Jabulile, PAC regional Chair writes:
Since trying to get a hearing from the municipality is like talking to a deaf donkey, people have found that defiance is the only way out. It seems good people get employed at the municipality and are soon caught by the demon and become incommunicable: very few people get assistance at the municipality.
It is pointless to blame acting municipal manager, Theo van Vuuren, for the by-laws causing misery to the people. Ok for being a poor municipal manager we can throw some criticism especially about those bouncers he dubbed security.
Security men wear uniforms and protect people; bouncers take out people and throw you out. R20 million has been wasted doing it.
Some people think just because Van Vuuren is a white person he is a fair game, the fall guy, a fair scapegoat.
Van Vuuren does not make the by-laws. Blame the councillors who pass the by-laws; it is the by-laws that are oppressive, otherwise people would not be burning tyres in the streets and blocking roads. It is a councillor thing to decide which diabolical evil by-laws it wants.
Who passed the law to demolish houses in town under some spurious building standards pretext? Yes some people broke the law, but who made those laws? Who decides that slum people must have no electricity because they have no money to pay for it? Then answer who made the decision to make the prepaid metre unit cost more than the conventional metre in the street box? Yes poor people who are forced to use prepaid metres pay more for electricity: calculate it.
Laws should be corrective, not punitive. If inspectors missed stopping a house at foundation level, then accommodation should be reached to fix the problem with the owner at the owner’s cost, not leave it to finish and then demolish it, that is evil.
Houses are national assets; whoever builds them and how he builds them is not important. You do not destroy national assets, doing so is evil. Anyone who orders evil to be carried out must be evil.
Who passed the laws: do not build on the fence, leave two meters from the fence? Okay it must be the National Government, but why? Yes, they were thinking of servitude for sewage pipes. But there can only be one pipe passing through and it is marked where it passes; so why not grant concession where there are no pipes; and why must it cost so much to apply for relaxation? Remember before 1994 municipal rulers of the time were building on the fence: for evidence, look at the servant’s quarters in town or the doubles in the township.
Even if there were such hidden laws of the past before 1994, why didn’t they change them? Just excuse to blame apartheid when you are in full charge.
Who is building more locations like apartheid did, more townships, more Klarinets, more separate development, more labour reserves? Question is why don’t they build flats in town and save space and land? What is this horizontal planning instead of vertical planning? The is plenty of land by shifting the golf course and beyond it, towards the grave yard, towards Mgewane. The mine must give way and rehabilitate.
Who ordered operation Hlasela in Emalahleni? Why blame the municipal manager for that? It was the mayor and her committee, councillors, in order to try raise the Eskom money which someone stole, now the poor must bear the brunt. We are told that the government also owes the municipality some of the Eskom money. I can tell you that that money for Eskom was allocated in the government budget, all you have to ask is what happened to that Eskom money? Hopefully it was this government that baled out Emalahleni. We are not out of the woods yet.
Who passed the law to chase the people selling bananas in the streets? These are the people from the slums trying to raise money to buy electricity. No, they have no permit? Permit, just to sell one banana? Who made that law?
Where is the social responsibility of Eskom? Where is the social responsibility of Emalahleni municipality itself. I tell you their social responsibility is to the slum people, the people who voted for them. Subsidy for poor people! What subsidy? The debt for poor people at the municipal does not go down, it keeps going up in spite of the subsidy.
If the slum people have electricity that can make life worth living, since they see no services delivery. And if the people want a better life than a slum life then they must stop voting for people who make laws that keep them in the slums. Why must it be the mines only with social responsibility? No.
Eskom and the municipality also must do their bit of social responsibility to the poor.
Who privatized the rezoning process so that people have to pay private consultants more than R20 000 just to do what one can do self, fill in a form and advertise? Why do they insist on building plans that must be drawn by private architects when one can pick up a building plan from the internet free? It is the work of the inspectors to see that a plan is followed, and not who drew it. Why must one engage an architect just to build a four wall back room hut? All you need is a builder for that. Architects must go and design sky-scrappers, dams and bridges, not huts.
What was not understood was the absolute fact that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is what the absolute majority did to the councillors; and in a democracy people get the government they deserve. Now some of us who fought for this freedom knew what we were fighting for: we fought for freedom: not tears. We did not fight for tyres burning in the streets and blocking the freeways 20 years after freedom.
