North West Province municipality investigates death of two workers

Tswaing local municipality in North West Province says it is investigating the death of two employees who lost their lives on duty yesterday.

The two were reportedly dispatched to unblock a drainage system in Agisanang Township outside Sannieshof. The pair aged 38 and 53 perished inside a sewage manhole.

Municipal spokesperson Osupile Tys says, “We have lost two of our employees yesterday who were busy trying to unblock the main hall. I can’t say anything further because we’re busy doing our internal investigation one, number two we’re still waiting for the postmortems and also we’re trying more to have ‘ubuntu,’ to respect the families. So we can’t give anything out. The formal report will detail everything that you need but for now can we please agree that we’re busy doing our internal investigations that will form the part of that formal report I’m referring to.”

Meanwhile, the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) Provincial Secretary, Vincent Diphoko says these incidents keep recurring.

Diphoko says there is seemingly no improvement in the working conditions, despite them previously engaging different municipalities.

“What is the outcome of this engagement? We’ve heard you unions. We’ll improve the conditions of workers. We’ll buy or procure proper Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for electricity people, drainage people or roads and stormwater people. But in the end, we don’t receive those things and when we say to our workers, we can’t work in an unsafe environment, the very same employers are charging our members, suspending them, and some have been dismissed. But we must make our point that report this to the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and we will intervene with the Member of the Executive Council (MEC), even the Minister.”