Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape will protest outside the Civic Centre from 12h00 until 13h00 today and submit a memorandum to Patricia de Lille, the Mayor of City of Cape Town.
According to Abahlali spokespersons today’s protest follows a number of attempts by Abahlali baseMjondolo to secure an open public meeting with the mayor of City of Cape Town.
Abahlali went on to say; “We have done our best as organization, trying to secure a meeting with the mayor of City of Cape Town, we have submitted number of written request to the office of the mayor asking the mayor to address our public meetings about issues that affects us direct such as floods, shack fires, water cut offs and the role of law enforcement within our communities because many of our communities have been victimised by law enforcement through illegal demolitions.
“Today when we protest to the office of the mayor we want to make it clear to her that we will not compromise our struggle for human dignity and participatory democracy. We want to make it clear to her that democracy is not only about service delivery, therefore our engagement with her and the City of Cape Town will not be limited to service delivery as she wants to limit our engagement only to service delivery.
“Today’s protest is a build up to a number of protests that Abahlali baseMjondolo of Western Cape will embark on until the mayor meets with us on our own terms, should the mayor fails to meet with us then we will left with no option but to go back to our members and communities to pave a way forward.
“Last year after MEC for human settlement and previous mayor failed to respond to our memorandum our members decided to embark on an informal settlement strike which took almost a month and our strike were also hijacked by the members of the ANC youth league at other areas such as TRA informal settlement because the ANC youth had ambitions to make the City of Cape Town to become ungovernable and they done so through violence.
“And this year we would not want go to another informal settlement strike but if the Mayor of the City of Cape Town does not want to engage with our members anything will be possible and the impact might be double and we will ensure it does not inconvenience our members but does have a huge economic impact”
Mzonke Poni, Mthobeli Qona and Charles Adams.
