Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone was fond of saying: “If you want to host F1, you need a massive ego and a bucket load of money”. Please take note, sports, arts & culture minister Gayton McKenzie!
However, now that the race to appoint mayoral candidates for the local government elections has started, Ecclestone could also have offered the same advice to those ambitious political players who aspire to wear mayoral chains and promise to “fix” our ailing towns and cities.
He could also have suggested that the likes of the DA’s candidate for Johannesburg, Helen Zille, and others be mindful of the well-known song “There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza”, which highlights the futile effort of trying to fix something without the necessary resources.
Despite high levels of looting, wasteful expenditure and plain incompetence, the primary and deep-rooted cause of the dysfunctionality and failure of most of our municipalities is a lack of financial resources to create, maintain, repair and manage the infrastructure needed to provide the services they are responsible for.
With our debt-trapped national fiscus, bloated cabinet and oversized, underresourced government departments, as well as overtaxed citizens and corporations, it is difficult to understand where these mayors will find the bucketload of money they will need to “fix” their towns and cities.
Perhaps our high-profile political players should focus less on their flamboyant rhetoric, meaningless election promises and personal attacks and insults, and concentrate more on creating a viable, flush national fiscus that has the capacity to fund all levels of government in a responsible, fair and affordable manner — without resorting to more borrowing or higher taxation.
By allowing the ANC-dominated government of national unity to continue with its ideologically conflicted, misguided and ill-constructed version of a national budget, as the DA and other parties that should know better recently did in parliament, they simply perpetuated the hole in the bucket and drained it of the necessary funds to fix our municipalities.
David Gant
Kenilworth
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