By Wendell Roelf

Targeting teachers, President Thabo Mbeki took a swipe at public service employees who on Thursday embarked on nationwide protest against a wage negotiation deadlock with government.

“The teachers deserve proper treatment, better salaries. The minister of Public Service and Administration (Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi) is leading a senior government team that is negotiating with them. I don’t understand why in the middle of negotiations they decided to go and demonstrate in the streets and abandon the classrooms,” he said during the Western Cape launch of the expanded public works programme in Gugulethu.

Mbeki said he hoped as they demonstrated through the streets that they remembered that South Africa and its people were faced with many challenges.

Mbeki said teachers deserved better pay, but children deserved better schools and books, people deserved better health services, better infrastructure and houses.

“There are people in the rural areas who still have got to go to the river to fetch water… Many people go to bed hungry. Many people would die when they don’t need to die because we have not developed our health services to the levels we should develop them.”

Mbeki hoped those teachers demonstrating for higher pay on Thursday remembered that there were many demands facing South Africans. That was why the expanded works programme needed to be launched in all the nine provinces.

Asking Public Works Minister Stella Sigcau how many provinces still had to launch their programmes, Mbeki lightened the mood when he suggested that he might have to include Piliswa and Sipokazi in a cabinet reshuffle.

Piliswa and Sipokazi were two of the children the president, dressed in a bright yellow workman’s outfit, met during a brief tour of a road rehabilitation programme undertaken by the Western Cape’s expanded public works programme, “Saamstaan” and who sat on opposite sides of him on the podium.

“We have to respond to the challenge of unemployment, because we have to respond to the challenge of poverty,” said Mbeki once the laughter had died down.

He said the government at all levels was very serious about the expanded public works programme.

South Africans needed to overcome problems by themselves, because no one was going to come from anywhere else in the world to help the country do this.

“This means that as we do these programmes, whether we are building homes or building schools or doing all sorts of things, our people must see themselves as part of that programme.”

The programme is a key part of government interventions in the “second economy” of the poor and marginalised, and is aimed at providing labour intensive temporary work opportunities through training, further education and mentorships. – Sapa

Source: Independent Online (IOL)
URL: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click…/p>