Pretoria - ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba wants to commission a study to explore ways of reviving the run-down factories, including the ones known as Babelegi in Hammanskraal.
While on a campaign trail in Ramotse village on Saturday, he expressed confidence that the abandoned factories had potential to create jobs.
He interacted with residents about poor service delivery during the door-door campaign.
People gave him warm reception as he entered their homes; some recalling him from television interviews and from being the Joburg mayor under the DA banner.
There were others, however, who had fond memories of their school days back in the late 1960s.
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Mashaba grew up in the dusty village and had recollections of the olden days when he used to play soccer in the streets.
“This is my foundation. This is the place where I grew up playing soccer,” he said.
He started schooling there in 1966 and finished the then Standard 6 in 1973.
Mashaba, who was accompanied by the party’s Tshwane mayoral candidate Abel Tau, reiterated a message of rebuilding the country for the sake of giving future generations a better life.
He cited his success as a businessman and a political leader as an example to inspire children in the village to strive to be better people in life.
“My message to them is that I want them to bring their children and come and show them Herman Mashaba. Use Herman Mashaba as an example to say ‘you know that you can be coming from Hammanskraal in a tin house and here is the man who grew up in a tin house without a father with a mother working as a domestic worker. It is possible,” he said.
Harping on the job creation message, he bemoaned the fact that when he grew up almost everybody had a job at Babelegi industrial site.
However, after democracy the operations in most factories came to a halt, leaving thousands of people unemployed.
“People used to work at the Babelegi industrial area. Today you saw me walking around and I saw people drinking on Saturday morning. At 11am and 10am people are already drunk.
“We can’t build a country on that basis, we need to rebuild our families and we need to build our morality as a country,” Mashaba said.
He said his party had already conceived plans to revitalise the factories, including others elsewhere in the country should it be given a mandate to govern the country in the 2024 general elections.
He said he was “already in discussion with one of the universities to do a study of all empty factories throughout the country”.
Pretoria News