The Mayoral Committee Member for Roads and Transport in the City of Joburg roads Kenny Kunene has underplayed tensions that arose at a community meeting he was scheduled to address which had to be abondoned.
Residents of Tshepisong near Soweto which is part of Joburg’s Region C were divided along party lines accusing each other of sabotaging the now postponed meeting.
Members of both the ANC and the Patriotic Alliance turned in their party regalia and engaged in heated arguments about where the meeting should be held.
The confrontation took place at the Civic Centre when other groups were reportedly at a church in the area where the meeting was meant to have been held according to an invitation that was also extended to the media.
Kunene said the confusion over venues was reason enough to postpone the meeting to friday.
“The communities reach out to the MMC’s office and when they reach out to the MMC’s office usually things will be lost in place. But I then decided that I want to listen to the communities directly in terms of the challenges, road infrastructure challenges, transport challenges that they are facing. So there is a stakeholder, stakeholders, community members in Sipiso West who have reached out to my office and have asked for me to come to Sipiso West.So that is why this meeting was arranged. Unfortunately, there was a change of venue. The councillor recommended that the venue that was found, that is closer to where the community is, which is a church, that is better if the meeting is held at the community hall,” said Kunene of the confusion.
He was adamant the engagement with residents would proceed on friday.
“ So we have all agreed with the councillor that we will then have a meeting on Friday at 12 o’clock at the church because it’s closer to the place,” said Kunene.
“I think it’s just a matter of people politicising service delivery. This service delivery meeting has nothing to do with t-shirts and politics but it’s not a crisis. When we do programmes, community members will come in their t-shirts, it’s not a problem.You can’t tell people not to wear t-shirts when they come to a meeting, when they represent their constituencies or their political parties,” he said of the near physical confrontation involving members of his Patriotic Alliance and those of the ANC.
A leader of a local NGO said the political parties wanted to hold meetings in specific areas they believed they have support.
“They are the reason this meeting is postponed (2 because they have influenced a certain part of the community to make sure that we are divided as a community so that we don’t feel that our problems, we need our co-operative unit so that we solve them. So they are pushing for this meeting to go to an area where they feel they have more members who are aligned to their philosophy and their ideologies.So that is why they want to go,” said Doctor Dlamini who heads the Concerned Residents Movement.