Destitute Gogo forced to sleep on the street
By Roland Mpofu
A Lesotho granny has alleged that one of the biggest insurance companies - Alexandra Forbes - has forced her to live a life of a vagrant, sleeping out in the open and having to fend off two rape attempts, after it failed to honour their promise to pay monies due to her, within a week.
Gogo Matsepo Moloko says her problems started when she arrived in Joburg on September 1 to submit some outstanding documents to Alexandra Forbes and was promised that her late husband’s insurance claims would be paid out within a week of her submissions.
But the 61-year-old said it's been weeks, now months since she was promised money and even her own money has run out and she doesn’t have any funds to pay for her trip back to Lesotho, and she is now forced to sleep on the streets and sometimes in Park City.
She says her cellphone was stolen by street kids and has been attacked twice and almost raped while sleeping out in the open veld.
“I have no money to go back home and no place to stay. I am now homeless in a foreign country. I have no relatives here. I am sleeping outside at this taxi rank at night. During the day I go inside the Park City to rest and beg for food, but at night they chase me away saying only people with bus tickets are allowed there.
“My phone was stolen by these homeless people around here and I have been attacked twice and they wanted to rape me here,” she said pointing at spot inside the stop for long distance taxis.
Moloko said she was worried that her children don't know her whereabouts because she no longer has a cell phone and she was hoping that this article will be read by someone who can inform them about her ordeal.
When this reporter met Moloko, on Thursday, she showed me the documents of her late husband's unclaimed benefit dated October 2018 that were around R66 000. Her husband died in 2002 after being laid off due to ill health at a mine in North West.
When asked why this claim has taken such a long time to finalise and what form of assistance the insurer can provide to the elderly lady while she is still waiting for her money to be paid out, Alexandra Forbes senior manager for public relations, Consi Kalamaras, said: “Thank you for your email. I have forwarded the information to our customer department who are investigating the matter and will respond.”
Kalamaras had not responded by the time of publication.