DA defies Kaunda’s gagging order
Durban — An oversight inspection of damaged and dilapidated eThekwini Municipality infrastructure in Chatsworth’s wards 65 and 70 was conducted by councillors on Wednesday in defiance of an order by the mayor not to expose the rot in the city.
The DA councillors did this in defiance of eThekwini mayor Mxolisi Kaunda’s instructions that they should not expose the city’s failures or be allowed to do oversight.
The party’s provincial chairperson, Dean Macpherson, and Chatsworth constituency chairperson, Councillor Ganas Govender, said Kaunda told them that councillors could not speak about the realities facing communities or do an oversight inspection of the municipal infrastructure, threatening that they would be charged.
Macpherson said the DA sent the mayor’s office a lawyer’s letter, stating that his instructions were unlawful and unconstitutional. During the oversight visit, Macpherson said drinkable municipal water that the municipality had bought through uThukela-uMngeni had been flowing onto the street for months. The delay in repairing the pipe resulted in a loss of revenue for the municipality. Macpherson pointed out that a sewer pipe had been overflowing for at least eight months.
“It is clear that the municipality has no intention of fixing the small issues, so that they can escalate to bigger issues, which will cost more, and is then able to give bigger tenders to ANC comrades and their cronies that are connected to them,” Macpherson said.
“What should cost thousands of rand to repair is turning into hundreds of thousands of rand, even to millions. There are clear disparities between what people are paying for and what they are getting,” Macpherson added.
Ward 65 councillor Samantha Windvogel said the big issues were the lack of service delivery in all spheres, whether roads or sewer, adding that the ratepayers were bearing the brunt.
“We have excavations where the road and water departments are playing a blame game. We have vehicles that have actually gone into these open excavations,” Windvogel said.
Ward 70 councillor Tony Govender said whenever burst water pipe repairs were done, the excavations were not covered up.
“We keep hearing the same story – that they have no materials in stock. I cannot believe all of this when we are running a R60 billion budget. This is an ongoing story, and it has been played up for months now. Leaks that have been flowing for weeks. All it would take for them is to simply fix them up, and the roads will stop deteriorating,” Govender said.
Local businessman Wayne Naidoo, of Aqua Indulge, said: “Our concerns are the constant roadworks, as well as the disruptions of the water flows with regards to the repairs of the current pipeline. There is also an existing sewer leakage on the corner of this road, which is very unhealthy and has a constant bad stench. That is bad for our business,” lamented Naidoo.
However, eThekwini Municipality’s mayoral spokesperson, Mluleki Mntungwa, said no councillor had been gagged or barred from conducting oversight visits.
Mntungwa said this was exactly the kind of misleading statement that Kaunda was talking about.
“The mayor cautioned councillors against making misleading and/ or unverified statements about the municipality. From where we stand, this is a perfectly acceptable caution as no public representative should mislead the public or base their utterances on unverified information.
“He did not bar councillors from conducting oversight visits. All he asked for is that the relevant senior management should be made aware of oversight visits instead of councillors descending on projects and expecting junior staff to have all the answers that councillors are looking for. Again, we believe this is a fair request”.
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