Premier Alan Winde slammed budgetary allocations for the province, as well as Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, during the first session of the Western Cape legislature’s seventh administration.
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Winde told MPLs and the public yesterday that financial sustainability would be a key focus for the provincial government over the next five years.
Winde referred to the National Government’s R1.1 billion in-year budget cut 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 stated that, despite being the country’s third-most populous province, the Western Cape received only the fifth-largest budgetary allocation, which he described as ‘unacceptable.’
When the floods were declared a disaster last year, the province was still owed R1.3 billion in disaster funding from the National Government.
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Winde claimed that 74% of households in the province had at least one wage earner, prompting disbelief among chamber members.
‘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 stated that the province was working to bring the unemployment rate below 20%. According to Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS), the province’s unemployment rate was 21.4% in the first quarter of 2024.
‘We are building homes as fast as we can, and in the last term, 43 000 housing opportunities were created.’ Between 2019 and 2023, 17 705 title deeds were registered to these beneficiaries, he said.
LEAP officers have made 34 0000 arrests thus far. The province had 477 accredited neighbourhood watches, with 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.’
Yesterday’s debate focused on the premier’s opening session, followed by his response.
While the session was underway, the Western Cape ANC protested outside the Western Cape Legislature in solidarity with Palestine, calling for Israel to be barred from competing in 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.
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