Irksome council shortfalls
THAT residents of Cape Town are becoming increasingly upset about many matters relating to the council is abundantly clear. The unrelenting spat within the DA certainly exacerbates that feeling of being disappointed and aggrieved.
The fact is that council is oversized and because of the enormous cost involved in having council meetings, scheduling occurs once a month in general. The time and opportunity for debate is therefore extremely limited. This is the first problem.
The second problem arises from the majority party, in our case the DA, choosing to appoint an executive mayor rather than having a collective executive system. This means that a councillor is permitted to ask one question per meeting directed to the mayor. Unlike Parliament where questions are put separately to the president, the deputy president and the ministers, all questions in council are directed to the executive mayor.
The replies we get, unfortunately, skirt the core of the questions.
There is thus no direct opportunity to put questions to the deputy mayor or to Mayco members. What they do and how they do it therefore escapes focused scrutiny from council as a whole. Portfolio committees are entrusted to hold some of the departments accountable and they do so to some extent only.
In the circumstances that prevail, the more privileged segment of society generally takes issue with tariff increases as is happening at present. Others in our society are protesting, often violently, about both lack of housing and basic service delivery.
The apartheid divide remains extant. I have asked for a master plan to be produced, for instance, for the development of Khayelitsha showing how it is going to shed its apartheid apparel. The city, to its credit, accepted a motion I proposed to upgrade Spine Road to a main road that fully accommodates businesses. This would make Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain into a town. We now wait to see how the city will carry the motion forward.
In the meanwhile, an amount of R270 million was withdrawn a few weeks ago by national government on the grounds that the city was not spending its allocation swiftly enough. This money was meant to build infrastructure for the poorest of the poor. Cope and the ANC took up the issue very strongly in council. I asked councillor Brett Herron to put together a multiparty delegation to ask the national government to reverse its decision. Thus far there has been no movement.
Make no mistake about it: frustration exists among us as councillors also. Many of us want to see more being done, more value being obtained from every rand and more opportunities being created to examine what each of the executive mayor’s team is doing.
The council is not functioning as I would like to see it. FAROUK CASSIM (COPE) Century View