CR is the worst president, says mayor
SOUTH Africa has regressed significantly under President Cyril Ramaphosa, as is evident from the highest level of load shedding citizens are being subjected to, Tshwane mayor Cilliers Brink said yesterday.
“Under Ramaphosa, the country experienced more load shedding than ever before, the extent of the lockdown, unemployment, and more businesses closing.
“He throttled the economy, he made it very difficult for municipal consumers to pay for their services,” said Brink.
He was responding to Ramaphosa’s comments at the weekend during the voter registration drive, when he told Mamelodi residents they found themselves in unfortunate circumstances due to the metro’s inability to provide services. The president said most complaints he got from residents were about water and non-working transformers in the area.
It was the municipality’s responsibility to provide water, take out refuse and make sure the township was functioning smoothly, Ramaphosa said.
He also took a swipe at the municipality, saying he had not seen good governance in the metro. Ramaphosa criticised the DA’s well-known slogan, “where the DA governs, it governs well”, highlighting its failure to deliver services to the people of Tshwane.
“This is where the DA claims to govern well. However, I have not witnessed effective governance here. The residents face significant challenges,” Ramaphosa stated. He attributed the challenges in Tshwane, particularly in Mamelodi, to the DA.
One of the major problems in the DA-run Tshwane was water, the president said, adding that it was the municipality’s responsibility to service its people. “They are the ones who are supposed to clean the township, provide water, and resources, and make sure that the township functions well.”
Hitting back at the president, Brink said the spread of violence, lawlessness and land grabs were because of lack of leadership and competent ministers.
“The president would rather blame other people than take responsibility because the space we are operating in local government to a certain degree depends on the performance of the national government. I went to Mamelodi not to point fingers or lay blame, but to address the unpopular, difficult question of illegal connections,” added the mayor.
All the illegal connections found at the Mamelodi reservoir were responsible for the water outages in the area, the mayor said.
As the metro leader, they took responsibility for making sure they build a city that worked for its people.
Tshwane’s woes began when Independent Municipal and Allied Trade Union (Imatu) took the municipality to the Labour Court for withholding more than 20% of the workers’ August salaries of 2023.
At the time, the court ordered the metro to pay about 60 employees who had their salaries docked, with a fraction of them still fighting for their payouts. The court proceedings stemmed from Imatu members complaining they were short paid in August.