Warwick Bruce Chapman

NOTE: This statement is here because I played a role in creating it while eThekwini Campaign Manager in the 2011 Local Government Elections.

Statement by
Cllr Ronnie Veeran
DA eThekwini Mayoral Candidate

08 April 2011
Release: immediate

It has been revealed that only one female officer, who is not a driver, was available to cover the merged Pinetown and Queenburgh policing areas on the night of 5 April 2011. Obviously no police station can operate under these conditions. Today the DA has learnt that of the 2200 posts in the Metro Police, 1144 are currently vacant (48%). If any sector of the public service is not properly staffed, it cannot deliver the service expected of it.

The DA believes that part of the problem is born of the consolidation of the Pinetown Metropolitan Police station with that of Queensburgh which, despite claims to the contrary, has had the effect of reducing the resources available to the police, rather than increasing then.

The question now is what must happen if the situation is to be turned around and the various offices be capacitated to deliver? The DA believes it has the solution based on best practice in Cape Town, where the DA-led administration has turned the Cape Town Metro police into a model of excellence.

When the DA took the City of Cape Town over from the ANC in 2006, there was already a metro police service. It was dysfunctional and had been crippled by cadre deployment. The number of officers had been reduced by 800 members. One out of every four posts in the metro police service in Cape Town was vacant. There were severe shortages of equipment and specialised skills. The metro police had a reputation for corruption, inefficiency and ill-discipline.

In the DA’s first 100 days in office, emergency funds were utilised to fill critical posts in the metro police. Extra money was allocated for police equipment. In the DA’s first financial year, the Metro Police received a bigger capital budget than it had had for the entire five years before that.

Cape Town now has a metro police engaged in more real police work than any other metro police in the country. They don’t just enforce by-laws. They go after the criminals who terrorise our communities. And they catch them.

Since the DA took over Cape Town, crime in the city centre has been cut by 90%. Cape Town is the safest city in the country. Last year, there were 955 arrests for drug-related crime, compared to just 180 arrests five years previously. The expansion of the metro police, coupled with a massive investment in social infrastructure like parks, libraries and youth centres, has cut down the murder rate in Khayelitsha by 33%.

Given the chance, the DA can bring this delivery record to eThekwini. It is quite clear from the situation in Pinetown and Queensburgh that this kind of attention to detail and turn-around strategy is needed if the crime rate is to be reduced and the police fully capacitated. The DA has the solution, it is based on its delivery record and, if given the chance in eThekwini, it is a service we can deliver to all of the residents.

Media Enquiries:

Cllr Ronnie Veeran
DA eThekwini Mayoral Candidate
082 371 7698

Michael Beaumont
Provincial Director
083 776 2760

A TNS research survey released this past week has found that the level of dissatisfaction with service delivery in eThekwini is the highest of the 5 major metros in South Africa. Only Nelson Mandela Metro, also run by the ANC, recorded a worse score than eThekwini.

In eThekwini, 57% of respondents were dissatisfied with the level of service delivery, nearly 20% higher than the same figure for the DA-run City of Cape Town. Cape Town scored the highest of all metros with 57% satisfied with the level of delivery and only 39% dissatisfied, the lowest dissatisfaction level of all metros by nearly 10%.

The time has come for voters to make their choices on the basis of the issues which really affect their quality of life. Unemployment is lowest in the DA-run Western Cape, service delivery is the best in DA-run muncipalities. The Western Cape Provincial Government got the first clean sweep of audits for a province since 1994. Where public funds are spent properly, to the benefit of the public good, it is hardly surprising that the public benefits.

What I see in the NFP logo is ANC colours, rearranged, combined with the DA logo recoloured. Is the NFP keeping its options open?

Here are two opinions on the effect of the formation of NFP on the KZN political environment:

ANC Project
The NFP is a very sharp, ANC supported move to finally collapse a very sick IFP. They will go into coalitions throughout the province installing some ANC mayors and some NFP mayors. In time we will see a DA/ID style MOU which sees the NFP collapsed into the ANC.

The DA will continue to be a sideshow to the main act of ANC/NFP kill IFP. The DA will grow less than the ANC will grow and will have to wait until the next LGE to finally start making some inroads.

DA Coalitions
The NFP will not go into an Allaince with the ANC. Most NFP followers love the IFP as a party but hate its leaders. The bigger picture here is 2014, the NFP will be looking to entice IFP voters and they can’t do that by sleeping with the ANC. There is a greater possibility of an alliance with the DA than with the ANC. Remember the NFP is taking ANC people in numbers even though it is not shown in the media.

I’ve come up with more than 10 reasons and will probably keep adding reasons as they come. Please spread this far and wide.

1. The DA delivers twice as many houses in the City of Cape Town than the ANC were able to when they ran the City. Across all DA-run local governments and in the Western Cape the DA delivers more, better quality houses than any other party.

2. The Gauteng Planning Commission’s Quality of Life Survey ranks the DA-run Midvaal Municipality as the province’s top municipality for quality of life. This year Midvaal’s achieved its 8th unqualified audit report in a row. Clean, effective local government.

3. The DA understands what the word “accountability” really means. The DA fires corrupt politicians and government officials instead of moving them somewhere else.

4. While unemployment increased by 1% in all other provinces in the aftermath of the recession, it decreased by 1% in the Western Cape, driven by Cape Town’s healthy economic growth. More than 50000 people move to the Western Cape every year and unemployment is still dropping. Better Government, more jobs!

5. The Democratic Alliance allocates significant resources every year to invest in a year long development programme for inspiring young leaders – the Young Leaders Programme develops tomorrow’s great leaders today.

6. The DA-run Western Cape Government became the first provincial government since 1994 to be given a clean audit by the Auditor General of South Africa – and it achieved this after only one year in office.

7. The DA-run City of Cape Town reduced crime in the CBD by 90% and the Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading programme reduced crime in Khayelitsha by 24%.

8. The Cooperative Governance Department’s 2010 Universal Household Access to Basic Services survey showed that nine in ten residents of the DA-run Cape Town have “universal access” to basic services – a higher proportion than any other metro in the country. On each of the individual service delivery metrics, the DA’s performance stands head and shoulders over that of the ANC-run metros.

9. The DA is the most multi-racial party in South Africa and has a proud history of fighting for liberty through the Apartheid years and in the new South Africa.

10. The DA tables significantly more parliamentary, provincial and council questions than the rest of the opposition parties put together, exposing more dodgy dealings, wasted expenditure and mismanagement than any other party. The DA tables more reports, policy proposals and discussion documents than any other party. DA politicians do the job the public pay them to do!

(Bonus reasons)

11. Helen Zille, now Premier of the Western Cape, won World Mayor of the Year in 2008 for her efforts in leading the turnaround of the City of Cape Town in only 2 years. Helen Zille is a courageous and principled woman who has been fighting for liberty from her younger days as the journalist who uncovered the murder of Steve Biko to today’s tough leadership during a difficult political climate.

12. BBBEE deals in the City of Cape Town have increased dramatically since the DA took over the municipality. DA-run municipalities grant tenders using an open-to-the-public tendering system which applies BBBEE legislation as it was intended – to empower a broad base of black entrepreneurs.

13. The DA is a party that delivers for all and prioritises growth and job creation. The DA is more effective in government because DA-run municipalities focus resources government’s core functions: basic service delivery, revenue collection, bulk infrastructure development, local economic development.

As our democracy matures, we need a small revolution of our own, a revolution in voter thinking about choice. Before we see the real balance our democracy needs, we must see a rapid swing away from racial voting and toward issue voting. The dominant issue in South Africa is delivery; the delivery of jobs and the delivery of services most crucially.

Many South Africans, across the spectrum have not yet experienced a government which is truly good to all. The NP government of white privilege and the ANC government of cadre privilege will be remembered for serving only some South Africans.

The Apartheid government made itself infamous for harnessing the wealth and human resources of a country to enrich a racial minority, and the new government was always going to have a mammoth task transforming it into a government which delivers for all.

But in too many respects, the ANC Government isn’t doing much better than its predecessor. Non-whites in general, and blacks in particular, continue to live in poor conditions, with little real prospect of material improvement. Cadres of the ANC meanwhile have jobs and contracts which they aren’t doing well enough to ensure the required service delivery and economic growth required.

What we saw in Egypt over the past weeks was not a people’s struggle for better delivery, but instead for the fundamental bedrock we already take for granted here in South Africa: a democratic system of government. The Egyptians want to be able to choose one party over another, one public representative over another. They want real choice.

Technically, we have real choice in South Africa but only to the extent that everyone in the country has the theoretical freedom to vote as they so choose. I believe that there are two practical limitations to that choice: intimidation and lack of experience.

First, threats that pensions and grants will be cancelled if beneficiaries do not vote ANC are widespread and well-known. This claim is repeatedly rubbished by the ANC as being unfounded and unproven and yet political activists come across it election after election and on an increasingly regular basis.

Second, the structural inertia among South Africans communities means that few South Africans get to experience the level of service delivered by a party other than the ANC. By this I mean that the lack of economic resources to travel or live in another part of the country means that a great many South Africans have no frame of reference when considering their choices beyond beyond the ANC they know.

I am regularly contacted by friends who have been to Cape Town or another DA-run municipality for the first time. Quite often they say something like, “Now I understand what you guys are on about”, because for the first time they have actually experienced the quality of government delivered by a government focused on delivery.

The miracle of our South African democracy came with a ryder, which like a nasty spell, keeps our democracy from realising its full potential. The race-obsessed mindset which most South Africans have regardless of their desires one way or another is the barrier to the informed choices we need South Africans to make.

The democratic system has become so popular, despite its inherent inefficiency, because it is the only system which manages to put real power in the hands of the people governed by the system. Democracy, however, does not functional very well when one party dominates with an overwhelming majority. This scenario allows that party to abuse its popular position without the real fear of enough voters turning against it in favour of another. One party or one party-dominant democratic systems the world over, with few exceptions, bear testament to the abuses which take place when the voter is dis-empowered.

In the wake of the Egyptian revolution, we are reading of Zimbabweans in South Africa being told to go back to Zimbabwe and stage a revolution of their own. Why such a revolution is not likely to happen, given the proximity of the army to Mugabe is clear, but the topicality of the subject reminds us of the widespread unhappiness with the number of Zimbabweans living in South Africa.

And yet the policies which drove the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy and the flight Southward of millions of its people are too often cited by individuals within the ANC as examples of how South Africa could be doing things. Nationalisation is forever being placed on the agenda, the land problem is regularly directed toward the Zimbabwean solution and the question of foreign ownership remains a concern. These are the grand populist policies, efficacy cast aside, that dominate the politics of out-of-balance democracies such as ours.

I want to see the control of South Africa’s democracy where it needs to be, in the hands of voters who genuinely believe that they have the power. Voters need to believe that their vote can bring the change they want to see in their government, and that is only possible through stiff political competition.