The Speaker of Council, Cllr Nonceba Molwele was live on various platforms such as the City of Joburg’s social media platforms, her own page “Nonceba Molwele” on Facebook and @Speaker_CoJ on Twitter to educate communities on public wards delimitation processes in local government last night, 3 March 2021.
This demarcation involves the division of the whole geographic area of a municipality into smaller geographic areas, called wards.
Consultations with planning and geographical information management officials from municipalities lets the Municipal Demarcation Board (MDB) align draft wards by considering local inputs and addressing geographic barriers, and the whole process must be concluded ideally not less than 10 months before the local government elections.
Every five years, the MDB delimits wards in metropolitan and local municipalities for electoral purposes.
“I must say that in this delimitation cycle, there has been various concerns raised by our communities and councillors. I therefore thought it prudent to create a platform where we can engage with the Demarcations team directly, so that our communities begin to fully understand the process, the importance thereof, the criteria used in the delimitation process, the stakeholders involved, public participation process and how all of this affects them as the ordinary citizen,” said Cllr Molwele.
Her special guest, Thabo Manyoni, the Chairperson of the Municipal Demarcation Board, said the City of Joburg has reached its maximum in terms of number of wards (135) and the number of voters is constantly increasing. Currently it is now more than 100 000 voters since last elections, 2016. Most wards gets affected because of being overpopulated.
“On the issue of space and integration we as the board are looking into ward delamination for voters not to congregate massively in one area while some areas have less voters. As a result of 270 councillors and 135 wards currently in this City, the board is doing a research with Gauteng province and other partners in resolving this issue as the City has met the limit in terms of councillors.
“We are considering to turn the City into ‘Greater Joburg Region’ where we are looking into linking the smaller municipalities surrounding the City of Joburg and expand the space of this city for developmental purposes, also because of the influx and internal migration,” said Manyoni.
The Speaker has invited community members to engage with the Legislature in the City to make their input or comments on the various platforms that we have made available regarding the ward process.
The discussion was streamed on Eldos and Chai FMs. Also joined were new City partners, Radio Islam and Eastwave FM.
Written by Thembelihle Radebe
03/04/2021