Concerns over new ward boundaries
The community will be given an opportunity to voice their opinion.
LOCAL Amakhosi have asked the Municipal Demarcation Board to be extra careful when deciding on ward boundaries, at a consultation meeting held at the Ugu Sports and Leisure Centre last Friday.
The Amakhosi who attended the meeting voiced their concern that they sometimes found that their traditional areas fell under two different municipalities.
“My area falls under Ugu District Municipality and Harry Gwala District Municipality,” said concerned Nkosi Dumisile Ngcobo. She explained how she finds it difficult to cater for both municipalities.
“Because I don’t have a seat in the Harry Gwala Municipality I can not cater to the people who reside under that municipality,” she said.
The demarcation board had called the consultation meeting with the intention of showing the people what the board is proposing with respect to wards in their municipalities.
If the community does not agree with the board’s proposals, they need to work through alternatives, following the rules and guidelines that have been provided to them.
The board will provide municipalities with draft ward boundaries for consultation purposes. Members of the public will be given time to consider the drafts and the MDB and the municipalities will convene consultation meetings.
Fazel Hoosen of MDB explained that the board did have guidelines in terms of setting the new boundaries. He explained that the board would try to keep current ward numbers as far as possible.
“We are going to use voting district boundaries as building blocks, eg follow voting district boundaries when drawing new ward boundaries,” he explained.
“We are going to make sure that we do not split obvious communities, groupings, villages, suburbs or traditional areas if at all possible,” he said.
Mr Hoosen also said that it would be hard to resolve Inkosi Ngcobo’s problem of having her community split into two different muncipalities.
“She should have raised her concerns during the previous consultation process,” he said. He however promised that he would have his office look at the issue and see if they could try to resolve the problem.
He also said they would have more consultation meetings, in which they would visit the different municipalities to talk to the community.
