The Freedom Front Plus (VF Plus) has repeatedly requested both the previous Mayor of the Drakenstein Municipality, Conrad Poole, and the current Mayor, Stephen Korabie, to reduce the size of the Municipality’s Mayoral Committee.
This Committee has taxpayers shelling out thousands of rand every month, while its members are not in the office very often. The party’s pleas keep falling on deaf ears, though.
Drakenstein has only four directorates, but there are currently eleven mayoral committee members.
The Freedom Front Plus proposed that the Committee be cut back to a maximum of five members. This would result in a saving of approximately R461 341 per month (more than R5,5 million per year) – money that would be much better spent on urgent infrastructure maintenance and service delivery.
In the party’s view, establishing inflated, expensive mayoral committees merely facilitates the remuneration of a political elite at the expense of taxpayers.
In a country where municipalities spend only about 2% on infrastructure, the proposed saving of R5,5 million per year in Drakenstein is a practical implementation of the Freedom Front Plus’s official policy to enforce fiscal discipline, cut back on excessive political salaries and restore priority to essential service delivery.
The Freedom Front Plus believes that Drakenstein residents deserve better than an inflated Mayoral Committee that delivers little tangible results.
The party will keep insisting that taxpayers’ money be spent responsibly and that service delivery be prioritised.
On 4 November, residents have the opportunity to vote for the Freedom Front Plus to ensure that taxpayers’ money is sensibly spent.
