CAPE TOWN'S MUNICIPAL INTELLIGENCE AT ITS WORST

Dear Patricia de Lille Mayor of Cape Town,

         In the Sunday Times article headed How Cape Town became a place that means business you told us why the Mother City has been named as having one of the best foreign direct investment strategies in the world.

         That’s great but it doesn’t mean that nothing must be done about a shocking waste of ratepayers money that keeps going on and on at the same place.

         You can’t get much more idiotic than this: piling sand that has been blown onto a road back on to the edge of it where it came from.

         You can’t get much more idiotic than this: dumping a lot of the sand in truck loads onto the edge of a nearby wind swept car park.

Sand being cleared

         The section of road that gets covered in sand is just before the entrance to the Soetwater recreational and camping area. This also has an environmental education centre and conference facilities for about 40 people.

Some cleared sand piled on the side where
it came from

         The road branches off there to Witsands surfing beach a short distance away where there is a car park as well as a slipway for launching boats.

Sand dumped on the side of the car park

        Within a week of the sand on the road being shifted with a front end loader and two trucks the road was covered almost as badly as it had been before. This expensive charade takes place every few months depending on how strong the wind has been.

         It’s as idiotic as digging holes and filling them up again. But nobody on the Council seems to realise this. After all it’s not their money that is being spent so why worry. See:clearing the road once again .

         The real problem is the adjoining dunes where the City has spent millions on futile schemes to stabilise the sand. See: capetown's money dump; wasting more; money dumping gets worse .                 

         No doubt our service charges will go up soon by the usual 8% to 10% while our money continues to be blown away with this kind of idiocy.

         Yours faithfully,

         Jon, a ratepayer and Consumer Watchdog who only wishes that his bite was effective enough to eradicate scandals like this.

  

VOTE DA - IF YOU WANT A BRIGHT EFFICIENT FUTURE

Dear South African 

Voters,

        This is why my wife Gayle and I will be voting for the Democratic Alliance in the election.

        Until six years ago we were living in the African National Congress run Johannesburg, the industrial heart of our country. The inefficiency there was mind boggling. There was a pot hole of examples bigger than Table Mountain that would take a book to list them all.

SO MAKE SURE YOU VOTE DA

        Our parting inefficiency gift from Joburg was this. When you sell a house there you have to pay your property rates six months in advance before transfer can go through. Then if this happens after say a month you are entitled to get five months back. It took us almost a year of unanswered emails and fruitless phone calls before we got what was due to us.

        And that was only because we contacted a DA councillor in Joburg who intervened.

        Of course if we had emigrated to say Australia somebody at the Council might well have pocketed our money.

        In the DA controlled Cape Town where we now live you can easily contact heads of departments who actually answer the phone and who deal with your problem promptly.

        As an example of the Council’s spot on efficiency we had a water leak on the pavement outside our house on a Sunday. It was fixed a mere three hours after I reported it.

        Had it happened in Joburg the waste of water would have gone on for days if not weeks.

        So if you want an efficient administration not only for the place where you live but for the entire country the only answer is to VOTE 

        Regards,

        Jon and Gayle  
P.S. If you don't listen to me you must definitely listen to my wife. If anybody knows what's good for you she does. Ask DA leader Helen Zille. 

Buy my book 'Where have all the children gone?' on Amazon.com  It's a thriller with an underlying love story that defied generations of prejudice.