The South African Communist Party (SACP) in Mpumalanga has made a call to the ANC to ensure that coal mines are not closed.
With Mpumalanga being a coal-mining powerhouse, the SACP believes that the closure of these mines will have a severe and negative impact on the province’s economy.
Addressing scores of ANC members and the party’s leadership and alliance partners, the SACP provincial secretary, Lucky Mbuyane, said the move to close coal mines will result in poverty as thousands of jobs will be lost.
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“The question of closing our coal-fired power stations must be dealt with. We believe that this is political than anything else. We believe that the just transition must be in our favour.
“It must be in our favour and in that of the labour, and our communities.”
“We must never be dictated to by imperialists to close our power stations,” said Mbuyane.
There are apparently already threats and plans by one of the giant mines in the province to retrench its workers.”
“We have noted that one of the mines is planning to retrench over 500 workers.
That must not happen. We have since established that this issue is also political. This is the reason why we want to call on the ANC and its deployees to develop an interest and intervene in this matter and ensure not a single job is lost,” he added.
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Mbuyane stressed the need to reconfigure the alliance.
“We want to remind the ANC that today is no longer the same as yesterday, when we were fighting against apartheid and colonialism. We are in power and in governance now and we must act and do things differently.”
“It is due to these reasons that we are calling for the reconfiguration of the alliance because we, as the SACP, are convinced that it must work differently now so that we can deal with challenges that we face. We must also be able to challenge the neo-liberal agenda, which is beginning to undermine the achievements of 1994,” said Mbuyane.
