Before I begin, I wish to remind Minister Bredell that the reason we sit in Mitchells Plain with so many problems to fix is because it was his original National Party that gave us apartheid and his party that removed so many people from District 6, Constantia, Newlands and elsewhere, dumping them in the dusty townships of the Cape Flats. This is why we are here today.
Last year our National Finance Minister brought an aloe to Parliament as he began to explain the year that lay ahead.
This year, I hope he will bring a protea – an icon of the western Cape fynbos.
The protea is named after the god Proteus and legend says that his gift was that he could see the future and always told the truth about it.
But we don’t need a Greek god to tell us the future – the world’s scientists are already telling us
Our future is a changed climate and we are running out of time to avoid the worst impacts of it.
Everyone here already knows this too. Two years ago we survived what under a normal climate would be a one in 3 000-year drought.
But we no longer have a normal climate. We will probably see worse droughts than the one we had two years ago in our lifetimes.
What can we do to stop that? Well, climate change is caused by carbon emissions.
During this SOPA, I was hoping to hear the plan to reduce air pollution and emissions. This province, more than any other place on earth, has a duty to lead the way. We have the highest biodiversity of any region in the world.
But because of development and climate change, thousands of species are at risk. Including proteas and the R460 million a year industry they support.
Protecting the environment, the air we breathe and the water we drink is the responsibility of each one of us, but government must play the leading role.
What I wanted the Premier to say is this:
ONE:
That the province will work to get public transport working. This means not protecting the useless leadership in Cape Town that stopped MyCiTi buses to Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain in June last year and have been unable or unwilling to restore the service.
It means not wasting time visiting empty train stations.
Action means working with Metrorail, PRASA; SAPS and the metro police to start trains and stop metal chop shops. Right now.
We cannot accept that in September we will get a limited service, of a train every 30 minutes, and only to Philippi.
Public transport is better for the planet, for the economy and for commuters pockets.
TWO:
Every town and the city must plan inward urban growth with well-located affordable housing.
The province will have to identify well-located public land for affordable housing – regardless of what the national government does.
Stopping urban sprawl means we can protect farmlands and reduce travel distances, traffic congestion and carbon emissions.
THREE:
We must prepare for the new energy economy. Patricia de Lille took the Minister of Energy to court in 2016. She did that to fight for the right of municipalities to procure renewable energy themselves.
She knew we had to fight for safer, cheaper electricity. No other mayor before or since has ever had the courage to do this. Now that it seems those rights may soon be granted.
I wanted to hear a plan from the Premier. What the Premier presented yesterday was limp, trite and unimaginative.
We need a plan that ensures that renewable energy projects are developed in a way that benefits all of our people, not politically-connected landowner cronies, and creates new work.
Why do I think this is so urgent?
Climate change is already having a devastating impact on agriculture, water costs, fire risk and our economy overall. In Mitchells Plain a elderly woman had a heart attack when she received a R60 000 water bill from the City of Cape Town.
Your city government is sitting on billions of cash reserves fleeced from families like those in the community of Mitchells Plain. Our farms are experiencing lower crop yields and seeing massive job losses.
Those impacts will make unemployment, poverty, inequality, hunger, disease and social instability worse. I was hoping to hear a plan to manage this.
Instead, we got business as usual and a bunch of repeated promises. The Premier's speech repeated all of his 2019 promises:
Taking government to people through “First Thursdays” – even though this only those who can come to you.
The immature promise to release public land, for affordable housing, only if Patricia De Lille, the Minister of Public Works does so first.
The DA has been in power here for more than a decade and has not delivered a single affordable inner city housing development. I suggest they get moving - De Lille, in her post for less than nine months, is well on track to eclipse them.
An economic war room to grow the economy – last year the economic war room was going to deliver 2.5% growth in the province. In 2019 the economy grew by only 0.7% with projections for 2020 only a slightly better 1.2%
An ease of doing business index – repeated promise from last year as a tool to ensure it is easy to invest and grow your business here.
Settling the Tafelberg School dispute – despite this promise last year the Province robustly defended its decision to sell the site during the court case in November.
Fixing public transport – yet the MyCiTi service from Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain hasn’t operated since May 2019 and the same communities no longer have access to a train service.
Improving investment in education and teachers – yet the Education Department’s teaching budget was cut by R41 million in December. This would have added nearly 200 teachers.
Last year the Premier promised to run a clean, ethical government. The lifestyle audits promised last year are not done.
Some of his MECs have been implicated in cadre deployment, theft of municipal services and driving irregular, overprice land sales.
The Premier says they are committed to spatial integration. But the DA leader in the province only buys the outermost, worst-located land for government housing.
He refuses to use well-located land that the government already owns.
The DA says they can’t build affordable housing next to floodplains in Rondebosch, but they have no problem doing so far away next to Dunoon in Doornbach.
We have less than 500 weeks to act.
I call on all parties, all spheres of government and every person, to acknowledge that we are in a climate emergency and act with the speed this global crisis needs.
* Herron is the secretary-general of the GOOD party