As South Africa builds-up to the General Elections in 2024, the Democratic Alliance (DA) has announced uMngeni Municipality Mayor and former eThekwini Ward 31 Councillor Chris Pappas as their Premier candidate for KwaZulu-Natal.
In a bid to spread hope and solutions to deteriorating municipalities, the DA leaders held a town hall meeting at the Hellenic Community Hall in uMgeni Park, Durban, on Saturday, 30 September. The DA KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Leader, Francois Rodgers, DA KZN Premier Candidate, Mayor Chris Pappas and Cape Town Mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis hosted the public meeting where they discussed the state of the eThekwini Municipality and how it can be saved.
Rodgers began by saying that their coalition with the IFP, in some municipalities, is restoring hope to those communities. “People have lost hope. They have nowhere else to go to. There is no response from the top and the people are losing hope. They have lost faith in institutions and we have to turn this around. It is hope that they need. It is the hope that we can get out of this quagmire of political instability and build cities, build towns and build a province that has economic opportunities for everybody,” said Rodgers.
His sentiments were shared by the DA’s Premier candidate in the province, Mayor Pappas, who told the audience that sometimes “when you take over as a mayor, one walks into a hostile environment where the culture of accountability is none existent”. He shared more details on his time as mayor in the first DA-run municipality in KZN.
“We still have many issues in uMngeni. I am not going to pretend like it is the perfect place. You do not undo 30 years of destruction in 22 months, but you can certainly make progress and re-instill hope into people. We have not yet fixed uMngeni but we have rescued uMngeni so that we can start rebuilding. One thing that we need to understand is that regulatory and legislative frameworks in South Africa around local government has been created to support a particular agenda and that is the agenda of the African National Congress. We are automatically on a back-foot when we go into government because we are working in a system that has been created to achieve someone else’s agenda. The first thing is to challenge the existing framework we work under because it is not geared towards the DA difference,” said Mayor Pappas.
His Cape Town counterpart, Mayor Hill-Lewis, began his address by providing insights on how the DA has made Cape Town one of the most successful metros in the country.
“The first step in fixing eThekwini is making sure that we can save KZN. Politicians are fond of saying ‘the next election is the most important election’, this time around there is not a single person in this country that can genuinely disagree about the importance of the 2024 National and Provincial elections,” said Mayor Hill-Lewis.
Feeding into the townhall meeting, at a summit that took place on Friday at the Greyville Racecourse, the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) chairperson, Thami Ntuli, revealed that government debt to municipalities has tripled in the last 12 months.
“Never in the history of this democracy has government debt owed to municipalities been so high. Government debt owed to municipalities in the province of KwaZulu-Natal alone increased from R800 million to R3 billion in the 12 months from July 2022 to July 2023, rates, water and waste are important revenue sources, municipal consumer debt in KwaZulu-Natal amount to R43 billion as of 2023,” said Ntuli.
Meanwhile, on Monday, the DA officially launched their 2024 voter registration campaign poster under the slogan ‘Register to Rescue SA’. Party leader John Steenhuisen unveiled the poster at Bree Street in the Johannesburg CBD. Steenhuisen said the 2024 General Elections will be historic.
“The year, 2024 offers us a last chance to rescue South Africa from the tight grip of the ANC’s criminal state and pull our country back from the brink of state failure and the complete collapse of the SA’s democratic dream. In 1994, we voted for freedom. In 2024, we will vote to rescue South Africa from crime, corruption, and unemployment and, ultimately, to ensure our country’s survival. The only way we can rescue South Africa is if we register to vote. Citizens have the power to rescue our country from load shedding, from crime, and even from exploding streets in our cities. Some 14 million South Africans are not registered to vote, and our future depends on every single citizen standing up and registering to rescue South Africa,” said Steenhuisen.
The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) on Monday, 2 October, confirmed the conclusion of the revision of voting district boundaries in an effort to increase voter access in the 2024 National and Provincial Elections. As a result, some new voting districts have been created, others have been disestablished, while some existing voting districts have changed shape. Chief Electoral Officer Sy Mamabolo said the revision of voting district boundaries, a process known as re-delimitation, has given rise to 23 296 voting districts, compared to 23 148 for the 2021 Municipal Elections – an increase of 148 voting districts, or 0,6%, with KZN being among the provinces affected.
“Nationally there are 1 925 affected voting districts identified for this TCR campaign, the majority of which are in KwaZulu-Natal (774), the Eastern Cape (332) and Limpopo province (296),” says Mamabolo.
He indicated that the Electoral Commission will embark on a campaign of targeted communication and re-registration (TCR) of voters affected by the voting district boundary changes on Monday, 2 October. The campaign will continue until Friday, 27 October, ahead of voter registration for the forthcoming elections.
For voter registration and to check your status, you can visit the IEC website or SMS your ID number to 32810 to get a notification of the current voting district and station on record for you.
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