post, the department noted that he had been brought into the UIF in 2004 "to help turn around the financial management of the UIF, which was in disarray".

This apparent contradiction in depart­mental assessments should have been picked up and queried. It wasn't.

But little notice was also paid in Febru­ary when the annual accounts of the com­pensation fund came under parliamentary scrutiny, and received a fourth consecutive qualified audit. During the hearings that month, ANC MP Faith Muthambi remarked that the situation at the fund had become worse over the past four years.

All the members of the parliamentary oversight committee agreed that "all is not well with the fund" and that employees were being allowed to "fail to carry out their duties".

This seems hardly credible, given the state the fund was in even three years ago. It was then that acting commissioner Phineas Mothiba announced that the WCC was "getting back on track". It needed to, since disclosures, forced into the open by a court application from the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) in Pretoria, revealed that there was a backlog of 198 000 casefiles.

Dubbed "T" (for temporary) files, some of these related to claims dating back as far as 12 years. And behind the dry statistical data lay shocking tales of human suffer­ing, frustration and death.

' "I think the record for delays in pay­ment was 15 years for the wives of a man killed at work in KwaZulu-Natal," says octogenarian Beulah Rollnick, the now retired former head of the Pretoria LRC.

It was she and former LRC attorney Paula Howell who, in 2002, brought my attention to the case of John Molefe, a truck driver shot and wounded in a botched hijacking and who had then waited six years for compensation.

It took another two years, including court battles, for Molefe to receive his due payment. As a result of that court ruling, the compensation fund also faced the prospect of having to review more than 170 000 cases where payment for "tempo­rary total disability" had been disallowed.

But Molefe was fortunate in having the LRC take up his case, as only a minority of cases are ever taken up by a campaigning LRC or, on rare occasions, by concerned em­ployers prepared to devote time and money.

"It's an evil empire," rages Tanja Glavovic, a Johannesburg media consult­ant who this week triggered my mea.culpa. She had taken up cudgels last year on behalf of factory worker John Matlala who lost an eye in an industrial accident in February 2006.

Her involvement began when, after three years, neither John Matlala nor his employer, who filed all the relevant documentation four years ago, had made any headway with the compensation fund.

Over the past year, a record was kept of the telephone calls, faxes and personal visits to the WCC. It is peppered with broken promises, claims of lost documents and the names of numerous officials.

"When we visited the fund in October last year, we met a man in the reception area who said he had been waiting eight years," says Glavovic. John Matlala notes that he was told then that he would be paid out in December. He is still waiting.

This week Shakes Mkhonto was "not available", but the fund call centre insisted that the Matlala payment would be made "this year". It was unnecessary to speak to any officials "because they will tell you the same thing" and only queries about specific claims could be answered.

However, it is obviously in the public interest that a numfeer of queries about the state of the compensation fund be an­swered. So a list of questions has been e-mailed to the media department at the fund. Watch this space.