Workers from different smeltering companies can be seen protesting outside the Chinese Embassy demanding that raw materials keep being smelted inSouth Africa instead of being transported to China to do so, 4 September 2020, Pretoria. This change in operation has already cost thousands of jobs and with more companies closing down the jobs and livlihood of smelters in South Africa is in danger. Picture: Jacques Nelles
An organisation calling themselves the Save SA Smelters has picketed outside the Chinese Embassy in Pretoria to hand over a memorandum of demands, calling for the People’s Republic of China to stop “ransacking the country’s mineral resources.”
The organisation says it will not allow the country’s minerals to leave the country without citizens benefitting.
In their list of demands to the embassy, the organisation wants the aggressive mass exportation chromite resources to stop as it was making it challenging for small business to benefit from the country’s own natural resources. As a result this was killing jobs for small enterprises.
The organisation called for the embassy to ignore the actions of political leaders, arguing that recent political actions of corruption indicated how some political leaders’ interests did not serve the people.
“We are here to tell you that if our leaders want to betray the freedom and mining charters, they must never do that in our name. Our minerals first. We are here to tell you that you are the world’s first chrome producers not because South Africans are stupid, but it is because the South African government has decided to serve the interests of Chinese rather than to serve the interests of its people.”
Save SA Smelters spokesperson Mandla Mohlala says it could not be that South Africa’s smelters found themselves closing, while China is benefiting from minerals coming from the country.
“The people in the country find themselves poor. The South African government is doing nothing to remedy this issue.”
He told The Citizen how it could not be that China was allegedly the biggest producer of ferrochrome minerals, but had no such mines.
Smelters were closing nationwide while the smelter industry was under attack. “China is so arrogant.”
Mohlala said the embassy backtracked on receiving the memorandum and did not come out to receive it.
“The Chinese embassy refused to send someone out to receive the memorandum. Instead, a police officer received it and handed it over to them.”
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