Cape Town - During the opening session of the seventh administration of the Western Cape legislature, Premier Alan Winde slammed budgetary allocations to the province, as well as those for Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.
While addressing MPLs and the public yesterday, Winde said a critical focus of the provincial government over the next five years would be financial sustainability.
Winde referred to an in-year budget cut by the National Government of R1.1 billion, as illegal.
“... that affects the citizens directly because services get taken away. We believe that was an absolutely illegal occurrence and we launched an intergovernmental dispute.”
Winde said while the province was the third most populous in the country, the Western Cape received only the fifth largest budgetary allocation, calling this “unacceptable”.
Last year, when the floods were declared a disaster, the province was still owed R1.3 billion in disaster funding from the National Government.
Winde said 74% of households in the province had at least one salary earner in that household, evoking heckles of disbelief from members in the chamber.
“We are determined to make it as easy as possible for the private sector to do business and create more jobs in our province. We are doing this through initiatives like cutting red tape or the ease of doing business in the last term, saving businesses R2.4 billion.”
Winde said the province was pushing to see the unemployment rate below 20%. According to the Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) by Statistics South Africa, the province had an unemployment rate of 21.4% in quarter one of 2024.
“We are building homes as fast as we can, and in the last term, 43000 housing opportunities were created.” Between 2019 and 2023, 17705 title deeds were registered to these beneficiaries, he said.
LEAP officers have made 340000 arrests so far. The province had 477 accredited neighbourhood watches, comprising 14 632 patrollers.
“I will not be satisfied until we see decentralised policing, decision-making and allocation of resources to the areas that need it the most.”
Debate on the premier’s opening session will take place today, followed by the premier’s reply.
While the session was under way, the ANC in the Western Cape protested in solidarity with Palestine outside the Western Cape Legislature, calling for Israel to be banned from the Paris Olympics.
“Apart from this issue which is to free Palestine, wehave other issues that we would like to send to the Western Cape Government. One of those is about service delivery in general,” ANC Provincial Executive Committee (PEC) member Vuyokazi Malafu said.
“We’ve always felt that the premier’s views and even the budgeting are always based on the affluent areas in the Western Cape. I’m hoping to see more on women issues, women and children being abducted. We’re seeing a lot of posters of women and children and people in general who are missing, and we are saying our security system needs to tightened.
“The scourge of GBV ... are we going to speak about that and are we going to support organisations that support those women? In our black and coloured townships, the sewer system... that is a crisis around the inequality in the Western Cape.
“So we want him to talk around those things and tackle them, and to say, what is the empowerment plan for everyone in the City of Cape Town? said Malafu.
Cape Argus