DEAR Editor,-
When the last local government elections took place four years ago, the Democratic Alliance, which had served on the core portfolio committees of Finance and Water and Sanitation since Ugu’s establishment ten years earlier, was arbitrarily expelled from both.
The ruling party, in its wisdom, decided to rather allocate membership of peripheral portfolio committees like ‘Special Programmes’ to the DA. For the last six months, this committee has drifted aimlessly along in the absence of a chairman, who must by law also be a member of the executive committee.
Now that a chairman has been found and allocated, it was not possible for the committee to meet as there was no quorum despite the fact that the ANC has sufficient members of the committee to raise a quorum by itself.
Ugu District Council has one of the highest HIV prevalences in the land at 38.3 percent, and even the agenda item that deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa is to visit Ugu on December 1 (involving 23 Ugu wards) failed to raise sufficient interest for ANC councillors to attend the portfolio committee to actually discuss the matter or to merely note it.
One wonders if it will take a visit by President Zuma himself to resurrect this moribund ‘Special Programmes’ committee.
DAVE SNASHALL
