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AfriForum issued a summons against the Tshwane Metro Council asking the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria to review and set aside name changes of 27 Pretoria streets.

The action follows after requests from AfriForum to engage with the mayor, Kgosientso Ramokgopa, to find a solution for the name issue, fell on deaf ears. AfriForum earlier this year sought an interdict against the changing of street name boards pending the finalisation of a review application, but at the time the court ruled that an arrangement, in terms of which the old names would appear on street name boards together with the new names, was sufficient, pending the finalisation of the review process.

Ramokgopa late last year held talks with several political parties, as well as with AfriForum to find a win-win solution for the issue of Pretoria’s name and that of certain streets. However, without concluding the talks, or without reacting to proposals put forward by the parties, the Metro Council went ahead with the name change of 27 streets in April this year. Public hearings on changing Pretoria’s name to Tshwane were arranged out of the blue, and at one stage the Metro Council indicated that it was planning to change Pretoria’s name ‘before the ANC’s Leadership Conference in Mangaung’. However, recent reports indicated that the ANC in the Greater Pretoria area decided not to pursue the name issue at this stage as the huge reaction against the city’s name change took the ANC by surprise.

AfriForum’s legal counsel, Willie Spies, said that AfriForum decided to opt for action proceedings rather than application proceedings in the intended review process. ‘This is done for two reasons. First, we anticipate significant factual disputes regarding the course taken in the street naming process, which has been ongoing since 2007, and in the second place, we believe the time has come for council officials and ANC politicians to be questioned and cross examined in an open court on exactly what prompted them to change the names of 27 streets at great cost while many other council functions and services have fallen by the wayside.
The summons will be served this week still, after which the action proceedings would commence in the New Year.