Parliament, Cape Town - Workers still engaged in an illegal strike at the Medupi power station were traitors, Eskom’s acting chief executive, Brian Molefe, said on Friday.
Briefing Parliament’s select and standing committees on appropriations on the financial and operational affairs at the power utility, Molefe said the strike had affected progress with South Africa’s power station construction programme.
Two Medupi workers were shot and wounded in Marapong township in Lephalale in Limpopo on Monday. There was also a bomb scare at the construction site of the Kusile power station on Sunday.
“We think that strike is actually treasonous because how do a group of people or a union for that matter call an illegal strike at a time when we need to deal with load shedding, which is a national crisis,” Molefe told MPs.
“The tactic of the people that are continuing to be on an illegal strike now that the majority of the workers are back at Medupi is to intimidate the majority who are at work.”
Molefe said on Sunday contractors were forced to halt work on the construction of the Kusile power station in Mpumalanga following a bomb scare.
“There was an SMS where somebody said ‘I’ve planted three bombs at Kusile and they would go off today’, so we had to stop work for many hours. The police, the bomb squad came and they searched and they eventually declared the place safe,” he said.
“The intelligence services are now trying to track the source of the threat and it’s things like that that are delaying the three years.”
Both the shooting incident and the bomb scare were adding to delays already experienced as a result of the strike action, Molefe said.
“I think it is actually treason. It is criminality of the highest order.”
ANA