Following the shutdown in Kagiso the Mogale City Executive Mayor Councillor Tyrone Gray spoke to News journalist Natasha Pretorius about the situation on the ground.
Also read: Chaos caused by protesters in Kagiso and surrounds
At least one person was shot and killed while 15 others were arrested. Gray explained that the community originally organised a peaceful protest; however, once the community tried to engage with the zama zamas, they retaliated. He warned that the community should not to take matters into their own hands.
Zama zamas are heavily armed. Some are merely miners but others are malicious forces,” he said.
Gray added the community went to the zama zama camp in Soul City, which is also colloquially referred to as Gold City, and the zama zamas fired at the community. The community then took matters into their own hands.
“We have apprehended about 15. I intervened so that there are no casualties. Unfortunately, it was reported that there was a death at the intersection lower down. At this stage we cannot confirm whether it is a zama zama; however, the dress does indicate that.”
He said what happened today has two aspects – firstly, the community is frustrated and fed up in terms of something that has happened over a number of decades, and he believed this is reactionary in terms of what happened at West Village recently.
Thereafter the community realised that they themselves do not want the incident to happen there and they took matters into their own hands. Going forward they must rather feed the intelligence through to the relative people who are adequately trained and will then do the operation.”
Adding that what should happen in instances like this is that an application should be made and the police and community should rather be working together.
One of the unintentional consequences of today’s shutdown were that the municipality was unable to take out their TLB’s because the contractor did not want their assets to be harmed in any way.
He said that they welcomed the community bolstering their own security but implore them to do it in an intelligent, coordinative and collaborative matter.
The community is meant to inform and then we will utilise that information to handle the operations on our own because the police are adequately trained and we want to ensure that there is no damage to infrastructure but also that the community is protected and kept safe in the operations.”
When the News left the scene the protest was still ongoing with police out in full force. The community are warned to avoid the area around Kagiso as well as surrounding roads close-by.
