Johannesburg | Monday
THE exclusively white community of Orania in the Northern Cape is to hand a report on its status as an independent municipality to Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi on Monday, a representative for Orania said.
Carel Boshoff said in a statement that the report was the result of a 14-month long study of the desirability for Orania to have its own local government structures, after it was demarcated with Hopetown and Strydenburg into the Thembelihle municipality.
Boshoff said the community went to court just before the local government elections in 2000 to fight the demarcation and to insist on its own local government structures.
The court granted an order that the demarcation should be halted and that an independent committee should be appointed to investigate the feasibility of the community having its own municipality.
The town’s rural transitional representative council, which was granted in 1995, was retained for the duration of the investigation.
Boshoff said the report makes four recommendations. The first of these being that the town should not have its own municipality.
Secondly it recommends that Orania should rather be demarcated with Van der Kloof, a town at the Van der Kloof dam.
Thirdly it says that certain municipal services should be delegated to the Orania community itself via a contract. The fourth recommendation is that a cabinet committee should investigate the community’s right to self-determination as guaranteed by the Constitution.
Boshoff said that the report contained all the elements to reach a positive agreement. He expressed the hope that the government would regard it in the same light.
Orania is a small Afrikaner community of about 600 people near Hopetown in the Northern Cape. Their main industry is agriculture. – Sapa