City ready and eager to welcome its festive season visitors
IT’S THE time of the year our city enjoys the most. For a couple of weeks, we have had our hands full preparing for the hordes of visitors who choose eThekwini to be their home away from home for the summer holidays.
We cannot afford to disappoint them and we are pulling out all the stops to ensure that we meet all their demands, bearing in mind that they have been working very hard throughout the year. Our responsibility is to ensure that they are in for a treat fit for a king at all times they are with us.
I am pleased to announce that our Festive Season Management Committee (Fesmac) has done exceptionally well, and it is therefore all systems go.
They have put together comprehensive plans to make all holidaymakers feel at home in Durban. Their preparations include the activation of the beach-buddy and child-minders programme.
The latter is instrumental in ensuring that children who come to the beach are tagged with wristbands bearing the contact details of their parents. We urge everyone to get their young ones tagged as soon as they arrive at the beachfront.
This committee has also come up with a watertight plan for traffic management. Specific roads leading to the beachfront will be closed and certain roads will be controlled by a boom gate manned by metro police.
Minibuses are not going to be allowed at the beachfront. There is a park-and-ride system at the Old DriveInn site, North Beach, near the old Natal Command. Beachgoers will be ferried from the site to the beaches at 30-minute intervals daily throughout the festive season.
We have made available in abundance ablution facilities at the DriveInn site for the convenience of all our visitors arriving in minibuses.
In our quest to keep our city clean this festive season, we will mobilise teams whose sole mission will be to clean and collect waste. These teams will work shifts of between 6am and 2.30pm, 3pm to 11pm and 10pm to 5.30am.
We’ve also brought on board 12 emerging contractors to pick up litter on the beaches. We are appealing to all visitors to use the rubbish bins that are generously positioned all over the city to minimise littering
All our visitors should note that both the metro police and the SAPS have a comprehensive programme of action to deal with organised crime, petty crime and vagrancy.
Anyone found to have violated our by-laws will be dealt with severely.
Visitors should rest assured that our goal is to ensure that they do not fall victim to crime while in our city.
Plans are on the cards to install more cameras at the beachfront with a dedicated control room and rapid response. We are also investigating deploying drones to augment our law enforcement plans.
It should be noted that liquor will not be allowed at the beachfront. Public drinking is also outlawed and anyone found to be behaving to the contrary will face the full might of our by-laws.
eThekwini Municipality is looking forward to hosting you: please be a good visitor. As our visitors will be driving to our city, please obey the rules of the road and do not drink and drive.