Acknowledgements

Let me congratulate everybody involved in this launch. It is yet another developmental local government feather in our cap. We can be justly proud.

This launch has been marketed as a logo launch. After my speech, I will be unveiling the logo and announcing the creative winner of this symbol by which our renewal programme will be identified.

But I believe this function is essentially a local official launch of a 10-year programme to integrate Mdantsane socio-economically into Buffalo City.

It is also a symbolic gesture to politically sanitise and eliminate the once disgraceful rationale for Mdantsane's birth as a dumping ground for South Africa's surplus people, so aptly put once by my designated political champion for the programme, Councilor Sizwe Dikimolo.

The launch comes at a very strategic moment before we celebrate 10 years of political freedom and is a momentous occasion to unleash the forces to achieve our economic liberation and equality.

I believe this second phase of the struggle is even more difficult than our bloody political battles but that it will concretely incorporate and integrate a politically cleansed Mdantsane into the democratic order of a progressive, non-racial and non-sexist South Africa.

But even before we achieve full seamless deracialised integration, I wish to announce my office has, together with Councilor Dikimolo, the Provincial Geographic Names Committee and the Department of Art Sport and Culture, set the ball in motion to change the racially offensive designation of NU 1 through to NU 17. I am told NU stands for "Native Unit". This is derogatory classification and is unacceptable.

You can read all about our strategy to restore our dignity through names getting rid of the impersonal house numbers in Mdantsane's 1 700 streets and roads in the first edition of the monthly newsletter, The Murp, which will be given to you in your information packs after the unveiling.

I know there will be detractors who will say that beside the right to vote and be voted for, nothing has really changed.

They will say political freedom has entrenched poverty and eliminated jobs, jailed them in their two-room matchbox-type houses and shacks without much of a prospect of a job and consequently a better life.

I concede that our City's spatial design continues to fit the apartheid model: townships on the periphery with poor transport links to far away places of work with predominantly white suburbs closer to the City centre and economic hubs where people enjoy the same type of pre-1994 lifestyle.

I must concede also that the dysfunctional urban environment we inherited with its racially skewed settlement patterns and infrastructure imbalances is a harder nut to crack than we thought.

We undoubtedly underestimated the depth, complexity and abjectness of the poverty in which our people are trapped structurally without jobs and basic services in the whole of Buffalo City, not necessarily Mdantsane alone.

It has been truly a complex socio-economic and political challenge in which we tried to forge a vision that seeks to strengthen, empower and democratize institutions of political and economic governance while extending services and investing in infrastructure.

The 10-year reportcard of our movement, the African National Congress, shows we have succeeded in some areas while the structural impediments in other areas have constrained our success. It has found that poverty measured by income has increased but that inequality is narrowing with grants and pensions having a positive effect in cushioning hardships.

As the agents of delivery at the cutting edge, we are proud that as a municipality we have played in a role in delivery that has eroded some of the inequalities. We have 39 983 indigent families whose services we are subsidizing through R120 a month package financed through our Equitable Share Grant.

Yes, we have a long way to go with 21% of our people still needing access to water and 39% without access to sanitation. A total of 80% of households have electricity. We are giving 6kl of water free to all our people and 20kw of electricity free to all households with indigents receiving 50kw.

We know we have a long way to go but we are persisting stubbornly until we see tangible visible change in places such as Mdantsane.

The Mdantsane Urban Renewal Programme is part of a basket of city-wide initiatives to alleviate poverty, create jobs and make Buffalo City a clean, prosperous investment destination.

The intervention in Mdantsane is not a standalone programme. It is an inter-governmental area-based initiative which must be located within a City Development Strategy (CDS). If Mdantsane is not linked to other develop initiatives such as the Industrial Development Zone, inner-city regeneration and the quest for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in our other industrial nodes, it will not succeed.

CDS is based on good governance, productivity and inclusivity as well as financial sustainability. It must of course in turn be located within the Provincial Growth and Development Strategy (PGDS). Programme Director, this launch today may be largely symbolic but it is a significant part of our strategies to transform our City by integrating Mdantsane into the urban economy and demonstrating how we have used the levers of political power to become agents of change.

It will be measured by our delivery which is the action-packed act of policies and strategies coming together and bursting out into the reality of beating the old system which denied people water, electricity, sanitation, roads and houses.

Lastly, I want to address myself to the Mdantsane councilors on whose shoulders rest the responsibility for the success of this programme. I believe you need to be passionate about what you are doing for the people who sent you to represent them. You must be honest in your endeavours to promote their welfare. You owe it to the Movement which deployed you.

You have a mandate to fight on behalf of your people. I want you to remember that if you are part of a decision on their behalf, you are part of the consequences. It is unspeakably dishonest to be part of a decision and when faced with the consequences, you lack the courage of your convictions and you deny any responsibility for its consequences.

Even Ministers of State get axed when they cannot grasp their portfolios and when they lose the confidence of their key constituencies. It is your duty to democratise development by empowering communities to participate meaningfully in their development.

You must keep your people informed so that they understand the nature and purpose of the proposals and plans being implemented. There must be regular information and feedback. There must be public participation at all times through the Ward Committee system, workshops and presentations.

You have the basic tools to do your job. The City Manager has provided you with a support system. Please deliver and ensure, together with our officials, that the programme is a success.

I thank you.

Sindisile Maclean
EXECUTIVE MAYOR

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