The past 12 months in the Makana Municipal area have not been boring by any standards. We had an important local election that saw the number of wards in our area change and after a rather tumultuous election campaign, we now have a new mayor and a several new councillors.
The past 12 months in the Makana Municipal area have not been boring by any standards. We had an important local election that saw the number of wards in our area change and after a rather tumultuous election campaign, we now have a new mayor and a several new councillors.
Large segments of the electorate repeatedly expressed profound dissatisfaction with the ruling ANC in Makana throughout the year. Yet those same protesters voted for the ANC again returning the ruling party to power with an overwhelming majority. This can only mean that either our electorate is perversely masochistic or they find the alternative to ANC incompetence worse than a bucket toilet.
City Hall has provided a rich source of articles throughout the year. Most of the stories have been about municipal fiascos – failure to get the water and sanitation system functioning properly, failure to fix the roads and failure to get a clean audit. The most intriguing series of articles has been about the suspension of the Chief Financial Officer. He insists that he is clean and does not deserve to be suspended while the municipality is vague about the reasons for his suspension and what they intend to do about it.
On the crime beat, there are far too many stories for this newspaper to follow up adequately. The national police stats tell us that crime is dropping but that is not what we have noticed in Makana. Crime in this area is out of control and the police are either reluctant to do anything about it, or they are not able to do so.
It is doubtful that there is a single family in Makana that has not been affected by crime in the last year. Most of the crimes are petty involving items of relatively low value, but even petty crimes are traumatising especially when a person is threatened with a knife or shoved onto the ground. There are also no shortages of extremely savage crimes committed on a regular basis. Murder and rape occur in Makana almost every week of the year.
In spite of this rather gloomy editorial, it is fair to say that not all is doom and gloom in Makana. We had a brilliant National Arts Festival featuring Ladysmith Black Mambazo; several marvellous performances of classical music from Juan, Mariel and Friends plus an absolutely amazing show by South Africa’s premier music group, Freshlyground.
Now as the year draws to a close we perform the annual ritual of waiting for the matric results to be published so we can see if our education system is finally bottoming out, or is it still plummeting into the abyss?
