Letter: The ANC doesn’t need a summit to figure out how to fix local government
Coming out of the weekend ANC NEC meeting has been some supposedly tough talk from President Zuma and Jeff Radebe about the performance of local government officials and councillors. In 2009, the ANC correctly diagnosed their cadre deployment on steroids programme as being responsible for much of the poor performance at a local government level. Now in 2010, they have made a further startling revelation: what is needed is “implementation, implementation, implementation!” and monitoring to ensure it is taking place.
So what are they going to do about it? If you guessed “Summit” or Indaba”, you’re correct. They’re going to call a summit to discuss how to achieve this. Once again, this means more hot air and less getting down to the jobs we all need to, including those jobs which involve making sure other people are doing their jobs. So aside from the efforts of the few who do work hard and the opposition constantly applying pressure on the ANC to perform, the average man in the street is still going to be waiting for service delivery.
Local Government Elections are just around the corner in 2011. If our Government will not change their crooked and sluggish ways, voters must give them some food for thought at the polls and force them to change, or be changed. –Cllr Warwick Chapman
