POLITICS - The ANC leadership in KwaZulu-Natal has to work together if the party is to fare better in the 2024 elections, President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Monday.
Ramaphosa was addressing the ANC’s provincial executive committee during its meeting held at the Msunduzi Athletic Stadium on Monday.
In his address, Ramaphosa touched on the ills faced by the power utility Eskom and water shortages in parts of KZN.
He told the provincial leadership that the ANC leadership needs to work harder to convince South Africans that the party still represents the people and their needs.
Before inviting Ramaphosa to the podium, provincial chairperson Siboniso Duma, during his welcoming address, apologised to the president for the behaviour of some members during the recent conference where Dr Zweli Mkhize failed to emerge.
Taking to the podium, Ramaphosa said more work needed to be done ahead of the “very crucial” 2024 elections, and that water and electricity issues needed urgent attention.
What has always been a heartbreaker for me is to hear people in a number of municipalities saying there is no water. I have heard that in a number of regions in this province so those must be addressed and I hope that later when we have a discussion let’s talk about that as well because those, chairperson, are going to be game changers for us as we go to the elections.
“The success of all these efforts to grow the economy and create jobs and to fulfil our responsibility to meet our peoples’ needs is the effective function of local government. In the state of local government barometer in 2021 Cogta said that 11 out of 54 municipalities in KZN were dysfunctional and we now need to speak to the reality of that.
“I said this much in the Free State yesterday (on Sunday) because in that province not a single municipality is not dysfunctional, and all of them are run by the ANC. This is the time to sit down and look ourselves in the mirror and ask what we are going to do to turn things around, and we only have 15 months.”
He said he was prepared to come and work in the province (ahead of the elections).
I’m prepared to come and work here as long as you want me to but we must be prepared to work together because the 2024 elections are very crucial.
He said there was a need for the ANC leadership to work with greater focus and purpose to ensure that the needs of the people and their interests were met.
“The priority objective and primary task must be to deal with the electricity crisis our people are faced with. Without energy investments dry up and productivity drops. Eighty percent of our power is generated by coal-fired power stations.”
There is no way for us to go and shut down our coal-fired power stations. We have come up with a new concept which is to retrofit [some of] the power stations and re-purpose them. Our aim is to improve the performance of the existing stations and add more capacity.
He said the country was short of 6 000 MW, and put the blame squarely on the government.
“What we are reaping now are the results of not maintaining our power stations for some time.
"We have brought in a team of independent experts who are international players to look into our system. In the past one of the problems that we had was that over time we did not maintain our power stations and in fact, we went through a period where the word that was issued was that don’t maintain [power stations], just run them and keep the lights on. You might have heard this particularly as we went to 2010. Over this time maintenance was downgraded. What we are reaping now are the results of not maintaining our power stations."
He said he had tabled a proposal to the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) not to implement the tariff increase as it would be heavy on the shoulders of the people to pay extra for a service they do not receive.
