EDITOR – In this free Durban, if the City Mayors and City Managers spoke to, and demanded from, the Metro Police (substitute any City Unit here) as City Manager Sibusiso Sithole does, for example, ratepayers at the Stables, we would have been well on our way to being the City envisioned in its second such booklet “Innovations – Good Practice from the eThekwini Municipality, Durban, South Africa” (ISBN: 0-620-36803-9 – June 2006).
This wasteful expenditure boasts, on Page 3, that “… the eThekwini Municipality is committed to the use of bright ideas to illuminate the lives of all who live in Durban.” The booklet ends with the telling words “the end (and also the beginning…)”
It's been nine years since the beginning, you say. Yes, but read on.
The booklet mentions a whole shopping list of governance talk-shops whose resolutions it supposedly tries to uphold. And, it boasts that, in 1994 (21 years ago), the Government demanded “Municipalities innovate in order to drive the change that fuels the new South Africa”.
Clearly there is a scarcity of will in our local government to transform. Even its inner city rejuvenation and Back-to-Basics plans (both revealed in the last week) have failed – on the drawing boards. This is evident from its extending the target date from 2020 to 2030 in this vision that “By 2020, eThekwini will be Africa's most caring and liveable city”.
If you have been holding your breath for the change we rightly deserve and are turning blue, go on, breathe and resolve to turn blue at the polls – DA Blue.
Mahmood
North Beach
