Makana Mayor Vumile Lwana and Ward 4 Councillor Melikhaya Phongolo faced some tough questions from angry residents when they presented the 2010/11 Budget/ IDP roadshow at an imbizo on Manley Flats on Sunday.
Makana Mayor Vumile Lwana and Ward 4 Councillor Melikhaya Phongolo faced some tough questions from angry residents when they presented the 2010/11 Budget/ IDP roadshow at an imbizo on Manley Flats on Sunday.
The meeting is one of a series of community engagement meetings required to take place before the budget can be approved by the council.
Lwana and his entourage, which included Municipal Manager, Ntombi Baart and other officials, arrived at a modest schoolhouse shortly after 10am and set about explaining how they intended to manage the budget for the upcoming year.
Residents of local farms in the area expressed their unhappiness with a number of service delivery issues that included water and sanitation, transport, housing and electricity. They complained that most of the promises made at an imbizo last year have not been kept.
The community is also concerned about a running dispute between farm owners Leonie and Rodney Yendall
and a group of occupants who claim to have lived on the farm for 80 years.
The Yendalls acquired the farm in 2007 in a barter deal with a company that had previously leased the farm to them. In an effort to restructure operations on the farm, the Yendalls offered the long-time residents a 53-hectare plot of land for their own farming activities including a proposed agri-village.
The deal was brokered by Phongolo who was supposed to have worked with provincial officials. However, when the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs was divided into the department of Agriculture and the department of Rural Development and Land Reform the process was derailed which resulted in a series of confrontations between the farm owners and occupants.
Leonie Yendall has accused the occupants of deliberately sabotaging infrastructure on the farm and they counter that she has been unreasonable in her dealings with them.
Some of the residents now say they don’t want the 53-hectare plot causing Leonie Yendall to put that particular piece of land on the market.
She has also initiated the process in terms of the Extension of Security Tenure Act (ESTA) to evict the residents from her farm.
