Cape Town’s population will grow by 1.4 million people in the next seven and a half years, according to Premier Alan Winde, who was invited to speak to Constantia Ratepayers’ and Residents’ Association members, at a Groote Constantia restaurant, on Monday night.
The event was a fund-raiser for the association which is struggling to get members to pay their annual fees of R650, says the association’s chairperson, Sheila Camerer.
Apathy and a lack of awareness of what the association is doing are more likely to blame for this than affordability, she suspects.
Mr Winde painted a picture of what Cape Town will look like in future and stressed the need for organisation’s such as the CRRA.
He commended the association for developing a spatial development framework for Constantia that could be used to guide appropriate densification and to preserve buildings and other resources for their historical value.
Mr Winde said the City had referenced the framework and adopted many of the association’s recommendations into its draft Southern District Spatial Development Framework for the area.
Ms Camerer told the Bulletin it had taken two years of hard work using professional urban designers to develop the 103 page document, which had first been submitted to the City in late 2020, and they had received a favourable response from the City for this framework which had cost the association R1.4 million to compile.
The City recently hosted a workshop at the Alphen Centre to examine its planning strategy for the Sub-council 20 area (“Densification plans draw fire from public,” Bulletin, August 11).
Mr Winde spoke about the steps the provincial government was taking to address the rapid growth in the Western Cape’s population. “In the past, 20 000 pupils had no place in schools. Last year there were 5 000, next year the aim is zero. We normally build six schools each year now I want 13,” he said.
Mr Winde said there is a need to find new ways to educate children such as creating partnerships with the private sector.
He said Education MEC David Maynier had found that maths and reading had slipped during the pandemic and he had created a catch-up strategy to address that.
In his cabinet reshuffle earlier this year, Mr Winde named three new portfolios: Infrastructure, Mobility, and Police Oversight and Community Safety.
It is the latter that gets the R1 billion lion’s share of his budget, “taken away from health and education”, he said.
“When I took office, safety was number one on my manifesto. It is one of the biggest obstacles to growth. Although jobs and the economy are my real passion as an entrepreneur,” he said.
Mr Winde said more than 4 000 people were murdered annually in the province and in communities such as Hanover Park, which he visited at the weekend, every second or third person had been touched by a rape or a murder, but the Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (LEAP), which had deployed more than 1 100 new officers to high crime areas in the past two years, was helping to turn the tide of crime around.
“When I came in power Nyanga was considered the murder capital. However, over the past four financial years, its murders have fallen by over a third and in this financial year stand at 131 murders,” said Mr Winde.
Mr Winde said mobility was another urgent challenge what with 14 000 shacks built on the central rail line.
“A rail system must be cost-effective, safe, on time… It happens around the world, why not in Cape Town?“ he said.
