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The Democratic Alliance (DA) is deeply concerned over the wave of service delivery protests that have erupted in municipalities across South Africa as well as the ANC Government's response to these protests. This situation needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency and the DA will therefore be visiting the municipalities worst effected by these protests to better understand the concerns of these citizens. I myself will visit a number along with Willem Doman, the DA's shadow minister on cooperative governance and Marti Wenger, our deputy shadow minister.

While protests over poor public service delivery are not a new phenomenon, the number and violent nature of these protests have escalated over the last couple of months due to the ANC government's failure to deliver basic services and its inability to properly administer its municipalities.

It is clear that citizens are angry and frustrated over the many promises that have been made and broken by the ANC government and are tired of the struggles they have to face on a daily basis due to a lack of proper housing, sanitation, access to water and electricity.

The DA believes the ANC's recent announcement that it plans to conduct an audit of elected councillors and municipalities in order address these protests is wholly inadequate and also reflects a lack of empathy of the part of the ANC, toward the majority of South Africans and the dire circumstances they currently live under: in and of itself an audit is a cold, detached and statistical response; it cannot be the only response. What is needed is to listen and try to understand people's frustrations.

This detached attitude to people's anger is further illustrated by President Jacob Zuma's refusal to answer questions on service delivery protests at yesterday's press conference after meeting with Sir Richard Branson, and suggests an uncaring attitude and unwillingness to tackle the issue head on and to make the needs of ordinary South Africans the party's number one priority.

Furthermore, the DA also believes this audit is a waste of time and will not result in anything new being discovered. The main cause of the ANC government's failure to deliver basic services was already indentified by the previous administration under Thabo Mbeki, which is the ineptitude and mismanagement of local municipal councils largely due to cadre deployment.

The DA believes that South Africans deserve better than a municipal audit and we will therefore be conducting visits to all those municipalities that have been affected by these service delivery protests in order to speak directly to the citizens and to find out why they have not received basic services fifteen years after the ANC was elected into power.

We call on the ANC government to follow our example. Instead of President Zuma embarking on a two month tour of South Africa to thank voters who voted for the ANC, he should rather use this time to visit poorly run municipalities and to deal with the concerns of disaffected citizens.

The DA believes it is imperative that ratepayers stop footing the bill while corrupt, inept municipal officials continuously fail to spend the rates paid to them on the adequate delivery of basic services with no action being taken against these officials by the ANC government.

Every South African deserves to live in dignity and should be able to access clean water, electricity, sanitation and housing and we therefore urge the ANC to start addressing these problems at a ground level in order to prevent further service delivery protests from happening in the future.