A lot has been said in the last few weeks about the establishment of a metro municipality (or UniCity) for the West Rand and many views about this have been expressed.
But the question councillor Dennis Pretorius, the DA Caucus Leader of the West Rand District Municipality has difficulty with – does the ANC and its deployed cadres have the capacity to make this happen? – remains unanswered.
Five years ago Pretorius, the DA on the West Rand and organised businesses on the West Rand supported the proposal of the West Rand being re-organised into a Metro or UniCity as the alternative then was to include Mogale City in the Johannesburg Metro; that, said Pretorius, was “an option too ghastly to contemplate”.
But that was five years ago, said Pretorius and a lot of dirty water has run under the bridge since then.
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“In the last five years no progress has been made towards rationalisation of services, planning has come to a complete standstill and politicians and administration were not working in unison towards the goal of sharing services and planning the staff utilisation and organisational structures of the proposed metro. Municipal staff clearly was concerned about their employment in a larger metro and was not too keen on supporting the administrative processes to work towards a metro.
“Now, less than a year before the elections in 2016, the Minister insisted that the process be fast-tracked to enable the declaration of a metro before the election. If the cadres of the ANC could not manage even to start the process over a period of five years, how will they do it now – in a short year? It is a disaster waiting to happen,” Pretorius said.
He said what has become clear is that the ANC has done some homework and realised that the DA can win in Mogale City in 2016, “The only way they can stop this is to dilute the Mogale DA vote by adding to it the ANC voter-rich areas of Westonaria and Carletonville. It is the same strategy it has adopted with Midvaal – the only DA-run municipality in Gauteng. Midvaal is a thorn in the side of the Gauteng ANC – because it is an example of how a municipality should be run,” Pretorius concluded.
