Toxic tour with municipal officials
Community Alerts/Thokozile Mntambo/Snakepark-Soweto/04/12/18
O8 November 2018
On Thursday morning on the 08th of November I was called by the councillor asking if I was aware that the official’s from Jo’burg city Municipality will be visiting the mine tailing dump. He asked me if I can go with him to approach them because I wrote a letter to them complaining about the tailing dump.
Around 13h00pm in the afternoon the official’s from Jo’burg municipality, speaker of council Vasco Dagama, Department of environmental management councillor Coogan and The Officials from the DRD gold mine. We met with them and I explained to them how the dust affects us on daily basis. I showed them the letter that I wrote to them because they denied receiving any complain from the community. I also gave them pictures of children swimming on the evaporation ponds and I handed the policy gap twelve reports to them. The councillor also showed them a report which which was sent by the DRD Gold mine saying that ” a number of dust monitoring bucket’s was allocated within the community and the dust program confirms that the is a high level of dust in the area which might not be acceptable from the health point of view. The EISD and the DMR will collaborate to ensure that a notice is issued to Mogale Mintails SA to develop a dust management plan. The plan will provide mechanisms interventions to control and manage dust. This notice will be issued by the end of January 2017″ this report was sent to the councillors office in 2016
The DRD officials denied receiving any complaints from the councillor and the community, but because they came that day and they saw the tailing dump they will go back to the office and sort it out. The speaker of council Vasco asked us if we had raised this issue anywhere else before because this is not the issue of yesterday. He said he will go to his office and trace when the complaints started because its very important. We are still waiting for them to come back to us until today. By Thokozile Mntambo
