Category Archives: Patricia de Lille

Request for engagement by Mayor de Lille with Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape

The Cape Town Municipality Refused to Accept our Memorandum

PLEASE NOTE – OUR PROTEST WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THIS WEEK

TOMORROW THE 24TH WE WILL PROTEST IN FRONT OF PROVINCIAL INHUMAN SETTLEMENT DEPARTMENT AND FRIDAY IN FRONT OF PROVINCIAL LEGISLATURE TIME WILL BE 12:30 TILL 13:30 AND OUR PROTEST WILL CONTINUE TILL WE GET WHAT WE WANT

Protest at the Cape Town civic centre – 23 November 2011

Today at 12:30 Abahlali baseMjondolo of Western Cape had a protest outside the Civic Centre offices of City of Cape Town, calling on Patricia De Lille to meet with our members without imposing any terms of engagement and demanding that such meeting should take place at Khayelitsha where our members are based and it should be open to everybody, and everybody should be allowed to voice out his/her views without any fear of favor or intimidation.

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Protest tomorrow the 23rd at Cape Town Civic centre

A CALL FOR MEANINGFUL ENGAGEMENT NOT STAGE MANAGED PR ENGAGEMENT

Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape tomorrow will have a protest outside Civic Centre at 12h00 till 13h00 and submit a memorandum to Patricia de Lille, the Mayor of City of Cape town.

Tomorrows protest follows number of attempts by Abahlali baseMjondolo to secure open bublic meeting with the mayor of City of Cape town.
We have done our best as organization, trying to secure a meeting with the mayor of City of Cape Town, we have submitted number of writtern request to the office of the mayor asking the mayor to address our public meetings about issues that affects us direct such as floods, shackfires, water cut-offs and the role of law enforcement within our communities because many of our communities have been victimised by law enforcement through illegal demolitions.

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Second Open Letter to Mayor Patricia de Lille

Wednesday, 21 September 2011

Dear Mayor de Lille

Thank you for the reply from your chief of staff to our letter dated 12 September. We have now had time to circulate it amongst our members and to discuss it carefully.

We do appreciate your invitation for the leadership of Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape to meet with the mayor. There has, after so many years of struggle in Durban, been no such invitation from any mayor in Durban and we note and appreciate your willingness to meet with us.

As we have previously stated we have no intereste in attending stage managed events that are designed for the media rather than to enable genuinely open discussion. We are committed to participatory democracy and to participatory budgeting and urban planning methods and would like to find forms of engagement that are genuinely participatory. As we have both noted in the past the current policies are failing to address the urban crisis in Cape Town. We cannot accept that so many of our people will live their whole lives in shacks. We need to find a new path and to advance down that path. This requires the development of a serious critique of the current policies and not just PR exercise in support of them. We want to build a people’s Cape Town in which all people count the same and everyone can live a life of safety and dignity. To us it seems logical that this will only be possible when people are put before profit and the social value of land is put before its commercial value.

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Open Letter to Mayor Patricia de Lille

8 September 2011

Dear Mayor de Lille

I wish, at the outset, to make it clear that we, as Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape, and the many organisations in solidarity with us across Cape Town, appreciate some aspects of your speech yesterday.

We appreciate the fact that you acknowledge that shack dwellers, including backyarders, are living as we are as a result of a history of oppression and not because there is something wrong with us. Once this fact is acknowledged then it becomes obvious that we need justice and not charity to help us to survive poverty for another day or education to train us to accept our poverty. What is required is an end to poverty.

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