Voter fatigue may explain the low turnout when Democratic Alliance (DA) parliamentary chief whip John Steenhuisen addressed a public meeting at Salt Rock library last week.
Endorsing DA candidate Privi Makhan for this weeks’s Ward 22 by-election, Steenhuisen told the mere 50 people present that there was an urgent need for the North Coast community to reclaim KwaDukuza municipality in the next local elections and “turn the city around”.
“We want a municipality that is well run and functional. Fixing storm water drains, building new substations and concentrating on these invisible services as they form the backbone of a well functioning and well run municipality where you don’t have electricity outages and where you don’t lose 35 to 40 percent of your water to leakages due to aging infrastructure.
“To have all that you need to have a clean and accountable government that fixes infrastructure. It is time for us now to start taking over some of these municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal and I am very proud to say that this municipality has been identified as one of the key municipalities we believe is vulnerable to be taken over.”
Also read: Salt Rock gears up for Ward 22 by-elections
Steenhuisen admitted to the DA’s poor performance in the recent elections and said the party had been hoping for a better result.
“The good news is that here in KwaZulu-Natal our voter numbers actually went up and we grew and expanded our MPL’s and our share of the vote.
“It is one of the three provinces in the country where we achieved this and I believe this is because people here are ripe for change.
“People have had enough of corruption, maladministration, poor service delivery and are looking for people to effect that change.”
The poor voter turn out was an issue Steenhuisen touched upon and said the DA need to do three things.
“We need to repair the trust of the people who may not have voted for us, we need to win the trust of the people who have never voted for us and thirdly we have to convince the hundreds of thousands of young people in this country who just didn’t vote in this election to come out and vote. That generation has given up on politics as a meaningful tool to effect change in their lives.”
Steenhuisen said KwaDukuza municipality would be one of the key battle grounds in the next elections and urged residents to vote for DA candidate Privi Makhan on Wednesday, June 19.
She faces ANC candidate, Geoff Chennels.
The DA’s previous ward councillor Malcolm Hubner died earlier this year.
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