Streets and stadium

The Mercury of January 14, 2009, reported that a fire had broken out at the Royal hotel the day before, resulting in the evacuation of a hundred guests and staff. The fire apparently broke out on the third floor in a linen storage room. 7 eThekwini Metro fire tenders attended the scene and soon contained the fire. I am personally amazed that, given the shortages of staff that the fire department is currently experiencing, they could actually send out seven fire engines.

The paper also reports that on the previous day, the last section of the Moses Mabhida stadium. The arch, costing R448 million, was nearly complete when, at 3:45 p.m., the 60 tonne final piece was hoisted into place. The arch is made up of 96 separate pieces and at its apex towers over 100m above the playing surface. The arch is presumably mainly decorative but it will support the Teflon coated glass fibre stadium roof which will be apparently unique in the world.

It was announced during the week that city management were going to go out on the streets to help clean the new street name signs which had been defaced by vandals objecting to the street reanming in their areas. The Mercury of Friday, January 16, 2009, reported that many of these officials had taken some flak as they worked.

Mayor Obed Mlaba said he had been confronted by two ratepayers including one old lady who said that what they were doing was nonsense and another resident, known as Alistair, who said the street then shouldn't have been changed in the first place and that spray-painting the street names was and vandalism, it was people protesting against the enforced changes.

The speaker of the council James Nxumalo said the city would continue the defaced signs and urged people to accept the changed names. He pointed out that they are about 45000 street names in the municipality and that only a hundred had been changed. DA caucus leader John Steenhuisen said that the street sign cleanup had been a cheap publicity stunt, and he had more to say on the subject in a letter published in the readers' letters section of the same newspaper. He wrote:

An open later to eThekwini Mayor Obed Mlaba and city manager Mike Sutcliffe:

Dear Obed and Mike, I noticed you both very hard at work in my ward in Durban North cleaning the defaced street signs (the same ones you forcibly imposed on the Durban North community despite overwhelming community rejection).

You obviously so busy keeping the very relevant Swapo sign with your ANC baddies that you both failed to notice the graffiti on all the other municipal infrastructures in the area which has not been cleaned for years.

You also, no doubt, overlooked the overgrown municipal verges and the weeds in the road, drains and pavements which, despite repeated requests to your parks department, remain unattended to.

Your hard slog would have meant that you were also likely to miss the near-fatal accident which took place in Danville Avenue on the same morning. You will remember that this is the road where the residents and I have been pleading for some form of traffic calming to be implemented for the past two years with no success.

There is always the same excuse: no funds. It appears you guys have used all the funds on fancy projects, seven BMWs, overseas trips and expensive tracksuits for your councillors.

I was, however; glad to notice that you brought the luxury mayoral 4x4 along. You would have needed it if you'd wanted to visit any one of your municipal parks in the area, because the grass hardly gets cut and there is lots of litter which never gets collected.

I am sure that this was not just a cheap publicity stunt and will be ongoing, so the next time you decide to come and do some work in Durban North, I would be grateful if you could give me a call to meet you on the site.

This will enable me to provide you with the long list of basic municipal functions which, under your leadership, failed to get done.

With the exorbitant rates which you've passed on to the Durban North residents I think we all deserve to see you both getting your priorities right and doing something constructive for a change.

By the way Mr Mayor; your press statement urges the public to report illegal posters. Two months ago I reported whole bunch of illegal ANC rally posters which had been put up across the city; perhaps you could do some follow up because for some reason Michael won't seem to come back to me on the progress.

John Steenhuisen
DA caucus leader.

Apart from the street naming issue, reporter Coleen Dardagan has a story on the Moses Mabhida stadium saying that, while the residents of Durban are looking forward to using the new stadium, it's also time the municipality told them how much they are in for. She quotes DA leader John Steenhuisen, again, saying that the city's failure to release the financials of the stadium since July last year should set alarm bells ringing. She also says that city manager Michael Sutcliffe had promised the Mercury an interview in August last year to discuss the costs of the stadium, but that nothing had yet materialised.

Dardagan says that it is concerning that no one really knows what we are in for once the 2010 World Cup has come and gone, what the maintenance costs will be, and how much the budget has been overrun. She said she believes it's time the city drew its citizens into its confidence and let them know.

The two issues covered in this post are ongoing but they show up the leadership style of our new masters perfectly; unaccountable. autocratic and obdurate. City councils and management from the past will be remembered for their support of of apartheid but at least nobody will be able to point a finger at them and say that the city fell apart while they sucked the cash tittie and scored cheap political points. We had high hopes that our society would improve when we voted "yes" in the referendum but all that's really changed is that there is a new elite and one, moreover, that is so concerned with its enjoyment of the trappings of power things like maintenance are forgotten.

I'm depressed !!
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The coastal cloaca

Last Sunday, which was December 21, 2008, I had a bit of a sad experience. With a a couple of passengers, I had occasion to drive from the Morningside, Burman Bush area, over to the Botanic Gardens, and from there to Essenwood Road, and then down through town to the Point area and back to Morningside. The town has a dilapidated air with pavements which were unswept, and had not been for many moons, judging by the size of the weeds. Street furniture was badly in need of painting, potholes were proliferating in the roads and it was not only the busy downtown areas that are affected in this way, but even the leafy streets in the suburbs were looking down at heel and badly in need of attention.

To say that Point Road, around the the intersections of West and Smith Street is looking squalid, is to be guilty of a gross understatement. The beachfront is our crown jewel, which tourists should be paying big bucks to visit, and yet it is being ruined, and I don't know the cause. Is it greedy building owners, a huge influx of poor people to the area, crime? What? Whatever factors are at work, they must be identified and sorted or we are going to end up as some sort of coastal cloaca. Ever fewer people are going to want come here.

Having travelled a fair way through town on Sunday, it was inevitable and that we would come across another problem which is plaguing Durban at the moment. The matter is, of course, the fact that there are so many malfunctioning traffic lights and, although I can't accurately remember exactly how many were not working, it was more than a double-handful.

By a strange, well perhaps not so strange, coincidence, the Sunday Tribune of the same day, December 21, carried a story headlined "Berea Road's killer corners". In the story, it was reported that faulty traffic lights have been causing havoc at a number of locations in Berea Road. These are the bridges at Essenwood Road and Musgrave Road and the robots have apparently not been working for three weeks. At least 30 accidents were reported from those locations in the last three weeks. In spite of this ongoing problem, City Police pointsmen had not been deployed in the area, which is one of the most busiest in the city. There is a picture heading the story which shows absolute chaos with cars going every which way trying to get through the intersection. An onlooker reported city policemen on a bridge over Berea Road operating a speed trap, but totally unconcerned with traffic chaos at occurring not a couple of yards from where they sat.

In the Natal Mercury of December 22, 2008, there is a reader's letter which notes that city management, because they live here, must pass these intersections and others like them every day, and yet they do nothing. The reader is is quite right to raise this point and you can't begin to understand how these people can neglect their own home in such a fashion.

The Sunday Tribune article of the 21st, said that a contractor was responsible for repairing the traffic lights and the questions should be asked why the city's own staff is not being used for this task, and why, failing that, the contractors are not being supervised adequately.

The Durban streets that we travel in every day are not yet looking quite like the streets of Zimbabwe or the other third-world troublespots that we see so so regularly in the news. But they are deteriorating and will start to look that way before too much longer.
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Snippets from the week

The Mercury of Monday, November 10, 2008 reported, amongst other things, that:

• The city hall organ, which is unserviceable as reported here, is not going to be fixed. This according to municipal manager Michael Sutcliffe, who said that fixing the organ was not a priority and that it was not something that ratepayers should paying for. The city can't afford a couple of million to fix an organ dating back to 1894 but it can afford billions for an unecessary football stadium??
• A local artist Jenny Cullinan held a Dirty Durban exhibition at the Botanic Gardens consisting of photographs of the filth and litter in Durban. The pictures were apparently all taken after the end of the Durban Solid Waste strike.

The Mercury of Tuesday, November 11, 2008 reported, amongst other things, that:

• That a heist had taken place the previous day in Maphumulo in rural KZN. Sixteen men, armed with assault rifles and pistols, had ambushed a convoy taking money to a pensions pay point, killing two policemen and critically wounding two others. By the sounds of things, the robbers drove up to and opened fire on the police vehicle without warning.
  

The Mercury of Wednesday, November 12, 2008 reported, amongst other things, that:

• There was a growing tide of protest at the decision not to fix the city hall organ.
• Moses Mabhida Stadium visitor's centre manager Florina Maphalala was quoted as saying that the stadium would be like Durban's Table Mountain - a great tourist attraction. She apparently doesn't think she'll be watching the world cup final because it would conflict with her Christian beliefs.
  

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Blue Flag rears its head again

The Mercury of October 6, 2008, reported that Blue Flag status was awarded to four beaches in KZN excluding Durban, which unfortunately decided to back out of the scheme. The awards were made at a function held at San Lameer on the KZN South Coast on Tuesday. A new fact that that was revealed by local Blue Flag manager Alison Kelly was that Durban-based hospitality groups were so concerned by the city's decision to go it alone that they approached the Blue Flag organisation in an effort to take over responsibility for getting the beaches into shape.. The request was apparently refused because attaining Blue Flag status did not have municipality support.
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DSW strike

A short article in the Mercury of October 21, 2008, says that DSW refuse workers currently working for agencies will be able to apply for full-time jobs with the municipality when positions are advertised later this year. Apparently, 25% of DSW are hired through agencies. Deputy city manager Derek Naidoo has apparently said that all agency workers would NOT automatically be hired. I hope this will not be the start of more trouble if the current temporary workers see other people getting employed.

In the meantime, I took a drive through the centre of Durban today and was struck by the fact that it looked quite a lot less filthy than usual. That's progress, I suppose.

On another topic, I don't know if it's my imagination but I have the feeling that deputy city manager Derek Naidoo is being quoted in the papers a lot more lately. In the past, Mike Sutcliffe rather dominated whenever city officials were quoted and it makes me wonder if there's something cooking behind the scenes.
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Another truck torched

The natal Mercury of October 9, 2008, reported that a fifth vehicle belonging to Durban Solid Waste had been set alight the previous day, Wednesday.

As I've said before, I have some sympathy with the strikers but I cannot condone arson or attacks of any sort in furtherance of their aims. I'm sure the majority of the strikers are honest decent people but attacks of this nature are likely to set people against them.

The same paper reports that talks are to begin between the ANC and the IFP about the proposal to rename of Mangosuthu Highway fter Griffiths Mxenge, an ANC activist.
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Short updates

The bits and pieces of news have been piling up so I thought I'd have a clear-out.

Sunday Tribune - October 5, 2008.

The paper reports that there are plans to declare the beachfront area a glass-free zone and outlaw public drinking. This is in response to the events described I described here. In addition, on the Friday night, there was a strong police presence and mini-bus taxis and buses were barred from entering the beachfront area. There are apparently also plans to keep a track of where buses and taxis come from in future.

In act assumed to be somehow connected with the bus drivers' strike, 19 buses were set alight at the depot at Ntuzuma early on Friday morning. A picture in the Tribune shows the buses absolutely gutted and one doubts if they could ever be repaired. This is not the first time that Remant Alton buses have been set alight, with 59 having been burnt in an attack on the Umlazi depot on April 23, 2006. You would have thought that with that experience, and given the present tense situation, they would have stepped up security at ther depots.

The Mercury, October 6, 2008

The paper reports that commuters are likely to be without buses for another week.

The Mercury, October 7, 2008

A heist at the Riverside Hotel (ex Athlone) netted millions in jewells which were going to be auctioned at the hotel. The robbery took place at 7am on October 6, as the jewells were being moved into the auction area.

I've already noted that two Durban Solid Waste trucks were set alight last Wednesday. Two more were burnt in an attack at 11pm on the DSW depot at Clairwood onOctober, 4. The paper reported that 80% of DSW workers were back on the job and that some collections were being done over the weekend. As noted in an earlier post, our rubbish was collected today in Waterfall.

The Mercury, October 8, 2008

The paper reports Remant Alton as having closed down indefinitely as result of the the three week drivers' strike. Executive officer Paul Rush said that the company was planning to recruit sub-contractors to operate its routes. Now, that should be fine recipe for chaos. And there could be more on the way if strikers go ahead with plans to march through town on Friday, in spite of being refused permission by the city to do so. I find it ironic that a city run by the ANC, an organisation founded to fight for democracy, has no problem denying others the right to protest.
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What a relief!

The familiar sound of a rubbish truck compacting garbage floated into the complex yesterday. When I left to go to work, a crew was still busy loading the garbage from last week. DSW's return to work caught us on the hop, a bit, because we hadn't taken out this week's bags. Next week for sure.
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Waste matters

The Mercury of October 2, 2008, also reported that two Durban Solid Waste trucks were set alight on the previous day in separate incidents.

Those must be the trucks that were on they way to our complex because I see that, onn Sunday, we still have a rubbish Matterhorn outside our gates, which has now received plenty of attention from passersby and dogs.

The strike of DSW workers was inevitable, said Independent Municipal & Allied Trade Union spokesman Dempsey Perumal, due to the fact that the municipality was employing workers through agencies on a long-term basis. Agency staff were paid less than than municipal workers and did not receive any benefits which, said Deputy City Manager Derek Naidoo, saved the municipality a lot of money. The Mercury gives the example of an agency-employed street sweeper earning R1200 a month.

To my mind, there may be an odd occasion when using agency staff is justified but that it is mostly the refuge of organisations out to circumvent racial employment quotas or save money, no matter what the cost to workers. It is a process that is apparently legal but often times not that ethical, and I am genuinely surprised that eThekwini Municipality would stoop that low. This situation is attributable either to deliberate policy or gross inefficiency but I don't suppose we will really ever know.

*** This issue of The Mercury has a page devoted to the street names which were recently changed and who they were originally named after.
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Uh oh, is right

I see that the mini-Matterhorn of rubbish at the gate of our complex is still there. That means that the workers from Durban Solid Waste must still be on strike. Joy!

Uh oh!

I've just been to the gate of our complex and spied a minor Matterhorn of black and orange rubbish bags. Seems as if our Tuesday morning collection didn't take place and that the DSW strike has spread this far.

The litter crisis widens

The Natal Mercury, of September 30, 2008, reports that Durban Solid Waste workers trashed the city yesterday, emptying litter bins onto the pavement and obstructing traffic. The workers were demonstrating in solidarity with the striking bus drivers and because they now also want to become full-time employees of the city???? It comes as news to me that they aren't.

In the same issue of the Mercury, there is a follow-up report on the chaos and litter left on the beachfront last Friday night by celebrating pupils. Metro Police spokesperson Supt. Joyce Khuzwayo is quoted as saying the force had not anticipated the influx of revellers. She said buses loaded with pupils had come from as far afield as the Eastern Cape.

It would probably infringe on their human rights so I don't suppose we could turn them away at Tollgate in future. Next time, let's ban all glass containers and get enough police and army to keep a lid on things when they start going pear-shaped.

Beachfront trashed

Making the front page of The Sunday Tribune, of September 28, 2008, is report describing the horrific amount of litter, including huge quantities of broken glass, left on the beachfront on Friday night, September 26. The carnage was put down to youngsters celebrating the end of the school year but the party must have been a far cry from those in my day. We just wouldn't have been allowed to run riot and smash glass to the extent that people had to turn from the beaches the next day because it wasn't safe to walk.

A former municipal employee apparently contacted the Metro Police and was told that they had only had 20 staff on duty on Friday night who were unable to control the situation. I didn't see the devastation but I did got through town at about 6:30 on Saturday morning and, to say that the streets were disgustingly littered, would be a gross understatement.

We have time and money to change street names and build vast new stadiums but we don't have enough money for esssentials like adequate policing and, for that matter, enough firemen to do the job of keeping us safe.