Patricia de Lille was forced to leave the stage of a public meeting in Philippi when a chanting crowd refused to let anyone speak.
|||Cape Town - Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille was forced to leave the stage of a public meeting in Philippi on Tuesday night when a chanting crowd brandished chairs and refused to let anyone speak.
They were angry their ward councillor was not present and accused the mayor of not inviting him.
The meeting was the first of a series organised by the City of Cape Town in a campaign to “know your community, know your contractor”, against a background of intensifying service delivery protests.
Before the meeting De Lille said she was “not expecting it to be easy”, expecting to hear complaints about basic services – especially sanitation and solid waste – but in the end she did not get a public word in edgeways.
As soon as the crowd in the hall of Bongolethu Primary School in Brown’s Farm heard that their councillor, Thembinkosi Pupa, would not be present, they rose, began singing Struggle songs and refused to listen to anything said from the stage, where De Lille and other councillors were sitting.
They also tore up pamphlets which explained the purpose of the meeting and starting stacking chairs as if packing up.
After five to 10 minutes of mayhem, De Lille left.
Some residents claimed Pupa, an ANC councillor, had not been invited on purpose, but De Lille said this was not true.
She told the Cape Argus: “The councillor was invited, his name and all his contact details are even at the back of the pamphlet.
“I expected it to turn out the way it did, you can see Pupa instigated the whole issue.”
De Lille said she felt sorry for elderly people who turned up to the meeting to “engage”.
“We wanted to show them how contractors that work for the city work so the community can assist the city in service delivery.”
Outside the hall there was a tense moment when DA councillor Nceba Hinana was trying to explain the situation to the Cape Argus, and a group of ANC Youth League members approached, shouting at Hinana.
A policeman arrived and told the ANCYL members to leave.
Loyiso Mdini, chairman of the ANCYL in Philippi, said the DA was only there to “drive their agenda”.
Nceba Tshandana said they were not there to listen to the “DA’s lies.”
Teenage Mtiyane said: “The councillor is a resident and this was a community meeting, he didn’t need to be personally invited to be here.”
The council has spent almost R14 million to repair infrastructure destroyed by vandals, often during service delivery protests, in the past financial year. And in the past two months, council staff have been attacked as they provided top-up services in informal settlements in Gugulethu.
The city has been granted an interim interdict against 89 former employers of cleaning service Sannicare CC and residents of Ward 40, who were identified as inciting violence and preventing council staff from delivering services. But the city is adamant the campaign is not a response to the recent attacks on city staff trying to service toilets in the Europe, Kanana and Boystown informal settlements.
“This is about service level agreements for all communities in Cape Town,” said De Lille. The next meeting is due to be held at the Weltevreden Community Hall in Kosovo in Philippi on June 4.
Cape Argus