City Manager wants defeated Baasskap DA eviction policy overturned

23 January 2018

As the first Council Meeting of 2018 nears on Thursday, I remind all residents and voters and councillors of City Manager Johann Mettler’s insistence that the most vulnerable of residents in our fair city be evicted at the DA’s baasskap whims – it is a repulsive attitude.

It is all the more obscene because the DA’s offensive eviction policy was defeated, on the very day, 30 November 2017, that the minority DA City Government held on for dear life when the EFF protected Mayor Athol Trollip against a motion of no confidence. The DA’s tacit EFF support vaporised when the baasskap party’s motion to evict was defeated, with the very EFF who had moments earlier allowed the DA to continue its minority rule voted against evictions.

Now City Manager Mettler wants the Council Resolution reviewed.

The DA lost in Council. But the DA is determined to remain baas and what the baas says must and will be done, never mind what the people’s  representatives decided.

Does this not sound frightfully familiar – like apartheid browbeating? Of course it does! The Nationalists, sorry, the DA knows best and all will do as the Nats, sorry, the DA orders. Die baas het gepraat! Never again!

Council had spoken.

Even Trollip’s hand -picked servant, DA Eastern Cape Provincial Leader, Councillor Nqaba Bhanga, abstained from supporting the noisome evictions motion, even in the face of public pressure by Baas Athol, on the Council floor, in the defeat of this critical, yet despicable DA motion to continue NMB evictions.

Now City Manager Mettler wants the Council Resolution reviewed, because the Council Resolution does not fit the DA’s baasskap policies.

Well, I, for one, am waiting for you in the long grass Baas Athol and your arbeider Mettler.

You will not harm the most vulnerable of our residents. You will no longer harm our residents. Period.

Issued by Councillor Mongameli Bobani, Nelson Mandela Bay Metro Council, 23 January 2018