Maurice Nkosi writes:
PAC STATEMENT AS EVRAZ HIGHVELD STEEL CLOSES
In this municipality of high unemployment rate, with youths having given themselves to nyaope and other drugs because of desperation, and in riotous protests for jobs where they confuse their own parents for the enemy, burning tyres, blocking the streets, preventing breadwinners and fathers and working mothers from going to work, now they will have the Evras Highveld Steel workers joining them as the unemployed, to sit at home with their unemployed sons and daughters. The closing of Evraz Highveld Steel means more poverty and gloom in the township. It forces the question: how did we get here? We let Evraz to buy Highveld Steel so it could close it, why?
Now with a municipality bent on and determined to destroy the informal sector of people trying to make a living selling tomatoes, bananas and puff-puff chips in their street fence spazas constructed with various materials, by demanding tribute in the form of taxes and permits, it really shows how we got here. It means these Evraz laid off workers can no longer use the lump severance pay to open tuck shops as in the past because they will be risking it, lose it all.
This tells a story of how bad things are in the township: the township is closed for business. Do not be mistaken: there are a few surviving but stricken businesses. The Pakistani and Somali tuck shops are not township business; we know this by the fact that they do not live in the township, yes some sleep in the shop, but that is not living there: these are appendages of external syndicates and we thank them for covering the space of destroyed African township groceries that existed in apartheid days. The Pakistani and Somali serve a purpose so that people can just walk to buy something instead of having to take a taxi to town. Tears are to those township groceries shops that had to shut and everyone assumed that it was bad business management that caused their bankruptcy.
Only ignorant people would accuse the Pakistani and Indian shops of destroying African business in the townships, as these were already bankrupt when they got there, because of high municipal levies.
The demise of the Mtsuki Building tells a story of how vicious the attack by the municipality on the original African township groceries shops was. Township shopping centres quickly turned into GHOST SHOPS after 1994, with a few exceptions such as the Ntuli Centre in Ackerville, some saved only by the Pakistani and Somali tuck shops that came to rent space. This trend of destruction of township business by municipalities has been wide spread all over South Africa as attested by the xenophobic attacks throughout the country when the wrong people were targeted.
Let us all remember how those viable grocery shops that existed before 1994, all went bankrupt because of high municipal tariffs in businesses that have no bulk electric meters; in Witbank we have seen the Metro and Trador wholesalers shutting down because these were depended on the township groceries that went bankrupt.
There are leaders in all political parties, and in our PAC, who play the fiddle while South Africa burns. For instance what conditions were put when Evraz bought Highveld Steel? How can the Russian billionaire not have operational funds for Highveld Steel to keep it going? Did Evraz buy Highveld Steel just to kill it so that its international steel plants should have no competition from Highveld Steel?
It was to be expected that an economy based on non-renewable materials such as mining. Those mining towns would soon become ghost towns. But turning WET LANDS into RDP Townships is the worst myopic leadership condition ever seen. Wet lands represent RENEWABLE ECONOMIC ACTIVITY. Besides Witbank has so little water you would think people will conserve and protect the little water we have. People fetch water from those fountains. What they are trying to do at Leeupold, invading those grazing Wet Lands and water fountains for RDP houses is sick. And they were so quick attacking Witbank News for alerting the people on what is going on. We said before: why not build five storey flats near town and save scarce lands, save long sewage and water pipes, save people taxi fare to town.
We need an economy based on renewable resources. Imagine sewage pipes in Leeupold spewing into those water streams and underground water. These streams are not like the Olifants River which is capable of cleaning itself of sewage.
