The City of Tshwane Municipality Demarcation Board held an engagement session with residents of Mamelodi at the Stanza Bopape Community Hall on Thursday.
“This engagement session is called Ward Delimitation Process and this is a way of allowing residents to have a say in the way their wards should be configured and we are not doing any process without input from community members, hence we are here today,” said the Demarcations Board official Barileng Dichabe.
“This process will run until the 30th of June this year and members of the community are urged to submit written proposals on or before the said date,” she said.
“Some community members are pleased with the draft wards that have been proposed while others are aggrieved by the said draft wards mainly because they feel they will not have access to certain service delivery points as they will be far from them and will have difficulty accessing them, so they have pleaded with us to consider their concerns when demarcating the wards,” said Dichabe.
She stressed that the Demarcation Board doesn’t want to implement many changes to the existing wards and that they don’t want to move residents away from their voting districts and voting stations.
Dichabe said the community must be mindful of the fact that the Demarcation Board is accessible; that it is there to listen to their views and that they must come out in numbers and engage us while they still have an opportunity to do so because they are there to lend them their ears and work together with them in order to create spaces that every body can be proud of.
She said the Demarcation Board is in possession of maps of different wards and that they are mere drafts and nothing has been finalised yet,” she said.
“Our aim for now is to allow members of the community to see how the draft maps look like as well as the number of people confined to each ward so that they can understand the motivation behind the way the wards were demarcated,” said Dichabe.
She said the demarcation process is conducted every five years and is a legislated process which must be undertaken before any local government elections take place so as to allow the IEC to step in and plan for the local government elections.
Sandra Ngwenya of Plot 123 (Leeuwfontein) expressed concern that the community at large doesn’t know much about the ward demarcation process and wished that this process should be conducted ward-by- ward so that ward members can gather at the same place at the same time and jointly make a decision as to how their ward should be demarcated.
“At the moment we are expected to come here individually and obviously our views and inputs will differ regarding how our wards must be configured,” she said.
A male resident told Tshwane Talks that he also wants the engagement process to be conducted at ward level so that the community can speak together as a ward, thus making the process impactful.
“People have different views and needs regarding their wards and for example people living in an informal settlement will have different needs to those living in a formal settlement and though this engagement process is fine at face value, it must reach the people on the ground and bring them together in a meeting so that they as members of the ward can ventilate their needs to the government,” he said.
A Ward 10 resident expressed satisfaction about the demarcation process and said it was up to ward committee members to call ward meetings, compile community registers and take decisions regarding what must happen in their ward regarding demarcations and present those resolutions to the Demarcation Board.
“In Ward 10 we didn’t wait for the Demarcation Board to impose its will on us and today we are happy and at ease with the way our ward has been demarcated,” he enthused.