When the Mapela community’s long fight with Anglo American Platinum turned violent in September, a new and still unoccupied old-age home donated by the company was one of the buildings that went up in flames. With it went the sympathy of many who might otherwise have cheered the Limpopo community’s effort to save a school they had built and paid for under apartheid from being buried beneath a mine waste dump... The context for the...[community's] fight for a decent share of mining’s riches is laid bare in a report due for...release...by the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. [It] confirms the perception among mine-hosting communities that the state’s strategy to democratise the benefits of mining is failing... [The] centre’s year-long analysis of...social and labour (SLP) plans [by mining companies states,] "Communities have the right to determine their own development agenda, and their opinions must be constructively and effectively considered and incorporated"... The report shows that...failure [to implement the plans] is a pattern across the industry, where initial promises can be downgraded with the permission of the mining minister — and with no notice to the community... It also underlines the almost total lack of transparency in the drafting, execution and monitoring of such plans... The centre identified seven key areas in which the system is failing...