The Gamagara community has come with a new wave of tactics to influence local mines to employ locals.

On August 23, 2018 about 300 people, dominated by youths, besieged Khumani Assmang’s operations and Kumba Iron Ore’s Sishen mine – a subsidiary of Anglo-American mining house, and delivered about the same number of curriculum vitas (CVs) to the mine management teams respectively.

The vibrant protest convenor Mr Shepherd Mines, before delivering the memoranda and submitting hundreds of CVs to Khumani’s management team, said that the mines have a racist approach when employment opportunities arise and the unstoppable tendency of employing people from outside the Gamagara sub-region and the region itself.

Mr Mines further elaborated that there is a skewed tendency where seasoned non-white supervisors have to train new white employee at a similar job then after three months to one year the white trainee is elevated to a higher post leaving his/her trainer confused of the positional changes. He said that if not given the better position the non-white supervisor is removed from the position for no apparent reason, succeeded by the junior he/she had trained, accompanied by better remuneration. The protestors said this is a common phenomenon – even outside the mining houses – where blacks do the donkey work but are given a pittance.

As the same protestors arrived at Kumba, they boldly told the management the mine was very arrogant to the plight of the Gamagara employment seekers. “You have over four thousand workers but less than thirty people come from this sub-region of Gamagara. We are a new generation and radical in approach. People from Postmasburg are well organised, because they have aligned the mines to do precisely as they want. This is what we want to do, people from Siyathemba, Mapoteng, Deben, Olifantshoek and Dingleton must be employed by the surrounding mines with or without matriculation as a matter of urgency even as general workers.”

The protestors demanded the construction of a skills college within Gamagara that will conduct relevant skills required by the surrounding mines.

There is a perception that time is over for mines to keep singing the rhetoric of lack of skills in the region when they have turned the underground mineral resources into billions for their glory without developing surrounding communities with the requisite skills. The excuse has become as obsolete as the machinery they have replaced with the modern ones.

Lastly the protestors equally submitted the CVs and declared that they want positive responses within the regulated period of seven days.