Patricia de Lille, the Democratic Alliance’s mayoral candidate for Cape Town, leapt to the defence of the city this week after Cosatu cried foul over the price it was being charged to hire the Cape Town Stadium for the federation’s May Day rally.
Earlier this week Tony Ehrenreich, Cosatu’s provincial secretary and the ANC mayoral candidate, was quoted in the Cape Times saying the city’s charges of more than R1-million smacked of “petty politicking” by the DA-led council. The impasse over costs forced Cosatu to move the rally to the Athlone Stadium.
De Lille’s response was that local government operated in a legal framework that governed the use of the site and was designed to ensure fairness and equality before the law.
“The law does not make a distinction between whether it’s Cosatu or any other organisation. He [Ehrenreich] is really asking the taxpayers to subsidise a Cosatu rally,” she said. “If the city must go that route it will be seen by the auditor general as fruitless expenditure that could possibly lead to a qualified audit for the city next year.”
De Lille was speaking to the Mail & Guardian on Freedom Day as her campaign for the local government elections kicked into high gear.
Earlier that morning she laid a wreath at the Trojan Horse Memorial in Athlone, where three people were killed and 13 injured in an ambush by apartheid police in 1985.
Wearing a dark leather jacket against the wintery morning air, De Lille spoke to a quiet gathering of people standing on the pavement in front of the memorial. The small crowd that packed tightly around her was reverential rather than festive.
In an interview at her office shortly afterwards, De Lille said she would like to see greater communication between city structures and residents. “Local government is not about ideology, it’s about local issues — it’s about bread-and-butter issues that affect people on a daily basis,” she said.
Focusing on issues for communities cut across racial barriers and required that politics be taken out of local government, she said. “We are constitutionally obliged to provide services to all people, irrespective of whether they voted for you or not.”
De Lille is frustrated by criticism that the DA has intensified divisions in the city and is interested only in serving rich white communities. She said that was simply “stereotyping”, which flew in the face of research that had shown Cape Town was the best-run city in the country. “How can it be the best-run city in the country, providing services to all the people, and still be a city that excludes people?” asked De Lille.
It was that kind of stereotyping that had allowed residents to forgive people involved in the struggle who had been “messing up the Âmetros”, she said.
Without forgetting the past, more focus on the progress made in the 16 years of democracy was needed, particularly by the media, she said. “It’s almost as if our communications are stuck in the old days of apartheid. Why can’t we look at the positives and build a better life for all?”
But she conceded that incidents such as the city’s failure to provide enclosed toilets to residents of Khayelitsha’s Makhaza township should “never have happened”.
“Before we get to the stage where there is nothing to say to each other a lot of engagement needs to take place. I am a firm believer that by continued talking you will find a solution,” she said. “We must learn to listen.”
She recalled the Codesa negotiations in the early 1990s as South Africa worked towards a democracy. “By talking we were able to bring the worst enemies together under one roof for the sake of a good cause and I would rather have more engagement with communities than confrontation.”
De Lille said that if she was elected mayor she would work to improve integration of the city through programmes such as the expansion of the integrated rapid transit system. New phases of the system were due to be rolled out, linking Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha to the city, she said.
Other plans included laying a fibre-optic network linking not only businesses across the metro but also public services such as police stations and clinics.