Gqeberha roads blocked by protesters demanding jobs
Unemployed Motherwell residents want to be prioritised by the Coega Development Corporation
Protesters demanding jobs in the Coega Indusrial Development Zone blocked roads into Motherwell on Tuesday. Photo: Joseph Chirume
- Protesters demanding jobs blocked roads into Motherwell in Gqeberha on Tuesday.
- They said they wanted to be prioritised for work in the Coega Industrial Development Zone.
- The protesters said companies investing in the area should not bring in their own workers if local people were available.
- The Coega Development Corporation said most companies employed local people for 80% of the workforce.
All access roads into Motherwell, Gqeberha, were barricaded on Tuesday with burning tyres by members of Ibhayi Workers’ Forum. The protesters were demanding jobs through the Coega Development Corporation (CDC).
Ibhayi Workers’ Forum says it represents the unemployed residents of Motherwell. Protesters were demanding that companies in the Coega Industrial Development Zone (IDZ) hire local residents. They said companies were bringing workers from outside.
There were about 200 protesters scattered in small groups burning tyres along the R334 (Kariega Rd) and R345 (Addo Rd).
“Our main grievance is that companies are bringing with them unskilled workforce from outside. Most of our members submitted their CVs at the CDC many years ago.”
“There are jobs that should be reserved for locals like that of general labourers, cleaners, semi-skilled jobs, boilermakers, welders, electricians, drivers and many more that are not classified as critical shortage skills jobs. We have people who are seated at home but are qualified for these jobs,” said the Forum coordinator, Zizi Ntame.
He said they would escalate their protest action until their grievances were met.
Ntame said the only way to stop the migration of local people to other provinces was by forcing companies to employ local residents. We want to stop the importation of workers into our area.”
Ntame cited some haulage companies in the IDZ that he said are overlooking local drivers. “One such company brought an entire workforce of drivers from another province though there are many drivers who are not working in this area,” said Ntame.
CDC Head of Marketing, Brand and Communications, Dr Ayanda Vilakazi, said his organisation had an established process for job seekers. “The CDC has over the years, through investors, provided employment opportunities to various stakeholders within the Eastern Cape and created in excess of 120,000 jobs.”
Vilakazi said the Zone Labour Agreement, which included trade unions, stipulated when contractors could bring in external workforce.
“However, as a general rule, all opportunities follow an 80/20 principle, with 80% of the workforce coming from the local community and 20% from the contractor,” he said.
He said the zone had an employment database in conjunction with the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality, categorised according to skill sets.
“It should be noted that investors, do however, have the liberty of recruiting workers outside of the CDC database and in line with the Labour Relations Act,” said Vilakazi.
A woman who was among a small group of women burning tyres near the Ramaphosa informal settlement, Addo Rd, said she had submitted her CV at the CDC in 2006. She had applied for a general work position.
“I have been checking since then and they often tell me that my name is still in the database. I live in the same township with people who came from outside our region with their employers and are doing general jobs. They arrived long after I had submitted my application,” she said.
A man who has a Code 10 driving licence said he had given up looking for a job using the CDC. “I am no longer hopeful at Coega. It’s about eight years now since I submitted my CV. The companies just came with their drivers.”
Next: This is how South Africa’s vaccination programme works. But is the system able to scale up?
Previous: Shack dweller Nikiwe Sipenuka has no feet and no hands. She has been waiting for a house for years
© 2021 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.