The African National Congress (ANC) in the Eastern Cape is gravely concerned about the ongoing labour dispute in Amathole District Municipality which has inconvenienced residents and visitors over the past few days in municipalities such as Mnquma and Raymond Mhlaba.
ANC supports and recognises the constitutional right to strike, but we deplore the violence, intimidation and destruction of private and state-owned property that has become a common feature of industrial action.
The lack of leadership in the District has prolonged the toxic relationship between municipal workers and officials. This has resulted in continuous strikes and massive infrastructure sabotage.
We strongly condemn the criminal activities, violence, damage to municipal, public and private properties, and intimidation associated with the strike. The perpetrators of these criminal activities will be pursued and brought to justice, after which the law will have to take its course.
Our ANC PEC Deployees with Amathole REC leadership have been working closely with all relevant stakeholders to ensure that the impasse is resolved as soon as possible.We are also quite happy that a package deal to end the strike has been offered to workers and hope that the dispute will be over as soon as yesterday.
The Amathole District Municipality management and political leadership must commit themselves to more effective communication and the development of mutual trust in moving forward.
In dealing with water outages in the affected municipalities, we request National government to implement short – term to medium term interventions which must include the deployment of technical teams, consisting of engineers, technicians and other artisans to assess systems in the problem areas and attend to these urgently to restore the water supplies. National government must inject more funding to deal with issues of infrastructure refurbishment, operation and maintenance to ensure that such interruptions in the water supply do not recur.
The ANC will go back to our communities and we would like to reiterate as the people’s movement that we will never be indifferent to the issues raised by our communities.
We therefore appeal to members of the community to allow the ANC space and time to deal with this process. We appeal to our communities to desist from any violent activities and to allow our children who are supposed to be at school to attend classes.
The ANC would like to apologise to residents and visitors who have been affected by the strike and call on the Amathole District Municipality to ensure that water is restored in all the areas affected.
Issued by :
ANC EC Communications
Enquiries :
Gift Ngqondi
Provincial Head of Communications
Mobile No :0848439706/0849519924
