Mayor challenged to provide proper answers

Madam – Thank you for publishing my letter, “no party to run show” in the Advertiser dated 9 October 2015, however I feel that the response to my letter from Mayor Afzul Rehman cannot go unchallenged.

Many of the questions asked went unanswered. The mayor’s statement that road shows address most of the questions is definitely not true.

I have attended a number of these budget road shows where it seemed that the main purpose of these was to brag about the size of the budget and to make promises, many of which he never kept.

At these meetings the public are limited to the number of questions that can be raised and once the mayor has responded to the question the matter is closed. There have been road shows where the public were denied the opportunity to ask questions. Can the public therefore be blamed for the poor support of these road shows.

The mayor now admits that loans were taken out over the last two years but neglected to reveal that the major parts of these loans was to finance the municipal offices.

The mayor made the following statement. “we have been absolutely transparent in all issues Finance and the municipal budget is an open public document that can be found in most libraries”. This is not always the case and the information requested in my last letter will not be found in these documents so the following questions which were ignored still need answers.

1. How much does the municipality pay for the rental of offices at the Nedbank building?

2. What will the total loan repayments be for the new offices and what is the repayment period?

3. Can the assurance be given that once the new offices are occupied it will no longer be necessary to rent offices?

The mayor denies that the municipal reserves have been depleted stating that there is over R400 million in reserve. What he is not stating is that this money is made up from government grants for specific projects budgeted for and other monies such as consumer deposits etc which cannot be used for capital or operational purposes, After all, if the municipality had all this money available, why then was it necessary to take out these loan?.

Peter Hair

Response from Mayor, Afzul Rehman:

Madam, thank you once again for the opportunity to respond. I am not in the habit of having a dialogue with a reader, and I most certainly don’t intend wasting any more of my time on Mr Hair.

He knows very well the intricacies of running a municipality, he being himself, an ex employee of the municipality.

As part of the ratepayers association, he was part of the group who had taken paid adverts to oppose every decision taken by my administration. I sleep peacefully with the fact that he and his ilk do not fall within my fan base.

I take umbrage with the statement he makes that not everything is covered with the roadshow and that promises made are not kept. His questions about the building were asked and answered, as far back as 2010 when we started the project. These questions cannot all of a sudden become pertinent when we are almost complete with the construction.

I challenge him to list which promises of mine were not kept. I take pride in the fact that I don’t make promises I cannot keep, and in the unlikely event that there are some we do not keep, we are easily able to justify why they did not happen.

I don’t make any apology for “bragging” about the budget. The municipality is an award winning institution with people who try extremely hard to make it successful.

We have turned it around since 2009, cutting expenses and boosting our capital infrastructure budget by almost 10 fold! This goes a long way into changing people’s lives for the better. We are also one of the few municipalities that spends a vast amount of our budget on maintenance. It is one of the reasons that you don’t have unnecessary blackouts and water shortages.

We also renewed our fleet of tractors, waste collection trucks, fire trucks and other fleet. This has not been done for over 30 years!

We are also one of the only municipalities that spends a huge chunk of our budget on our suburbs and CBD. The new Allen street and bridge extension is just one example.

We are the only city in SA not affected by load shedding, not only because we planned from the early 90s, but also because we spent millions since 2009 on scada and other upgrades.

We have done more for the wards in town than any other administration, and we are proud that Newcastle is on the map, continuously punching above its weight.

As this letter goes to print, I am being invited to all kinds of platforms to share our best practices. We were invited to the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) for load shedding , SALGA and Ilgm for going paperless and saving the ratepayer about R8-million a year, and SALGA again for investment promotion.

So yes, we own the bragging rights, and every citizen of Newcastle should share this pride. Of course we are not without our faults, and we are always discussing new ways to overcome our challenges.

Mr Hair seeks to sensationalise the amount of loans we have taken. Let me make it simple for him: since 2011 our capital budget totals just over R1,9 BILLION that goes to direct infrastructure development.

Of this, we have only taken loans of R255-MILLION. Every other cent of expenditure on capital projects were funded internally because we channeled funding from expenses into capex.

The new building is part of this amount. We currently pay about R10-million a year on office rental, which lease comes to an end this year and we will vacate and move to our new building. Any businessman will tell you, that spending this money yearly as rental is like throwing money down a drain. We rather pay towards our own building, and know that this belongs to us. The repayment for the loan should be in the region of R12-m per annum.

We also took into account that this building will cost us two times as much as long as we delay, and we therefore built it despite knowing that we will face criticism from cynics such as Mr Hair.

I cannot give you a guarantee that we will not need more space, I’m hoping that we do, as we continue to make Newcastle one of the fastest growing towns in KZN.

The surplus is indeed made up of many parts, but it is a surplus, over 25 per cent of which we can use immediately. Was it not the ratepayers association who took us to the national treasury insisting on us using the surplus to fund the building? How now is this depleted?? This amount has remained steady since my administration has taken over in 2009.

Madam Editor, sometimes I come across as arrogant to your readers, however I need them to know, that certain people distract us from getting the job done with their unnecessary noise. I wish that people could be more constructive and if they criticise, offer reasonable solutions.

How I wish that we could focus on the doughnut, and not the hole!!!