Ward 2 Forum put considerable effort into assessing the new IDP at the start of its 5 year cycle, and the budget for 2017-18, the latter being issued together with the medium term Revenue and Expenditure Framework for 2018-19 and 2019-20. These documents together comprise over 500 pages of text and tables. Our comments covered the 25 subjects that we thought most important, that we could in a small way try to contribute to constructively.
W2F comment on TWKM response to our IDP Budget Report (3)
Derek. Thank you very much for the summary. Without reading the substantive document you refer to, I am going to take the position that the commentary in the above document pretty much captures the reality on the ground. The additional insights into the substantive misallocation of human capital would also explain the tortuous processing of requests for data, and coherent economic implementation.
Thank you Michael for your comment, your observations are spot on. There is lots of talk about economic development with the main aim of creating employment with the emphasis of socio-economic development particularly in the 2nd economy into the mainstream economy. However no such strategy exists as can be seen throughout the whole of the IDP & Budget for the next 5 years. The opportunities for Local Economic Development (LED) and Rural Development are numerous, especially in the Ward 2 area but alas nothing is happening and we ascribe this to 2 fundamental challenges in the local authority structure; a) No Capacity within the TWKM to devise & implement a strategy b) Lack of intent, understanding of what LED & Rural Development is within the TWKM.
You see my feeling would be that this gets discussed at an open meeting at this point. Ie. 1) This is what we got 2) this is what we went thru 3) this is our response 4) this is there response 5) what now. I cannot read all but clearly a lot of work went into it. And 6) How does this affect me 7) What can I do about it?