The Uasa trade union has blasted the South African government for spending a significant sum of taxpayers’ money on employing Cuban ‘service providers’ over the last few years, instead of using it to save the jobs of South African engineers. In its statement, the union said it was “infuriated” and “sickened” to discover that the South African National Defence Force had paid the Cubans more than R1-billion during this period.
“State-owned enterprise (SOE) Denel is in dire financial straits,” highlighted Uasa. “Due to budget cuts, government is failing to step in and save the enterprise and the jobs of those employed there but engineers from Cuba have been getting paid.”
The union described the payments made to the Cubans as “exorbitant”. The government, it asserted, was maintaining good relations with Cuba “at the cost” of qualified South African engineers.
Uasa had been fighting for its members at Denel and seeking to save the defence industrial group for some time. The union pointed out that the crisis at the SOE had also hit small businesses that were service providers to Denel, because the SOE had been unable to pay them and now owed millions of rands to its suppliers.
“South Africa’s government needs to take care of its own citizens and patriotic taxpayers before outsourcing key projects worth billions to foreign companies whilst we have capacity within our country where people are willing and able to do the job,” asserted Uasa.