The KwaZulu Natal Provincial Parliament has not come to your area this week to hear your concerns about service delivery. It never does when it makes rounds about the province. Its main preoccupation is to splash the taxpayers' money on once-off festivities with the sole purpose of garnering votes for the ANC in whatever election follows next. This is cynicism at its worst.

If the ANC-controlled provincial government genuinely cared about your needs, it would have acted on the detailed analysis of the local developmental challenges listed in the formal submission by Mayor GM Dlamini to an institution no lesser than the national parliamentary portfolio committee on finance.

Predictably, the ANC did nothing for the local people apart from paying a pompous and wasteful visit to the area, billed as Premier's Imbizo. If the Premier had truly cared about the people of AbaQulusi, his provincial government would have sent to this area disaster relief following extensive floods in December 2006. But he did not.

Over the past year, the municipality has had visits from the MECs for Health; Welfare and Population Development; Local Government, Housing and Traditional Affairs; Agriculture; Transport; and Community Safety. All of these individuals made ample promises to the local community. None of these individuals, however, ever delivered on a single promise.

The ANC has gone out of its way to destroy the IFP-run AbaQulusi Council. Infamously, the MEC for Local Government dissolved the council in 2005 for reasons that are routinely ignored in ANC-controlled municipalities. One would have thought that the IFP victory in the 2006 local government elections would have put an end to ANC subversion in the area. But it did not.

Tirelessly, the ANC has been sending deputations to undermine a democratically-elected IFP administration. Yet not a single intervention from the provincial government has led to improved delivery. If anything, the ANC has selfishly retarded development in AbaQulusi.

Dr Lionel Mtshali MPP
Leader of the Official Opposition

Contact: Dr Lionel Mtshali, 083 256 4902