Community joins hands to show their displeasure.
BHISHO is on track to place the Inkwanca municipality under administration, where Molteno residents and farmers yesterday blocked the town’s main road at both ends in protest.
About 1000 townspeople and farmers marched and drove through town singing and chanting.
Traffic was held up for over an hour by the blockades, including a truck transporting almost 300 sheep from Cape Town to Elliot and four cars with teachers from Steynsburg. They were upset, frustrated and surprised.
Farmers and townspeople shouted “Gatvol!” with activist Sidney Meyer waving a roll of toilet paper.
About 10 police officers marched in a line in front of the colourful crowd and farming cavalcade, but despite some objections to a riot van idling noisily next to the crowd at one point, and angry shouts from a young township man that government had done “nothing”, the march and handover of a memorandum of complaints was peaceful.
After political speeches from the back of a trailer by Molteno Sanco secretary Luzuko Yalezo, wearing a Nelson Mandela T-shirt, the crowd – including about 50 whites – marched to the former offices of the municipality, where they were addressed by the deputy director-general of the Eastern Cape department of cooperative governance and traditional affairs, Ngwadi Mzama.
Black and white, Christian and Muslim sang the national anthem and prayed together.
Mzama told a grumpy crowd that the process of placing the municipality under administration was being hurried through the system up to ministerial level, and later in an interview with the Dispatch said he hoped it did not take longer than a month.
During the interview, Meyer handed Mzama’s puzzled aide the toilet roll.
Farmers, Sanco, Samwu, local ANC leaders and Mzama praised the unity shown by the community, with Mzama saying: “This is Molteno. It is not a political formation but it is a good sign of a community uniting in terms of the rainbow nation by Nelson Mandela.”
However, 26km away controversial mayor Mthandazo Qamngwane demanded that the Dispatch attend his rally in Sterkstroom, underlining the inter-town divisions which have beset the ANC in the municipality.
He claimed municipal employees were not paid because they were on strike, even though the employees emphatically denied this saying they stopped working only when he stopped paying them.
Amid a welter of claims of punitive water and electricity cuts, over-billing, VAT fraud and sewage leaks, Inkwanca chief financial officer Louisa Labuschagne cut a lonely figure sipping a cup of coffee in her car outside the illegal headquarters of the municipality in Sterkstroom at 7.30am yesterday.
She said she had one more year to go in the municipality and declined to comment further.
Molteno Farmers Association leader Meyburgh Erasmus said the day was a success. Instead of workers rampaging around burning tyres in futile protest, the community had united to make a constructive statement. — mikel@dispatch.co.za
VIDEO: Bhisho takeover on cards for Molteno
BHISHO is on track to place the Inkwanca municipality under administration, where Molteno residents and farmers yesterday blocked the town’s main road at both ends in protest.
About 1000 townspeople and farmers marched and drove through town singing and chanting.
Traffic was held up for over an hour by the blockades, including a truck transporting almost 300 sheep from Cape Town to Elliot and four cars with teachers from Steynsburg. They were upset, frustrated and surprised.
Farmers and townspeople shouted “Gatvol!” with activist Sidney Meyer waving a roll of toilet paper.
About 10 police officers marched in a line in front of the colourful crowd and farming cavalcade, but despite some objections to a riot van idling noisily next to the crowd at one point, and angry shouts from a young township man that government had done “nothing”, the march and handover of a memorandum of complaints was peaceful.
After political speeches from the back of a trailer by Molteno Sanco secretary Luzuko Yalezo, wearing a Nelson Mandela T-shirt, the crowd – including about 50 whites – marched to the former offices of the municipality, where they were addressed by the deputy director-general of the Eastern Cape department of cooperative governance and traditional affairs, Ngwadi Mzama.
Black and white, Christian and Muslim sang the national anthem and prayed together.
Mzama told a grumpy crowd that the process of placing the municipality under administration was being hurried through the system up to ministerial level, and later in an interview with the Dispatch said he hoped it did not take longer than a month.
During the interview, Meyer handed Mzama’s puzzled aide the toilet roll.
Farmers, Sanco, Samwu, local ANC leaders and Mzama praised the unity shown by the community, with Mzama saying: “This is Molteno. It is not a political formation but it is a good sign of a community uniting in terms of the rainbow nation by Nelson Mandela.”
However, 26km away controversial mayor Mthandazo Qamngwane demanded that the Dispatch attend his rally in Sterkstroom, underlining the inter-town divisions which have beset the ANC in the municipality.
He claimed municipal employees were not paid because they were on strike, even though the employees emphatically denied this saying they stopped working only when he stopped paying them.
Amid a welter of claims of punitive water and electricity cuts, over-billing, VAT fraud and sewage leaks, Inkwanca chief financial officer Louisa Labuschagne cut a lonely figure sipping a cup of coffee in her car outside the illegal headquarters of the municipality in Sterkstroom at 7.30am yesterday.
She said she had one more year to go in the municipality and declined to comment further.
Molteno Farmers Association leader Meyburgh Erasmus said the day was a success. Instead of workers rampaging around burning tyres in futile protest, the community had united to make a constructive statement. — mikel@dispatch.co.za
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