UPM Press Statement. We reject DA's political gimmicks

[UPM media]

MCF-UPM OPEN LETTER TO THE PEOPLE OF THE MAKANA LOCAL MUNICIPALITY

19 June 2023

 

We are the poor and the unemployed of Makhanda. No one will speak or stand for us. We speak and act for our selves. We are a people with conscious and autonomous political agency. We are the Unemployed People’s Movement and the Makana Citizens’ Front.

 

Reject the political shenanigans of the ANC and the DA

We do not turn whichever way as the political winds blow. We are not toys that kowtow to the narrow party political shenanigans of either the ruling African National Congress (ANC) or the opposition Democratic Alliance DA). Both these parties advance anti-poor neo-liberal policies that hollow out the state and promote the privatisation of basic services. In the lead-up to the 2024 national elections, we will obviously witness intensified political shenanigans between the ANC and the DA. This is nothing else but meaningless elite politicking on the carcass of black lives. It will do nothing to solve the hunger, poverty, misery and squalor defining the lives of the majority. We call on these 2 parties to put their hands to the wheel and join us in solving the problems of our people.

 

Continuing service delivery failures

We are extremely frustrated and angry at the continuing failures of the ANC to deliver basic services to the people of Makhanda. Our people still suffer the indignity of the bucket system. Even worse is the inability of this municipality to provide us with clean, safe drinking water. Despite that government has spent close to R400-million on upgrading of dilapidated infrastructure at the James Kleynhans Water Treatment Works, this year alone there have been more than 100 water outages in Makhanda. Even the water that eventually trickles to our taps is below safe drinking standards.

 

This municipality and the Amatola Water Board have manifestly failed to upgrade the Water Treatment Works since 2013. Instead of a successful upgrade, we have seen a worsening water crisis and they have blamed everything except themselves. As we can now so clearly see, this upgrade has been a business opportunity where the state has become the ‘public’ arm of the ‘private’. In this role, the local municipality and the Amatola Water Board have turned the upgrade of the Water Treatment Works into endless business opportunities for tenderpreneurs rather than a public good. Even worse, the municipality’s interpretation of the court-instructed Financial Recovery Plan seeks to make the poor pay for basic services which should be provided to all as a universal public good instead of the cost-recovery logic of commodification that we now see. This is worsened by the severe austerity budgets of the last few years – this austerity has reduced the amount of fiscal allocations to municipalities.

 

The above management and policy failures are now likely to be worsened by the climate crisis. With the April 2022 floods in northern parts of the Eastern Cape province and in KwaZulu-Natal, we saw the importance of functional and accountable municipalities in responding to climate shocks. Proper local services should build people’s resilience, reconstruct and climate-proof settlements, fix broken roads, storm water drains, water and sewage pipes, street lighting, and provide proper municipal services (including waste water treatment works), water, use renewables such as solar water heaters, and be based on accountability and participation. Our municipality is far from this. We fear a catastrophe should we suffer a severe climate shock in the near future.

 

People’s Engineering Panel and Water Monitors

The foregoing are what have led us to decided to set up a People’s Engineering Panel to get to the bottom of the Makhanda water crisis. By the end of June, we will issue a call for the nomination of progressive engineers and other technical experts to constitute this panel. We call on the people of Makhanda to define the mandate and work of this panel. To kickstart this discussion, we believe that this panel must focus on the following:

Produce a definitive baseline report on the water crisis in Makhanda – its impact, its causes, the culprits responsible,

Table a set of recommendations for solving the crisis as urgently as possible; and

Train ten water monitors per ward – training in basic technical water treatment skills.

 

Further, the water monitors will conduct weekly tests and monitoring visits at both the Waainek and the James Kleynhans Water Treatment Works and produce a People’s Monthly Water Monitor. This will ensure that we can go beyond the propaganda that the municipality has consistently fed us.

Further, we will also monitor and undertake a social audit of all municipal expenditure on water. Through this, we will expose corruption, misamanagement and maladministration. We will ensure that all municipal finance is optimally spent to solve the water crisis and other basic needs. We will also ensure that from the Mayor down all municipal employees perform their work according to the well established standards and without any involvement in corruption, fraud or other malfeasance.

We give the municipality no more than 6 months to solve the water crisis. We will also use mass action whenever the above initiatives are blocked by any quarter in the municipality or provincial government or the Amatola Water Board.

 

No false solutions

We therefore reject and dismiss the self-serving call by the local DA for the removal of the Mayor as if that will magically wand a new machinery that will address all the intractable failures of this municipality. ANC has always recalled Mayor's when under pressure. The problems facing this municipality are structural and systemic, they go beyond one individual. They require stability and sustained focus on solving its problems. We therefore call on the Mayor to perform as required and to ensure transparency, democratic participation and accountability. We also call on her to ensure that the municipality does not block any of the above actions that we will undertake. Failure on any of these fronts will not stop us from demanding accountability even to the point of his replacement or the dissolution of the municipality itself.

 

We call on the community of Makhanda to join us as we build the power to reclaim the municipality from below and make it work.We must reject sectarianism and gimmicks to gain votes that has characterised South Africa's politics

Issued by MCF and  UPM