Cape Town - The need to reduce informal settlements, greater preparedness for disasters, and the province’s Safety Plan, were just some of the issues under scrutiny during a debate on the Opening Address of the Provincial Legislature yesterday.
Premier Alan Winde on Wednesday delivered his Opening Address at the first sitting of the seventh Western Cape provincial parliament, with the debate following yesterday.
Leader of the Opposition in the Western Cape, ANC’s Khalid Sayed, said a clear and detailed programme of action for the seventh administration was “glaringly absent”.
In order to be better prepared for disasters in the province, Sayed urged the premier to prioritise the appointment of a commissioner for the environment, as set out in the province’s Constitution.
Sayed also called on Winde to convene a multiparty and multi-stakeholder dialogue on addressing racism and solutions for the realisation of a non-racial province.
“We need an urgent assessment of the 668ha of land released to the Western Cape for opportunities for housing, health care and economic development. We must drastically reduce the number of informal settlements by the end of this administration. We must accelerate the uptake of renewable energy and reduce the tariffs that are too high for too many, especially the poor and working-class including in the City of Cape Town,” Sayed said.
EFF Chief Whip in the legislature, Aishah Cassiem, said while the premier spoke of storms and other disasters, not much was said regarding the “disaster” on the Cape Flats and in other parts of the province devastated by drugs, gangsterism and crime.
Infrastructure MEC Tertuis Simmers said there was a need to accelerate the delivery of essential infrastructure.
“This means increasing both the speed and the scale of our projects to meet the growing demands of all in our province.”
He called on parties to support his call for the devolution and decentralisation of the Emergency Housing Fund in order for the province to respond more speedily.
GOOD Party’s Brett Herron criticised the ineffectiveness of the province’s Safety Plan calling this a “failed experiment”.
“The premier defunded education and health by over R1 billion in order to dabble into law enforcement,” Herron said.
“In the areas where LEAP officers were deployed, murder has gone up every year from 1 584 murders in total in 2019/2022 to 1778 murders in 2022/23.”
He said the province failed to deal with the root causes of crime – the apartheid spatial plan and the discrepancy of infrastructure and services between communities.
“This government has done nothing to address well-located affordable housing and thus, spatial integration,” said Herron.
Winde agreed informal settlements should be reduced.
“We’ve got to put plans in place, come up with ideas of how we decrease the number of shacks.”
Winde said: “Crime is a serious issue, our children are getting shot in gang warfare. It is terrible and the constitutional mandate for fighting that crime is the SAPS but they are not able to do it, it gets worse every single year.
“It’s unacceptable, it needs to change. We need a different model. We need to try something else and we are doing it in the province with the Safety Plan.”
shakirah.thebus@inl.co.za