Silicosis claims to Tshiamiso Trust jump 64% as deadline nears

The Tshiamiso Trust, which compensates former gold miners with silicosis and tuberculosis, reported on 28 August 2026 that claim lodgements had risen 64% year on year, from 8,131 in the 2024/2025 reporting period to 13,337 in 2025/2026. The trust said it had conducted 9,486 benefit medical examinations over the year and paid out R534 million to 4,884 eligible claimants, taking cumulative payments since the trust's establishment to R2.53 billion for 26,300 eligible claimants.

Despite the jump in new claims, the trust said only 17% of its 156,924 completed lodgements to date had converted into payments, a gap that reflects both the time needed to verify diagnoses and the sheer administrative scale of processing claims from elderly former mineworkers spread across six countries through 42 lodgement centres in South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique, Botswana and Zimbabwe.

A funding warning

Trust chairperson May Hermanus said bluntly that "the current administration budget will not be sufficient to sustain the current level of operations" for the trust's full lifespan, a warning that raises the prospect of the settling gold companies, African Rainbow Minerals, Anglo American South Africa, AngloGold Ashanti, Harmony Gold, Sibanye-Stillwater and Gold Fields, being asked to contribute more toward administrative costs even as claim volumes accelerate.

Why claims are surging

Claim lodgements remain open until December 2029, and the trust's own reporting suggests awareness of the settlement is spreading as word travels through mining-sending communities in the region. With more than three years still to run before the lodgement deadline, and payout rates still lagging far behind the pace of new claims, the trust faces a widening backlog unless processing capacity is expanded.

The bigger picture

The Tshiamiso Trust implements one of the largest occupational health settlements in South African corporate history, addressing decades of silica-dust exposure on the country's gold mines that left hundreds of thousands of miners, many of them migrant workers, with incurable lung disease. The funding strain highlighted in the August 2026 report underscores a recurring theme in the settlement's implementation: even with a R5-billion-plus fund and six major mining companies underwriting it, verifying and compensating claims at the scale and geographic spread required remains a slow and resource-intensive process, one that risks leaving elderly claimants waiting years for payments they may not live to receive in full.

Sources

• TimesLive: Tshiamiso Trust sees 64% jump in claims as deadline draws closer, 28 Aug 2026

Photo: Pathology image of a silicotic dust macule, the type of lung damage compensated through the Tshiamiso Trust. Yale Rosen from USA, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.