Makana Mayor Vumile Lwana was jeered and heckled as he addressed angry township residents outside the City Hall on Thursday morning.
Makana Mayor Vumile Lwana was jeered and heckled as he addressed angry township residents outside the City Hall on Thursday morning.
Struggle songs filled the air as a crowd of about 200 people from various Grahamstown townships toyi-toyied down Raglan Road, turning down Bathurst Street and into High Street, to hand over a memorandum to Lwana at the City Hall.
The latest march was organised by the Unemployed People's Movement and the Women's Social Forum, two weeks after service-delivery protests in Phaphamani township turned ugly.
Among the grievances highlighted in the document was a call for more transparency and better accountability regarding tender processes. The memorandum demanded that residents be told "the whereabouts of the R10 million aimed at rebuilding houses [in Vukani Township]destroyed in the 2007 tornado".
Reading aloud from the document was Liziwe Gqotolo, an executive member of the Women's Social Forum. She highlighted crumbling RDP houses, water shortages, and the bucket toilet system still in use in some Grahamstown townships.
Gqotolo said, "When one walks through the township streets of Grahamstown at night, one sees hundreds of drunk men and women drifting aimlessly through the darkness of poorly lit streets… Something must be done to stop the blight of sexual violence and clearly not enough is being done as evidence[d]by the recent local spate of rapes."
Five residents from the townships worst affected by poor service-delivery, including Phaphamani, Zolani and Xolani, where mud houses abound, were also given a chance to address the mayor.
One resident, Simbonile January, from Ethembeni, in Joza, spoke of a lack of service-delivery in his area, including the lack of proper toilets. "We don't even show on the map of Grahamstown when it comes to services, but when we have to vote, suddenly we are expected to appear."
Mayor Vumile Lwana accepted a memorandum from Gqotolo on behalf of the residents – but not before putting up with heckling, jeers and insults.
Addressing the residents, Lwana asked the residents to understand that the municipality handled a small fraction of the services that they were supposed to enjoy. The bulk of the services were shared between provincial government departments, including the Department of Human Settlements, based in Bhisho.
The march was peaceful, compared to the two-day protest a fortnight ago, in which residents burned tyres and dug up newly tarred roads in Phaphamani and Joza. Yesterday, around 30 police officers stood by while the marchers toyi-toyied.
This was in contrast to their response to the Phaphamani protests, where they fired rubber bullets, threw stun grenades and arrested four community activists. The crowd dispersed by 1pm, but not before Lwana promised to meet with a delegation from the Unemployed People's Movement and the Women's Social Forum at a later date, to provide the residents with a detailed reply to their demands.
