People of Pennington: Tidy Towns pulls South Coast town into competition finals

Daily Maverick

5 days ago

Residents of Pennington, KwaZulu-Natal, are volunteering their time and money and working with the municipality to improve local services. Now, they're vying for Pennington to be crowned Town of the Year.
Trimmed hedges, a walkable town, safety, cleanliness and a Blue Flag beach. It's these little things that improve the experience of a town, and despite challenges such as water outages and other service delivery issues, the residents of Pennington organise daily to help make the town pleasant and comfortable to live in.
The chairperson of the Pennington non-profit organisation Tidy Towns, Viv Sandwith, says what they do is like putting lipstick on the town. Sandwith and her team at Tidy Towns played a big role in entering Pennington into a Town of the Year competition, which offers a R1-million prize.
Sandwith and her team entered the town in the competition. They are all volunteers who do this work of organising the community over and above their day jobs or commitments. She said this was not possible without willing residents and daily community organising and building.
She gave an example of a car park by the beach that Tidy Towns refurbished: 'You couldn't drive in this car park because of the potholes,' she said. 'So, we spent R350,000 repaving from scratch. We took out the tar and paved it. The bathrooms were unusable. They were so bad. And we got them renovated from head to toe. So, they're now like a five-star hotel inside. You can't go in because there's no water. So, basically, we put the lipstick on,' said Sandwith.
Street groups
'Just to make our town look beautiful and feel clean. If the rubbish truck hasn't come because they're on strike, we organise rubbish collection. I've started a thing for street groups, so now every street in Pennington has a group and a leader.
'So, if I want to announce something, I put it on, and all the admins are in one group. I put it in one group and then they all spread it out. We can say, guys, rubbish trucks are not coming today, please keep your rubbish inside,' said Sandwith.
Tidy Towns is a community-driven project. According to its web page, it is 'Supported by the joining hands of like-minded volunteers, private security companies, Umdoni Municipality, local Law Enforcement, the SAPS and the business sector. Participants are committed to restoring our public spaces to clean and safe environments, for the enjoyment of locals and visitors alike, whilst creating opportunities to improve the livelihoods of the committed cleaning teams created.'
Sandwith said the street groups were also helpful because they helped foster safety, especially for the older people in the community.
'It's incredible, we're not living with potholes anymore. We're collecting money on our streets. We're fixing our potholes. Many of our streets are smooth sailing now because of the locals, so people are putting their own money in. But the important thing is that we never work outside of the municipality. I've got a very good relationship with them, with the beach manager. I had a meeting last week with the mayor, the municipal manager, and three of the GMs. We just sat and chatted,' said Sandwith.
Despite continuous challenges with the Umdoni Municipality, the community pulls through to create a better community. A recent incident caused the Democratic Alliance (DA) in the Umdoni Local Municipality to write to the Public Protector, the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, as well as lay an official complaint with the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) 'over the Umdoni crisis that continues to cripple services'.
This follows another staff strike that has paralysed operations amid calls for the mayor, Councillor Mbali Luthuli, and Acting Municipal Manager Nhlakanipho Khumalo, to go. The strike has entered its second week with no services being rendered.
R1-million prize
Pennington has got through the initial phases of kykNET's Dorp van die Jaar (Town of the Year) competition, beating competing towns in KwaZulu-Natal to become a finalist in the last round.
Top towns from all participating regions in South Africa and Namibia are competing and the winner will win R1-million.
Sandwith said they hoped to win so they could continue the work to upgrade and keep up the town. They hoped to buy a soccer kit for the local soccer team, install an outdoor gym, pay the guys who help clean up the town and other initiatives.
'We're going to refurbish the outside of the clinic and the library. Because this clinic serves a lot of Malangeni here,' Sandwith said.
'We want to add three bus stops. Oh, and we want to put in a fitness gym, [an] outdoor fit gym. So we want to put outdoor gym equipment for older people or kids. We want to help fix the roof of that hall because it needs work. We want to fix the showers up a bit here (at the beach),' said Sandwith.
The town is small, and it is a retirement town, but it offers a variety of activities from golfing to beach activities and hiking.
It also has special businesses such as the Basset Brewery, which has expanded to be a restaurant and nature sanctuary as it is built in what used to be a nursery.
Andy Turner founded and runs the Doghouse Craft Café with his partner Natalie Danks. They offer tasting trays and advice on which meals to pair with the craft beer they offer.
Turner said that the business originated when he was still making beer at home just for himself.
Craft beers
'So I was brewing a little, 20 litres at a time, just trying to make the styles that I knew from Europe.
'And the first one I ever made that I was really proud of, which was good enough to show my friends, was an English bitter type of beer, so I called it Bassett Bitter.'
Now they offer a variety of beers with certain crafts blended specifically for different seasons.
Turner said the café and brewery had attracted beer enthusiasts from all over the world, along with their pies. He noted that a lot of people liked the beers that tasted most like commercial lagers, but others were more experimental and liked to be exposed to different beers.
Danks moved to Pennington 17 years ago and says she loves the do-it-yourself spirit of Pennington residents — 'because either you are going to moan about the problem, or fix it'. DM