Tshwane mayor Smangaliso Mkhatshwa is holding a R4,2-million festival this weekend while residents of the Winterveldt, Soshanguve and Olievenhoutbosch communities have been protesting a lack of service delivery, the Freedom Front Plus said in a statement on Friday.
MP Willie Spies said the event called by the African National Congress mayor is to commemorate ”five years of service delivery”, while residents have been complaining about inaccurate service accounts and irregular power supply.
Spies said that to give the Saturday festival content, the metro council has in the past two months ”displayed hundreds of placards, bus-stop advertisements and billboards in the ANC’s yellow, green and black colours in which announcements were made of the capital projects that have been completed within the last five years”.
While the FF+ has taken note of the capital projects that have indeed been completed within the past five years, ”it is a bit too much that a festival has to be held about it on the eve of elections”.
Municipal elections are taking place nationwide on March 1.
Spies said it is the normal work of a municipality to undertake capital projects and render services.
”If we are to hold a festival every time when a municipality for a change does what is expected of it, it only entrenches a culture of under-performance and mediocrity, which has unfortunately become synonymous with local government in South Africa,” said the MP, who was elected in 2004.
”While the metro council is inappropriately celebrating five years of mediocre service, it completely refused to give any support whatsoever to last year’s 150th commemoration festival of the establishment of Pretoria.
”It appears, therefore, that the ANC is attempting to create a fiction that everything in South Africa only came into being with the transfer of power in 1994. Reciprocal respect is only possible if the histories of everybody in the country are celebrated within the boundaries of truth.” — I-Net Bridge