Mayor did take the lead

Mayor did take the lead in the Schoolbus saga

Few local publications have been more supportive of the DA led Kouga council than St Francis Today and in particular the work being done by Executive Mayor Elza van Lingen. The chaos at the licensing department last week however caused us to criticize the way this department was functioning. A week later the news of school children having to hitchhike caused us to further comment for on the face of it, the Kouga traffic department was to blame for taking their bus off the road.

As a law enforcement agency it is understandable that they show no favour and because the bus’s paperwork was in order, they were absolutely correct in taking it off the road for had there been an accident this would have placed them in an extremely difficult legal position. Yesterday SFT suggested that possibly the Kouga council should have taken a lead in solving the problem and documents received late yesterday confirm that the Mayor did in fact, going back some two weeks in anticipation of a problem, do all in her power to prevent the situation.

Communicating with the powers that be in Bisho, it is suffice to say the bureaucracy within the two responsible departments, Education and Transport in turn, stymied the Mayors efforts which seems the norm when dealing with ANC run government services. Van Lingen confirmed her dealings with Bisho had been frustrated commenting “the person in Bhisho who must sign off on the contract to correctly license the bus, a Mr Siyabonga, seems to be very busy man”.

Our thanks therefore go out to the Mayor for her efforts and certainly hope this all ends well and soon. A question that must be asked however is as Sea Vista’s councillor is an ANC cadre why did the community not approach their councillor for help. They voted the ANC in for Sea Vista so why not get their councillor to do some work.

More good news!

The Mayor confirmed to SFT that she had led a delegation to the licensing department and recognised some of the problems brought up in our article “chaos at licensing department” and advised that action was being taken to correct the problems that existed.