Local foster discussions seeking radical resolutions
They said this was especially critical, ahead of the incoming 2024 elections.
The Soweto Action Group (SAG) says it is time for Soweto residents to rise and take governance by electing people who have their interests at heart.
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They said this was especially critical, ahead of the incoming 2024 elections.
These were the sentiments echoed during a community meeting at Mofolo North termed ‘our last hope’ which sought to seek resolution discussing RDP housing, township economy and foreign nationals.
“We are seeing that people in Soweto are not getting the correct services, every sector of the economy is falling down and we are sitting and accepting the status quo as it is.
“We realise that people need to be enlightened and told about the dire state and impact of where we find ourselves and say now is the time to stand up,” said Vusi Kunene, a community leader and representative of SAG.
He stated that they were concerned about the continued declining state of affairs in the country, adding that their immediate mandate was ensuring that communities are better served.
He explained that the distinction was that they were not a political party, but rather community leaders with a cause, understanding the existing challenges that communities face.
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“All of these issues are interlinked and working against our people, so when we talk about illegal nationals, we are not being xenophobic, but we are saying let’s remove them officially, and in that space we put a South African.
“We got 27 business people today who want to be informal traders and service our people,” Kunene continued.
New Nation Movement Director, Tshepi Finca said the country was currently experiencing a secondary wounding which included unemployment and economic oppression which has rendered citizens as survivalists. Finca made a plea calling on citizens to take governance back.
“We are not a political party nor will we register as one. We are facilitators because our country needs to be rebirthed we cannot be in labour for 30 years.
“The lost dream of a new nation has actually never materialised. So we are saying we must take governance back into our own hands.”
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Tshidi Madisakoane, Chairperson of the Meadowlands Community Forum who delivered an address on RDP houses, said she believed that the national database was not the true reflection of the number of people who have applied.
“We took our own database of people who applied and at that time we were only focusing on people in Meadowlands and a small number from surrounding communities.
“During our engagement with the city, we found a lot of discrepancies, the people we had did not appear on their database and they told us that at the time they were not computerising the information,” Madisakoane explained.
MEC of Human Settlements recently presented the budget speech indicating that for the current term of office, over 70 000 housing opportunities were created, with the Department targeting to service 5667 stands and 7502 housing opportunities for 2023/24 financial year.
“They talk about how much they have built but how many of those 1995/96 people have been given houses? To us it’s just a sale to get us to think they are doing something. They have failed in allocating houses otherwise we wouldn’t have people sitting with c-forms from 1995.”
