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Yesterday DA shadow mining minister James Lorimer shared how literally billions of rand are being extracted by criminal syndicates through illegal mining (click here). After politically charged incidents involving illegal foreign workers, the ANC has suddenly started paying attention. Some are actually visiting the crime scenes on Saturdays. In theory, anyway.
Last weekend, Lorimer guided a troupe of Parliamentarians to sites in Emalahleni (Witbank), the epicentre of SA’s coalfields. He’d visited the area in May after a local DA colleague was asked for help by residents of Dubha Park, a middle-class suburb. Pollution from coal burning in nearby illegal workings is making residents sick, a child having been hospitalised.
Lorimer applauded the ANC chair of the portfolio committee who agreed to surprise visits of three illegal operations. These included strip mining on an industrial scale by front-end loaders, diggers and dump trucks. But the group never got to that one. After observing the first non-stage-managed site, ANC and EFF members simply refused to go any further.
Makes you wonder who some of our R95k a month taxpayer-funded Parliamentarians are actually serving.
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SA’s shadow mining minister James Lorimer had his hopes of a breakthrough in the war against organised mining criminals dashed when ANC and EFF members of Parliament’s task force refused to visit an illegally-worked open pit coal mine. This was the second site scheduled for observation during Saturday’s visit to Emalahleni (Witbank), unusual in that it avoided typical Potemkin-village staging by bureaucrats. But as Lorimer explains in this podcast, the risk of getting their shoes muddied apparently took precedence for the R95k a month taxpayer-funded ANC and EFF deployees. In this interview with Alec Hogg of BizNews, the DA veteran unpacks how illegal mining has become big business in SA’s coal mining epicentre with criminal syndicates leasing heavy duty diggers and dump trucks to illegally strip-mine hundreds of tons of coal sold wholesale into the system at massive profits. Lorimer explains how this crime is facilitated through deliberately blind eyes of those paid to protect society against such abuse. Including, it appears, some Parliamentarians.
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