14.09.2025
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Rustenburg residents pin hopes on Ramaphosa’s visit

5 mins



  • President Cyril Ramaphosa at an ANC North West Provincial Executive Committee meeting, 11 September 2025.

Residents from some parts of the Rustenburg Local Municipality are pinning their hopes on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s visit to their municipality on Friday.

A joint Cabinet and Northwest Provincial Executive Committee (PEC) meeting, led by the President, will discuss service delivery challenges in the province and possible interventions.

Dozens of residents are protesting outside the venue where the President will meet with members of the North West Provincial Legislature.

A community leader in Phatsima Extension 3, Mathew Setshose, says there has not been visible service delivery in their area for over a decade.

Setshose says the Rustenburg Local Municipality is failing the Phatsima community, emphasising that they go back and forth about service yet service delivery is not carried out.

Video | North West residents voice concerns during Ramaphosa’s visit:

Meanwhile, President Ramaphosa says there’s a need for real radical solutions to deal with issues affecting local government in the country.

Ramaphosa was speaking at an African National Congress (ANC) Golf event at Sun City in North West.

He says his party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting scheduled for this weekend will address challenges, such as what happened in the Lichtenburg-based Ditsobotla Local Municipality, where councillors ran parallel councils with two municipal managers.

Following a number of interventions by the provincial government, Ditsobotla has now been placed under the administration of the National Department of Cooperative Governance.

Ramaphosa says such incidents cannot be allowed.

‘That is just completely unacceptable, because the inability for our leaders in the province at the local level, to straighten out operations of local government, is actually resulting in bad services being delivered to our people, and our people deserve much more than what we are giving them right now, through the dysfunctionality at local government level. So, we are focusing on that, at national government level, as well as provincial government level,” adds Ramaphosa.

Ramaphosa says the ball is now in the court of different political parties.

“As we are going to the elections next year, we’d like all political parties, to deploy people, as their candidates, who are capable, who have the competence, to run local government properly, and many political parties will admit that we have not yet reached that level,” says Ramaphosa.

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