Umngeni Mayor and the Democratic Alliance’s (DA’s) KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) Premier candidate Chris Pappas has told Polity that the devolution of powers is the solution to fighting crime in the province, which has been beset with high levels of violent crime.

In an exclusive interview with Polity, in which he outlined his plans to improve governance and service delivery in the province, Pappas said that the KZN government under Premier Nomusa Dube-Ncube was doing nothing to win the battle against crime.

He said her solutions of installing cameras and panic buttons were not answers to the problem.

“It is one thing to talk about things but implementation and the management of those is different. We have to push for the devolution of power to provinces. The law currently states that the national Minister [Bheki Cele] can give provinces releasing powers,” said Pappas.

He added that police stations had no vehicles, which were crucial to crime fighting, and he stressed that adding more boots on the ground, such as Leap Officers in the Western Cape, could help tackle crime.

Pappas added that unclogging crime intelligence and forensics and supporting criminal justice could also help as many people were arrested for crimes but did not see the inside of a jail cell.

“We must have active partnerships with community-based policing organisations. We must support them with torches and vests, radios, especially in areas that are far from the police stations,” he said.

Pappas was emphatic that his party would not work with the ruling African National Congress but that the DA was willing to work with the Inkatha Freedom Party in a way that both parties could hold each other accountable.

When asked about his comment on the fact that some political analysts believed it would be difficult for him to garner votes as KZN is a conservative province, he said that people wanted to vote for delivery, action and a proven track record in the upcoming election.

SERVICE DELIVERY

On the issue of fixing the province’s infrastructure, some of which was damaged by flooding and the July 2021 riots, Pappas said that the riots happened largely because of political instability and high levels of unemployment, as well as a failure of the State to capacitate intelligence and security mechanisms.

“If we are unable to get our economy moving and unclog and unblock the blockages and if the roads in the rural areas are not working and if our small towns are failing then we will not be able to create jobs in this province,” he noted.

He said it remaied a mystery as to what happened to the R1-billion 2022 flood mop-up funds.

He pointed out that the Umngeni municipality, and other municipalities which were affected by the floods, didn’t receive any of the R1-billion that was allocated to the province to assist with the flood mop-up. He claimed that most of the money was allocated to eThekwini municipality, which he noted still struggled with issues such as sewage running into rivers.

“If we stop stealing the money, if we make sure that the contractors that are employed can do the work and if we do proper oversight and management, we can start to turn these effects of global warming and storms around,” he added.

Pappas boasted that despite inheriting a municipality that had been under one political party for 28 years, service delivery, in 22 months, had made significant progress, although he admitted that there was still a long way to go.

Under his mayorship new equipment had been purchased, more staff hired and municipal debt reduced and also he had offered more free basic services to people, he said.

He added that the Umngeni municipality finances were stable.

UNEMPLOYMENT CRISIS

He told Polity that as a young leader that understood what the country was going through, he would focus on skilling the youth for the future economy.

He pointed out that there were people coming out of matric with certificates “that do not mean much”.  

He added that there was a need to make sure that there were rapid upskilling programmes in key sectors in the province, especially in fields such as robotics, technology, coding and logistics.

On the recent allegations of nepotism and corruption against him, Pappas dismissed them as a smear campaign by the ruling party.

Former DA KZN leader Sizwe Mchunu filed a complaint with the Public Protector's office in which he alleged that a tourism contract was awarded to Pappas’ former fiancé Jean-Pierre Prinsloo.

Pappas defended that there were a number of irregularities in the allegations put against him as “there are no tourism contracts in this municipality. They don’t exist. I don’t know what contracts he is talking about. The company that he claimed to have got a contract was only registered in August 2023. It is impossible for someone to have got contracts two years ago, as he claims, as the business was only registered a month-and-a-half ago.”

Pappas questioned the timing of the allegations.

ZULU ROYAL HOUSEHOLD BUDGET

On the issue of the Zulu Royal household budget allocation which had always been a debate among opposition parties in the province, Pappas said he had had engagements with King MisuZulu KaZwelithini whom he said could become a driver of job creation, particularly in rural areas.

He described Zwelithini as a young and visionary King with great ideas but noted that he needed the support of the provincial government to implement them.

Pappas accused the KZN government of treating the Zulu monarch as a vote-winning mechanism saying, “they go there when they need him. They threaten the Royal family with funding when they don’t play by the government’s rules instead of respecting them and treating them as the household that they are, and working to actively develop the sustainability around that particular household and to restore dignity to it and to bring back a dignity to it and to bring back a dignity to the Zulu household as opposed to treating it as a political football."