The wage and housing deal that the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) struck last week with the Royal Bafokeng Platinum (RBPlat) company is the light at the end of the very dark platinum mining tunnel. Instead of five months of mayhem, the NUM and RBPlat sat around the boardroom table to put the lowest-paid mineworker in a better position than has been reached in any other agreement, because it includes a housing component that enables employees to create personal wealth through the ownership of their very own family homes. Pernicious living-out allowances have been thrown on to the rubbish dump, where they belong, and a finite horizon has at last been placed on the destructive migrant labour system, the root cause of all the platinum belt’s deadly unrest.