ANC must concentrate on municipalities where cholera is rife
This morning I visited Vosman near Emalahleni and Thembesile near Standerton. After 15 years in government, the ANC has still not provided large parts of these townships with reliable supplies of electricity and water. In winter, the taps run dry. There is no infrastructure. After heavy rains, the roads turn to mud.
In conditions like these, disease spreads like wildfire. No wonder that Mpumalanga , along with Limpopo, is bearing the brunt of the cross-border cholera outbreak which started in Zimbabwe . According to news reports last week, nearly 4 500 people in Mpumalanga have been treated since the crisis began late last year, 26 of whom have died.
In the City of Cape Town , the DA-led multiparty government is implementing a set of policies that give life to our vision of an open, opportunity society for all. As part of this, we are working hard to install electricity and water in all the areas that did not receive them when the ANC was in government. Every day, we make a little more progress, and if you add up all these small steps over a long time, you go forward a long way.
There are some ANC politicians, like the Labour Minister, Membathisi Mdladlana, who claim that, where we are in government, we do not spend our budgets or deliver services in informal settlements. That is an outright lie. In Cape Town , we have a capital budget of R65 million for the current financial year for basic services in informal settlements.
In the last financial year, we installed 422 water standpipes and 2458 toilets in informal settlements in Cape Town . In the current financial year, we have already installed 2840 toilets (nearly 400 more than the whole of the previous year), and we have installed 186 water standpipes.
Regular tests have confirmed that our water remains safe. Our drinking water fully complies with national standards, and we were the first local government in the country to achieve international ISO 9001:2000 certification for water provision.
Because of the steady implementation of our successful open, opportunity-driven policies, Cape Town has not been as badly affected as other municipalities by the cholera outbreak. 7 cases of cholera have been reported, and these have been linked to human contact, not to drinking water.
But instead of the focusing on municipalities where cholera is rife, the ANC is abusing the parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Water Affairs and Forestry to focus on Cape Town - the one municipality that is working - for narrow electioneering purposes.
The ANC has claimed in the Committee that our rollout of water flow management devices is somehow "anti-poor", and likened them to Johannesburg 's pre-paid water meters. That is a blatant lie. In fact, payment is not required before water is supplied through our water management devices. And the devices have helped people to avoid losing water and money through leaks by allowing them to monitor how much they use, and giving them a fixed amount of free water per day.
Ironically, just as our Health Minister Barbara Hogan is busy calling for prudent water management by municipalities in order to prevent outbreaks of disease, her own party is trying to undermine prudent management in the City of Cape Town for electioneering purposes.
We do not have to look far to see what happens when water security fails. Following the collapse of municipal water supplies in Zimbabwe, 70 000 people have been hit by cholera. The ANC in Parliament should be scrutinizing those South African municipalities which are heading in the same direction, and stop harassing the City of Cape Town .
The ANC is trying to detract attention from its own failed policies in local government by resorting to lies about the DA. But the people of South Africa won't be fooled. The DA is a party of government. It is a party with solutions. It is a party that delivers.
We have condensed our policy solutions into a manifesto - our blueprint for winning nation - which we will release on Saturday.
Our manifesto covers every area of public policy, and offers costed, workable alternatives to the ANC's failed policies. We offer winning solutions to the crisis in Zimbabwe , to the service delivery bottlenecks in local government, and to poverty - all of which provided a fertile breeding ground for cholera to spread.
Our record in government shows that we can deliver on our promises to all the people.
That is why the voters of Mpumalanga must support the DA. A vote for the DA is a vote for real change in Mpumalanga and South Africa.
This is an extract from a speech by Democratic Alliance leader, Helen Zille, at Siyabuswa Community Hall, Mpumalanga February 11 2009
