#Letter: Slashing council meetings a regressive step

Tony Kruger of Ballito writes:

With reference the Courier article “MM slashes council meetings to 4 a year” published on July 8, the proposed slashing of the number of general council meetings from 12 to four a year is a regressive step.

It will effectively make citizen access and ability to participate in decision-making on local matters more remote than it already is.

I’m sure the length of meetings will not increase, and even if they do, this will still result in fewer agenda items being covered – and in less detail.

Consequently, voter participation will diminish further still. If, as is the view of numerous opposition councillors, this action was implemented via sleight of hand, i.e. “snuck in” by the municipal manager, then it is even more deplorable.

For him to cite as a reason (presumably one he finds acceptable) that councillors “always tell me they are part-time…”, then this is really annoying, especially since the taxpayers are paying generous salaries to these councillors.

Your article states “earnings” (I hesitate to use the word) vary between R254 000 to R541 000 a year!

Do we have any recourse on this backward step? We are sliding further away from living in a functional democracy in which citizens can play an active part in decisions that directly affect their lives.

In another article on the same page of the paper, it was doubly irritating to read that these taxpayer-funded councillors have, for more than three months, been squabbling over appointments to the most important committee in the KwaDukuza municipality, the one responsible for oversight of investigations into financial issues, including irregular expenditure.

As such, it is not functioning effectively, and as one opposition councillor remarked, this results in “failed service delivery and corruption…”.

So, to sum up, slothfulness, incompetence and probably corruption, too, means we the taxpayers are being horribly shortchanged, in fact robbed.

I need not remind our council that the ones who suffer first are the most poor sections of our community.

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