A people-centred council gives poor residents the same urgency it gives businesses when they come to city hall with a problem.
That is how a Council of the Left leader explained the bloc’s proposal for municipalities as parties negotiate who will govern hung councils.
The bloc includes the SACP, MK Party, EFF and Afrika Mayibuye, among others. It wants prospective partners to commit to a minimum programme for local government.
Afrika Mayibuye deputy president Thato Magogodi said municipalities must stop treating the needs of wealthy residents and businesses as their main concern. A council, he said, “must not just become a platform to manage the affairs of the rich”.
Magogodi said councils responded readily when businesses made demands, then took a harder line when poor residents expected help.
“When the poor have certain expectations, [they] go hard on them,” he said.
The difference would show up in how councils handled service charges.
Magogodi said municipalities must keep services running and recognise that some households could not afford to pay. “We’re not saying services must not be paid.”
He said water was the first test of that approach. A reliable supply would serve households and help employers keep people in work.
He recalled a factory in Ditsobotla in North West whose operations suffered because it could no longer count on the municipality for water.
“There was no reliable water for the factory to continue to work.”
Magogodi also recalled residents having to jump over sewage while officials blamed one another. A responsive council, he said, would act when residents raised such failures.
He called the proposed councils “centres of people’s power”. They would “put the interest of the people of South Africa first and not that of politicians and political parties”.
- A people-centred council gives poor residents the same urgency it gives businesses when they come to city hall with a problem.
- That is how a Council of the Left leader explained the bloc’s proposal for municipalities as parties negotiate who will govern hung councils.
- The bloc includes the SACP, MK Party, EFF and Afrika Mayibuye, among others.
- It wants prospective partners to commit to a minimum programme for local government.
- Afrika Mayibuye deputy president Thato Magogodi said municipalities must stop treating the needs of wealthy residents and businesses as their main concern.
