First published by MACUA
By Seipati Mokoatsi
The community of Klerksdorp is living in fear every day. We have a huge problem of crime in our area where young people chose to break into people’s houses and work with illegal miners so that they have money. Most of them say they do this because they have been applying for jobs for a long time but they are still unemployed so they have no choice but to do what they have to do to get money. The mines are not engaging with the community at all. When you ask the youth that is employed in the mines how they got employed, most of them say the same thing that you will never get employed by just submitting your CV but you have to have connections and money for cold drink to be able to get employed. Even in the municipality, you pay to get employed.
This has led our youth to doing very bad things that put their lives and their loved ones’ lives in great danger. Nowadays they collect bottles from people’s houses so that they can go and sell them at bottle stores and get money in return. If they see them in your yard and you refuse to give them they come at night while you are sleeping and take them. They also go around asking to clean yards but they don’t just clean them, they look around for things to come back for at night to steal them. “Since this thing of children being allowed to sell bottles to people who sell them to bottle stores we have a big problem. We do not sleep at night because we are scared that they will come and take our things in our yards and maybe rape those of us who live with our children only without any males. This has to end, we cannot take it anymore”, says Joyce Jasson. We once had community members who volunteered to deal with criminals by beating them since the police does nothing but the very same police arrested them saying they do not have the right to do that they have to report to them, unfortunately those community members gave up and crime escalated. Now, we are receiving help from local taxi drivers for crime cases. You pay them and they get the criminal, beat him until they give your things back. “It is not like we enjoy taking money from the community but we have to because paying us is for us to be able to pay for bail if one of us gets arrested. We save that money we do not spend it. We just want to see our community be better that it is. These criminals are stealing from us too and have to deal with them so that they can know what they are doing is wrong”, says Ntate Talaki.
The most heart breaking one is our youth is working with the illegal miners and a lot of them lost their lives in a very painful way because of that. They make deals with them that involve money and when they betray them, illegal miners, they kill our youth and make sure that a life is lost. Right now innocent people are losing their lives because they fight with guns and some claim that its illegal miners but we are not sure about that because there are some gangsters that use guns. If only corruption could end and things can go back to being better again.
