DEAR Editor,-
I have been informed that at the public meeting on the transfer of housing stock in Hibiscus Coast held at the Port Shepstone Civic Centre recently, the MEC for Human Settlements, Mr. Ravi Pillay, turned the meeting into an ANC election rally rather than a municipal meeting to distribute title deeds to owners who had, in any event, waited an inordinately long period to receive them.
Although I was not present or involved in any way in the meeting, my information is that the beneficiaries of the scheme, as well as the public, were told in no uncertain terms not to believe anything that I had written about in the local press, as my facts and and figures were invariably incorrect.
This is a time-worn tactic of the ANC. Confronted by relevant facts and figures they would prefer to keep from the public, they do not attempt to repudiate the statements I have made, but simply resort to making personal attacks on me. This is a tactic long been practised by councilor Ronnie Nair, who has recently retired to his lair to lick his wounds after an unsuccessful foray into local press correspondence columns.
Other actions taken by the same ANC that has driven the Ugu District Council into hopeless insolvency and provincial intervention, have been the rigging of votes in stage two of Ugu councillors’ elections where it voted with the IFP and NFP in carefully calculated, sufficient numbers to exclude the DA from the executive committee of the district council, even though the number of votes recorded at local municipal council level elections entitled the DA to membership of the committee.
An example of this underhandedness is what happened at Umdoni during the municipal elections where the IFP and NFP with 2.9 percent and 5.4 percent of the vote, both sent councillors to Ugu District Council, but the DA with 20.22 percent of the vote was denied a single representative. Democracy, ANC style.
In another piece of trickery, the ANC then reduced the total councillor membership of portfolio committees to eight in order to expel the DA from the crucially important Finance, Water and Sanitation Committees on which they had served for ten years. All this in an attempt to gag the party by denying it ready access to the critical information it needs to fulfil its oversight role in the council.
Despite all this obstructive chicanery, the conclusion I draw from my attendance at council, portfolio and Auditor- General meetings is that the much-vaunted recovery plan is not being implemented in any meaningful way, and that it is likely that Ugu will receive a qualified audit report for 2012/2013.
DAVE SNASHALL
