Cape Town - In a shake-up of the existing structure of the provincial government, Premier Alan Winde has announced the establishment of new departments as part of his stated pledge to spearhead a new way of work in the province.
The announcement was contained in his State of the Province address (Sopa) which Winde delivered at the Velddrif Town Hall on Tuesday.
The changes to the composition of the provincial executive council come as part of his efforts to streamline service delivery.
They include a new department solely responsible for infrastructure, which will be crafted out of a merger of the existing departments of Human Settlements and Public Works which will be hived off from Transport.
“The Infrastructure Department will be tasked with leading the change, working together with local governments in the Western Cape, the national government, as well as the private sector, to ensure that we collectively complete quality, catalytic infrastructure projects that will help inclusively create jobs.”
Winde said the Transport Department will now be known as the Mobility Department and will include the Province’s transport programmes, such as financial support to bus and taxi services, including the Blue Dot Taxi pilot, the transport regulation mandate, and the extensive traffic management operations.
He also announced that the current Community Safety Department would be renamed Police Oversight and Community Safety and its responsibilities will include the monitoring of police stations across the province, with a focus on GBV police conduct, visible policing, and crime investigation efficiency.
Winde also announced plans for the creation of a dedicated Violence Prevention Unit to be established in the Health Department.
The unit will be responsible for identifying and designing interventions to reduce violence in communities across the province through an evidence-based public health strategy.
On the issue of jobs, Winde said he would take responsibility for co-ordinating the Province’s response to what he called the “joblessness pandemic.”
He proposed to do this through an extended jobs provincial council that will consist of the new Infrastructure and Mobility departments, as well as those of Economic Development and Tourism, Agriculture, the Provincial Treasury and private sector representatives.
With regard to exiting the national State of Disaster, Winde said he had asked for a meeting with the president requesting a full roadmap, including exact time lines.
On education he said the province would focus on recovering lost learning time and that the Western Cape Education Department had been working with the national government to concentrate the curriculum into the critical skills learners needed to succeed in further grades.
Winde announced that the province had taken steps to ensure that it could leverage new, green infrastructure.
“As a result of hard-slog efforts to become energy resilient, it is now legal in 24 Western Cape municipalities to produce solar energy, with 19 of these municipalities allowing you to be compensated for feeding back into the grid.”
On the issue of gender-based violence (GBV), Winde said everyone has a role to play and brought up the issue of suspended Community Safety MEC Albert Fritz and assured the public that he hoped to receive the report of the independent investigation by advocate Jennifer Williams soon.
In a reaction immediately after the Sopa, ANC MPL Cameron Dugmore, who will lead the opposition’s response to the speech in Velddrif today, said Winde had not dealt with the issue of the chief director of the Transport Department, who was facing criminal charges of sexual misconduct and was still in his position.
“We’re not saying he’s guilty, but the reality is if someone is charged in court they should not be there while the alleged victim in this case is at home.” He accused Winde of ignoring the fate of the poor and the majority of people in the province.
“We’re on the West Coast and there was not a single word about the plight of farm workers on a number of farms who have been evicted and don’t have security of tenure,” he said.
Dugmore said Winde’s speech contained nothing to correct historical inequalities and failed to mention gangsterism on the Cape Flats, “the most critical issue in our province,” Dugmore said.
Read more on the premier’s Sopa here - Premier Alan Winde’s State of the Province Address summarised: Everything you need to know