DA secures Sarah Baartman legacy centre handover, honoring history and culture

Please find attach soundbites by Bonginkosi Madikizela MP here, here and here.

The DA is proud of a collaboration between our representatives in national and local government, that has secured major progress on a previously stalled and abandoned project: the Sarah Baartman legacy centre in Hankey, Eastern Cape.

Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure, the DA's Dean Macpherson, handed over the site to a contractor to complete the job that had been left abandoned by previous government role-players for over 10 years.

Under previous ANC Ministers and officials almost R250-million was misspent on the Sarah Baartman centre, with corruption, disputes, delays and ultimately an abandoned, unusable building site only to show.

This was utter disrespect to the memory of Sarah Baartman, but today's handover demonstrates a new commitment to honouring history and culture by the DA.

The people of Hankey, and those who commemorate the life of Baartman, a symbol of the hurt and inhumanity of our past, can be assured that the DA Minister and Local Government officials in Hankey, take this very seriously.

With the contractor handover complete, the DA looks forward to seeing progress toward this centre opening, so that the life of Sarah Baartman may be recognized and honoured with dignity. A dignity that was denied by a series of ANC failures and corruption.