Johannesburg - Cosatu president Zingiswa Losi has pleaded with South Africans to find solutions to the country’s problems as looting of businesses continued in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga on Monday.
Losi was speaking following President Cyril Ramaphosa's address to the nation on the ongoing looting and announcement of the deployment of 2 500 members of the SA National Defence Force until October.
"We want to plead that, as South Africans, let us find solutions to our problems, and we are capable of doing so," Losi said in an interview with Newzroom Afrika.
She said the county needed the businesses to be up and running, so that South Africans could be employed.
"This is a plea to South Africans“ for us country to recover from the blow Covid-19 had dealt unemployment.
"As Cosatu, we have always said that the levels of unemployment, inequality and poverty in our country, particularly unemployment sitting at over 32%, which means it's over 7.2 million that are unemployed (and it is) is a ticking time bomb… We have said for years that it's ticking time bomb that is waiting to explode, and we have always said that each explosion will be in the face of policymakers and decision makers in our country/"
Losi said the destruction and looting were worrying because they reversed whatever South Africans thought were strides in moving forward.
"Just last week, we were celebrating the extension of Ters (temporary employer/employee relief scheme) to the sectors that are hardly affected in the two weeks (of the alert level four national lockdown)," she said.
Losi said the federation and its affiliates were inundated with calls from worried health-care workers who were wondering how they were going to get to work as protests and looting intensified.
Political Bureau