Cape Town Mayor reflects progress in 2022

The City of Cape Town held a council meeting on Thursday, 8 December to discuss about its progress this year and launched its Disaster Management Centre, which will remain on alert until the threat of load shedding ease its stages.

Addressing the city’s council, Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, emphasized in keeping the city safe following the release of the quarterly crime statistics from the SAPS.

“Two weeks ago, we received the latest quarterly crime statistics from the SAPS. Amid a truly bleak national picture, the stats for the areas where we are doing more to make up for SAPS and the national governments' policing failure, show cause for optimism”.

“Of course there is still far too much violent crime. But our model is starting to bring down violent crime and remove criminals and guns from our streets,” he said.

With the recent high power cuts impacting residents and workers, Hill-Lewis warned that the threat of higher stages of load shedding has risen following Eskom’s move to stage 6 on Wednesday, while the country waits for the power utility to shut down unit 1 of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station for maintenance.

The mayor said that the city had pledged in 2021 to end the effects of load shedding on residents and businesses, which resulted in a tender for the procurement of 300MW of privately produced power.

“Every time this happens, our resolve is only strengthened further that Cape Town will show South Africa how the future can be different. We will exploit any and every opportunity to accelerate our efforts to reduce our reliance on Eskom and the national state as fast we can”, the mayor lamented.

The mayor said he was impressed with the attitude of capetonians, who were actively engaging in cleaning up the city and vowed they will be assisting in keeping the living conditions clean.

“I have said that restoring the health of our waterways and vleis is non-negotiable. In the coming years we aim to steadily close off the multiple sources of pollution to our critically affected waterbodies, including Milnerton Lagoon, where we are building up to the dredging and removal of sediment containing decades of urban pollution,” he noted.

He also spoke about improving the City`s public transport in order to make it affordable for the public.

“Our newly-launched No Cost Transfer programme will make it easier for tenants of around 7 500 saleable Council rental units to become home owners, without having to pay anything towards the transfer costs of these units”, the mayor said

Hill-Lewis then addressed the issue of housing by promising to do more for social housing and added that 1 300 social housing units were approved this year.

 

 

By Lulama Klassen