I’m tired of the abundance of professional whingers I have to deal with on a daily basis. Too often do I hear throw away comments about how “the municipality does nothing” for our rates and taxes. Such statements demonstrate a level of ignorance which should have no place in the South Africa of today. In eThekwini we patently have water, electricity, excellent roads, reliable refuse removal (recycling), beaches, pools, uShaka, ICC, and yes parks and gardens – even though many spaces aren’t maintained as well as they should be.

Further, a huge proportion of our budget is spent spent rolling out infrastructure, services and housing to parts of the City where there were none before. How many of these professional moaners have actually driven to Waterloo or through the new KwaMashu town centre or visited Bridge City and seen that despite the many issues facing this council, money is actually spent relatively well.

I continue to be stunned by the number of people quite happy to say things like “we get nothing” for our taxes or “the government does nothing”. Do yourself a favour, go to Zimbabwe or Mozambique or Angola and spend some time there. Perhaps then you’ll stop taking for granted the services our governments provide.

And don’t get me wrong, Cape Town refers, we could and should be doing more and better but we’re hardly doing nothing.

CLLR WB CHAPMAN
Glenwood

I have it on good authority that a request and motivation are to be forwarded to the City Manager that “Durban” be officially renamed to “Dirtbin”. I call on Dr Sutcliffe to reject this request, regardless of the very real merits of the motivation. He would, however, do well to heed the reasons why people from other parts of the country have started calling us “Dirtbin”.

Littering, dumping and going to the toilet in public go unpunished in Durban – and authorities like Durban Solid Waste are helpless as Metro Police do little to enforce the bylaws. Dr Sutcliffe, before you leave us, please get Metro Police back on the horse and enforcing the laws of this City.

– Cllr Warwick Bruce Chapman, Pinetown

Now before I go into this, keep in mind that the politicians that count when it comes to national policy issues like transformation are almost always Members of Parliament and pretty much all of them fly at least twice a week.

Transformation is necessary in South Africa. Like it or not, our history and the momentum it generated has produced a skewed society and a bias towards whites out-performing everyone else. Indeed, since 1994, whites have, on average, benefited the most – outstripping everyone else in earnings.

Government intervention in order to ensure other races, but blacks in particular, have the same opportunities as whites do is all but obligatory. How we go about that, however is where the DA differs from the ANC.

For us it is about producing what we call an “opportunity society” through great quality basic and tertiary education and skills development, good healthcare and financial support where it is deserved.

In 1997, by contrast, the ANC promulgated a policy now commonly known as “Cadre Deployment”. It forcefully transformed almost every corner of our society by placing ANC cadres in positions of leadership and authority on the basis, first and foremost that they were ANC people and only secondarily that they had the wherewithall to get the job done.

And the results are well known. CIPRO is a recent example. Numerous failed municipalities are examples. Eskom is an example.

Where those failures are challenged and cadre deployment is blamed, invariably the race card and/or the accusation that we are resisting positive change in South Africa is levelled. And despite the failures, we regularly hear calls from politicians (and now ABSA) that the pace of transformation be stepped up.

But, and this brings us back to pilots, have we ever heard a politician make a serious effort to transform our white male dominated airbus jockeys? No, I believe not. We’ve never heard them say, “to hell with your stringent requirements, I want a black pilot!”.

I’m firmly of the belief that this is because, unlike in the case of CIPRO for example, the potential repercussions of vaulting someone into a role as a pilot to which they are not suitably trained and experienced is, well, death. Death of yourself the politician, perhaps, and the death of everyone else in the plane.

So, they say nothing about it. If the ANC was so very keen to see more black pilots, they would ensure that SAA is provided with the budget to re-establish their Academy.

I believe that many black candidate pilots are failing to qualify, not because they are incapable, but because of the abysmal quality of our now decimated education system.

I am certain that if you surveyed the black pilots flying in South Africa now, you will find that most of them went to ex-Model C or Private schools where they got the sort of quality maths and science education required to make it as a pilot.

The travesty that is our education system would be, I’m pretty certain, the top priority of a DA government in South Africa, followed closely by health, crime and economic development (job creation).

So that’s that. The ANC don’t really care if someone unqualified and with no experience takes over a sewage works, because if it fails, and someone makes enough of a stink (eek) about it, there’ll always be someone, somewhere who can fix it – at a price. BUT, a pilot who is not up to scratch has far more serious, more personal implications for an ANC MP – death is not something one tends to get over very easily – so they don’t push the issue.

“Death Road”
Cllrs Macpherson and De Boer proposed a motion which would have seen urgent measures taken place to improve the safety of “Death Road” on the M4 Ruth First highway between Broadway and Virginia in Durban North. The proposal suggested barriers be installed to separate the lanes and Metro Police establish a permanent unit to monitor that road. The ANC dismissed the motion with contempt suggesting the proposers were not following protocol despite the numerous efforts by councillors with City officials to see action taken.

The Deputy Mayor went as far as suggesting the DA Cllrs were trying to further protect their “leafy suburbs” while other parts of the City were in a significantly worse condition. DA Cllr Heinz De Boer clarified that “if the Mayor chooses to admit other parts of the City are in a poor state, that is his prerogative and shows up the lack of action by the City and councillors in those area, but as the Councillors responsible for Durban North and Umhlanga, we are doing our jobs as demanded by our communities.”

“Street Lights”
Also dispatched with a stunning display of arrogance and personal attacks was the motion proposed by Cllrs Chapman and Lindsay seeking that a task team be setup comprising councillors and officials from the Metro Electricity Department to urgently address the high number of faulty street lights in the City. Lindsay contended that despite 6 months of trying to get the Electricity department to fix over 200 faulty lights in the Pinetown New Germany area, little or no action had been taken.

Chapman explained that with the FIFA World Cup coming up and noting the serious impact that poor lighting has on crime, the DA wished to see councillors working together with Electricity Department officials to resolve urgent lighting and safety issues ahead of the big event. Again the ANC, through Cllr Reddy, used protocol as their excuse to sideline this constructive proposal.

Chapman, referring to the treatment of both proposals, said that “the ANC chose cheap politics over urgently needed service delivery in what is indicative of the attitude which has seen the gradual decline in support for the ruling party and spawned service delivery protests all over the country.”

– Warwick Chapman (Cllr Ward 18) | 083 7797 094 | ward18@ethekwini.org | http://warwickchapman.com

The letter goes on to state that Mr Mabanga “is not totally informed of the status of the electric fence” and that the fence depicted in the picture in the Daily News 24 February “is still under construction” and “not operational”.

As the councillor who represents the community bordering the prison, I find it totally unacceptable that the head of the Correctional Centre appears to have lied about the stance of the HRC on this matter and additionally that he was not sufficiently informed about the status of the electric fence. I sincerely hope his replacement does a better job.

A copy of the letter is available here.

On arrival, guests were be met by ushers with no guest lists and instead asked to write their names on a page in exchange for a gold wristband.  Any of you could have come along.  When finding a table in the main hall, a few people had seating cards and the rest of us just sat anywhere.  Thank goodness it was poorly attended!

While criticising anything 2010 is frowned upon by all, one has to ask how an event celebrating our readiness to host the event could be so poorly organised?

This is just plain irresponsible.  For the price of several drinks a month (perhaps not drinking those reduces your chance of having one of these accidents as well), you can get a basic hospital plan which covers your medical costs in the event you have an accident or land up in hospital for whatever reason.  If you don’t have one, GET ONE!