The Dolphin Coast has its share of problems, from poor infrastructure to uncontrolled bad behaviour on the beachfront.
It’s not amusing, as reported elsewhere in this issue, that the police have professed ignorance of public nuisance laws, to discover with just a little digging by us that not only are there provincial laws that cover drinking in public, but that the municipality has had its own in place since 2005.
They just don’t care to enforce them.
That will make a lot of people angry. As do the potholes, the broken streetlights, irritating traffic lights or lack of them, total absence of traffic policing, noisy parties, etc.
I could go on and on.
There is a lot of complaining and finger pointing but it doesn’t seem to go further than that.
I want to tell you about a village on the South Coast where residents who’ve had enough have decided that the best action is to be positive.
Southbroom is a balmy spot, a quiet village where nothing much happens. It has beautiful beaches and a lagoon, a few restaurants and businesses that service the holiday homes, a cracking golf course with the best-run pro shop anywhere, and not much else.
Except that a decade or so ago, things really took a turn for the worse. It was ignored by the municipality, roads fell apart, housebreakings were rife and, worst of all, the water system collapsed.
In fact, the whole lower South Coast is struggling with horrific water problems.
Little maintenance, money disappears – the old story – aging pipes, belligerent unions.
Some villages would go without water for weeks if it weren’t for tankers and boreholes.
The old folks decided, enough is enough.
But, instead of getting angry, they reckoned that honey attracts more flies than vinegar.
Ratepayers association chairman Eric Annegarn explains.
“There are the people who shout ‘Do this, fix that” and blame ‘them’ for all our problems. I call them the Angry Birds,” he chuckles.
“We go out of our way to be extremely co-operative with the municipality. There are 20 good reasons why a rates boycott and that sort of thing won’t work. We recognise that we are not going to be able to fix everything at once, but we chip away here and there, a little at a time, and make things better.”
Making things better includes buying cold mix, rolling up their sleeves and fixing the potholes themselves.
Making things better means establishing a nursery for indigenous trees and planting them along the verges.
Making things better means paying for security services through an organisation similar to the Ballito UIP but covering the whole village, not just sections like here.
Residents pay an extra R120 a month on their rates for the service.
“We’ve gone from rampant crime to zero,” says Eric.
An old Comrades mate of mine, David Hallé, was one of the group who set up the Southbroom Conservancy that contributes so much to the look and feel of the village.
There are nice touches throughout the resort – benches at viewpoints for tired feet, a rambling path through the indigenous forest, neat verges and even rolls of disposable bags at beaches for ‘pooper scooping’. The beach toilets are sparkling clean.
Water is a huge problem, but there are a couple of dedicated, retired engineers and enthusiasts who make it their duty to check the water supply every day, rain or shine, and keep the villagers and the municipality informed when trouble is looming.
They look after the water staff. One helpful government worker, who always goes out of his way to help, had his tyres slashed during a recent strike.
So, no sweat, the ratepayers chipped in to replace them.
“Running this (ratepayers’ association) is an all-consuming job, but you just need a bunch of people around you who are going to pay attention, then we communicate, communicate and communicate and co-operate, co-operate, co-operate until it hurts,” Eric explains.
Wise words, we here would do well to emulate.
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