Whites get the best seats in Toilets-with-a-View row

Dear South African Voters,

          It’s rubbish that only poor blacks are getting the short end of the toilet roll by having to make do with walless Council toilets.

          The ruling African National Congress has gone one better at the Witblikkiesfontien Municipality, which they have controlled for the last 17 years. As you know this is a town on the coast in the Northern Cape.

          There the enlightened Black dominated Council was determined not to be accused of racial prejudice so it has built 5 000 open plan houses for Whites only. They are lined up along the coast so that all of them are only meters from the sea.

          So as not to get bogged down in another toilet saga the Council decided to put these in first as soon as the foundations had been laid. The project has so far cost 50-million in a place where the only people who have a job work for the Municipality.

          Their biggest drawback is that the development is tailor made for nagging wives. Since we got our house my Mrs has been on at me constantly to get hold of the Mayor.

          One hundred and twenty phone calls and 30 visits to the Council offices later I managed to corner him as he was about to go fishing. He exploded as if it was all my fault.

          You whites, he screamed, are all the same. We try to do our best for you and risk riots from our followers and all we get are complaints, Lucky Lobengula, who owns a sanitary ware shop in the town went on.

          When you Whites come to live by the sea all you worry about is a view. So that’s what we’ve given you. You can see right across the Indian Ocean to America from those properties. So what more do you want?

          Don’t you mean the Atlantic Mr Mayor?

          You might think you can speak to your garden boy like that but don’t try it with me Whitey.

          To try and calm him down I replied, Mr Mayor I don’t want to be critical but we’ve had our houses now for two years. When are you going to build the walls?

          That’s news to me, he said picking up his fishing reel. I thought you people had agreed to put them up yourselves. The Council doesn’t have money for that you know.

          Our rules handbook is what we have to go by. And that says that before we do anything else, me, my deputy and our five most senior officials must all have a Mercedes Benz costing at least a million. And these must come complete with toilets because of the enormous distances we have to cover in this part of the country.

           We've got beyond going behind a bush you know.

          Sorry to have bothered you Mr Mayor, I retorted. In the interests of racial harmony we’ll just have to be content with enjoying the view. And of course we’ll go on voting for that AWC party of yours.

          That’s me in the picture doing my toilet training while reading  the Sunday Times. It gives you a good idea of what the Council means by open plan houses. But I must say they’ve saved us a packed on air freshener.

          Happy sight seeing,

          Yours faithfully,

          Jon, a Town Planner of repute when I’m not sitting on my Blog.

PS. For those of you who don’t keep up with the news the Democratic Alliance, our second largest party, exposed itself by installing unenclosed toilets in a black township in Cape Town. This is the only City in the country it controls.

          This was done after the people concerned agreed to enclose the toilets themselves. Most of them did this but some didn’t get round to it.

          With an election just round the corner this delighted the AWC’s youth wing rabble. When the DA put up structures to hide its embarrassment they kept smashing them down.

          The case went to court where a judged ruled the City must enclose them once again. Inexplicably he didn’t say what with so we can expect a lot more sewerage to hit the fan there.

        Meanwhile the DA is flushed with success having caught the AWC with their trousers down and you can appreciate they couldn’t stand the smell. It turned out that one of the ruling party controlled towns in the Free State had 1 620 uncovered bogs going back to 2003.

          The Sunday Times reported that a spokesman for the Moqhaka Municipality said they had covered 378 of these since last year and were busy doing the rest. It would cost R8-million to do them all but they only had R4-million available.

       There is nothing like a pending election to get Councillors everywhere off their arses.

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