Thousands of African National Congress (ANC) demonstrators gathered at the civic centre in Cape Town on Wednesday to protest against the Democratic Alliance-led (DA) city council.
”March against DA council’s high rates, service cut-offs, pink letters and evictions,” read a pamphlet distributed to the protesters, who had marched through the streets of central Cape Town to the civic centre.
In attendance at the heavily policed protest were various members of the ANC provincial government, including Premier Ebrahim Rasool.
”This is the Cape Town that we need,” Rasool told the crowd. ”Let Africans and coloureds unite because we are all suffering under the pink slip. Let Muslim and Christian unite because everyone is suffering under the pink slip.”
In a memorandum addressed to mayor Helen Zille and signed by ANC provincial secretary Mcebisi Skwatsha, the ANC said it was protesting against the ”455 000 pink letters threatening to cut off water and electricity supplies mainly to poor families and evict these same families from their home”.
The memorandum also said that rates that had ”on average increased by 15%” were ”well above inflation rates and way above undertakings given by the DA”.
‘She is a boer’
Beauty (who did not want to give her last name), an ANC Women’s League secretary in her ward in Khayelitsha, said she had come to the protest because ”we haven’t got the money for the water”.
She said things had been better when the ANC’s Nomaindia Mfeketo had been mayor because rates were ”decreasing” not ”increasing”. She did not like Zille because ”she is going to treat us very badly because she is a boer”. Rasool, she said, was a ”nice gent”.
Buyiswa Tsholoba, from Kwezapark in Khayelitsha, said she was being asked to pay R10 000 in water arrears. ”I don’t even have money to buy half a loaf of bread, so where must I get R10 000?” If her debt were cancelled, she would be willing to ”pay R100 or R200 a month”, she said.
The crowd, addressed by Rasool, Skwatsha and representatives from the ANC Women’s League, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the South African Communist Party and the South African National Civic Organisation, booed when Cape Town city councillor Dan Plato came to fetch the memorandum instead of Zille.
”Any leader of the people would not run away from the people,” Skwatsha told the crowd, which had earlier pointed in anger at alleged sightings of Zille on a ledge of the civic centre.
Response
A statement was released by Zille’s spokesperson, Robert Macdonald, on behalf of the ”multiparty government of Cape Town”, which responded to each of the grievances listed on ANC pamphlets about the march.
”The complaints around service delivery are hypocritical, given that we have improved on the ANC’s previous performance in Cape Town; and in some cases, the ANC is objecting to policies or actions that their own party has implemented in other metros and municipalities around the country,” said the statement.
Rate increases were needed ”in order to be able to afford to catch up with the massive infrastructure backlogs created by years of neglect by the ANC”, the statement read.
The statement also said pink letters were only ”final warnings” and did not evict people. It said the council only targeted ”those who can pay but won’t”, and ”has an indigency policy and free basic services to assist those who cannot pay”. — Sapa