Today, 29 April 2016, Khayelitsha residents, together with the Social Justice Coalition (SJC) will hand over individual submissions on the City of Cape Town’s 2016/17 draft budget.
Over the past two weeks 3000 submissions have been collected. This will mark the first time that the Mayor will receive thousands of direct submissions from poor and working class communities.
Last year, 502 residents from Khayelitsha, mostly from informal settlements, participated and made individual submissions on the 2015/16 draft budget.
The 502 submissions were misrepresented and labelled as a focus group in the City’s participation report. As a result of this categorisation, the 502 submissions were ignored and did not receive individual responses as had been done with the other submissions received from the public.
The collection of submissions and the discussions with residents of Khayelitsha over the past weeks have been based on significant research on the Water and Sanitation budget by the SJC supported by the International Budget Partnership.
Participation is at the heart of democracy. The way that resources are allocated by local government affects everybody’s lives in the most direct ways possible.
The Municipal Finance Management Act, 56 of 2003, requires that when a budget is tabled it needs to be made public and the local community must be given an opportunity to make submissions. Council must consider these and the mayor is required to respond to the submissions and, where necessary, revise the budget to be considered by council again.
Date: 29 April 2016
Place: Gather at Kaizergracht and march to Cape Town Civic Centre
Time: 11am
Read the SJC’s organisational submission here.
[ENDS]
For comment:
Axolile Notywala
0743861584
Thandeka Kathi
0734272083