Gift of the Givers' founder, Imtiaz Sooliman, delivered the fourth annual keynote address on Monday to commemorate the Marikana Massacre 11 years ago. The Givers were distributing food parcels to the mine workers and their families during the strike when Sooliman said he got calls from people claiming to represent Luthuli House and Lonmin investors asking them to stop. The chilling message was that the strikers would surrender or starve.

The Gift of the Givers was doing their thing, selflessly providing food parcels during those dangerous August days in 2012 when a wildcat strike at platinum producer Lonmin's Marikana mine was spiralling into violence.

Imtiaz Sooliman, who gave the fourth annual keynote for the Marikana Commemoration Lecture - an initiative aimed at advancing the cause of healing and renewal launched by Sibanye-Stillwater in 2020 after it acquired the mining assets of the now defunct Lonmin - related two distressing phone calls that he received one day while the Givers were distributing food to the hungry in Marikana.

"Disappointingly, on one of the days, we received two calls. One was from someone purporting to be from Luthuli House. The message to me was 'please stop giving food parcels to the miners ... that's an instruction from the president. Once they're hungry, they will stop the strike soon'," Sooliman said.

"I told the person, 'the president has my number, I don't understand him to be a person like that. He must call me directly to say those words himself to me ... I will now double the number of food parcels to give to those poor people."

Why would the ANC want...