Cllr Thomas Ngwenya said: “We need to celebrate the rich and illustrious life of Mandela and we should also remember him and his contributions in the struggle for freedom.”
He said Mandela always insisted that he was no saint, but a cadre of the movement who also, in the course of the struggle, made mistake.
Cllr Ngwenya said he knew from an early age that the key feature of genuine revolutionaries is not to make mistakes, but the ability to timorously recognize and admit to those mistakes and seek ways to correct them.
He added that national reconciliation for him has never meant tackling the class and other social inequalities in society.
He said for Mandela national reconciliation was a platform to pursue the objective of building an egalitarian South Africa society free of the scourge of racism, patriarchy and gross inequalities.
“Our boldness requires us to always ensure that our programmes, projects, policies, procurement and service can incrementally boost job creation and the creation of safe and sustainable viable and liveable communities. Our developmental objective are aimed at releasing the district’s latent economic potential, encouraging development in the SMME’s and cooperative and encouraging the better and maximum use of resources such as land, infrastructure and human capital by our local municipalities,” explained Cllr Ngwenya.
He said they would not shy away from intervening to affect improvements on issues of financial viability, fiscal discipline, governance and long-term sustainability of the delivery of first class service within the local municipalities.
He also said that in order to ensure value for money in their programmes, projects, repairs and maintenance of infrastructure in their local municipalities they will ascertain that their planning process are always informed by the reality of climate change and global warning as one of the challenges for sustainable development.
He also gave an account on the Socio-Economic Review and the Outlook for Mpumalanga (SERO) published in November 2013 and that the district recorded the lowest poverty rate at 33.5%. “We call upon all of you to emulate the example of selflessness, sacrifice, commitment and service to the people.
Let’s make our practical contribution towards nation building and a better South Africa; let us make sure our schools, FET colleges and our university are functional, let us build safe communities by building safety forums in our localities, let us build better localities by protecting our schools, our clinic and our community hall, let us do permanent door to door campaigns to tackle problems in our communities and let us be like Tata Mandela, let us not throw stones, but let every one of us make a contribution to build better, safer and sustainable municipalities,” ended Cllr Ngwenya.
