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Cape Town - The platinum strike was putting the country's credit rating at risk, ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe warned on Thursday.
"We are still by and large a mining economy. Now, if your platinum sector is not producing for five months, that will impact on the overall performance of the economy," he told reporters at Parliament.
"So that strike needs to be attended to."
Mantashe said the strike had contributed to the negative growth of 0.6% for the first quarter and cautioned that if credit ratings fell "our borrowing costs will increase" - a key concern for the state's ambitious infrastructure drive.
He repeated his claim that foreigners were actively involved in the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union's (Amcu) negotiations with mining houses, but declined to mention names or nationalities.
"Four people from foreign countries are actually right in the negotiations of Amcu and basically articulate the position of Amcu in public. That is a worrying situation," he said.
"If you allow a free-for-all, the risk of economic sabotage becomes real, because you will have people of all political persuasions come into the country and you will begin to see agitation in a country."
Mantashe said South Africans were naive to think they were the beneficiaries of global goodwill and that the country was immune to foreign meddling.
"South Africans only are naive enough to believe that they are darlings of the world. People have our interests at heart, they are not interested in actually sabotaging our economy.
"We always think it can happen in Egypt, it can happen in Tunisia, it can happen everywhere, it will never happen to us," he said.
"It will happen to us if we are reckless and we allow things to go as they can and people to do as they wish."
Mantashe said the ruling party was concerned that the Economic Freedom Fighters were playing an active role in platinum mine wage talks.
"The second issue that worries us... that made us to describe that strike as turning into a political strike is the direct participation of the EFF in the negotiations."
Mantashe was speaking as strikers were waiting in Marikana for union leaders to brief them on the latest developments in wage negotiations after mining companies said an agreement in principal had been reached that they would propose to workers.
He stressed that, since 34 mineworkers were shot dead at Marikana in August 2012, another 17 people had died there in violence related to the lingering labour unrest.
"Our view is that state security must actually deal with the fact that... people feel so frightened that they can't go back to work even if they are starving," Mantashe said.
"There must be security and safety in the area so that people can make decisions, whether they want to continue to strike or they want to go back to work and not be frightened that you will go to work and may not see the sun the following day as death will be the case."
It has been widely reported that the foreigners Mantashe reproach for talking to strikers include Liv Shange, a Swedish national and deputy general secretary of the Workers and Socialist Party (Wasp), who has termed Mantashe's remarks xenophobic.
Shange told the media it was outrageous that Mantashe was blaming the strike on a "third force".
The strike began on January 23 and saw the SA Reserve Bank warn this week that it would drive down export figures as platinum stocks began running out.
