Are you playing your part?

The current deficiency in service delivery around the Makana region is sometimes exacerbated by residents in the CBD, the suburbs and in the township. Sure, we should loudly complain when our roads have potholes, our streets have no lights and animals are roaming around in Church Square as if it’s Kruger National Park. To sort out these messes is the work of Makana Municipality. We have an elected council that makes and amends bylaws, makes and amends budgets and takes political leadership of our fair city.

Additionally, we have a bureaucracy that supports the elected officials in executing their mandate. These collect refuse, resurface roads, impound wandering livestock and provides basic amenities like water, electricity and sewerage services. When those fail, these two groups are generally to blame, because they never once stop collecting their paycheques even when things are not going too well.

There is, however, the part of individual residents of Grahamstown that is often excluded from debates on municipal citizenry.

Just at it is they who enjoy the well-lit streets at night and whose vehicles glide over well-tarred roads, it is these good men and women who generate rubbish.

Makana Municipality officials do not generate the rubbish that creates smelly mountains at the taxi rank. It’s also unlikely that one of the councillors owned the cattle that caused the recent crash on the N2, or the goats that have no conscience about breaking into and destroying the vegetable garden that sustains someone’s family.

Community members know who these animals belong to. They should call them out (the owners, not the animals) at public events such as weddings and church sermons and community policing forum meetings.

It’s residents who litter the streets of Grahamstown as if we are at a music festival, in the full knowledge that service delivery has been extremely difficult in recent months. It’s the same residents who ignore municipal pleas to conserve water by using perfectly clean water to wash their cars and wet their gardens, in the full knowledge that our dam levels are less than 20%.

As citizens, we ought to have a level of responsibility to our town that is beyond reproach. That means your buried garden irrigation system is mean and terrible, even if Makana has not sanctioned you – and even if it is borehole water!

You are as guilty as the roving cattle owners, if you throw your garbage out of the car window as you drive along Bathurst Street. And a green lawn is a sign that you’re out of touch with this community.