Grocott’s Mail is strategically placed as a news gathering organisation in Grahamstown.
Grocott’s Mail is strategically placed as a news gathering organisation in Grahamstown.
Right on Church Square and opposite City Hall we are well positioned to observe the comings and goings in the municipal offices. If we need any information from the mayor or his administration, our reporters can hop skip and jump over to their offices in under a minute. It also means of course, that councillors can easily monitor our activities. The mayor can sit in his board room and look directly over the square into the Grocott’s Mail front shop.
When protesters decide to march in town, their destination is either the courts or the municipal offices. In either case, they walk along High Street past the front door of our offices. We usually hear the protesters approaching before we see them so this gives us time to whip out our cameras and go charging off down the street to capture the latest images.
This does not mean we latch on to every single protest. We miss them sometimes when strikers hold a relatively small scale picket outside a commercial establishment.
All this means that we have a fairly good idea of what is going on in terms of protest actions. Clearly our anecdotal experiences could never take the place of professional statistical survey, but it certainly seems that there are more unhappy people in Grahamstown this year than there were last year. This would not be surprising as we flounder through an international economic crisis, but it is uncertain that the upswing in protests can be attributed to the financial crisis or to growing dissatisfaction with the people who run our municipality.
Demonstrations are usually linked to shortages of water, housing and electricity supplies – factors often clumped together under the term service delivery. In almost all aspects of service delivery the municipality does not act alone, it merely acts as the provider of ‘the last mile’. The municipality has to take water, power and housing provided by government and its agencies, so it is not always fair to blame the municipality for service delivery problems. However, there are certainly quite a few people in Grahamstown who believe that the municipality could do more to improve the delivery of services to the residents of this town.
