Yesterday’s State of the City Address by Mayor, Mxolisi Kaunda, was a copy and paste exercise from his speech last year.
Instead of highlighting the true state of the city and giving an update on the promises he made over the past few years, he instead, made additional promises. For example, he failed to address the issue of water, sanitation and electricity which is a massive problem in most parts of the city. This has been going on for years and was made worse by the 2022 floods. Last year the mayor made a commitment that the city will repair all disaster related damages and ensure there’s no interruption of water supply and sewerage spills. To date, huge parts of the city still experience constant water outages. Places like Phoenix, Verulam, Tongaat, Ntuzuma, Kwamakhutha, Dassenhoek go for days on end without water because of the city’s failure to repair and upgrade infrastructure. The same can be said about uncontrolled sewerage spills as this has been left unattended by the city resulting in beaches being polluted with E.coli.
Consequently the tourism sector has been massively impacted with hotels closing down and people losing their jobs and livelihoods. The Mayor and the city management must take full accountability for this crisis. This is the true state of the city that the Mayor did not speak about.
Failing electricity infrastructure continues to be a massive problem resulting in constant outages both for the residents and businesses. Last year the mayor in his SOCA said a process to purchase 400 megawatt from independent power producers was being finalised and that the city will move away from relying entirely on Eskom. Yesterday, the mayor made no mention of this. Instead he promoted more lies about his commitment to resolving the electricity crises. The reality is that he doesn’t have a plan.
Affordable and reliable public transport remains a massive problem for our residents, job seekers and the general public. We have a state of the art Go Durban transport network infrastructure which was completed years ago but remains a white elephant. The Mayor yesterday lied again and said this was going to now resume in July this year because there was an agreement with the taxi industry. The same was said in his SOCA last year that this was going to start operating but unsurprisingly it did not as the city continues to massage the egos of taxi operators at the expense of the people.
The reality is that the true state of the city is that the Mayor and the ANC do not have any plans to get anything right. In fact, this city leadership is the most uncaring we have ever experienced in the history of eThekwini. That’s why immediately when Chris Pappas becomes the premier of KZN he and his cabinet will put the city under administration to save the little that’s left.