Military veterans plan R10 billion class action

KevinDecember 9, 2022

1 minute read

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Reparations: ANC launches its election manifesto in Durban (. Military veterans, who were members of the Non-Statutory Forces, are planning to protest at the ANC’s elective conference on 16 December in protest against their not being compensated. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)

More than 2 000 military veterans are preparing to go to court in a class action aimed at forcing the government to pay them R4 million each in “reparations” for the services they rendered during the liberation struggle.

In addition to the R10.6 billion in reparations, the former members of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the ANC’s military wing, and the Azanian People’s Liberation Army, their Pan Africanist Congress counterparts, want the state to provide them with housing, medical and other benefits.

The veterans also say that as members of the Non-Statutory Forces, they were subject to inferior pay, rank progressions and conditions of service to members of the apartheid state’s South African Defence Force (SADF) and the Transkei Defence Force (TDF) and other bantustan armies, which were integrated to form the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) in the mid-1990s.