Stop bleeding city’s ‘rich’ dry – rather trim the fat

IT HAS puzzled me for years, but I may have finally cracked the code to the mystery of Cape Town’s leaders’ seemingly deliberate efforts to alienate its core citizens and voters with ongoing increases in rates and all types of charges and fees, almost all based on property values, and seldom or never having any correlation with the services offered.

There seems to be a complete lack of understanding that the middle classes do not have endless financial resources and don’t appreciate being treated like ATMs by a bloated, inefficient and ungrateful municipality.

The reason for this aggressive treatment of the city’s “rich” has to be based in the history of the current municipal leaders.

The now beleaguered mayor, Patricia de Lille, is not a liberal politician.

She has a background as a trade unionist and member of Parliament for the PAC, an extreme left-wing party advocating nationalisation and socialism, before she founded the Independent Democrats and later merged this party with the DA.

Her ideology is closer to that of the EFF than the DA.

With a socialist ideology, you will always advocate “big government” and regard “the rich” as people who have just been lucky to have money and do not really deserve it.

I suspect the recent DA infighting might be based on this ideological difference rather than competence or corruption issues.

(And remember, the DA voted against the city’s first punitive water taxes proposal.)

Many in the DA probably fear losing the city to the ANC in the next election if this witch-hunt on the middle class and ordinary citizens continues – and rightly so.

The present levels of tariffs for rates, electricity, water etc are already very high, even by international comparison, and many house owners are pushed to the limit. Attempts to blame consumers for the municipality’s lack of planning about water supply infrastructure didn’t go down well with the electorate.

The city also cannot indefinitely provide free housing and services to newcomers, since this is not sustainable and the migration flow will simply never end.

The city’s leaders must find other ways to balance its budget – try cutting expenses – rather than continue bleeding “the rich” dry, or they might well find themselves without a job come the elections.