CRAZY COMPLAINT REQUIREMENT OF THE PUBLIC PROTECTOR: 'PROVE YOUR CASE BEFORE WE CAN DECIDE IF WE CAN START'

Dear Readers,

          Adv. Busisiwe Mkhwebane, South Africa’s Public Protector recently announced that in the years 2016/17 and 2017/18 they finalised 21 176 out of 25 288 complaints.

Well, if mine is anything to go by these figures must be extremely suspect.  After more than a year her Cape Town office had not yet decided whether or not the law allowed them to investigate my complaint against the Cape Town City Council.

For nearly three years now I have been investigating why the Council goes on spent millions on ineffective schemes to try and keep the sand dunes in place, above a municipal rubbish dump at Witsands near Cape Point. The dump was closed more than 30 years ago.

26 June 2017: I emailed my two page complaint about this shocking waste of money to the Cape Town office of the Public Protector.

29 June 2017: The receipt of this was acknowledged in a letter signed on behalf of a senior manager in which I was told that once they had established “whether the law allows us to investigate your complaint” they would contact me again.

6 November 2017: Ayanda Mngqinya asked me to provide proof of my allegations against the Council and two days later I sent her a five page email in which I expanded on my original complaint. This included links to six of my posts on the subject in which there were numerous pictures, which showed conclusively how the use of nets to try and keep the sand in place had failed dismally. They had either been blown over or buried by the very strong winds that are endemic to the area. I quoted Councillor Johannes van der Merwe, the Member of the Mayor’s Executive team at the time, who was in charge of the Environment, as well as other people involve in the project. Van der Merwe claimed that what they had been doing was an extremely cost effective way of managing the landfill site. I pointed out that on 30 March 2016 the Cape Argus carried a story based on my blog that effectively verified what I had written. I mentioned that in another post addressed to the Mayor Patricia de Lille I had emphasised the fact that the Public Protector had described the conditions in the township of Masiphumelele, which is not far from Witsands, as the “most disgusting I have seen in my life.” And I appealed to her to get the Council to stop wasting money at Witsands. I also pointed out that although my posts had all been very critical of what the Council had been doing, I never had single complaint about the accuracy of what I had written.

22 January 2018: I sent an email to Ayanda Mngquinya asking her what progress there had been with my complaint as the money wasting by the Council was starting all over again at Witsands. I attached photographs that showed how nets had been blown over just days after they had been erected.

11 April 2018: Ayanda replied saying she was “currently unavailable” and that I should directed all queries to Mrs Judith Steyn. This I did.

16 April 2018: Nkagiseng Motaung replied under the heading PROGRESS REPORT. “Kindly take note that your complaint was received by the Public Protector Western Cape Regional Office and I am the investigator assigned to your matter.” She went on to say that she will be “assessing my matter” and will revert back to me with the “outcome of the assessment.” So it was clear from what she told me that at this stage, 10 months after her office received my complaint, nobody had yet decided whether it was something they were entitled to investigate.

12 June 2018: I sent an email to Advocate Stoffel Fourie, who I was told was in charge of the Cape Town Public Protector’s office, even though he is apparently based at Bhisho in the Eastern Cape. Before I was given his email address my phone calls to the office in Cape Town, the head office in Pretoria as well as the one in Bhisho went unanswered. His email address wasn’t much help either, because all I got was two read reports in reply to my emails, and nothing more.

23 July 2018: Although my complaint was now more than a year old this unbelievably inefficient organisation was still trying to work out if it was qualified to deal with my case. Nkagiseng Motaung told me in an email that they required some more information to “assess whether the law allows your complaint to be investigated.” She wanted to know the following (My comments are in brackets):

1.    Issues that you wish the office of the Public Protector to investigate (As if I hadn’t told them already).

2.    Outcome sought by yourself should your matter be investigated (This must have been painfully obvious from what I had already sent).

3.    Proof that you formally raised your complaint with the City of Cape Town Ombudsman, your reference number as well as proof of outcome (This I hadn’t done because I didn’t think it was necessary as the Mayor and a member of her Mayoral Committee must have been aware of what I had written)

4.    Proof that you formally raised your complaint with the Office of the Speaker in as far as the conduct of the Councillor and Council is concerned and the proof of outcome (Same answer as Item 3).

5.    Proof of any other institution/s you raised your complaint with as well as the out come thereof (Same Answer as 4).

6.    Any other relevant information and/or documentation including correspondence between yourself and the official you communicated with. (I wasn’t prepared to send all this because I felt I had already sent more than enough information for any investigator to get started)

It ended with “Please take note we will now proceed to pend your file to the 3^rd of August 2018 in anticipation of the above requested documents, as we cannot commence the investigation due to insufficient information. As soon as the above has been received, we will then proceed to asses the matter further and advice (sic) accordingly.” In this email this ace investigator also changed my sex by addressing me as Ms. J. Abbott, although all my emails had ended “Regards, Jon Abbott.”

24 July 2018: I replied to Nkagiseng Motaung saying that her office was an “absolute disgrace” because more than a year after I submitted full details of my complaint I was now being asked what outcome I wanted “should your matter be investigated.” I added that it was like reporting a murder to the police and being asked what outcome I wanted. “If something appeared wrong it was up to the Protector’s office to investigate it and not expect the complainant to provide all the proof,” I told her. “How could some poorly educated person possibly provide any of the information you are now asking for?”

10 September 2018: I got an email with a letter attached signed “PP Sune`Griessel (Mrs), Provincial Representative (Western Cape). It began with: “For further enquiries: Mrs N. Motaung, 31 August 2018.” The gist of the five paragraph letter was that as the Public Protector was “an office of last resort” I had not taken “all reasonable steps to exhaust all remedies available” to me

          “Due to the insufficient information regarding your complaint, we are unable to assess the matter further. We will now proceed to close our file and thank you for engaging with the office of the Public Protector.”

          I’m a retired former Sunday Times investigative journalist. So if I can’t present the Public Protector’s office with sufficient information to get it started, what hope has the average person?

          My experience shows how very unlikely it is that 83% of complaints to this branch of Government were finalist in the last couple of years as Busisiwe claims.

          Regards,

          Jon, a very disgusted Consumer Watchdog, who hopes she does a much better job than this.
See also: Monumental waste

CAPE TOWN'S COSTLY INEFFECTIVE DUNE STABILIZATION CONTINUES AS IT PROPOSES HUGE SERVICE CHARGE HIKES FOR RATEPAYERS

Dear Cape Town Ratepayers,

          Here we go again. Having proved conclusively that a web of nets erected to keep the sand in place over an old rubbish dump has been a hopeless failure the Council is putting up even more of them. The dump, closed more than 30 years ago, is in the middle of a 19 ha site that consists of mainly sand dunes.

          The Council is repeating what it has done at the beginning of every year since 2016. Only this time an even larger section of the dunes next to the Witsands surfing beach not far from Cape Point is being covered with these rows of nets.

          Officials seem unconcerned that they’ll soon get flattened or buried in the sand by the gale force winds that are endemic to the area.

          In its efforts to ensure that none of the remaining rubbish (plastic and other non biodegradable material) gets washed into the sea during the winter rainy season, which happened many years ago, the Council has spent something like R7-million in the last 12 years.

          Even though we are in the midst of the worse drought anybody can remember the Council upped its wasteful spending on the site from 2016 onwards, blowing about double the R500 000 average that had been splurged in previous years.

The waste of money gets worse and worse. It just goes on and on. My efforts over a period of more than two years to get the Mayor Patricia de Lille to put a stop to this have proved fruitless.

          On 26 June 2017 I lodge a complaint about this with the office of the Public Protector and I got an acknowledgement a few days later. It said that my complaint would be “assessed to establish whether the law allows us to investigate your complaint. As soon as the process is complete we shall revert to you and advise you accordingly.”

          I have yet to be “advised accordingly” although I was asked to provide further proof of my allegations in addition to what I gave in my original evidence. I then sent links to my various posts on the subject as well as photographs etc.

          But if Advocate Busisiwe Mkhwebane the Public Protector keeps complaining that she hasn’t got enough money to investigate the big crooks properly what is the chance of my complaint ever being finalised?   

          This never ending waste is particularly galling at a time when the Council has drastically increased the price of water as it badly needs money because of the crippling draught. In addition it is proposing massive hikes, some as high as 26%, on all services charges for ratepayers. These are way above the inflation rate.

On the other side of the mountain from Witsands there are 40 000 people living in the Black township of Masiphumelele who are crying out for improved living conditions while this waste goes on and on.

          When the netting began all over again in 2018 I tried to find out what the Council intended to spend on the site this year. At the start of my investigating in 2016 I dealt with Councillor Johan van der Merwe, who had the Environment portfolio.

My questions to him evidently became too hot when I asked how the tenders for the work had been allocated. That was when I was told I would not be given any further information.

          It is ironic that the Councillor in charge of Environment when the waste of money at Witsands really escalated is now the Mayoral Committee Member for Finance who recently made a speech introducing the The Greater Cape Town Water Fund Pilot Project.

          This year Van der Merwe told me that Councillor Brett Herron the Mayoral Committee Member for Transport and Urban Development was now in charge of Environment. He in turn passed me onto Gregg Oelofse the Manager: Coastal Management.

          He wanted me to meet him on the site but he had to cancel our appointment because his elderly mother in Durban broke a leg.

          Obviously he could not have anticipated this but I was mystified as to what he could have told me on the site that he could not have put in an email. How much the Council plans to spend at Witsands this year is surely not a secret.

          A couple of days ago workmen were busy digging out buried nets along the sea front where virtually all the original ones had disappeared. They were rolling them up and carrying them away. And when I asked if they would be re-erected I was told that they had rotted.

          This makes nonsense of the assurance that I was given in 2016 that buried nets would be dug out and put up again. So that’s another aspect of how wasteful this netting scheme is.
          The pictures below are glaring examples of what a wasteful failure the netting has been ........  

Nets being re-erected on 2018.01.17 with what's left of the
previous ones in the foreground

Five days later on 2018.01.22 what's left of of the nets at the
same place as the above scene after a gale

Diary of Cape Town City Council’s huge waste of money in a futile attempt to keep the sand in place at the Witsands rubbish dump site which was closed more than 30 years ago.

(This is a sample of the wasteful expenditure on parts of the 19 ha site that has been repeated all over it in the last two years)

Section of dunes next to the beach at the car park end where the mountain stream washed rubbish into the sea some years ago.

Feb 2016: Heavy earth moving equipment and dumper trucks used to cover exposed rubbish

May 2016: In the same place sand blew away exposing rubbish once again.

June 2016: More sand brought in with dumper trucks.

Feb 2017: Back to square one. Rubbish exposed again as the sand had all blown away as nets proved hopelessly inadequate in keeping it in place.

April 2017: New nets erected right on top of the rubbish without first covering it with sand as had been done twice before.

Nov 2017: Nets trashed by the wind.

Beginning of 2016 & Feb 2018 showing rubbish once again
exposed in the same place

Money wasted deepening the stream from the mountain.

August 2016: While the stream was running an excavator was used to deepen it but because of the fine sand it just went back to its original depth within hours of it being “deepened”.

Jan 2017: There was no sign that there had ever been a stream there because the wind had blow so much sand across it.

May 2017: A bulldozer was used to dig out another river bed for the stream even though there was absolutely no sign of any water running down from the mountain as there was a serious drought.

Nov 2017: The river bed had once again completely disappeared under tons of wind blown sand. 

The new river bed and now

For years sand blew onto the road to the Soetwater recreational area and the Council brought in a front end loader from time to time to clear it. All the nets on the dunes nearby did nothing to prevent sand getting blown onto the road and even when bulldozers and other earth moving equipment was being used nobody thought to substantially reduced the height of the dunes next to the road. Now suddenly in February 2018 nets have been erected for the first time next to the road in an effort to stop the sand blowing onto it. But they had hardly been put up when the wind had blown some over and almost buried others in the sand. And as most of them are on high ground the chances of them all being flatted or buried very quickly is huge, as this has happened all over the site in much more sheltered places.

 

What's happening here is described immediately below

 Sand being removed from the road in January 2017:
It was then dumped in the nearby Witsands carpark making double work because it had to be removed from there. The ironical part of the second picture is that some of the newly erect nets next to the road (February 2018) are beside naturally grown Port Jackson, which the council has so far flatly refused to plant to stabilize the Witsands dunes at a fraction of the cost of nets and earth moving equipment.

Surely this is the most sensible way of dealing with the Witsands site especially as the City Council badly needs money for drought relief and numerous other projects to uplift the poor. And it makes more sense that ever because

everything the Council has tried up to now to stabilize the dunes has been such a very expensive failure.

March 29 2016: In a Cape Argus article base on my post City of Cape Town’s never ending money dump Gregg Oelofse  was quoted as say: “We haven’t had litter exposed for nearly 10 years.” He added that the netting was cost effective as it was easy to pick up and move around.

Both statements were questionable. As the pictures above show the litter is constantly being exposed because the nets do not do the job they are supposed to do. In addition they are hardly easy to pick up and move around when they get complete buried and trashed by the wind. It also turned out that they rot. This results in new ones having to be erected in places where others had been put up previously.

Cape Argus story - not one of the nets shown still exist

                                              *    *    *    *

          Why does a local authority go on splurging money for years on something that clearly does not work? It surely can’t be that none of its experts haven't got the brains to realise this.

          So I can only assume there must be a reason that is not immediately apparent which nobody is prepared to reveal.   

             

          Regards
          Jon,
          a Consumer Watchdog who is 

          also a Cape Town rate payer.
      .

   See also: money dump; wasting more money; worse money dumping;
Worse still ; blowing millions; money wasting again; the proof

Cape Town's monument to waste - THE PROOF

Dear Patricia de Lille, Mayor of Cape Town,

          In a month or two it will be the usual time, if the last two years are anything to go by, when your Council starts wasting a pot full of money once again on trying to keep the sand in place on top of a rubbish dump closed 32 year ago.

          Here’s the proof that what has been done up to now at Witsands, not far from Cape Point, has been a dismal failure. Tragically this hasn’t prevented your officials from repeating the same expensive mistake ad nauseam and that’s why I am appealing to you once again to step in and stop it.

          It has already cost the Council something like R6 million over the last 11 years with the worst examples being during 2016 – 2017 when the spending went through the roof. I am sure you have read all my other posts on this subject so you can easily go back to them if you want to refresh your memory about exactly what has been going on.

          Here are my latest pictures which show once again what a failure the very costly nets have been when it comes to keeping the sand in place.

May 2016 - Rubbish exposed after twice being covered with
sand and having nets erected on it

April 2017 - Nets erected again this time right on top of the 
rubbish whereas on all previous occasions sand was dumped 
on top of it before the nets were erected

Nov 2017 - Rubbish being exposed in the same place as shown
in the previous pictures. Will soon be back to square one
as it was in May 2016

          The next set of pictures show what happened to the bed of the stream that was dug out for the water that never appeared.

May 2017 - The place where the stream was in 2016 was dug
out with a bulldozer even though there was no sign of water
 running. This is the view looking towards the mountain.

                                 

Nov 2017 - The sand blown by the wind has completed filled 

                       in what the bulldozer dug out.

       Here's one that shows how much rubbish is now exposed on another part of the site. It's another glaring example of how your Council's expensive management of this old dump has been a complete failure.

Nov 2017                                                                                     

         These pictures show conclusively how ratepayers money has been blown away. And I have more equally graphic examples that illustrate that there is probably more exposed rubbish on this 19 ha site now than there has been for some years.
         Regards,

         Jon, a Consumer Watchdog hoping against hope that you will at last do the right thing by putting a stop to this terrible waste.

P.S. See also: Blacks in disgusting conditions ; Money wasting department ;
Millions blown away ; Scandalous money dumping

While 40 000 Blacks live in 'disgusting conditions' Cape Town keeps spending millions on a rubbish dump site closed 30 years ago

Dear Patricia de Lille, Mayor of Cape Town,

            While 40 000 Blacks live in what the Public Protector Advocate Busisiwe Mkhwebane described as “The most disgusting conditions I have seen in my life” your Council continues to squander a fortune on the site of a rubbish dump closed more than 30 years ago.

            This scandal is compounded by the fact that the Blacks live in the township of Masiphumelele, just a few kilometers away from the controversial dump site next to the popular surfing beach of Witsands. So they don’t have far to go to see how futile the Council’s efforts have been to try and keep the sand in place in an uninhabited wasteland of wind swept dunes.  

            Year after year your Council spends hundreds of thousands on trying to keep the sand in place above what is left of the rubbish. Your officials appear to be obcessed with the notion that our winter rainy season will result in the plastic and other biodegradable material being washed out to sea. So it has just started repeating exactly what proved to be such a failure last year and like last year the first winter storm has flattened or covered kilometres of nets that were erected a little over a month ago.

            That’s another R200 000 or more that has been blown away on top of the R6-million that has already been wasted on this dump over the years. This is all money that could have been used far better to upgrade the facilities at Masi.

            To add to that a huge bulldozer has just spent two weeks moving the sand about and, of all things in the middle of the worst drought anyone can remember, digging a river bed for the small stream that sometimes runs down from the nearby mountain to the sea towards the end of the winter months. At a hire fee of something like R1500 an hour that’s R100 000 or more added to the amount so far rubbished on the dump.

            About this time last year when the stream was running a few centimeters deep and about 10 meters wide an excavator was brought in to deepen it.  But as the sand that covers the area is the finest of powders the trench that was dug just closed up within hours, making this expensive exercise as pointless as everything else. And as soon as the winter was over the strong winds that are endemic to the area closed the river bed so completely that there was no sign of it ever having been there.

            Now this will happen all over again, possibly even before the winter ends because the sand has been piled so steeply on the banks that it is asking to be blown straight back to where it came from. 

The Council stopped answering my questions last year when
I asked it to explain how the contracts were awarded

          The pictures below tell the sorry story of one failure after another.

February 2016 Sand being dumped on area of exposed rubbish. This
was done again within a couple of months after the first lot
was blown away

May 2016 Rubbish exposed after twice being covered with sand and
having nets erected on it to keep the sand in place.

January 2017 The nets have all been blown away & the rubbish is
once more exposed.

April 2017 - Nets erected again this time right on top of the 
rubbish whereas before it was first covered with sand

June 2017 What's left of the nets after the first big storm of the winter

            I can only assume that there must be some reason that is not immediately apparent that would explain why so much of our ratepayer’s money is being repeatedly spent on very expensive methods to keep the sand in place, when they clearly don’t work.

August 2016 Stream being deepened                                              
                                         
                                         

Jan 2017 It's as if there was never a stream there the sand has covered
it so completely

May 2017 The newly dug river bed for the stream that may never come

May 2017 The bulldozer used to make a new river bed & to move the
 sand around 

            This terrible waste just goes on and on with a reckless disregard for the fact that you and your Council are entrusted to spend our money wisely.

            I appeal to you once again to stop this right now.

            Regards

            Jon, a Consumer Watchdog who only wishes his bite was a lot more effective than his bark.

  P.S. See :  cape town's money wasting department

*Note: The first five pictures are of one of the mostaffected areas. But there were other larger sections of the 19ha site further inland that also had nets trashed by the weather and on 14 June 2017 about half a dozen men were digging the nets up and re-erecting them. This was something that should have been done on an 
ongoing basis since the nets were first put up at the beginning of last year. But this was hardly ever done.

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.

  

CAPE TOWN'S SCANDALOUS MONEY DUMPING GETS WORSE & WORSE

Dear Patricia de Lille, Mayor of Cape Town,

            As the head of what your Democratic Alliance party claims to be the most efficient municipality in the country can you please, please stop your Council wasting more money on a rubbish dump that was closed 30 years ago?

            The cost so far this year could exceeded R1-million or even reach R1 500 000 before the year is over.

            Don’t blame me if I haven’t got my figures spot on because ever since I began my expose`of this scandal Councillor Johan van der Merwe, your Mayoral Committee member in charge of Environmental Planning has not been very forthcoming about the cost and exactly what is being done to maintain this site at Witsands next to a popular surfing beach not far from Cape Point.

            I have had to drag information out of him bit by bit. At one stage he told me my figures were not correct but he didn’t give me the right ones.

            Now my questions and the posts I have written about what is going on at this 19 ha sand dune covered area have clearly got too hot and embarrassing for your Council.

            How else can you explain why Van der Merwe has now clammed up and refuses to answer any more of my questions? I’m not surprised that he doesn’t want  more publicity because this is a shocking waste of ratepayer’s money made worse because it is taking place not far from the townships of Masiphumelele and Ocean View where the residents so badly need funds to upgrade facilities.

            In March this year he told me that managing this site to ensure that what is left of the rubbish under the sand - plastic, bottles and other biodegradable material – doesn’t get washed into the sea by streams that develop in the winter rainfall season, has cost R500 000 a year for the last 10.

            He added that “more than 60%” of the amount spent had gone to “the employment of unskilled labour.” This would have meant that the poor in the area would have benefited by a massive R3-million over the period, a figure that I would dispute as ‘Unbelievable.’ But I am happy to apologise if your Council can give me some kind of reasonable proof that this actually happened.

            I have been going to Witsands regularly over the last few years and this year your Council has gone berserk with its spending there as if money is no object.

            Since February hired heavy earth moving equipment consisting of a huge tracked bulldozer; an excavator and two dumper trucks was brought in on two occasions. They spent several weeks on the site moving the sand around. And if the job had been done properly the first time this equipment would not have been needed again just a couple of months later.

            These machines don’t come cheap and at a rough guess R700 000 has already been spent hiring them. To this must be added another R400 000 for the maze of nets that have been put up in an effort to keep the sand in place in a very wind swept area.

            The disregard for the way our money is being thrown away was graphically illustrated when a lone excavator recently arrived on a Monday to deepen the stream that had started running into the sea on the one edge of the site.

            It stood idle until Thursday, was used on that and the following day, and remained parked at least until noon on the following Monday. When I questioned this Van der Merwe told me that the City’s hire rate at Witsands for an excavator was R538 an hour and it didn’t cost anything for the first three days of the week as it was delivered earlier than required.

            On the site I got a different more probably version and that was that the excavator could not be used initially because the operator was waiting for the nets that went across the stream and near it to be lifted so that it could get in.

            I would have expected your experts to have been able to predict where the stream would run so the nets did not end up straddling it and then have to be removed.

            The deepening of the stream was definitely an absolute waste of money. Where the work began it was about six meters wide and the water was a mere two or three centimeters in the deepest parts.

            The sand was dug out in the middle of the stream to a depth of a meter and piled on the side for about a kilometre. It evidently hadn’t occurred to the Council’s experts that if you dig holes in waterlogged sand they close up almost immediately and in this case, before the excavator left the site, the stream had reverted back to its original depth. 

After the stream was dug it went back to this which was
no deeper than what it was before the excavator moved in

            So that was at least another R21 000 thrown away on the dump.

            Among my very first questions to Van der Merwe I asked what effort had been made to cover the land fill site with vegetation as this was internationally accepted as the best and most cost effective way of stabilising coastal sand dunes.

      

            He replied that in this case it was “almost impossible to do” and in any event to “modify this natural system” could not be done “without several authorisations.”

            He didn’t explain this and on several occasions since then he repeated that an “Environmental Authorisation” would be needed to do this.

            The contract to erect the netting was given to Vula Environment Restoration a firm of dune restoration specialists at a price of R200 000. It claims to have stabilised dunes with indigenous grasses and to be able to produce vast quantities of indigenous plant seeds.   

            “The reason why the entire 19 ha has not been instantaneously vegetated is that there has not been a detailed study of the viability of this and there in not an Environment Authorisation in terms of the viability of the relevant legislation to implement this,” Deon van Eeden the founder of Vula told me. 

            So for more than 10 years your Council has been happily spending millions on this site without bothering to do the “detailed study” he talking about or getting the necessary authorisation that would allow the site to be covered in vegetation in much the same way as the adjourning dunes, thus solving the problem forever at minimum cost.

            It now transpires that Van Eeden’s firm is doing what I advocated six months ago even though that mysterious authorisation has not been obtained.

            “Natural recolonisation by local vegetation has taken place in certain areas where seed banks exist,” he told me last month. “This has been possible with the reduction in sand movement created by the netting. Some limited planting of cuttings taken from the area is taking place adjacent to existing vegetated areas where sand has inundated areas that previously had vegetation.”

            However when asked him if he had solved the Environment Authorisation problem he again repeated what had now become a council mantra: “Any proactive planting of the historical mobile dune field will require an Environmental Authorisation.”

            In March Vula initially put up 5 km of netting on a 4ha ridge that was made by the earth movers parallel to the sea. The nets were supposed to force the wind to drop the sand on top of the landfill between the rows.

            The first two winter storms flattened or buried much of the netting and a large area of rubbish was exposed. That was when the earth movers had to return in May to dump tons more sand on the exposed areas.

Some of the first nets that were erected

         

Nets put up more recently near the stream

              Since then nets have been erected over another huge area further inland. But like the first lot the wind flattened or buried a lot of them within weeks of them being put up. Once this happens according to Van der Merwe they are supposed to be restored to their original positions, but from what I have seen this has only been done in a very small section.

            I believe that if the Council stopped disturbing the dunes so often with earth moving equipment there would be far less chance of existing vegetated sections being covered with sand and the plants would be more likely to spread across the entire site.

Left to nature this is how vegetation is growing on the
dunes on the edge of the Council's sand pit next to the beach

         

What the dunes in the Council's sand pit next to the beach
look like after being shifted around and netted.

             It’s odd that Van Eeden’s company, the experts, should start planting now just when the Cape’s rainy season is coming to an end.

After the Council gave Van Eeden permission to answer my questions and he told me that his R200 000 vat inclusive contract lasted until March 2017 he never made it clear that this was purely to put up the nets and maintain them.

It was only by chance that Van der Merwe disclosed recently that the nets themselves plus the poles to hold them up were bought from two other different suppliers in December 2015 and June 2016 at cost of R101 000 and R111 400 excluding vat.

The depressing thing is that spending on nets and putting them up is not yet over because Van der Merwe says that the City will soon be advertising for quotes for “the remaining netting and maintenance work required on the site.” He added that the cost of this would only be known once the job had been awarded.

“It is the intention to net the entire dune field before next summer and the ongoing management will include strategically lifting some nets while leaving others to encourage sand to accumulate in areas where it is needed.”

            And who knows, if they don’t do the job properly we might see the earth movers back.

Questions that Van der Merwe would not answer:

·       Why is it that after spending R500 000 annually on the site for the last 10 years the Council has not yet got Environmental Authorisation to enable vegetation to be planted on the entire 19 ha?

·       Why is planting taking place when there is no Environmental Authorisation?

·       From whom and how it the necessary Environmental Authorisation obtained if the Council wants to go ahead with vegetating the whole of the site?

·       Was Vula’s price to put up nets on the 19 ha or only the 4ha that was done in the first phase?

·       If it was only for the 4ha section how much will it cost to do the rest of the area?

Regards,

Jon, a very concerned Cape Town ratepayer.
See:City won't stop dumping your money;
Is cape-town wasting more money on a rubbish dump;
cape town's huge waste of money

P.S. My suggestion, which was clearly regarded as sacrilege, was to plant fast growing Port Jackson willow over the dump. As you no doubt know this was originally brought from Australia to cover coastal dunes, similar to the ones at Witsands, in other parts of Cape Town.
It spread so quickly it got the alien tag so your Council would rather carry on squandering millions than plant this. Meanwhile a whole mountainside is covered with it 
a few kilometers from Witsands and your Council is doing nothing to get rid of that. It is now flowering, so it won’t be long before millions more Port Jackson seeds will be sprouting all over the place.