Majali, Nkqonkqweni, Draai & Village, Undertrain, Sixekweni, Mdange, Hanover, Zinyoka, Balasi Valley, Tyutyu, Zikhalini, Kwelerhana, Tyhusha, Balasi, Skhobeni, Bhisho

Ward Councillors:

Nomfanelo Madonono - 45 Thembisa Marwele - 44 Mthuthuzeli Phakade – 26 Noncedo Xashe - 42

(acknowledgments)

I greet you most heartily this morning, comrades, and thank you for finding the time to come and share notes with me on the life and welfare of Buffalo City in general, and your areas in particular.

I also wish to greet your Ward Councillors, Councillor Mthuthuzeli Phakade of ward 26, Councillor Noncedo Xashe of Ward 42, Councillor Thembisa Marwele of Ward 44, and Councillor Nomfanelo Madonono of Ward 45.

I also greet members of the Ward Committees for all these Wards, and wish to remind them that they have a very big role to play in the successful development of their respective Wards.

As Buffalo City, we are constantly engaged in a variety of processes aimed at becoming more responsive to the needs of our communities, and we adopt the view that we must use all the tools at our disposal to understand better what the masses are saying and thinking. This becomes even more important in reaching the majority in our communities who are poor.

The proper functioning of our newly-elected Ward Committees will therefore be critical to a healthy local participatory democracy.

Throughout our consultation processes, all communities have repeatedly identified crime and insecurity as one of the most critical of all issues to be addressed. We know that safety will continue to be elusive while people remain desperate, and that none of us can be secure if any one of us is hungry, homeless or hopeless.

Our principal mandate as your Municipality is to deliver on community needs and aspirations as articulated by the affected communities themselves. It was with this mandate in mind, when I took office as Executive Mayor in March this year, that I made a solemn pledge to accelerate the rate of development and service delivery.

Housing remains a burning issue amongst all our communities, and this area is no exception. The growing number of shacks is a clearer indicator to us of the drastic measures that we need to address the situation.

Our goal is not simply to provide roofs above the people's heads, but to develop healthy and sustainable human settlements that have all the basic services like water, electricity and refuse removal; settlements that have all the necessary social amenities like clinics, schools, recreational and shopping facilities close by.

I am happy to announce that the moratorium that was placed on building new houses will be lifted some time this month, and that we as the Municipality have already been granted full accreditation to drive the delivery of housing at a local level.

We have provided R916 239 for the Tyutyu Phase One housing project, and another R8 677 889 for the Tyutyu Phase Two project. I have however been informed that the developer is not yet on site. Your Councillors are looking into the matter to find ways of expediting the programme.

We are planning a massive project to upgrade the Yellowwoods settlement, and we have already R175 000 for the sub-division of the area. We have also pledged an amount of R3,3 million for the planning and development phase of the project.

I am aware that the rate of development in our rural areas is not as significant as we all would like it to be. The reasons for this are to be found in the skewed development policies of the past regime, policies that were characterized by lack of respect for the welfare and dignity of poor people.

The apartheid government regarded rural areas as traditional holding settlements for the masses of Black people in this country. This attitude was amply demonstrated in the notorious homelands system, where so-called development was nothing more than a concerted effort to ensure that people living in communal villages did not graduate beyond the status of subsistence farmers and migrant labourers. No provision was ever made to even try and create jobs for the rural labour market.

Separate development saw nothing wrong with people sharing their drinking water with cattle and other animals. Roads were not a priority. Clinics were few and sparsely placed, with each clinic serving communities living within a radius of up to fifteen kilometers.

That, comrades is the situation that we inherited in the year 2000 when the present dispensation of developmental local government came into effect. And to this day we are still grappling with the challenge of turning around the situation and ensuring that you, the people in living in our rural areas, enjoy the same quality of life as your urban counterparts.

In the past financial year we were faced with two major challenges. The first challenge was the fact that we do not have the delegated authority to implement some of the infrastructural and human development programmes that we want to put in place for you.

Programmes like agriculture and the provision of health services in rural areas remain the prerogative of the Provincial Government.

Right now many of your fields and grazing pastures are not fenced, and your livestock faces the danger of either being impounded or killed on the roads.

Our people have to travel long distances to reach clinics, and those who are too sickly to move have to be carried on wheelbarrows for several kilometres. I have seen this happening at Majali Village, where the nearest clinic is in Nkqonkqweni.

But we have not given up on our consultations with the Provincial Government on these and several issues that cause unbearable hardships to our rural communities, and we strongly hope that something drastic will be done to rectify the situation.

The upgrading and maintenance of roads is the shared responsibility of the Provincial Government and the District Council. But we have not left that entirely in their hands. We continue to bring to the attention of these authorities all the rural roads that need urgent attention. We will continue doing this because we believe you have a right to be connected to the rest of the world through reliable and well maintained roads.

This spirit was amply echoed in our Council meeting on Tuesday this week, and we decided to do something to confront the situation head-on. Affected areas will hear from their respective Councillors in due course.

Electricity supply to rural areas is a delegated function of Eskom, whilst the provision of reticulated water still remains with the Amatola Water Board.

I am happy to report that we do have amicable relations with these two authorities, and that they respect the fact that we are the sphere of Government that is closest to the people and as such constantly on the pulse of the frustrations and suffering experienced by rural communities because of few and sparsely spaced water taps as well as the slow rate of electrification.

The second challenge that we faced was the immediate availability of funds. I echoed this frustration repeatedly during my speech in Mdantsane on Saturday when we were launching these imbizos, and I explained that the Municipality is constantly searching for and implementing innovative ways to grow our revenue base and to improve our financial management systems in a bid to cope with development and service delivery backlogs.

Nevertheless, the Municipality has managed to respond directly to your most basic needs, this in a bid to improve your quality of life.

Our rural development partner the Amathole District Municipality has promised to give us funding amounting to R600 000, and we will ensure that at least a third of this amount comes to this cluster.

The Municipality is presently developing a rural development strategy that we hope will effectively address the frustrations and aspirations of all our rural people. This strategy will not in any way take away your traditional way of life, but will rather augment what you have and what you do with economically viable mechanisms and programmes that will enable you, as rural people, to partake fully in the economic wealth and development of Buffalo City.

We are confident that all these rural development initiatives will result in a number of sustainable job opportunities for our people.

Over and above all the development initiatives that I have mentioned, Buffalo City Municipality is giving each Ward a sum of R100 000, and we leave it up the ward community to decide how this money should be used.

Comrades, Buffalo City Municipality continues to plan for the ongoing development of Bhisho and its surrounding areas, and I want to assure you that we will continue to do all that we can within our limited resources to respond to your needs.

We take the fight against HIV/AIDS seriously. Two years ago the Municipality started inter-sectoral HIV/AIDS forums to counteract fragmented service-provision and lack of information on the prevalence and impact of HIV/AIDS on the community.

In conclusion, I do not want to boast that we have successfully met your expectations. All I can say right now is that we are trying our best, and that we will continue to look for more and sustainable ways of developing both the people and the infrastructure of your respective villages.

Which is why we are here today; to share your needs with you; to discuss together ways and means of unlocking bottlenecks that may occur here and there; and to mutually find or develop a way forward for the systematic development of your villages.

I thank you.

ENDS.

Zintle Peter
EXECUTIVE MAYOR
2nd November 2006.