Good Day Mr Steenhuisen.

I am a resident of Plantation, Boksburg, Ekurhuleni.

Plantation is a small community consisting of a little over 100 homes. It is one of the oldest suburbs on the East Rand as it was established during the late 1800s, early 1900s Gold Rush. A large portion of the community members are elderly. Many of them are plagued by Health Issues.

In the early 2000s, less than 2km from Plantation a Commercial Compost Farm was erected (View Point Farm). Ever since the erection of the Compost Farm we having been fighting for it's removal. To my knowledge, minimal or no public participation was done. Our earliest record of objection was laid with the DA in 2007.

We had gone through numerous Tribunals and in Nov 2020, we were successful and the land was declared not suitable for Commercial Compost Manufacture. View Point lodged an appeal. In May 2021 this appeal was turned down. This was made known to the owners.

We are now in October 2022 and View Point have still not ceased operations. Nothing has been done by anybody to bring View Point to a close. I have emailed GDARD in order to revoke the Waste Management License without success. GDARD claim it is not their area of responsibility, as they purely monitor compliance. I have approached MMC Corporate and Shared Services, MMC Environment and Waste Management Services and Town Planning without any positive result. They too claim it is someone else's area of responsibility.

We are a DA lead ward. Our ward councilor has tried to assist as much as he possibly could but even he has no solution to our problem. He had tried to arrange meeting with the various departments without any success. Everyone is either out of office or attending to other matters.

We are so disheartened by a political party that seems to have little to no regard of our community. Everytime I watch News I see the DA telling is how bad the ANC is, yet to us, the DA is no different. It has been 15 years fighting a cause for us. We used our own resources from 2007-2020 and we're successful with our objection. We only had our DA councilor come in to observe proceedings. We are now at a stage that we require The DA lead Ekurhuleni Municipality to take necessary steps to close down View Point Farm but no help is forthcoming.

I will be re-looking my support for the DA in the upcoming elections. I cannot put my faith in an institution that has no regard for my basic constitutional rights. I always hear from the DA what the ANC is doing wrong. In this case I'd like to know what The DA is going to do right.