Grahamstown's beleaguered railway station may finally have found a champion. Democratic Alliance MP Andrew Whitfield was in town to investigate the status of the Heritage site, which has been stripped, battered and bruised by vandals and looters.
Grahamstown's beleaguered railway station may finally have found a champion. Democratic Alliance MP Andrew Whitfield was in town to investigate the status of the Heritage site, which has been stripped, battered and bruised by vandals and looters.
He told a meeting of concerned residents at the station on Tuesday 5 August that he would keep returning until the station was restored.
He said that he was furious when he visited the station because he came across a thief stripping an item off the building.
The former Rhodes University student said, “Grahamstown has a special place in my heart.”
As the DA Frontier Constituency Leader & member of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Tourism, he appears to be the man for the job.
He promised to take the issue to Minister of Tourism Derek Hanekom and Minister of Arts and Culture Nathi Mthethwa.
Among the residents at the meeting were Fleur Way-Jones, Curator Emeritus of the Albany History Museum, Amy van Wezel, Curator of the History Museum, Sally Price-Smith of the Grahamstown Hospitality Guild and Cope's Philip Machanik.
Local plans to revitalise the station have been thwarted by the question of ownership.
According to the Heritage Resources Act, the building's owner is responsible for maintaining it, Whitfield said. The problem was that Transnet had transferred ownership to the Passenger Rail Association of South Africa (Prasa), but it appeared that Transnet still owned the land.
Whitfield said the railway station "is a symbol for the whole of Grahamstown and what has become of it”.
He also touched on other issues negatively impacting on Grahamstown, such as the its overall financial state and the municipal dump, and added that it would be difficult for the municipality to get back on to its feet.
"The municipality has an acting manager and an acting chief financial officer seconded from Bisho, so my question is how many acting people does the municipality need to become Hollywood?” he quipped.
In a 2013 interview with Grocott's Mail Lungile Mxube, managing director of the Frontier Hotel, said Prasa had agreed to fund a proposal to develop it into a bus terminal; however, he claimed the project had been blocked by the municipality.
In an article in Grocott's Mail in September 2013, Mxube said the Cacadu District Municipality had allocated R1 million for the renovation, and the Department of Transport a further R1.5m.
"When an organisation fails to use a conditional grant before it expires, then the funders take it back, which was the case with Makana Municipality," Mxube said at the time.
