Lesufi plans to create metro
‘It’ll fix problems in Sedibeng district’
Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi says he has already activated a process to see if all the municipalities under Sedibeng district can be combined into a single metropolitan city.
Speaking to councillors of the district in Sebokeng yesterday, Lesufi said the government had tried to create a metro in Sedibeng, but it did not work. He said he planned to get it right this time.
Lesufi was speaking just hours after a group of 900 business owners, who call themselves the Vereeniging Business Corporation, told Sowetan they won’t be paying for rates and taxes to Emfuleni council from November after years of failed service delivery.
Lesufi said he was in talks with cooperative governance and traditional affairs (Cogta) MEC Mzi Khumalo to turn Sedibeng, which is made up of Midvaal, Emfuleni and Lesedi local municipalities, into a metropolitan municipality.
“We can only solve longterm problems of these municipalities here if we convert all these municipalities into a new metro of Sedibeng. I have assigned the task to the MEC to start that process again.
“That is the only way we can sustain [development]. This thing of intervention and intervention is unsustainable. We need a long-term strategy. They are starting that process of analysing why it failed, fix the problem that made it to fail so that we can be in a position to solve it,” Lesufi said.
Of the three municipalities, only the DA-led Midvaal is stable and has performed consistently for years. The ANC in the province has previously maintained that having a single metro, which can pool the resources of all the local municipalities, is better than smaller councils struggling to deliver services. In 2015, the Pretoria high court set aside a Municipal Demarcation Board decision to amalgamate Midvaal and Emfuleni into a metropolitan municipality which was victory for the DA.
Lesufi told councillors the Sedibeng district would be the first area where all the programmes of his administration would be implemented.
“As the premier of the province, I have adopted Sedibeng as my terrain of operation. Even though I was born and bred in Tembisa, whatever this provincial government will do, if it does not start in Sedibeng, it is not a real thing.
“We will test our programmes [to see] if they are working in Sedibeng. If they cannot work in Sedibeng, we can’t expand it anywhere because it cannot not work.”
Among the programmes Lesufi wants to introduce is using technology and young people to fight crime with 6,500 new police officers, 400 hitech vehicles, and 180 drones.
Lesufi said he is engaging the national government to intervene in the legal battle over R1.3bn that Emfuleni owes Eskom and has appointed a legal firm to assist the municipality.
dlaminip@sowetan.co.za