The Eastern Cape education department is offering counselling to 11 young Selborne College boys who were reportedly victims of an assault at the hands of three matrics at the weekend.
Water and sanitation minister Senzo Mchunu is forging ahead with plans to remove water provision status from all Eastern Cape district and local municipalities, and confer the responsibility solely on the troubled Amatola Water Board (AWB). In the government gazette this week, Mchunu said he intended to extend the area Amatola Water serviced to cover the entire Eastern Cape.
Residents in the seaside village of Kidd’s Beach outside East London have been rattled by a sudden crime surge in which 11 homes have been broken into in a week-and-a-half with three targeted on Tuesday night. An octogenarian who stays alone in a beach house in the area said he feared for his life after he was assaulted and partially blinded by pepper spray during a recent burglary.
New co-operative governance and traditional affairs (Cogta) MEC Zolile Williams will soon establish a team of “specialists” to investigate how to turn around financially distressed Eastern Cape municipalities. Williams on Wednesday said the team would comprise financial experts and economists from his department, the provincial treasury and the South African Local Government Association (Salga), and would be constituted in the next two weeks.
With just two days before the November 7 deadline for all ANC branches across SA to convene their branch general meetings (BGMs) in preparation of the December national elective conference, more than 200 branches in the Eastern Cape have yet to convene these crucial meetings. A recent party report on the status of branches ahead of the conference revealed that just more than 70% of the 3,979 ANC branches countrywide had concluded their BGMs and selected their preferred candidates.