This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. It is the product of almost two decades of research and includes analyses, chronologies, historical documents, and interviews from the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.
12 Nov 1994: Kriel, Hernus
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POM. Derek Keys said to us that he stayed in the Cabinet to ensure that the free market policies that the business community hoped to see enacted were being pursued and once he was satisfied that they were he felt his job was done and he left, which suggests that in the kind of economic empowerment struggle, if you want to call it that, or ideologies, is that the National Party persuaded the ANC to its point of view rather than the other way around.
HK. I think that's fair comment. I'm not the greatest economist in the country, not a financial man, but it's quite obvious if you look at the original RDP document that was published by the ANC and you look at the new one, then you will see that there is a vast difference in economic policy between the first document and the present one. I think it was also announced that the ANC are now in favour of the free market system which I believe is one of the most significant breakthroughs that the National Party had in this whole process since the elections.
POM. This is just a completely different question, but how does it feel to be the only National Party Premier when all the others, other than Natal, are controlled by the ANC? Does that make for any difference in your relationship between central government and the Western Cape?
HK. Well if you talk about my feelings, obviously we would have liked to be in power in more than one province but it feels good to be in power in the Western Cape. About our relationship between central government, we've just had cooperation with central government, we've also formed a forum consisting of the nine Premiers of the nine regions. As you rightly point out I'm the only National Party Premier there. The cooperation between us cannot be faulted. I'm accepted by the seven, eight others as a Premier and the relationship is cordial. We have one thing in common between the nine of us and that is that we want maximum powers to the regions, to the provinces. So the old idea of a strong centralist government of the African National Congress, they are also starting to pick up strong vibes from the provinces that even in a new constitution not only what we have in the present constitution should be maintained, but that those powers that we have should be expanded.
POM. So do you find that some of your colleagues among the Premiers are now advocates for greater powers being devolved to the regions than they would have had before negotiations, that they would have been unitarists, for a unitary state.
HK. Well it's always dangerous for a politician to give names to things. Suffice to say that they want more powers. Now if you want to call that that they have become federalists, I'm not prepared to say that, but then you give a name to it. But it's quite clear if you want more powers then the equation is quite interesting.
POM. Do you want the power to tax?
HK. Well we have the power to tax in the present constitution, we have the power to tax.
POM. To tax at what level?
HK. At a provincial level.
POM. Which means that you could impose a personal tax, a state income tax?
HK. Yes we have that power, but what we would dearly like to see it that the majority of the financial cake comes to the provinces. I personally would like to see a formula be worked out in terms of which a province gets an allocation of money which we negotiate in future and once we have that, the province would be in a position to decide it's own budget. If I want to spend more on education then I want to have the right to do so, whereas in the present budget it's really not the case. So from that point of view we would like greater autonomy.
POM. We have spent the better part of last month going around the country and have met with a number of the regional Premiers and one common complaint is their frustration at the delays in powers being devolved to the regions, that they are not getting the resources to do the jobs that they should be doing.
HK. Oh yes, there's no difference of opinion between us.
POM. Why do you think the centre has been so slow to devolve powers?
HK. To devolve powers?
POM. The centre will say that it's because many of the regions don't have the administrative capacity to do so.
HK. Some of the regions don't have but my viewpoint is that why must transfer of powers take place in terms of the slowest marching soldier? Why not give powers to the guys that can handle it and take your time to get the other people in place? Why must I be penalised if I'm ready to assume powers and wait, for instance, for Northern Transvaal where it will take a further two years in certain respects to handle these powers? So I believe in asymmetry.
POM. Devolution should be on the basis of people's capacity to handle it?
HK. Correct.
POM. Looking just at the economy, the Western Cape is different from any other region. Cape Town is totally different. You would never believe you are in Africa and you have to pinch yourself occasionally to remind yourself. Yet it has some of the worst informal housing settlements, maybe a higher proportion relative to its population than any other province. Are there any special provisions?
HK. I want to take you on on that statement. I don't think it's completely true. If you were to go, for instance, to a place like Durban you will see far worse than here. Certain areas on the Reef are far worse than what we have. But the problem is that the influx of new 'immigrants' to the Western Cape has been tremendously high for the reason that nothing happened especially in the Eastern Cape about development there. General Holomisa and those guys just didn't do anything for the upliftment of their people and people just got poorer and they didn't have food to eat so they started moving. I'm not one of the people who believe that people become urbanised because they like to see the lights of the city. They come here with a false hope of trying to find work and to eat and one must remember that it was very heavily concentrated over the last three/four years, the influx of people, immigration to this part of the world.
POM. Is there any tendency for whites to start moving to the Western Cape too? I say that specifically because we deal with a couple of families who are very conservative living in and around Zeerust who essentially have made the decision to move into the Western Cape. They bought a farm here.
PAT. Like an Afrikaner homeland.
HK. No, it's very difficult for me to judge that because if I were to judge that it will purely be on an impression that I have and it will not be based on any hard evidence or figures that I have. I think what you will find is that people will buy alternative homes in the Western Cape most probably for holiday purposes but also feeling that perhaps it can be a little bit of an insurance policy should things go terribly wrong in other provinces. That may happen. Whether it is happening I don't have the figures to substantiate that at all.
POM. Does the Western Cape have the highest rate of growth economically than any other region in the country?
HK. Again that is not quite correct. We saw some figures the other day, and with figures you can really play around, you know people make sums because there is no hard and fast criteria here in terms of which you can really meet that. No, I don't think that we're the highest. I think that the highest, if I remember correctly from those figures was KwaZulu/Natal. But if you want figures in this regard then I would suggest that you contact Dr Jan Visser of the Productivity Institute, Institute for Productivity.
PAT. But you are experiencing a fairly positive economic growth in the Western Cape. Maybe not the highest of all.
HK. Yes but obviously I would like it - but we are experiencing that yes, definitely so.
PAT. And the prospects for the future are quite attractive.
HK. Well if you look at not what we say about the future but what a publication like World Link, which you will know which is the official magazine of the Davos meeting that they have, the World Economic Forum I think it is called, they have recently published a survey where they evaluated the regions and they came up and placed the Western Cape second in the world for the best places to invest in, which is quite phenomenal for us and obviously I can go into a long story trying to sell you the Western Cape by telling you about our infrastructure but you're not an investor so I won't do it.
POM. Is there a split in the ANC in this province between coloureds and Africans where essentially Dr Allan Boesak got dumped?
HK. I think a lot of that is due to the person of Boesak, but whether they actually have a split between the coloured and the black within the ANC here I cannot comment on that.
POM. When you talk about the person of Dr Boesak, his personality is ...?
HK. I think that one should have a look at that in the context of ANC politics which I'm not an expert on. I don't think there's anybody who's an expert on that one.
PAT. That qualifies you as well as anybody else.
HK. It qualifies me to pass a few comments. Boesak was not popular in the Western Cape but he was brought in, rather forced down on the Western Cape by President Mandela at the time because he has got great confidence in Boesak, really to capture the coloured vote for the ANC here. And it didn't work out. Not at all, because, as I have said, he is not popular amongst the coloured people. He brought a lot of baggage, personal baggage with him and the coloured people are fairly religious people and they didn't like that. So he failed when it came to that, that he did not deliver the goods for the ANC in the Western Cape as they thought he would do. Obviously a scapegoat had to be found. I don't believe that another candidate would have done much better. I still believe that we would have won it. They could have gained perhaps a percent or two more but we still would have won the election in the Western Cape for various other reasons.
POM. Why do you think that the majority of the coloured vote went to the National Party?
HK. Why do I think it went there?
POM. It's like you're voting for the party that in a way had repressed you for a long period of time. Why didn't they vote instead for the DP?
HK. There is still such a thing as honesty that people appreciate. The DP was never accepted by the coloured community because they saw too much of how the Cape Town City Council and how they tried to keep coloureds out of the running of the Cape Town City Council. It's one thing to preach something and then when it comes to practice you do something else. I think they accepted our bona fides because we've been brutally honest all these years and said we wanted apartheid and they hated us for it. But the moment when we went to them and said, all right we made a mistake, we apologise, now let's join forces to bring good government to the Western Cape and they accepted it. Another thing that heavily counted against them, against the ANC, was their relationship with the Communist Party because traditionally the Communist Party is against religion and again I want to say that that was a major thing amongst the coloureds. They were not going to vote for a party that is in cahoots with the communists. So perhaps the ANC was its own biggest enemy in the election in the Western Cape.
POM. When I came back here, just following the news from abroad, and I subscribe to two or three clipping services, one was struck by what is making the news and what you had making the news was part of the MK in rebellion, a ferocious level of crime, a serious crime being committed every 17 seconds, you had the SDU units still running amok in the townships, you had taxi wars.
HK. Are you specifically talking about the Western Cape?
POM. No, the country as a whole. You had taxi wars, you had the inability of the police to bring crime under control, you had huge wage demands being made by unions, you had random strikes. One got the impression that things were teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Is there true political stability, social stability in the country as a whole? And then you could probably address specifically taxi wars in relationship to the Cape Province.
HK. Well obviously the election did bring stability in various fields to our country. I think we should not underestimate that. Yes, it was not the end of violence but violence did come down quite a lot. It was not the end of the taxi wars because that is not a political fight it's an economical one. Strikes, it did push up the strikes because people thought that if you have democracy you have money and unfortunately democracy does not mean that you have money, it means that you have freedom, but it doesn't mean that you will immediately be in a position to have money. So the frustration, I mean the expectations were very high. The expectations, I believe, are still high but realism is slowly but surely setting in that people are starting to realise that the government of the day cannot build four roomed houses with a bathroom and a kitchen with a washing machine in it for free. That realisation is slowly but surely dawning on people. But I think on the whole if we look at the stability of the country, the election did bring quite a lot of stability to us.
POM. Let me ask you about the elections. You had the IEC report which was very damning of itself, which admitted that hundreds of thousands of votes were unaccounted for, that the final count might have been around 70%. There were allegations by the ANC, the CP and the IFP about vote rigging or pirate voting stations. And then you got an almost perfect result, everybody was a winner. Buthelezi got his KwaZulu/Natal, you got the Western Cape and the ANC got a majority but less than a two thirds majority, but a very comfortable majority, so a miracle had been achieved. Do you think in a sense that the final outcome was brokered? I don't mean brokered in the sense of rigged, but the parties coming together.
HK. No I don't believe that. I have no evidence to support that whatsoever. I was then still in a fairly senior position in central government and I would have known about it if something like that was to take place and it didn't happen, not as far as I'm aware of, really. No, I don't believe so. If you look at the way the election was run, we've warned about people who know nothing about elections running it. With all due respect the people who were appointed to run the elections were not qualified to do so. They were good people but they had no idea of what they were going to do and so the mess of the election was really through incompetence.
POM. Again just looking at the economy, is the economy here, this region, in better shape or worse shape than it was six months ago?
HK. Better shape. Undoubtedly so. Just one example, trying to find good hotel accommodation in this city is virtually impossible. Before the election you could have walked in here and got the royal suite for half price. At the moment we're inundated with tourists, with visitors from overseas, with trade delegations. There's an expansion and because of the confidence that investors have in the Western Cape there is slowly but surely expansion of present capacity by local investors. I think we will also see people relocating to the Western Cape from in South Africa. I won't be surprised if that happens because of our sound government that we have here, because of our infrastructure and because of the sophistication of our labour force. So it's going quite well. Obviously when you have businessmen from overseas coming here they won't start a factory the first time they come here. They will investigate and they will investigate and only then will they go home and go and fetch their cheque book, but they don't bring it with them when they come here. So it is a process. I think one would be rather naïve if one would think that all the people who are coming here to have a look at the investment scene here will immediately start factories and investment and that sort of thing. It is a process.
POM. Is business playing it's due role in recovery and reconstruction or is it staying on the sidelines?
HK. No, no, business is very heavily involved in it.
POM. I ask that because not so long ago the Minister of Finance said, "South African business must start scoring tries. I feel like a scrum half who cannot get the ball out of the scrum because my loose forwards are not there to protect me."
HK. Who said that?
POM. Chris Liebenberg.
HK. We don't have that experience in the Western Cape. I think our business community is very committed in this area.
POM. I want to talk a bit about the programme for reconstruction and development. Again when we went around to the various regions we found that among ordinary people the word RDP meant nothing, we were met with blank stares, that the same was true of a number of MPs though they had just some idea about it, different government ministers within the same region had different interpretations of it, but overall one got the view that the whole concept of the RDP had not been marketed very well.
HK. No I do not agree with that. We may run into difficulties with implementation of the RDP now, that I would agree with, but the RDP was the major policy statement of the ANC before the elections and it was very well done, make no mistake about it. From a political point of view it was really quite a master stroke to have something like that. So everybody knows about the RDP as far as I am concerned. Wherever I go people talk about the RDP, but as you know the RDP has kept its name but the contents have been changed quite dramatically. It has now become a central government document still in the process to be finalised.
. We are in the process in the Western Cape of formulating our Western Province RDP document. But I have a few problems with the way we are trying to implement the RDP. There's a tendency, firstly, to control all expenditure in provinces centrally and that cannot be done because we are not in a position in the Provincial Administration to implement the RDP and the RDP will have to be implemented by local authorities. Trying to control the whole country from a central office I think will be disastrous.
. The second point that I have a problem with the RDP is too little attention is given to the creation of jobs to stimulate the economy. Too much money people are planning to spend and because we haven't got it as yet it's like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We've all heard about it but we're still waiting after six months for a drop of that or a coin of that gold to be dropped into our lap. So we're spending too little money, I believe, on the stimulation of the economy. Let's take, for instance, a house; if you build a house for a man or a woman and they move into that house, let's say it's a fairly small little house, but they still have to be in a position to look after that house, to paint it, to generally look after the house. They must be in a position to pay for electricity, for water, for refuse removal, make a contribution towards the administration of the local authority. If they cannot do that what have you achieved? You have placed a burden on that man or that woman especially when he's out of work. You've just placed a burden on him, but what you've also done is you've built a slum. Right from the beginning you're earmarking it as a slum because he can't look after that property. A man with a job is in a far better position. Yes, still help him to get the house but it must be an asset to him not a burden. That is why I think that there's an unbalance between those two sides of development.
. The last problem that I have is that they say the RDP is not an add-on programme. They say it's a rearrangement of priorities. Now I say that that is very, very dangerous because what we are in fact saying is, and I want to use an example, right through the history of the Western Cape we have placed great emphasis on health services, for instance. Our health services, which we believe are the basis for sound economic and a sound family life, now what is happening now because we've done that, they say, no, but your expenditure per capita on health is so much but for instance in the Northern Transvaal it's so much. So we must rearrange the priorities that Northern Transvaal can catch up but that means take away from the existing funding to help Northern Transvaal. That places us in a situation that I have to close hospitals, that I have to fire people and that I cannot do anything to improve my health services at all. And I think that is wrong. It doesn't mean that I'm talking about white people, I'm talking about coloured and black people too in the process. So I think therein lies a danger that if you think you're just going to rearrange the priorities then the weakest situation becomes the norm and so it can only mean that you go backwards.
POM. The RDP it would seem is the vision of the future and the people don't appear to have taken ownership of it.
HK. They have not.
POM. Do you think this might have something to do, this comes back to expectations, with the culture of entitlement, culture of dependency?
HK. Culture of non payment.
POM. Which results in non-payment and now when you are being asked to pay the first kind of tangible result of, in the government of national unity you're finding that you must now pay for something so your standard of living in fact goes down. Now do you think that the people of the townships have been told for so long to make the townships ungovernable that that behaviour has to be unlearnt in some way before they can become part of the process?
HK. We will have to turn the heads of the people into a culture of payment. Funnily enough I said to an ANC friend of mine the other day, I said, "I've admired the way that you've run this liberation struggle. It was really well thought out, well planned, well executed but you made one fatal flaw and that is to tell people not to pay because you're going to reap the benefits of that." And he agreed with me. He agreed. And to turn that one around, that will take time, which obviously places the whole concept of an RDP in jeopardy because how do you build more houses and more people use water and electricity, etc., etc., unless people pay. I have a problem now with municipalities within my region or my province that are on the brink of bankruptcy because they just cannot go on delivering the services without getting money for it. You are also getting a reaction from the people who have been paying all these years. They say if nobody else pays why should I pay?
POM. That is spreading to white communities?
HK. That may spread to white communities.
POM. I talked to Derek Keys two years ago when he was Minister of Finance and he said that the best one could look for between now and the end of the century was that employment would grow by 1% a year and I talked to him three weeks ago and asked him the same question and he very bluntly gave the same response. With nearly half the people unemployed and if you are only cutting that by 1% a year where do the resources to build these houses and provide these jobs come from? It's the chicken and the egg. You can't give a house to somebody unless they can pay for it and to pay for that they have to have a job. So with such limited opportunities for jobs ...
HK. That is what I was trying to tell you earlier by saying that our emphasis should for the first three or four years not be necessarily on the building of houses and that sort of thing but we should try and create jobs. Yes, house building can be job creation, it can bring that about, then you have to have a sustainable programme over a period of ten/twenty years to keep people in building houses. So I'm not against the building of houses but I still say that our main emphasis should be on industrial development, on agricultural development, on tourist development.
POM. Do you think that the level of expectations that had been engendered by the elections increased the rate of migration to the Western Cape?
HK. Again I haven't figures to substantiate that but that people are still coming to the Western Cape, that is so.
POM. Joining squatter camps?
HK. Yes.
POM. Just looking at the national government, if you had to rate its performance where one would be very unsatisfactory and ten would be very satisfactory?
HK. Central government you're talking about?
POM. Yes. Where would you place it?
HK. That's a very difficult question to ask me. Of what I've seen, again compared to what? Before you rate something you have to compare it. If I have to compare it to Britain for instance then we will do very badly. If I have to compare it to the rest of Africa they'd be doing quite well. So again it's a question of against what do you measure performance.
POM. In terms of its list of accomplishments, its list of delivery of legislation affecting crucial issues, its very functioning.
HK. I won't rate it higher than four.
POM. That where it comes out, about most people thought, everyone deep down feels the same thing.
HK. It's not doing all that well.
POM. On the other hand how would you rate the performance of Mandela?
HK. Mandela is doing well. Mandela, I think, is doing well.
POM. Is he the glue that holds ...?
HK. The ANC together?
POM. Yes.
HK. Oh yes. Oh yes. No doubt about it.
POM. If he were to die suddenly or whatever, do you think there would be a power struggle?
HK. I think there would be a struggle, yes, between three people Mbeki, Ramaphosa and Sexwale. But we will see in December who is the winner when they have their congress and if I had to take side bets I will place it on Mbeki winning it. It must not be forgotten that Ramaphosa is a very, very clever politician. Very clever. It's not for nothing because he's young.
POM. 41 I think.
HK. 41, 42, he's in no hurry. I think his political plan is to say, all right I'll take the new constitution and then he will say this is the constitution that I have delivered, it's even better and more in favour of the blacks than the first one so I've done my job. Now has Mr Mbeki performed? Has Sexwale performed? Have they delivered the goods for the ANC in respect of the RDP, which they can't? He will come forward as being the saviour of the ANC eventually.
POM. I like it, that's what I like best. Is the whole concept of the RDP an illusion that's hanging out there, that in the short run has no real prospect of being implemented to the degree that the powers wish it to be implemented? Is the whole concept of the RDP an illusion? Because the resources are not there to implement it in any meaningful or sustainable way.
HK. No, I still think that the RDP is a good plan. It is really a plan to improve the quality of life of people but I just think that it will take much, much longer to really see results from it than the expectations we have from it.
POM. Will the people wait that long?
HK. What option will they have?
POM. At what point w ill they throw everyone out? Vote PAC?
HK. No. No, there's no alternative at this stage. There may be completely new political orientations coming forward. That may happen.
POM. So all you could see is the realignment of elements within the ANC with other parties, the Conservatives going with the National Party, the radicals going ...
HK. All sorts of things can happen.
POM. I want to talk to you a little about the Truth Commission which has made much of the headlines in the last couple of months, or Commission for Reconciliation, whatever it is called.
HK. It is a bit of a misnomer, but in any case it will cause tremendous problems, if it works.
POM. Could you go through what some of those problems might be, what you would see as the arguments against it vis-à-vis the arguments for it?
HK. My party has accepted it but I still believe it will be a witch hunt. I still believe that unless people confess, which we will see how that goes, that you will not really get behind the truth of all these matters because how do you investigate allegations? Lets say the Commissioner of Police gets up at the Truth Commission and he says let's take a name at random, let's say he says that Vice President Mbeki was an informer of the South African Police, that's where we got all our information from. What the hell is Mbeki going to do if it's not the truth, all the truth? How is he going to prove it is not true? It can be an extremely dangerous exercise. People will not only use it to confess, they will use that Truth Commission to implicate people that they have a grudge against and then they will say to Van der Merwe, can you prove it? He says, obviously we don't keep records of things like that, we don't keep records, it was too dangerous but Mbeki was paid in cash and that year we had ten million rand to pay for informers. You see we spent it all and we don't take receipts. Where does Mbeki then stand? Or Mbeki can climb in and say, Johan van der Merwe gave us the movements of the IFP before the time so we knew exactly what to do. It is an extremely dangerous thing that we're embarking upon.
POM. In other countries intelligence files on various individuals must have been kept and the question is, who should be the custodian of those records? And, secondly, whether the record should be open so that I can then go to whoever and say I want to have a look at what was in my intelligence report, who was spying on me and when they were doing it. Because in Czechoslovakia and East Germany this proved to be a hugely painful exercise. People were finding out that the wife was spying on the husband and your best friend was spying on you and so on.
HK. And we call it a reconciliation exercise. That's why I say it is a mistake.
PAT. ...
HK. That you will have to ask the ANC. I don't know why.
PAT. But the National Party accepted it after some compromises.
HK. Well after compromises because we know that if we vote in parliament we will be outvoted. It's as simple as that. You rather go for a compromise than say at the beginning, no I'm against it and I'll fight you in parliament.
POM. How are decisions made here in Cabinet?
HK. In our Cabinet?
POM. Yes.
HK. We work on a basis, as you know we are seven National Party and four ANC, we work on a basis that if we take a decision, or when we take decisions, not if, because we take them quite regularly, when we take a decision we minute it whether it is a consensus decision where everybody agreed. But the minority party will have the right to say, no I'm against this decision and I maintain the right to criticise the government of provincial unity for having taken this decision. We even went so far as to say if we minute it as a consensus decision and after a week they come back and say, because they work on a different basis, they say caucus minded, they have to clear just about everything with their caucus, and they come back and they say, no, they've changed their minds, then they are still entitled to do so. Fortunately it's never happened.
PAT. When we first came back there was news that the ANC walked out.
HK. Well they walked out, yes.
PAT. What was that about? Where did the unity break down there?
HK. That was a political thing. It had nothing to do with the merits of the thing at all. They were looking at the time, I believe, from a political point of view and many political commentators agreed with me, and that is that with the fight for the leadership of the Western Cape Boesak was quietly retired because he saw the writing on the wall and they elected a chap by the name of Nissen as their new leader. But Nissen is the Deputy Speaker of this House and then it came up that Boesak was going to Geneva as our Ambassador there so they had to elect in their caucus here, they also work on that basis, somebody to take Boesak's place in the Cabinet here, that they will recommend to me to appoint. And the caucus here, and their new leader remember is sitting in that caucus, they didn't vote for him they voted for a young, pregnant girl that's here. Not that I have anything against young, pregnant girls, but can you have a bigger motion of no confidence in your leader by not voting him in? So Nissen went and he called the whole head council of the ANC together and he said unless you elect me I'm resigning as leader of the party in the Cape. And then they voted him in. But that caused such an uproar that they had to try and show some strength and so they tried to walk out, which they did and they issued a statement, I replied to it and then they started issuing more statements and I didn't say anything about it. I didn't make any further comments. Eventually through an emissary they said, how are we going to resolve the problem? Can we appoint a mediator? I said, no. They know where my office is and they can come and see me, which eventually they had to do and they brought in a memorandum which they called a Memorandum of Understanding which I wasn't prepared to accept. We then drew a memorandum from our side which they accepted and they said they will never do something like this again. And that is what happened.
PAT. Which person got the seat?
HK. We're still waiting for Boesak to leave, but we are now sitting with Nissen that's coming in.
POM. On the way out of the door. Local elections are scheduled for next October. Now one gains the impression going around the different regions that most of them are totally unprepared for them, haven't done voters' lists, haven't demarcated the constituencies, drawn lines for wards and there is a strong belief that they will not be held on time simply because the country won't be ready for them. Do you think that's correct?
HK. There was a statement issued by the minister of central government, Mr Meyer, saying that it will be held in October which I think is unfortunate, that you again tie yourself to a date come hell or high water because we are still reaping the benefits from putting time frames to things like this. Not reaping the benefits, but also reaping the unfortunate side. But I say that we cannot have local government elections until such time as we have proper voters' rolls.
POM. Are you ready to start that process here in the Western Cape?
HK. Yes. We should be in a position by the end of November to start that process. There was already such a lot of irregularities of people coming in during the voting period for the central government, crossing borders of provinces and influencing the outcome on this side of the border instead of voting on their own side. Now if you don't have voters' rolls and this thing takes place over a period of time you won't have a fair election. It won't be the people from the jurisdiction of a local authority voting for it. They will again start sending people to go and vote, to try and win that seat.
POM. OK. Thank you ever so much.
PAT. Would you as Premier go to Khayelitsha?
HK. I was in one of the worst places the other day, landed there with a helicopter, walked in there, people just swarmed there and they recognised me and they started shaking my hand, they started singing. I said I've come here to see what your problems are and they showed me. I said there will be water taps there, there will be this, that and the other and we have started doing it already. I have no problem going in there.
POM. Thank you ever so much. I'll be back in six months.